When I first started working with Innovate the Label, their TikTok had 57 followers.

And I always love saying that number because now we’re approaching 7,000 — but honestly, the follower growth is only a small part of what we actually built.

From the beginning, I saw Innovate as something that could be much bigger than just another beauty page. The mission was already there. There was a real purpose behind the brand, an incredible founder story, and this idea of creating a space where beauty brands and consumers could actually connect. What we needed was to figure out how to translate all of that into content people genuinely wanted to watch and be a part of.

So that became my focus.

Instead of treating TikTok like a place where we just needed to post consistently, I wanted the account to feel like a personality. We started experimenting with trends, educational content, founder-forward storytelling, product discovery, events, and content that actually invited people into the conversation.

And slowly, you could literally watch the audience start to form around us.

One of the biggest turning points was LIVE.

TikTok LIVE became such an important part of the strategy because suddenly we weren't just talking at our audience anymore. We were talking with them.

People would come into the livestreams, ask questions, learn about the brands, talk about products, give us their opinions, and then start coming back again and again. We started recognizing usernames. They started recognizing us. There were inside jokes, familiar faces in the chat, people asking when we were going live next.

At that point, you're not just growing followers anymore. You're building community.

And I think that's one of the things I'm most proud of with Innovate.

We created an audience that actually participates.

Then we started taking that same energy offline.

Through Innovate's events, we were able to bring together consumers, creators, beauty brands, makeup artists, founders, and industry professionals in real life. We incorporated master classes, brand activations, conversations, pop-ups, creator partnerships — all of these different touchpoints that allowed the digital community we had been building to actually experience Innovate in person.

And that completely changed the way I looked at the brand.

Because now it wasn't just, “We grew this TikTok account.”

It was, “We used content to build an audience, used LIVE to turn that audience into a community, and then created experiences that gave that community somewhere to actually go.”

That community also became incredibly valuable when it came to partnerships.

When I started doing outreach and working with brands, we weren't simply offering impressions or follower counts. We could offer something much more meaningful: access to people who were already actively participating in beauty conversations and genuinely interested in discovering new products and brands.

That's a completely different value proposition.

So yes, going from 57 followers to nearly 7,000 organically is something I'm extremely proud of. But I'm even more proud of what exists behind that number.

We built a highly engaged livestream audience. We created repeat viewers instead of one-time views. We turned social content into real-world event participation. We developed relationships with brands and creators. And most importantly, we helped position Innovate the Label as a place where people could actually discover, learn, connect, and feel included within the beauty industry.

Working on Innovate has reinforced something I believe across basically every brand I work with:

Community will always be more powerful than vanity metrics.

Because getting someone to watch one video is great.

Getting them to follow is better.

But getting them to come back, participate, trust the brand, show up to an event, tell their friends about it, and genuinely feel like they're part of what you're building?

That's the goal.

And that's what we've been building with Innovate the Label.