Career Diaries: Taylor Frankel Talks Co-Founding NUDESTIX and the Importance of Utilizing Social Media

How has your personal presence and experience on social media translated to how you utilize social media to connect with consumers? 

My growth on my personal platform has really been thanks to our growth with NUDESTIX as well as being the face of the brand and having a very direct line of communication with my community. On the NUDESTIX platform, whether it's responding to DMs or going on live or stories and responding to comments, I've been of the mindset that the one thing that will always differentiate NUDESTIX is its founders. There will be so many brands that will try and replicate our products and our formulas but they can't replicate us. 

Pre COVID, my platform wasn't as much of a priority. I would post a bit, maybe some travels, but not as much personal content. Through COVID, I’ve recognized that video content is everything. Educating your consumer through video content is what converts 一 so that's what I've been focused on. And I also realized that I do have such a nice community on my personal platform that it also has advantages to the brand. 

In addition to individual products, the brand is known for curating kits like the new Dark Romantics kit which seem to be a unique take on palettes. What is the creative process behind developing and curating these kits?  

For kits like Dark Romantics, a lot of the time we work together and we look at trends. Dark Romantics specifically was inspired by the fall beauty and fashion trends. We always work with our artists internally and we always look at trend reports [to identify trends]. Another take is looking at previous kits and shades that are existing and that our consumer loves. We always know that our consumer loves neutrals. She loves luminous shades of bronze and gold and rose gold and terracotta, so a lot of times we’ll develop different variations of palettes like that. 

We look to our community as well, and ask them like ‘If we were to launch a palette, what would that look like?’ We also think about what we can do that's really different and that we feel would surprise our community in a good way. 

How has your personal makeup style evolved over the years?

I'm a creature of habit. I love my glowy skin. I love my neutral tones. I'm very much that classic NUDESTIX CUSTOMER which I think makes what we do that much easier. We will always identify trends and will always have fun with certain palettes, but what I think makes NUDESTIX so unique is that we don't shift ourselves based on so many different variations of trends. If we were to shift our brand and our philosophy over the past eight years, we would be all over the place. By shifting you're almost alienating your existing customer. So as much as trends shift, we always try to speak to the NUDESTIX customer and who she is: the everyday girl. 

What’s next for NUDESTIX? Is there an area of the industry you want to tap into or a new product launch you’re excited about? 

NUDESKIN is so fresh. I think we're going to be focusing on skincare heading into next year. We are playing in the mineral SPF world, which I'm very excited about. It took us a while to develop a great formula that is very natural on the skin. So we'll be launching that in spring or summer 一 stay tuned. 

And then we are going to have another big focus on Nudies going into next year. You know, I think something that we learned throughout COVID and over the past few years [the importance of] focusing on our loyal categories. As much as newness and innovation do drive growth, I do think that even more than that, enhancing our existing core categories, drives more growth. When you're constantly developing more and more innovation, there are so many innovations that fail. And we feel like people are just constantly going back to our best-sellers. So Nudies being our staple is going to be a focus. 

We're also going to have another focus and reinspire our complexion products. We realized with our concealer, which we launched in fall of 2020, the launch didn't have much of a digital moment. We didn't really give it the love that it deserves. I think we need to amplify existing products because we did spend so much time innovating so many of these beautiful products that we need to give them a second life. So we're just going to reinspire.