013. The 2026 Beauty Community Playbook: What Actually Builds Loyalty Beyond the Shelf

Everyone's talking about building community in beauty. Almost nobody is doing it right. In this episode, Susannah Dellinger breaks down exactly what she'd do right now to build real, lasting brand loyalty — from the simplest fix nobody's trying to roller rink parties, farmers markets, and the brand trip model that CocoKind is getting exactly right.

In this episode:

• Why the disappearance of chairs from Sephora and Ulta is costing brands more than they realize — and the stat that proves it
• Why strawberry ice cream carts and food crossover activations are table stakes — and what actual community building looks like
• Cooking classes, book signings, and why your customer in Boston needs something completely different than your customer in LA
• How empty mall parking lots could become beauty's most underutilized community asset
• Why roller skating nostalgia is the activation nobody has tried yet — and why it would go viral
• College campus pop-ups, Rush week partnerships, and why showing up on a day that matters creates loyalty that lasts decades
• The difference between an audience and a community — and why brands that don't know the difference will never win long-term
• Why CocoKind's community brand trips are a best-in-class blueprint every beauty brand should be studying
• Susannah's dream for 2026: what happens when a brand trip becomes a mission trip

CHAPTERS

01:17 Everyone's Talking About Community. Nobody's Actually Building It. 

02:33 Bring Back the Chairs — Seriously 

05:54 Why Gimmick Activations Are Table Stakes in 2026 

06:29 Cooking Classes Are the New Makeover 07:43 Book Signings by City — and Why Local Always Wins 

09:40 Empty Mall Parking Lots Are Beauty's Best Kept Secret 

10:13 The Farmers Market Activation Nobody Has Tried 

11:26 Why a Roller Rink Party Would Break the Internet 

13:11 College Campuses, Rush Week, and Showing Up When It Matters 

14:34 Stop Selling at Community Events. Seriously. Stop. 

16:54 Audience vs. Community — The Most Important Distinction in Beauty 

17:23 Why Most Brand Trips Are Getting It Wrong 19:16 How CocoKind Flipped the Brand Trip Model on Its Head 

21:47 What If a Brand Trip Became a Mission Trip? 

22:34 These Conversations Matter

Off the Shelf is a podcast about the people, brands, and behind-the-scenes forces shaping the beauty industry — money, relationships, risk, and what it really takes to scale.

