How to Build a Category-Defining Beauty Brand

When Wildling Beauty launched, Gua Sha wasn't part of the mainstream skincare conversation in the US. Before the brand could convince people to buy its products, it first had to educate customers about the ritual behind them and why it deserved a place in their daily routine.

That challenge shaped nearly every decision the company made as it grew. It influenced product development, customer education, creator partnerships, and even the strategy for expanding beyond its first bestselling product.

In an episode of the Word of Mouth podcast, host Robyn Nissim spoke with Gianna De La Torre, co-founder of Wildling Beauty, about what it takes to build demand around an emerging category, navigate rapid growth, and create products customers come back to every day.

Here are the biggest lessons from their conversation, and how other ecommerce brands can apply them to their own growth strategies.

TL;DR: Key lessons on building a brand that grows beyond a bestselling product

Build products that become part of customers' daily routines, not one-off purchases.
Invest in customer education before, during, and after launch.
Scale operations alongside demand rather than trying to perfect everything upfront.
Expand into new categories by solving adjacent customer problems, not chasing more SKUs.
Build long-term creator relationships through education and shared values.
Approach difficult conversations with curiosity and use them to strengthen your brand.
Build systems that help both your business and yourself scale sustainably.

1. Build products that become daily habits

When Wildling launched in 2018, many people in the U.S. had never heard of Gua Sha. Selling the product meant first helping people understand what it was, how to use it, and why it belonged in their skincare routine.

So the brand was introducing a practice that required education.

From the beginning, Wildling was designed to offer more than a standalone tool. Co-founder Gianna De La Torre brought her background as an acupuncturist and healer, while the other co-founder brought years of experience building beauty brands at companies including L'Oréal, Johnson & Johnson, and Redken. A third co-founder, a holistic aesthetician in New York, had already seen remarkable results using Gua Sha with clients in her practice.

Together, they launched the flagship Empress Collection, which paired the Empress Stone with a facial oil and botanical mist. The products were intentionally designed to work together because Gua Sha requires an oil to help the tool glide across the skin while supporting the overall ritual.

From the start, the founders believed the experience mattered just as much as the product itself. They weren't asking customers to buy another skincare product. They were introducing a ritual customers could build into their daily routine.

If you're building a product ecosystem, keep these principles in mind:

Don't assume customers already understand how or why to use it.
Build around how customers will actually use your product.
Make complementary products feel like part of the experience, not separate purchases.
Teach customers how your product fits naturally into their existing routine.
Create an experience that's greater than the individual products themselves.

2. Prepare your business for the growth you're chasing

The pandemic completely changed the trajectory of the business.

As interest in Gua Sha exploded, the team found themselves learning fulfillment, inventory management, and retail logistics in real time. They didn't even have a fulfillment center in the early days. Gianna packed orders herself, often with her baby strapped to her, before loading boxes into an SUV and making multiple trips to the post office.

Then retailers like Free People started reaching out.

Suddenly, the team was balancing marketing, content creation, fulfillment, and wholesale shipments all at once. It often felt like they were three or four steps behind, solving one operational challenge only for another to appear.

Because Wildling was bootstrapped with roughly $30,000 to $40,000, building enterprise-level infrastructure before demand arrived wasn't an option. The business evolved alongside its growth.

Brands with more funding can often invest in operations earlier. For bootstrapped businesses, it's usually a matter of solving the next problem and then moving on to the next one.

If you're preparing for growth, keep these things in mind:

Build the systems your current stage of growth requires.
Match your operational investments to your funding strategy instead of following a one-size-fits-all playbook.
Accept that some of your biggest lessons will come while solving problems in real time.
Identify the next bottleneck before it becomes the biggest obstacle to growth.
Prioritize systems that directly support fulfillment, inventory, and customer experience.
Revisit your operations regularly because the systems that got you to one stage won't necessarily get you to the next.

3. Expand your brand beyond its bestselling product

Every founder hopes to create a bestselling product. What the team didn't expect was how quickly that product would become the entire brand in customers' minds.

For years, Wildling became synonymous with Gua Sha. That was a major achievement—it meant the company had helped introduce the practice to a much wider audience.

But it also created a new challenge. Customers knew Wildling for one product, while the team knew the brand had the expertise to support a much broader range of wellness needs.

That realization changed how the company approached growth. Expanding the product line wasn't about launching more SKUs. It was about solving adjacent customer problems that naturally aligned with the brand's expertise. Rather than moving away from what customers already trusted, Wildling looked for ways to build on it.

The team began thinking beyond Gua Sha and more broadly about wellness. Areas such as perimenopause, menopause, and postpartum felt like natural extensions of the brand because they aligned with Wildling's philosophy around holistic care and whole-plant ingredients.

A bestselling product may open the door, but brands also need room to grow beyond it. As you expand your product portfolio, consider these questions:

What is your brand best known for today?
Does your expansion make sense to your customers, not just your team?
How will you help customers understand what your brand stands for as it evolves?

