The Business Challenge

MCoBeauty has built its name on a simple promise: prestige-quality products at a mass-market price. It's a proposition that travels well, but proving it in a brand-new market doesn't happen on its own.

In 2025, MCoBeauty launched into the UK through Superdrug, a market where competitors were already entrenched and well-funded. The hard question to answer was, “how do we stand out?” The team knew they wanted to go big, but had no way to size the opportunity: whether that meant working with 10 creators or 50, seeding 300 products or 1,000.

"We had an aspiration to be top ten in Superdrug within our retail partner, but really no idea how big the program needed to be. So we needed a tool that would enable us to go, this is how big is big. And then the next layer down is: what's the tactical mix — how much are we putting behind paid, boosting, seeding?" — Peter Stocks, CMO – Europe, MCoBeauty

Without a way to see the full creator ecosystem, or how MCoBeauty's efforts stacked up against those competitors, every decision carried outsized risk in a launch year with real budget on the line.

The Solution

MCoBeauty brought Traackr in ahead of the Superdrug launch to build a single, repeatable process for the UK influencer program: get the right insights, plan against them, and review performance to inform what comes next. Rather than treating each of those steps as a separate exercise, the team used Traackr to run them as one continuous loop.

Three capabilities were core to their success:

• Competitive benchmarking.  A clear read on how competitors were performing by tier, platform, and content type, in a market MCoBeauty had never operated in.
• Granular performance tracking. The ability to break every campaign down by creator tier, platform, and paid, boosted, or organic placement.
• A monthly insights-to-action cadence. One platform the whole team could report from, month over month, to see what was working, what wasn't, and why. 

How It Was Done

Reading a Market MCoBeauty Had Never Operated In

The first job was translating a brand-level ambition (being top 10 in category at Superdrug) into a concrete, quantitative target for the influencer program. Traackr's early read on the UK gave the team two findings that reshaped the launch plan. 

• First, the UK's influencer ecosystem was far denser than other markets MCoBeauty had launched in. Consumers were already oversaturated with creator content, which raised the bar on creative quality. 
• Second, a disproportionate share of category views were coming through organic content rather than paid or boosted posts, which meant the team needed to prioritize genuine creator relationships over simply buying reach.

"We couldn't just copy and paste an existing strategy from Australia or the US into the UK. We needed to understand on a granular level what tiers, platforms, and organic/paid split would make an impact in the UK market." — Nicole Roberts, Senior Influencer and Advocacy Manager - Europe Lead, MCoBeauty

Those insights shaped MCoBeauty's approach to the launch itself: less of a brand-trip spectacle and more product in real people's hands for real reviews. They built “chaos by design” which gave creators the freedom to film candidly, testers and all, right in the Superdrug aisle.

Building a Monthly Loop From Data to Decision

With the strategy set, the team built a monthly reporting rhythm in Traackr that has become the backbone of how the UK program operates. Every month, MCoBeauty reviews activity by tier, platform, and placement type, tracks performance trends against its own history, and benchmarks the results against competitors.

"We look at all of our influencer activity and go into detail on what tiers, what platforms, and what was the paid versus organic placement of it. Then we review that on a month-by-month basis, so we can track where we are winning. Traackr also gives us the overview of where we landed within our competitor set, so we can easily present to senior leadership how we’re performing against the market." — Nicole Roberts, Senior Influencer and Advocacy Manager - Europe Lead, MCoBeauty

The team also uses Traackr to look beyond any single month. A creator who underperforms in their first campaign sometimes builds momentum over a longer stretch, and a quarterly or biannual view surfaces that pattern in time to re-engage them. It's also how the team identifies which paid or gifted partners have organically become genuine brand advocates, so MCoBeauty can prioritize the relationships already returning the most loyalty.

"In November, we ran a campaign that was all around trending beauty hacks. Through Traackr, what we could see is where one paid partnership and showcasing of that hack was then becoming picked up by other creators, and the tool naturally surfaces all these other pieces of content, so we can see that story coming together day by day, which was really exciting." — Peter Stocks, CMO – Europe, MCoBeauty

The Results

Seven months after launch, MCoBeauty was named the fastest-rising beauty brand in the UK, and also impressively achieved: 

300M+  views generated across MCoBeauty's UK influencer program

13.6M  engagements driven by influencer content

1,390  influencers activated across the program

+3,807%  growth in attention (measured by Traackr’s VIT score)

But the bigger shift has been internal. With one platform as a shared source of truth, MCoBeauty's UK team spends less time reconciling numbers and more time deciding what to do with them.

Now with that foundation in place, the team can set their eyes on bigger ambitions of becoming a top 10 beauty brand in the UK and bringing the brand to new markets across Europe. 

"Traackr has given us the permission to double down, to ask for more funding, to build a stronger program, to have the confidence to keep going. That emotional feeling of confidence that we're on the right track is probably the most powerful thing it has done for us." — Peter Stocks, CMO – Europe, MCoBeauty