CONNECT WITH SUSANNAH

Instagram: @brightbeautyconnect

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/susannah-dellinger

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Figuring out again what matters to your community. It sounds so simple, but it requires letting go of your ego as a brand. Getting to know your customers as to who they truly are versus who you've mocked up your unique customer profile to be. Getting out of your head of whatever marketing and McKenzie Consultant moment you've done. How do you find out what matters to them because they changed, they evolved what mattered to your customer 18 months ago. This is Off the Shelf, where we take the most iconic beauty brands, products, and people in the beauty industry off the shelf and examine the stories behind the story. It's where beauty is treated like the economic, cultural, and power-building force it really is. I'm Susanna Dillinger, and here we're gonna talk about what really shapes the industry, who holds the power, how the decisions get made, and what it actually takes to build, scale, and quite frankly, survive in beauty. These are the conversations happening behind closed doors about money, relationships, risks, and cult moments. If you're building, breaking through, or trying to understand how beauty really works, or just love a really good story, you're in the right place. Welcome back. On this episode of Off the Shelf, I am so excited to dig into where I see the beauty industry going in 2026 and beyond, or even where I just hope the industry goes. Whether or not it goes there is up to who knows who. But if I were running a beauty brand, here's what I would do right now to build community. We have talked on this podcast ad nauseum. And if you're a beauty lover or in the beauty business, you cannot read anything in the industry without this now buzzword of building community in beauty. It's a beautiful, wonderful thing, but how do we actually do it? How do we take our brands, quite literally, off the shelf and create iconic moments and community moments that build long-term loyalty? So here are a few of the ideas that have been rambling around in my head and some fun activations that are actually being done across the country, whether or not it's by my team or others. They're all doing it. It's a lot of fun, and it's free for you to listen, take some notes, take it, make it your own. I'm not gonna send you an invoice if I see your brand pulling any of these off. I'm just gonna be over here cheering, rooting you on, and I'll probably talk about you on the next episode. So let's get into it. First and foremost, this is such a simple one, but I cannot believe that I have to say this. Where have all the chairs gone? I'm so serious here. When I was coming up in the beauty industry inside of a Nordstrom meme in Saxeth Avenue, at every cosmetic quote unquote counter, even what they call the open cell, where there's not like a big counter that people stand behind, but you can just like walk through a Nordstrom, right? And it feels very open. There's chairs. And we were taught and trained on how to put literal cheeks in seats, how to get the customer to just take a load off, sit down, even if it was to get like a quick little hand massage. I worked for Shiseido and they trained us not only in facial massage, but actually to certify us in hand massage because just getting somebody to down, getting somebody to sit down and be touched helps people to engage and connect. And we're in a time now more than ever in 2026 where we have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation, right? We're behind our screens now more than we ever had at a society. But think about it. If you live alone, there are times when you will go to a grocery store just to see somebody else, right? You'll go on a walk just to pass somebody else and say, How's your day? Have a nice day. You can go into a beauty store just to interact. And imagine if there was actually a seat for you to sit down. You might not have noticed it, but Sephora, there's nowhere to sit except for their makeup artist bar. Those appointments cost money. They actually charge you, they charge you to get your makeup done in Sephora, which is wild because application is part of the experience and the play in beauty. Anyone who's been on a sales floor in beauty knows the stats that a customer sitting down will spend up to two and a half more times than a customer who is standing. Okay. This is also just a connection opportunity. It's a way for somebody to sit down and get to know you, get to know your brand through your reps that are in store. They're gonna start taking somebody's makeup off. That is such a vulnerable moment. If you've ever been in a store and had somebody take off your makeup, suddenly you feel like exposed. You feel like you're in a therapist's office and you start talking about what's weighing on you. Talk to any makeup artist and they will tell you that they are equal parts bartender, therapist, and makeup artist. They know about people's divorces before the people that are being divorced know about them, right? It is a way to connect with people. And for some reason, it has been almost wiped out of two of the biggest retailers that we have in Sephora and Ulta. Sure, there's a few seats in Ulta, but very few. And most Ulta employees are not actually trained, encouraged, or motivated to sit a customer down. We talk about building baskets, we talk about multi-world selling, but we don't talk about actually connecting with a customer and doing a service as simple as a makeup application. So, yes, I'm gonna talk about a lot of other cool, fun things we can do, but honey, just go get a chair. Start there. Take a little director's chair out of the trunk of your car with a freelancer and set it up in store with the store's approval. And you tell me how much money you generate in that chef. I guarantee you it's going to be so much more