Client:

KAYALI

Industry:

BEAUTY

Services:

INFLUENCER
PR
CREATIVE

ABOUT:

Base Beauty built KAYALI a year-long earned media and influencer engine that kept the brand consistently at the center of the fragrance conversation.

DELIVERABLES:

Influencer strategy and seeding, press relations, editorial pitching, experiential event support, guest list curation, and ongoing relationship management to drive sustained earned media coverage and social amplification.

KEY
CHALLENGES:

Fragrance is a crowded, noisy category. Breaking through once is hard enough. Staying relevant across an entire year, across launches, cultural moments, and activations, while maintaining a coherent founder-led point of view, is a different challenge entirely. KAYALI needed both momentum and consistency, and those two things rarely come from the same playbook.

PROCESS:

Base Beauty built a year-long earned media strategy around cultural relevance and relationship depth. We mapped editorial moments, seasonal storylines, and tentpole activations to create a rhythm rather than a series of one-off pushes. Press, creators, and experiential were not treated as separate workstreams. They were built to feed each other. Every event was designed to generate social content and media narratives simultaneously, so KAYALI showed up across cultural, editorial, and social channels at the same time, consistently.

Solution:

The core insight was treating press as a storytelling layer, not a recap of activity. Top-tier placements in Business of Fashion, WWD, Who What Wear, and Essence gave the brand authority. Creators translated that authority into conversation. Founder storytelling, product launches, fragrance rankings, cultural moments: everything was contextualized, not just covered. By aligning editorial with launches and pairing both with creator amplification, each moment built on the last. Press drove discovery. Creators drove engagement. Experiential generated content. The flywheel kept moving.

OUTCOME:

Over $100M in EMV across the year. 3 to 7x EMV relative to activation spend per event. Over $9M media impact value, exceeding the client’s goal. 92% of coverage directly promoted product links. KAYALI won WWD Breakthrough Brand of the Year.

The editorial coverage did real work: founder interviews, product features, and trend-driven stories in top-tier outlets kept KAYALI positioned as a category leader, not just a product. Creator trips, consumer pop-ups, and ongoing seeding turned individual moments into sustained visibility. What started as event-driven surges compounded into something more valuable: a brand that was always in the conversation, not just occasionally in the news.