Summer Fridays just claimed the number one beauty product ranking with their Lip Butter Balm, supported by over 9,000 organic influencer links that amplified their success. Here’s what makes this fascinating: while other beauty brands were still fighting over traditional gateway products like face wash, Summer Fridays recognized a fundamental shift in customer behavior and positioned themselves to win in the new paradigm.
For decades, beauty behemoths like Clinique, CeraVe, and Neutrogena built empires on face wash as their gateway product. Clinique’s “Three Step System” started with their clarifying lotion and cleanser. CeraVe made their hydrating cleanser the foundation of their entire brand story. These brands understood that face wash was the perfect entry point: essential, frequently repurchased, and able to introduce customers to broader product lines once they found a cleanser that worked.
But Summer Fridays recognized something others missed: the gateway had shifted. While legacy brands continued fighting over an increasingly commoditized face wash market, a new category was quietly taking over that role.
The Loyalty Trap Beauty Brands Missed
Traditional beauty marketing has always obsessed over customer loyalty, and face wash was the perfect loyalty-building product. Brands spent fortunes trying to convert customers to their cleanser because once someone finds a daily routine that works, switching costs are high—both financially and emotionally.
But consumer behavior has fundamentally shifted, especially post-COVID. The global lip balm market exploded from $3.8 billion in 2023 to a projected $7.1 billion by 2033, driven partly by mask-wearing that increased skin sensitivity around the mouth area. More importantly, lip balm now dominates the lip care market with 44.2% revenue share in 2024, becoming what industry experts call a “gateway product.”
Summer Fridays spotted what traditional brands missed: loyalty doesn’t matter when customers don’t want to be loyal. People use one face cream at a time and buy one cleanser for months. But lip products? Customers happily own 20 different options simultaneously.
The New Face Wash Is Lip Balm
Beauty brands used to fight over face wash because it was the gateway product—affordable, frequently repurchased, and essential to daily routines. Everyone needs to wash their face, so if you could capture that habit, you could introduce customers to your broader line.
But face wash became oversaturated. Every brand had multiple cleansers. The category became commoditized, and customers became overwhelmed by choice and marketing noise.
Meanwhile, lip products quietly became the new gateway category:
Low commitment: Easy to try without disrupting existing routines
High frequency: People lose them, share them, keep them in multiple locations
Collection mentality: Different shades, textures, and occasions create natural variety
Social proof: Highly visible product that others can see and ask about
Impulse friendly: Perfect price point for spontaneous purchases
Summer Fridays recognized this shift and leaned into it strategically.
The Collection Psychology
Here’s what Summer Fridays understood that most brands miss: customers don’t want one perfect lip product, they want a curated collection of lip experiences.
Their three-tube purchase limit isn’t solely scarcity marketing, it’s acknowledging collection behavior while creating urgency. Customers think: “I can only get three tubes, so I need to choose my favorites now before they sell out.”
This taps into collection psychology rather than loyalty psychology. Instead of trying to make customers monogamous with their brand, they made it easy and desirable for customers to be polygamous lip product users who always include Summer Fridays in their rotation.
The Strategic Pivot Recognition
When Summer Fridays launched their skincare line, they were playing the traditional beauty game: trying to build customer loyalty through superior formulations and brand storytelling. Face creams, serums, weekend routines—all designed to create habitual, loyal customers.
But their market data told a different story. The lip balm was generating disproportionate organic content, repeat purchases, and customer advocacy. More importantly, it was attracting new customers at a scale their skincare products couldn’t match.
Smart brands recognize when their data is teaching them something their strategy didn’t anticipate. Summer Fridays could have doubled down on skincare and treated the lip balm success as an anomaly. Instead, they recognized they’d accidentally tapped into a superior customer acquisition and retention model.
The Category Migration Strategy
Rather than fighting their lip balm success or trying to redirect customers back to skincare, Summer Fridays embraced category migration:
Product Development: Expanded into lip care with new shades, textures, and limited editions
Brand Messaging: Let lip care become central to their identity rather than peripheral
Marketing Strategy: Amplified what was organically working rather than what they originally planned
Retail Strategy: Used scarcity and exclusivity to build collection desire
Summer Fridays masterfully introduced a new hero product without abandoning their skincare heritage. By evolving their brand, they were able to expand their reach and customer base by selling at a new price point. Their brand evolution around superior market dynamics is a fantastic case study that brands at any scale or stage can learn from.
For brands looking to identify similar opportunities, Summer Fridays offers a useful framework:
Monitor Collection Categories: Look for product types where customers naturally want variety rather than loyalty.
Track Organic Advocacy: Pay attention to which products generate unpaid social content and word-of-mouth.
Recognize Switching Costs: Understand the difference between high-commitment categories (skincare routines) and low-commitment categories (lip products)
Embrace Market Education: Sometimes your customers are teaching you about category dynamics you didn’t see.
Migrate Strategically: When data shows superior dynamics in unexpected categories, follow the market rather than fighting it.
The Branding Lesson
Summer Fridays’ evolution from skincare brand to lip balm empire illustrates a crucial principle: sometimes your customers understand market dynamics better than your brand strategy does.
They discovered that in modern beauty, collection behavior beats loyalty behavior. Customers don’t want to commit to one brand’s entire skincare philosophy, but they’re happy to add your lip balm to their rotation of favorites.
This insight extends beyond beauty. In any category where customers can naturally own multiple products, collection psychology often outperforms loyalty psychology. The question becomes: are you optimizing for customer commitment or customer variety?
Thanks for reading this week! As always, I love helping small businesses win, whether that’s through my self-paced Social Media Masterclass here or through a 1:1, Direct discovery or working with my agency!
xx,
Camille