than it typically would be. Okay. So now let's talk about how we can do fun things that feel new, that feel fresh. People are always saying we want to do activations inside of our retailer. We want to build community. Can beauty retail become a third place for people to hang out? Activations in beauty is not, oh, we got strawberry ice cream cart because we have a strawberry-flavored body lotion. Okay. That's what we're seeing right now. 2024, 2025, we saw a lot of that. There were these food crossovers that were happening around the shade launch or a scent launch of a brand. It's like table stakes, right? Let's talk about actual community building. How about life skills? Cooking. Nobody knows how to cook anymore. I don't know how to cook. That was my mother's act of feminism. She taught me how to drive a stick, change a tire, and my brother how to cook. My poor husband, he's been married for me to 20 years, and it's like I make I make reservations, I do take out, I do not cook. But this generation, especially, Gen Z, they don't know how to cook either. And so imagine if you're like, hey, we're gonna have an amazing local chef come in and we're gonna teach some basic cooking classes in the middle of a Nordstrom. Okay. Now, I'm not saying we're gonna have like iron chef with like open flames, but have some sort of like how to meal prep, how to look up recipes and shop for ingredients so your pantry's always stuck and have it be something cool and fun. And maybe there's an ingredient tie into something that you're launching, but bringing people together to talk about something they're interested in. People love watching cooking shows. The amount of friends that I have that watch cooking shows that do not actually boil water is just completely crazy. So let's say, okay, what can we do that like doesn't have like open flame spire and sharp knives inside of a retailer? Fine, you're being picky. Okay. Now, maybe it's something as fun and lowlift as a local book signing. Think about having an author of some really cool murder mystery or true crime or whatever we're all into right now, come and do a book signing inside of a Sephora, inside of an Ulta. You're bringing together people who have the same love of a type of literature, the same love of an author. And if you're a multi-state retailer, like an altar Sephora, you would look at saying, okay, the person I want to bring into Boston is different than the person I'm gonna bring into LA, who's different than the person I'm gonna bring into Chicago. You can find local authors in each city. That's how you actually build community is finding what are the people who live here invested in and what do they care about? And it's never gonna be the same, even in the same state, right? Even the same suburbs. Michigan Avenue shoppers are probably into something very different than people who live in Old Orchard, which for those of you that don't know Chicago geography is a suburb of Chicago. They might have very different lives, right? Old Orchard might be much more suburban life. So they might be like, okay, I want to look at a cooking class in Old Orchard. Michigan Avenue might be like, we're never cooking because we live in apartments that barely have a kitchen, but we want to come in and we want to hear about, you know, some new self-help book, right? How do you find out what people are interested in? You go where they are. You show up actually in your socials and you engage. You look at what else people are talking about besides engaging with your brand. What else are they doing? Where what are they doing on Pinterest? What types of things are they pinning? Getting to know and be obsessed with your customers and what they're interested in, and then bringing it in a small way into retail is so underestimated, the type of impact, because then they say, Oh my gosh, you're just like me. You get us. And they're like, I want to support you because now they feel that they are part of your world and a part of your community. Okay, so besides cooking, besides book signings, what else can we do? Y'all are gonna think I'm crazy. There's two things that I actually think malls could pull off and just absolutely crush it. I actually gave Beauty Independent this idea when they asked me what I what I thought about where malls were going, in particular JC Penny. They have huge parking lots that have no cars in them, right? If you've driven by your nearby mall, especially ones that have some of these retailers that are distressed, it's very sad. There's no cars in the parking lot. Do you know what you can do with that space? You can do local community farmers markets. You can say the first Saturday or the first Sunday of every month, we're gonna have food trucks, we're gonna have local farmers, we're going to have, you know, artisans, we're gonna have maybe a little music playing, and we're gonna have it be a family event. People are always looking for fun, free things to do with their families. Or again, even if you're single and living by yourself, where are other people around doing things similarly to what you're interested in? Going and shopping at a farmer's market, imagine doing this in, you know, Los Angeles. Imagine doing this in Seattle, imagine doing this in Miami, showing up and being able to get locally sourced food, discover, right? The art of discovery, discover up and trend up and coming trendy items in your local community. Retailers could actually say, okay, we're gonna give these brands a platform at just the farmers markets. We're not gonna carry them yet in the store because they're not well known enough and they might not, you know, have the infrastructure and the finances to be able to be in retail, but you could actually have local brands like I think Miami and I think FitGlow, a gorgeous, gorgeous makeup brand that's based out of Miami, could come and do these farmers markets and discover a great, great community. Also, roller