In the midst of it all, REFY is moving from strength to strength: the company is anticipating sales to reach £100 million in the year up to August 2025, a year-on-year leap of 60%. With a new members club (‘REFY World’) launched in December 2024 and a confident foray into skincare in January 2025, it’s clear the only way is up in the eyes of this minimalist beauty brand.
We’ll be getting into the details of the REFY Marketing Strategy, helping you understand:
- How are they responding to the priorities of contemporary beauty consumers?
- How are REFY standing out in such a crowded market?
- What is it about REFY’s marketing approach that is so wildly successful?
Contents
- Who is REFY?
- Who is REFY’s target audience?
- What is REFY’s marketing strategy?
- Why is REFY a good marketing case study?
Who is REFY Beauty?
REFY is the poster child for today’s social-first beauty industry: founded in 2020 by Instagram influencer Jess Hunt (now sitting at 1.7M followers) and entrepreneur Jenna Meek, the brand was borne in response to organic trends was quick to go viral on TikTok with its focused line of brow products.
Everything about the business was shaped by an immersion in the social landscape. The ‘Instagram brow’ trend was in full swing, and Jess Hunt was riding the wave. As a beauty creator known for her flawless brows, she was inundated with messages from her followers who were struggling to find products that would provide the results they wanted.
The market gap had presented itself and a loyal following was already in place. Combined with partner Jenna’s business acumen, it didn’t take long for the REFY Brow Collection to achieve cult status.
In a niche saturated with overwhelming product ranges and multi-step processes – particularly for brows – REFY emerged with a laser focus on simple, high quality products designed to complement natural beauty.
By 2022 REFY had added bodycare to its product lineup, followed by a limited fashion range, and its first lash product in 2024. With the arrival of skincare in 2025, the brand is quickly creating an entire REFY ecosystem for its loyal customers.
Though it got its start through viral trends, REFY is working in earnest to establish itself as a serious beauty brand for modern consumers. This new identity is underpinned by sustainability, inclusivity and quality, all superbly communicated through a combination of intelligent branding and creative marketing.
Who is REFY’s target audience?
REFY has turned a saturated market to its advantage. Combining simple, minimalist branding with a limited range of products geared towards the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic, it offers relief to consumers who are overwhelmed by an ever expanding range of choices.
REFY’s core audience are beauty-conscious individuals who value simplicity, inclusivity, and sustainability. They’ve carefully built their brand from the ground up to resonate with this customer persona at every single level.
The REFY visual identity is as clean, focused and streamlined as their product range. The brand adds a minimum of bold, black text over a palette of whites, tans and greys. It’s a design that stands out through its effort to step back, hinting at the brand’s mission to complement – rather than cover – their customers’ natural beauty. It conveys scientific, almost clinical qualities, without being sterile. REFY isn’t glitz and glamour, but something altogether more refined.
REFY is a premium beauty brand. So, rather than racing to the bottom on price, REFY’s approach to building loyalty and driving sales is – by necessity – all about trust. Beauty consumers expect reputable brands to enhance sensitive areas of their body in a completely healthy, safe and effective manner. Alongside a deep focus on the quality, safety and function of ingredients, REFY is committed to demonstrating that it offers equal quality for every type of skin. Whether it’s on a product page or through an influencer partnership, REFY ensures it speaks to its truly diverse community with a broad range of models and partners.
What are the key ingredients to the REFY marketing strategy?
Leveraging TikTok trends and creators
It’s no surprise that, as a brand that was founded by a successful beauty influencer, REFY is totally dialled into TikTok and Insta trends, as well as their rising stars.
Jess found influencer fame off the back of TikTok’s ‘Clean Girl’ trend which, despite taking off in 2022, shows no signs of slowing down three years later. REFY continues to exemplify the aesthetic, smartly placing itself as one of the quintessential brands of the trend.
Focusing on inclusivity and activism
REFY is committed to serving every skin type, but the brand’s dedication to beauty inclusivity isn’t simply the range of shades a product comes in.
Almost every aspect of REFY’s marketing output includes and empowers a huge range of individuals – not just in terms of skin tone or ethnicity, but across facial features, skin textures and body types. REFY is part of the modern vanguard of beauty products, where inclusivity is not just a claim or a token effort, but a deeply embedded brand value.
This is especially powerful due to the brand’s heavy use of influencer or community generated content. Rather than being a centrally expressed ethos, shaped only by budget allocations and model selection, REFY works to give every individual a platform to express themselves. Whether it’s a get ready with me or a product review, anyone can become a part of the REFY family.
Leaning into sustainability
REFY makes alignment with modern, eco-friendly beauty values a headline characteristic of the brand. Not only are their target consumers more alert to the ethical and environmental impacts of their products than ever before, but REFY understands that it only takes a lack of integrity at one stage of the supply chain to potentially undermine the entire brand reputation.
REFY offers 100% vegan and cruelty-free formulas, its packaging is 100% recyclable, and it holds certifications from the FSC and Leaping Bunny, as well as a number of ISO accreditations for environmental and quality management.
Recognising that influencers can be in-house
Real authenticity has to be all-encompassing. The REFY marketing strategy nails this by placing their founders and the entire team at the heart of the brand TikTok and Insta channels. Rather than just limiting themselves to content partnerships, REFY takes every opportunity to give viewers glimpses behind the scenes at the company HQ, do challenges with staff, and show the human side of their charismatic founders.
The effect is powerful and dovetails perfectly with their brand message. REFY beauty is for everyone, and nothing makes that more evident than showing audiences that the people who make up REFY are just like them – not to mention, funny – and are making products that they personally love.
Brand experience: fusing the digital and the physical
REFY isn’t a brand to be admired from afar – follow them on socials and you’ll find that challenges, polls and Q&A’s are cornerstones of the brand’s digital experience. The customer-company relationship is definitively two-way here, and the benefits of that are twofold. 1) REFY gains a continuous stream of customer insights, while 2) audiences are empowered and engaged by something far more interactive than your standard corporate content.
REFY takes this further, creating a rich array of events and experiences to celebrate the brand and its users. Through everything from sponsored wine bar events to pilates classes and pop-up stores, REFY transforms from simply a makeup brand into a lifestyle, a community, and a source of exclusive, limited-range products.
Events are announced via socials, and experiences feed back into the platforms when shared through the brand channels and various influencers. This mutually reinforcing physical-digital ecosystem is the heart of a living, breathing brand.
Why is REFY a good marketing case study?
REFY offers a masterclass in holistic brand building and shows us just how effective it can be.
The key lesson from the REFY marketing strategy is that your socials, creators and partnered influencers should all be fully aligned with your brand identity, actively shaped by it, and stimulated by other parts of the digital ecosystem that you’re cultivating.
REFY shows us that brands gain more humanity – the essence of brand community – when there’s visible give and take between a company and its people, whether those people are its founders, staff, customers or influencers.
As REFY deftly complements that humanity with a genuine ethos of sustainability, quality and inclusivity, it’s hard not to feel that the brand has discovered the perfect recipe for loyalty among Millennial and Gen Z beauty markets.
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Building a brand with individuality and having your voice heard can be difficult in today’s social-led markets, especially in hot verticals like beauty.
The Goat Agency specialises in helping you nail down that nebulous ‘brand identity’ and applying it across your entire digital journey.
Whether you’re looking for the perfect influencers or working out how to weave them in with engaging social content for your brand’s own channels, we can help.
Get in touch today to get started!
