Social is where discovery happens now, but it is rented land. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still not own the relationship, because the algorithm decides who sees you and the landlord keeps raising the rent. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about turning borrowed reach into something a brand actually owns. It pairs the person building the tooling with the person living the problem every day.
Social is where discovery happens now, but it is rented land. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still not own the relationship, because the algorithm decides who sees you and the landlord keeps raising the rent.
Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about turning borrowed reach into something a brand actually owns. It pairs the person building the tooling with the person living the problem every day.
Brett Bernstein, who came to Klaviyo through its acquisition of Gatsby and now leads its new social product, sits down with Kathleen Loftus, Marketing Director at Sculpted by Aimee, an Irish cosmetics brand with a 350,000-strong Instagram following. Kathleen runs brand, creative, PR, influencer, CRM, and paid under one roof, which is exactly why she can trace a viral moment all the way to revenue.
She walks through a campaign built on a piece of theater: teasing the discontinuation of a beloved cream blush. The stunt ran as a closed loop, from Instagram to the brand's broadcast channel to a website waitlist, and it sold roughly eight weeks of forecast stock in under a week. Brett and Kathleen then dig into the unglamorous problem underneath the fun: attribution, why the brand rebuilt its entire UTM structure this year, and how so many of the people engaging with a brand never actually hit follow.
The payoff is a practical view of what it means to own the social moment: spotting the commenters and lurkers who signal intent, and giving them a reason to move into channels the brand controls.
"Not everything needs a million likes or a million views, but it has to have a purpose to be on our channels." — Kathleen Loftus, Marketing Director, Sculpted by Aimee [~7:05]
"We sold out eight weeks' worth of our forecasted product in less than a week." — Kathleen Loftus [~9:15]
"Instagram is the landlord that keeps raising the rent every month." — Kathleen Loftus [13:23]
"You might think they're no longer an active customer, but then you notice their comments on your content. Those are signals we can now unlock." — Brett Bernstein, Klaviyo [14:36]
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!
[00:00:00] Phillip: It is really hard to build a large social following. It's even harder to get that organic reach today in 2026. But the hardest thing of all is to get your social followers to actually convert on a website. The social tax is real, and that's why Klaviyo has actually built a piece of product suite to help brand marketers to convert. And today, we have Brett Bernstein, who built that product and integrated it within Klaviyo's core suite, to talk to us about why they believe that this is so important right now in the age of AI. But it's not enough to just hear about what a product suite is doing to try to help brand marketers and operators to meet that gap with their social followers. We need to actually hear tactically how a brand operator is making it real. And so today, we're joined with Kathleen Loftus, who is in charge of that very job with Sculpted by Aimee. They have a passionate social following, and she's gonna talk to us about how they're taking the theoretical and are gonna make it tactical and practical, and how they are taking their followers and turning them into customers. Let's go live to the interview here at Klaviyo London 2026 at Tobacco Dock.
[00:01:19] Brett: Hi, everyone. It's great to be here today. I'm Brett Bernstein. I'm on the product team at Klaviyo, running our new K Social product. And I am thrilled to be here talking with Kathleen. So, Kathleen, go ahead and give us a little intro on what you do, your company.
[00:01:31] Kathleen: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. I'm Kathleen Loftus, marketing director at Sculpted by Aimee. We are a cosmetics company with skincare and makeup and all of our products that go on your face. So our complexion products, we get from Korean ingredients. So we're really excited about makeup and skincare and kind of building a hybrid so that you can get ready in five minutes or less.
[00:01:54] Brett: Wow. I mean, I don't wear much makeup, but that sounds really fast.
[00:01:57] Kathleen: Yeah. It's all about multitasking. You know, we're women on the go, so we...
[00:02:01] Brett: Make...
[00:02:01] Kathleen: Products for people to use in their daily lives that do more than one thing.
[00:02:05] Brett: Mhmm. So tell us more about, like, what you cover in that role. Where does your purview start and stop?