skating parties. People love nostalgia. Okay. Gen Z loves nostalgia. They think we grew up in like the literal 1900s. That's what they call it, right? Okay, I am sorry, but like 1997 was not the 1900s, okay? And also it was five years ago. I don't care what you say. Like that is the math in 1997 was five years ago. However, we all know, joking aside, that nostalgia is such a comfort for people in times of change, in times of uncertainty, which is what we are in in 2026. People like the sense of comfort, they like the sense of nostalgia, and they love the sense of fun. There is nothing more nostalgic and fun than showing up to go roller skating with your friends. These malls have open space for days. You can easily do an indoor roller skating activation as a brand. It doesn't have to be a permanent thing. Having a roller skating party at like 10 malls across the country, that is going to become a viral moment. And it could be something like skate your way to great skin. Like, I don't even know. Like just make it up, but have fun with it. You could have cute little branded roller skates. You could have like little roller girls. It could just be in guys, of course. It could be such a fun moment again, where it's free. People come together to do something that's fun. When you laugh with friends around a place that is branded, you will subconsciously equate that brand to having a good time. Okay. Who doesn't want their brand to be equated with nostalgia and fun and community? I, for one, will be so sad if 2026 comes and goes and I am not invited to a retailer or brand roller ring party. Okay. Can somebody please get on this? All right. Now, where do we go outside of that? Where do we go for like, okay, how can we take this from behind the walls of a retailer? How can we actually get out into community? I love seeing, for example, what Ulta is doing. Ulta's been doing some pop-ups on college campuses. There's even been some beauty brands doing installations inside of college bookstores, not waiting for people to go get in the car or public transportation and get to their nearest beauty store. They're bringing the beauty store to where they are. Ulta also just recently, and another retailer in another city helped to sponsor Rush on some of these college campuses. And they were doing fun pop-ups and little mini makeovers ahead of Rush. That's adorable. That's something that everybody's coming out for on these campuses. This is something that people have, you know, in common. And having a beauty retailer or brand say, hey, you love this and you think this is important, we're going to be here and we're going to support you on quite literally up until that moment, one of their biggest days that they've had in their young lives. Where they rush, like they've been thinking about this for well over a year, if not more, right? This is something that imprints on them as who showed up on a day that mattered to me. That's the same brand they're going to go to and buy when it's their wedding day or when they're about to become engaged. It's that brand that they remember as being special and being there for them in moments that matter to them. Figuring out again what matters to your community. It sounds so simple, but it requires letting go of your ego as a brand and getting to know your customers as to who they truly are versus who you've mocked up your unique customer profile to be and getting out of your head of whatever marketing and the Kenzie Consultant moment you've done. Actually find out what matters to them because they change, they evolve what mattered to your customer 18 months ago. Maybe now they're like, we love mahjong. Like, where did that come from? Right. I remember in Crazy Rich Asians when we saw them all play mahjong in one of those, you know, ending scenes, and we're all like, what is this? It was the first time I'd ever seen it. And I'm married to an Asian man. And he was like, oh yeah, no, I think my mom has a mahjong set. And now, fast forward however many years later, and I'm like, Am I the only one that doesn't know how to play mahjong? Like, what happened? Like, was I like sick that day? Like, I woke up and everybody's playing mahjong and people are getting together and they're using it as fundraisers. Having a beauty-sponsored mahjong event or tournament or whatever we call it would be so fun. So figure out again, what are your customers into? What are they spending their time on that has nothing to do with shopping and showing up to support them? Do not sell at these types of events. I cannot stress that enough. This is not when you're like, hey, also buy our product on your way out. This is creating core memories that bond them to your brand and build community. You cannot build community if you treat your customers like a bank. The end. It was something I was taught at the age of 21 when I worked at Nordstrom. And back then, all we did was work the phones, right? It was called clientele. And we would call our customers and they said if the only time a customer hears from you is when you're trying to book them to come in for an event in the store to spend money or to give you their credit card over the phone to replenish your product, you will never have customers because you're treating them like a bank. We sent thank you notes. We wrote down when their birthdays were, when their children were graduating from high school. We called them just to check in on them. I worked at Chicago, Michigan Avenue. So we had tons and tons of people from all over the country visit. I remember specifically calling a client in Michigan because there was a blizzard. And I was like, How are you? Are you snowed in? How was your day? And she's like, Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you called. I'm bored. She's like, What's going on in Chicago? And I just sat there and I talked to her about what's going on in Chicago, right? You have to treat your customers like your