How K18 is capitalizing on trends to boost TikTok results

Since it was founded in 2020, hair-care brand K18 has always tried to “stay scrappy” in its marketing, CMO Michelle Miller told us.

Looking back, Miller said K18 “was doubling down on TikTok when none of the other hair-care brands were doing it” and has since embraced TikTok Shop and developed a deep understanding of how paid media works on the platform.

The brand, which was acquired by Unilever in 2023, has recently begun experimenting with creators and celebrities, including a two-year ambassadorship with Simone Biles announced earlier this year and some short-term partnerships with creators including the “cucumber guy” Logan Moffitt and Alix Earle.

We spoke with Miller about how experimenting with “cultural relevance,” primarily on TikTok, has helped the brand grow and sell products.

Making (split) ends meet

At K18, all social media strategy, including owned media, influencer partnerships, and community management, is done in-house, Miller said. She said she views community management, including talking to customers and creators, as the most important social tactic for the brand.

Miller said she breaks down K18’s creator strategy into three categories: pro stylists (like Alfredo Lewis and Eric Vaughn, who are two of the brand’s 15 pro-stylist influencer ambassadors), nano-creators, and who Miller described as “culturally relevant” figures. The first category, she said, is important for education around using the brand’s hair-care products, while the second category is for introducing the brand to newer demographics, like Gen X.

To reach Gen X and millennials, Miller said that K18 has been exploring long-form content like podcasts and YouTube videos. “The bigger strategy is, how do we reach different types of consumers, or people that might not be on social?” she said.

When it comes to the third category, culturally relevant figures, Miller said that’s where Biles and influencers like Nara Smith come into play. Smith, in particular, is “a very influential creator that gets a lot of people talking and has a lot of influence,” she said.

K18’s two videos with Smith have driven both awareness and conversion, according to Miller. The brand has also posted content featuring Smith’s husband, Lucky Blue Smith. As a whole, Miller said approaching creator partnerships through a cultural impact lens has been a “really, really winning” strategy for K18.

Beyond Nara Smith, K18 has also done partnerships with creators and celebrities like Earle and Biles, all of which have “outperformed the benchmarks in terms of engagement, click-through rates, conversions, and brand lift,” Miller said.

Because K18’s sales are omnichannel, she said it can be difficult to measure direct conversions, but the brand still tracks earned media, search impression rankings, and how SKUs are performing following a creator partnership, and there have been signs of positive effects: When Earle promoted the brand’s AirWash dry shampoo in March, for example, Miller said it sold out quickly.

“We couldn’t keep it in stock this year,” she added.

It’s not only big-name creators getting K18 partnership deals. When TikToker Logan Moffitt, aka @logagm, went viral repeatedly this summer for his cucumber recipes, K18 partnered with him on a cucumber-recipe-plus-hair-mask video that ended up being the brand’s best-performing ad, Miller said. The video, which was posted about a month after Moffitt first went viral for his cucumber content, received more than 8.8 million views and nearly 350,000 likes on TikTok.

“We get [content ideas] pretty fast,” Miller said. “The team is really good at getting in touch with the right agents and the right talent really quickly.”

Miller said K18 will continue to focus on culturally relevant creator partnerships moving forward. That also seems to be true with its owned content strategy based on the brand’s posts referencing Moo Deng and brat summer.

“We learned a lot from Ryanair on [TikTok],” Miller said. “They really decreased friction around expectations on traveling and made it really funny.”

Heading into next year, Miller said K18 plans to continue focusing on pro stylists through events like its first stylist fest in February and sending samples to more niche influencers. When it comes to balancing educational hair-care content with posts about, say, the Four Seasons Orlando baby, Miller said it comes down to posting and finding out what the brand’s audience responds to.

“If something is funny and trending, we will lean into it,” she said. “We’re not afraid to delete something or try a trend three different times and see which ones work.”