4. Make customer education part of your growth strategy

Expanding into new categories only works if customers understand why you're making that move.

Education was never something Wildling treated as a launch campaign. It became an ongoing part of how the company built the business.

In the beginning, the focus was on teaching people what Gua Sha was, how to use it, and why it worked. Later, the challenge changed. Customers already knew Wildling as the Gua Sha brand. The next step was helping them understand everything else the brand had to offer.

That required a different kind of education.

Wildling had already earned trust around one product. Now it needed to show customers how its skincare products fit into the same philosophy of holistic wellness. The team continued creating educational content, hosting Zoom classes, and answering new questions as the brand evolved.

Customer education isn't a one-time investment. It should evolve alongside the business.

As your brand evolves, your education strategy should evolve with it:

Update your messaging as customer awareness changes.
Create content that answers the next question customers are likely to have.
Treat education as part of the product experience, not just your marketing.
Help customers understand why new products belong within your brand story.

5. Build creator partnerships that feel like relationships

As Wildling expanded beyond Gua Sha, creator partnerships became even more important. But as a bootstrapped brand, one question kept coming up: with a limited budget, which creators are worth investing in?

Product seeding alone wasn't enough. If creators didn't fully understand the ritual behind the products, they couldn't educate their audiences in a meaningful way.

During the conversation, Gianna Dela Torre pointed to Anastasia Beverly Hills as a brand she admires. Rather than simply sending products to creators, the company taught them a signature eyebrow technique that creators still use years later. Education became part of beauty culture because it gave creators something genuinely valuable to share.

That example shaped how Wildling thinks about creator partnerships. When creators genuinely understand a product and the philosophy behind it, they can explain it with far more authenticity.

The strongest partnerships feel like relationships, not transactions. If there's a creator you truly believe aligns with your brand, show them the bigger picture. Help them understand where you're going, invest in them over time, and give them a reason to grow alongside you.

If you're building a creator program, focus on these fundamentals:

Educate creators before asking them to promote your product.
Build long-term creator partnerships instead of one-off campaigns.
Use affiliate incentives to reward continued brand advocacy.
Invest in affiliate creators who genuinely align with your brand before expanding your roster.
Evaluate creators by the trust they build, not just the size of their audience.

6. Turn difficult conversations into opportunities to learn

As brands grow, so do the conversations surrounding them. Some of those conversations challenge how a company thinks about its products, messaging, or role in the market.

Wildling experienced this as Gua Sha became more mainstream and conversations around its cultural origins gained greater attention.

Rather than becoming defensive, the team chose to approach those discussions with curiosity. They worked with advisors, listened to members of the AAPI community, supported organizations like Hate Is A Virus, and became more intentional about how they represented the practice.

Looking back, the experience was an opportunity to learn rather than something to overcome. It strengthened relationships, expanded the team's perspective, and influenced how the brand showed up going forward.

If your brand faces difficult conversations:

Listen before deciding how to respond.
Stay open to perspectives from people with lived experience.
Let meaningful feedback influence your partnerships and messaging.
Build trust through consistent action over time.

7. Build systems that support the founder, too

Building Wildling required Gianna Dela Torre to grow alongside the business.

She never expected to learn Shopify, Klaviyo, fulfillment, wholesale logistics, inventory planning, and countless other skills. But every stage of growth demanded a different version of the founder.

During the conversation, Gianna Dela Torre described this through the lens of neuroplasticity: the more willing founders are to learn unfamiliar skills, the easier it becomes to adapt as the business evolves.

She also emphasized that personal sustainability is just as important as operational growth. Burnout is inevitable if founders don't intentionally create space to recover. While taking weeks off isn't realistic for many entrepreneurs, find "micro moments" to reset, whether through exercise, breathwork, acupuncture, meditation, or simply putting the phone away for a while.

Those habits make it easier to continue growing alongside the business.

As your company scales:

Expect your responsibilities to change as the business grows.
Learn the skills your next stage of growth requires.
Build systems that reduce your involvement in repeatable work.
Protect time for strategic thinking and continuous learning.

Ready to build a brand customers keep coming back to?

One theme came up throughout Gianna's story: sustainable growth starts with relationships.

Wildling didn't grow by chasing every trend. It grew by creating products customers wanted to build into their routines, investing in education, and building trust over time. As the brand expanded, those same principles shaped everything from creator partnerships to customer loyalty.

As your brand grows, managing those relationships becomes increasingly complex. Recruiting creators, seeding products, tracking affiliate performance, collecting UGC, managing payouts, and measuring results can quickly become difficult to scale manually.

That's where Social Snowball comes in.

Social Snowball helps Shopify brands build and scale creator and affiliate programs from a single platform. From creator recruitment and affiliate management to automated payouts, product seeding, UGC tracking, and performance analytics, it gives you the infrastructure to build long-term partnerships that support sustainable brand growth.