friends, like your family, like an actual community. There's a difference between an audience and a community. And brands sometimes do not understand that. An audience is somebody you perform for, it's somebody that you speak to, it's somebody that you show up in front of and you expect to sit there and absorb your content and react accordingly. A community is somebody you support, it's somebody you pour into, and it's somebody you listen to. And once you understand that you cannot help but win. One of the last areas that I'm super interested to see how it evolves in 2026 is a bit of a controversial one, and that's brand trips. Okay. I would say Tarte was maybe one of the first. I'm gonna have to double check my beauty history here, but I think Tarte Cosmetics has been doing brand trips for my gosh, 10, 15 years. So the idea of brand trips really came around the same time that social media took off for those of you that aren't familiar with them. And brands will select a group of influencers. It could be 10, it could be 20, whatever the number is, and they fly them somewhere together to do something super fun for two or three days around or ahead of a big launch. And the hope is that this influencer with their platform and their audience will then post about it and talk about it and drive engagement that now everybody wants to buy your lip gloss because you flew their favorite influencer to Bora Bora. I know when I say it like that, a lot of you all are gonna be like, what? But that's actually how it works. And if you go look at your social feeds, you'll realize, like, oh, almost every beauty influencer you follow is going on these brand trips, and the content they're posting is from them. Beyonce concert is a perfect example. Around the Beyonce concert, almost every beauty retailer and every beauty brand did a sponsored. We're gonna take you to this city and have you in this box on this night to see the Beyoncé concert, right? They do the same thing around Taylor Swift. It's concerts, it's trips, it's luxury locations. Tarte is talked about the most because, honey, every dollar of that shape tape concealer is going to flying your favorite influencer somewhere absolutely epic, and they top themselves every year. Now, is that actually building community? What if brand trips were more like what Coco Kind is doing? What Priscilla, the founder of Coco Kind, has done with brand trips, I think needs to be absolutely studied. It is a best in class example of how you can take a whatever typical thing that's being done and flip it on its head. Instead of taking influencers, Coco Kind actually will post, hey, we're doing a brand trip experience to Beyoncé, or we're doing a brand trip experience around our Olipop collection launch. And they have their community, the people that follow them, their customers, send in like a headshot or a video and a thing about why they want to come and how much they love Coco Kind. And they select people, not based any way, shape, or form on the size of their social media following, but based on how they represent Coco Kind's community. They bring people just like you, me, people you know at the street, they bring anybody and everybody who represents their community. Now, they can only do 10 or 15 people at a time. So again, it's it is still selective, like a community brand trip is the same. The community brand trip is the same idea as an influencer brand trip, because only a small segment of a community can come to it. But the idea then is that you're looking at these pictures of people who look just like yourself, that you could easily be. It's not this perfect airbrushed three million follower influencer. It's a person who's like, oh my gosh, that could be my neighbor. That could be my person sitting next to me in my college class. They look just like you and they're being celebrated. And I guarantee you, the community members that are chosen for these Coco Kind brand trips, honey, they never banned anything else but Coco Kind. Coco Kind also builds community beyond just the people who purchase their products. Back in early 2025, when the tariffs were introduced, you know, that was absolutely rocking the beauty industry because so much is imported in the beauty industry, whether it's components of materials, ingredients, you name it. Priscilla again hosted a live, I think it was on LinkedIn, if I'm not mistaken, where anybody could come and talk about how tariffs are affecting them and ways that as a community, as brand founders, they could address it. So she looks not just at, and she and they at Coco Kind, not just at who is purchasing our products as community, but who are our peers as community and really looking at community over competition. And that is what I'm hoping that we can see for 2026 a move away from just pouring into influencer brand trips and a move towards true community, true collaborative efforts. And one of my wishes and dreams for 2026 is that I see one of these brand trips actually become a mission trip. Could you imagine if a brand sponsored going to go help build a school in a third-world country and they paid for that to be done and people went and could actually see the impact that they could make in another community? What if it was just a trip to somewhere in the United States that had recently had a flood or a hurricane or a national disaster? I hate to say these words because it's not a matter of if we're having one in 2026, it's when and where. What if a brand showed up and had people spend a week helping in a disaster relief? That is showing the true power of beauty and what I'm reading for this year. These conversations matter because who gets to speak shapes who gets to win. If this episode challenged how you see beauty, business, or the power behind the industry, share it with someone who needs to hear it. To connect or explore more, check the show notes. I'm Susanna Dellinger, and this has been Off the Shelf.