[00:02:11] Kathleen: So we are a scaling business. So I don't think there is a place where you start and stop in this industry. But my remit is anything to do with marketing. So it's brand, creative, PR, influencers, CRM, and social media that drives all of that, as well as paid.
[00:02:28] Brett: Yeah. Okay. That's a lot of things. So we... we know each other a little bit. So there's, you know, some of my background. I've been running a product called Gatsby for a long time. It's now been acquired by Klaviyo. I'm building out this K Social product natively within Klaviyo. So I've talked to a lot of brands over the last decade. And it's... it's rare to find somebody doing all of those things. Like, typically, there's somebody that is is pretty active on the email, the SMS side, someone else on social. And, of course, even within social, there's usually influencer. There's own. There's... there's advertising. Right? Paid. So how do you do all those things? And I wanna dive into some more details, but just how do you literally do all of that?
[00:03:03] Kathleen: So I have an amazing team. I think the best part about Sculpted by Aimee is Aimee actually started as a makeup artist, and her first actual job was building this business. So she actually runs everything based on her own personality. So everybody gets along really well. We definitely... as we're even building the team, our final interview stage is a culture coffee. So you actually get a coffee with someone. Make sure... obviously, there's like a nice banter and challenge there so that you can work well together. But we... we only hire people that we know will, you know, provide obviously value to whatever part of the business that they're working on, but also bring that culture forward for positivity and that grit.
[00:03:44] Brett: That makes a lot of sense. I wanna dig a little deeper with you specifically on the social angle today in our conversation. So being a cosmetics brand, selling to consumers, I've seen your Instagram. You have, like, 350,000 followers on there. Right? Kudos, by the way. It's not easy to do. Thanks. How does your brand show up on Instagram? Like, how do you think about what your team's publishing, what the message is, what the brand is? What's the strategy there?
[00:04:09] Kathleen: I think it's a funny one because the strategy changes as the algorithms change. Then as soon as you're like, yes, we got it. Here's our monthly cadence, something will shift. So we adapt. For us as well, like a viral moment can last up to what, three days? And then people will go back to it. But I think where we learn the most is who's saving things that are more educational? Who is finding us and then, you know, sending it to a friend, so shares, that kind of thing? So we think about it as a bit of a full funnel approach where we want things that are funny because I work for an Irish brand, so the Irish humor is definitely important, educational, informational. I think based on... moms to grannies to Gen Zs are all using our products, so we need to provide things for everybody in that ecosystem. So for us, we will only post something if it ladders up to one of our pillars. And not everything needs a million likes or a million views. Yep. But it has to have a purpose to be on our channels.
[00:05:10] Brett: So I'm glad you brought up the data side of this because obviously that is one of the big benefits of social. Right? It's this real time feedback on what's working. Right? And what's resonating the most. How do you think about that data stream you get from Instagram or other social channels? Right? It's like what is the viral moment? The content that did that. Right? Or there would be the creator or your own content. How do you think about that data, you know, being able to really leverage that at scale? I mean, you're in your shoes, you manage a lot of things. Right? So you know what it's like to have owned relationships, owned content. You can email someone on your... on your Klaviyo list anytime you want to. You don't have that same ownership over an Instagram follower or the data you're getting from that, like, like in the comments. So how do you think about being able to sort of take advantage of all those signals?
[00:05:55] Kathleen: Yeah. I mean, it's a really loaded question but also so important, which is why all of these different areas sit within marketing because just as you said, so an example for us would be we were relaunching a cream blush in May and we were on set and we were all actually playing jokes on Aimee, our founder, and we had different people, like, put their fingers in a Cream Luxe, and we would go over to Aimee and say something to her and wipe her entire back with different shades. So we put that on social because it's just fun. Like, she had no idea. And then Aimee and I are on set, and we filmed Cream Luxe is... is no longer here. Like, are you sure you wanna discontinue this? This is a huge product for us. And then we took it one step further where Aimee sits down, like, face to camera, and she says, that's it. I'm really sorry. I've made this decision. Cream Luxe is going away. And that caused chaos. Interesting. So we took this into our broadcast channel...
