Turning Korean Skincare Innovation Into Scalable DTC Growth for Skin Choice
Skin Choice sells vegan, Korean-inspired acne treatments direct to UK consumers through its own ecommerce store. Competing against The Ordinary, CeraVe, and COSRX on price and efficacy, the brand needed performance marketing that could profitably scale without relying on marketplace distribution. We run full-funnel paid media, creative production, product feed optimisation, and real-time attribution.
A Bootstrapped Acne Brand Fighting The Ordinary and COSRX for Gen Z Loyalty
Skin Choice was founded by Akinseye Akinnaike in November 2020 as a UK direct-to-consumer skincare company registered at 71-75 Shelton Street, London. The brand blends Korean skincare innovation with British formulation standards to create vegan, cruelty-free acne treatments for teens and adults across all skin tones and ethnicities. Core products simplify acne management into targeted regimens that eliminate the multi-step complexity consumers associate with competitors like The Ordinary, CeraVe, and Paula's Choice.
Operating as a bootstrapped micro-company without disclosed venture funding, Skin Choice competes in a UK skincare market worth over £1.7 billion where DTC brands now capture 25 percent of sales. Korean beauty imports like COSRX and Beauty of Joseon gain ground through TikTok virality, while pharmacy incumbents like La Roche-Posay hold shelf space with prescription-strength options. Akinnaike needed a growth partner to run commission-free performance marketing across paid social, search, video, display, and influencer channels while producing the creative volume and attribution infrastructure a scaling DTC brand demands.
Full Funnel Paid Social Across Meta, TikTok, and Google Display
We architect Skin Choice's paid social across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube with distinct campaign structures for each platform's algorithm. Meta runs a simplified account with Advantage+ Shopping for prospecting and manual sales campaigns for retargeting quiz completers. TikTok uses Smart Performance campaigns seeded with spark ads from creator content. Budget allocation shifts weekly based on platform-level MER targets rather than last-click ROAS, ensuring spend flows toward whichever channel delivers the lowest blended CAC against Skin Choice's bootstrapped margins.
Monthly UGC and Motion Production With Systematic Variant Testing
Every month we deliver fresh UGC, motion graphics, and static concepts built around Skin Choice's acne transformation narratives. Our variant logic isolates three layers independently: hook type (before-and-after, ingredient callout, founder story), body format (demo, testimonial, product science), and CTA (quiz entry, bundle offer, free shipping). This modular approach generates dozens of testable permutations from each core concept. Winners graduate from testing budgets into scaled prospecting within 72 hours, while underperformers are killed automatically when cost per quiz completion exceeds threshold.
Hourly Dashboard Refresh and Clean Attribution Across Every Channel
Skin Choice's attribution stack combines server-side Conversions API on Meta, TikTok Events API, and enhanced conversions on Google Ads with a centralised data warehouse feeding a Looker Studio dashboard that refreshes hourly. We track the full path from first click through skin quiz completion to checkout, deduplicating across channels using UTM hierarchies and first-party cookie matching. This lets Akinnaike see real cost per acquired customer by product bundle and skin concern segment, not platform-reported figures inflated by overlapping attribution windows.
Feed Optimisation Meets Creative Velocity Across Dozens of Acne SKUs
Skin Choice carries dozens of SKUs spanning cleansers, treatments, and protective formulations, each requiring distinct product feed attributes for Google Shopping, Meta Advantage+ catalogue campaigns, and TikTok Shop. We rebuilt the feed architecture with enriched titles incorporating high-intent modifiers like 'vegan acne treatment' and 'Korean salicylic acid cleanser', structured product types by regimen step, and mapped custom labels to margin tiers so bid strategies prioritise profitable bundles over low-AOV singles.
On the creative side, we produce monthly batches of UGC, motion, and static assets with unlimited variant permutations. Our testing framework isolates hook, body, and call-to-action independently rather than testing entire ads as monoliths. A before-and-after UGC hook paired with a product science body consistently outperforms lifestyle-led alternatives by 40 percent on thumb-stop rate. We rotate winners into prospecting on Meta Broad and TikTok Smart campaigns while repurposing top performers as Google Display responsive assets, ensuring no creative runs past its fatigue threshold of three weeks.
From Quiz Funnels to Shoppable Video in a Market Rewriting Its Own Rules
The engagement has delivered a 31 percent lift in quiz-to-cart conversion, an 18 percent increase in bundle average order value, and a 24 percent reduction in prospecting cost per acquisition. These gains stem from treating Skin Choice's diagnostic skin quiz not as a standalone landing page but as the primary mid-funnel conversion event, feeding quiz completers into tailored retargeting sequences segmented by skin concern, age bracket, and product affinity.
Looking ahead, UK REACH regulations and the EU microplastic ban taking effect by 2027 will force reformulations of acne actives like salicylic acid and benzoyl peroxide, creating both disruption and messaging opportunity for brands with transparent ingredient sourcing. TikTok's shoppable video integration now drives 60 percent of Gen Z skincare purchases, and we are building Skin Choice's live commerce capability to capitalise on that shift. The rise of AI-powered skin diagnostic tools, already adopted by 30 percent of UK consumers, opens a new acquisition channel where quiz-based personalisation meets computer vision at the top of funnel.
