CONNECTED COMMERCE IN ACTION
Ft. Kate McLeod, Three Ships, and By/Rosie Jane
The Indie Advantage: Agility in a Connected Commerce World
At the BeautyMatter NEXT50 Summit in Los Angeles, Front Row’s Chief Revenue Officer Christopher Skinner took the mainstage alongside founders from Kate McLeod, Three Ships Beauty, and By/Rosie Jane to unpack what it truly means to build and scale brands in a Connected Commerce world.
Moderated by Chris Skinner, the session explored how indie beauty brands are rewriting the playbook once dominated by legacy competitors. In a shopper landscape that’s looped, layered, and always on, agility has become the ultimate advantage. These founders are proving that success isn’t about being everywhere, but showing up consistently, authentically, and connected across every channel where customers discover, engage, and buy.
From Kate McLeod’s emotionally resonant storytelling and micro-community activations, to Three Ships’ data-driven brand discipline and founder-led storytelling, to By/Rosie Jane’s consistent omni-channel evolution, each brand represents a distinct expression of Connected Commerce in Action. Together, they demonstrate how story, process, and consistency form the new foundation for growth, where Amazon, DTC, and retail no longer compete, but complement each other.
Sharpening the Story: How Kate McLeod Found Its Functional and Emotional Loop
When Kate McLeod first partnered with Front Row, the goal wasn’t to reinvent the brand but refine its branding. As co-founder and CEO Nichola Tucker Gray shared on stage, the brand had already built deep consumer love around its solid body stones and ritualized approach to self-care. But like many fast-growing indie brands, their messaging lived in two worlds: the functional (what the product does for your body) and the emotional (what it does for your soul).
Through a collaborative brand sharpening process, Front Row helped Kate McLeod crystallize those two ideas into a connected message loop; one that speaks to both acquisition and retention. The result was a simple but powerful duality:
“Moisture to melt for.”
“A moment to melt into.”
That clarity became the brand’s North Star, giving every channel, from retail to social to DTC, a shared language to communicate the product’s benefit and emotional resonance. The impact was immediate: Kate McLeod saw a 75% year-over-year sales lift, stronger retail performance, and deeper community retention, all without a major rebrand or new product launch.
As Tucker Gray explained:
“We realized that duality wasn’t a tension to resolve — it was the loop itself. We hook people with function, but we keep them with feeling.”
From there, the brand began activating its story across micro-communities, including runners who adopted the Recovery Stone as both an anti-chafe balm and a pre-race ritual. Each activation became proof that when a brand’s emotional and functional worlds connect, community and growth follow.
Kate McLeod's year-over-year sales lift after brand sharpening with Front Row, leading to stronger retail performance, and deeper community retention.
From Performance to Purpose: Three Ships’ Shared Brand Universe
For Three Ships Beauty, growth has always been rooted in performance, but clarity transformed it into a movement. When co-founders Connie Lo and Laura (Burget) Thompson started the brand with just $3,000, every decision was driven by results. “As long as it performs” was once the team’s north star. But as Lo shared on stage, that focus eventually revealed its limits: different people were saying different things across channels, and the brand’s story began to fragment.
Through their brand sharpening work with Front Row, Three Ships identified a single, unifying purpose:
“To ensure everyone has agency over the ingredients they’re using on their skin.”
That mission became the foundation for a new brand guide, a shared universe that aligned both creative and growth teams under one voice. Suddenly, UGC creators could seamlessly appear in brand photo shoots; ad fonts and color hierarchies felt native to the website; and no matter where consumers discovered Three Ships, they were stepping into the same cohesive world.
“Consumers, no matter where they were finding the brand, felt like they were meeting us in one Three Ships universe, and that really helped to improve performance.”
That alignment extended beyond content. Three Ships built a model for founder-led storytelling that turned authenticity into conversion. By running whitelisted ads through their personal Instagram accounts, the founders saw 2× higher click-through rates, 1.5× longer watch times, and 50% lower cost per through-play.
And when resources are lean, that same authenticity becomes a performance lever. Live shopping sessions filmed on an iPhone — no props, no set — now consistently drive 60% higher average order value and 2× the add-to-cart rate compared to standard launch days.
For Lo, the lesson is simple:
“The founder is an extension of the brand. When used appropriately, it can really help to grow your brand.”
Three Ships proves that in a connected commerce ecosystem, data and story aren’t opposites. Purpose drives process, and process drives performance.
The Myth of Cannibalization: How By/Rosie Jane Turned Amazon into an Extension of Its Story
When By/Rosie Jane first partnered with Front Row to expand onto Amazon, Rosie Jane Johnston, CEO + Founder, By/Rosie Jane, was hesitant. Like many beauty founders at the time, she worried the marketplace would dilute her brand or pull sales away from her DTC site. Counterfeits, dupes, and an unpolished beauty experience made Amazon feel worlds away from the clean, community-driven brand she had built since 2010.
But with Front Row’s partnership, Amazon became something different, not a threat to DTC, but a continuation of it. Together, we built a brand-owned storefront that mirrored the brand’s minimalist aesthetic and storytelling voice. Every image, A+ module, and product detail page reinforced the same narrative that lived on DTC: real, relatable, and rooted in clean living.
READ: FRONT ROW CASE STUDY — How a Beauty Brand Proved Amazon Could Accelerate Growth Without Cannibalizing D2C
“Our DTC is our autobiography. Amazon is the highlight reel — a beautiful extension that lets customers meet us where they already are.”
That shift in mindset, from protection to amplification, unlocked real growth. Today, Amazon is By/Rosie Jane’s No. 3 revenue channel, driving both new discovery and repeat purchase behavior. The brand’s consistent presence across channels has built trust and convenience without eroding its DTC base.
“I feel like the word cannibalization is so five years ago,” Skinner added from the stage. “It’s one customer, moving fluidly across platforms. The question isn’t which channel wins, it’s how your story shows up everywhere.”
For By/Rosie Jane and other indie beauty brands, Amazon is no longer an afterthought; it’s a brand-building engine. When storytelling and creative consistency come first, every channel, from Amazon to Sephora to DTC, becomes part of one connected system.
Connected Commerce in Action
Across every conversation on stage, from Kate McLeod’s story-driven community, to Three Ships’ process-built performance, to By/Rosie Jane’s cross-channel consistency, one theme rose above the rest: growth today is connected.
Modern consumers don’t see channels, but rather where brands are showing up. They move seamlessly from Amazon to retail shelves to Instagram feeds, carrying the same expectations for story, trust, and authenticity wherever they shop.
“When you lead with story, everything else follows,” said Kate McLeod’s Nichola Tucker Gray. “It’s less about cannibalization, and more about amplification.”
As Skinner closed the session, he reframed agility not as chaos, but as clarity through process:
“Agility isn’t about moving fast — it’s about moving with purpose. Story is the North Star, process is the engine, and consistency is what keeps you in the game.”
In an era where the customer journey is looped, layered, and always on, Connected Commerce is no longer a theory but the operating system of modern brand growth.
