It’s tough to compete with Supergoop, the sunscreen startup that entered the market in 2006 and quickly became the industry darling before selling to private equity firm Blackstone in 2021. In many ways, the company created the modern sunscreen playbook by marketing it as skin care, not sun care.
“[Supergoop started] with the mission of really transforming the SPF category, so that people wouldn’t think of it as a seasonal thing,” Lauren Weinberg, chief marketing officer of Supergoop, told Glossy. “The way the brand did that was really by coming out with formulas that debunked, I would say, all the things that people didn’t like about sunscreen. So, it wasn’t sticky, it wasn’t greasy, it didn’t have an odor, and it could go as a primer underneath your makeup.”
Today, Supergoop sells one unit of its cult-favorite Unseen Sunscreen every 16 seconds, but staying on top requires constant evolution, Weinberg told Glossy. For Supergoop, this has included evolving the company’s channel mix this year to better reach new and existing consumers.
“Consumers don’t really think about where they see and hear about brands,” Weinberg said. “One of the things I noticed when I came [into this role in February 2026] is that the way we were storytelling as a brand, or how we were communicating with consumers, was not really cohesive across all of our channels. So we’ve really been trying to focus on doing cohesive storytelling.”
Small shifts this year have helped to grow sales through a more diversified channel mix. For example, Weinberg’s team is focused on promoting lesser-known SKUs on evolving platforms, such as TikTok Shop, while launching its best-sellers across new channels, including Target in February and Amazon Premium starting in May.
Weinberg joined Supergoop at the top of the year after more than two decades in marketing. Her CV includes six years at Yahoo, ending her tenure as VP of marketing, plus another six years at Square, where she was the global chief marketing officer. She held the role of CMO at Peloton before joining the Supergoop team five months ago.
Glossy Beauty Podcast host Lexy Lebsack sat down with Weinberg to discuss everything mentioned above, plus the challenges of tackling Amazon in-house through a Premium storefront and entering mass retail at a prestige price point, and the power of emerging social channels and social commerce.
The following conversation was recorded in front of a live audience at Glossy’s annual E-Commerce Summit in Miami on June 1.
On joining Amazon’s Premium Beauty channel
“This is the other very recent change that happened on May 19, which is: Supergoop launched a new storefront in Amazon Premium Beauty, and so this was a really exciting and big moment for us as a brand, and we made this change because it really enables us to just do much better brand storytelling across Amazon — how we show up, how we tell stories — [because] it’s where people are doing research. And so this has been a really new and exciting shift for us. … The goal is to grow the Amazon portion of our business and to just be able to have a more cohesive narrative as a brand. I think a lot of people have heard of Supergoop, and a lot of people haven’t heard of Supergoop, and so we see Amazon and Target as being places where we can really increase awareness and drive demand. We have a number of campaigns right now that are really designed to support our most important products. … I don’t think people even realize all the places they can buy Supergoop today, but the idea of making this change in Amazon was, for us, to just have more control as a brand over how we show up to make sure we are helping to guide consumers. I think sometimes people don’t know which product is the right product for them, for their skin type, and so we feel like, with us having our own storefront, we can really do a much better job of telling our story and guiding consumers into the right purchase.”
On using TikTok to promote novel SKUs
“TikTok is a very interesting channel for any beauty brand, but for us in particular, because there are a lot of just misconceptions about SPF and sun care in general, and TikTok is a place where we can work with creators that can give us some credibility, and really talk about debunking some of the like fake narratives or false memes that are going on about sunblock right now. Secondly, I think it really helps people see creators using our products, so they can see how the product goes on [and] what it looks like on different skin tones. … We have a lot of SKUs, and so we’ve been doing a lot of work at the brand level to make sure we’re creating more awareness and demand for our most popular SKUs, the things that are going to be the front doors into our brand, so that’s Unseen and Play and Glow Screen. But there are a lot of other amazing products, and I love TikTok for our ability to really talk about them and show how they get used. Those are ones that need a bit more storytelling and a bit more narrative around them, and so we’ll use TikTok for that reason to be able to storytell and then to drive people into TikTok Shop to make purchases.”