[00:06:50] Brett: Yeah.
[00:06:50] Kathleen: On... on Instagram. We sent things out. We've had, obviously, like, Meryl Streep crying from, you know, different memes here to really have a follow-up because just as you said, not every post has the same impact but if people are seeing a closed loop system then it's working. So we took all that information, we shared things with our broadcast channel. We brought people to the website to sign up for Cream Luxe in advance. And that data that we're driving actually built such a big waitlist that we sold out eight weeks worth of our forecasted product in less than a week.
[00:07:25] Brett: Wow.
[00:07:26] Kathleen: So brilliant for sales, brilliant for data, terrible for content because we filmed all these things to last us for ages. And we ended up in a really great situation where people loved it so much. The hype was there, and the follow through was there. But when we look at that data, it has to be particular to each of these channels. If we know that these waitlists are building, we need to keep that relationship growing with the customer and tell them four more days.
[00:07:53] Brett: Mhmm.
[00:07:54] Kathleen: One more day. Sign up now. Early access. So, yeah, all of our data, I think, works together, and we share that information every Monday in trade. If there's, you know, an update coming through, there are Slack messages with this is the back in stock date just to keep close tabs with regards to everyone from product to customer service to marketing to finance.
[00:08:13] Brett: You know, one thing you really hit on there is that a throughput all the way into the conversion and actually tracking the revenue. Right? That's not easy to do. One of the... one of the areas of social that is, I know, like most frustrating for people that are managing social is they know they're driving bottom line. Right. But it's often hard to get that attribution. So when you think about this bridge between this campaign you did and actually be able to report on the revenue, you mentioned a form at some point to, like, get the... the access in there. Like, how... how do you do it? How do you actually go from the social to the revenue attribution?
[00:08:48] Kathleen: Like, Brett, even businesses who have millions of followers or millions of, you know, dollars or pounds and or euros in revenue, they struggle, I think, with data. So I cannot wait to have a chat with you about K Social. For us, literally this year, we redid all of our UTM structures.
[00:09:07] Brett: Mhmm.
[00:09:07] Kathleen: So we need to firstly make sure that the data we're reporting on is somewhat accurate. It won't be 100% perfect with everything as we know with privacy settings and whatnot, but we need to have a good steer because our teams are working hard. Our organic social team, our influencer team, our partnerships are really working hard, and we need to ensure that they're getting that credit. So at the same time, we're also doing a lot of acquisition right now. Our UK business is on track to double this year versus last year. So as you're bringing in all these new customers, we need to make sure that they're actually buying into the brand and that they're returning. Otherwise, we're just spending money to get people on-site for what. So as we're kind of growing this business, I think for us attributing whatever we can to social, even if it's return on vibes is what we call it, that's something that's important to us so that we treat everybody differently based on where they've come from or what kind of behavioral triggers that they've shown us when they land on-site.
[00:10:09] Brett: Hi, Kathleen. You're speaking my language. We're here at K:LDN. You got to see some of our earlier presentations. You know, we're releasing today a lot of our K Social products. There's some amazing opportunities. We... we're building things based on the use cases you're talking about.
[00:10:22] Kathleen: Yeah.
[00:10:23] Brett: And I'm just... I'm just so energized right now...
[00:10:25] Kathleen: To think...
[00:10:25] Brett: Through that.
[00:10:26] Kathleen: I'm like...
[00:10:26] Brett: Let's go. I mean, this is awesome. So I wanna... I wanna kinda bring us home here pretty soon. I wanna talk about there's this concept out there of Instagram being more of like a rented audience. It's a... it's a phrase. Right? Because when you publish content on Instagram, you have 350 somewhat thousand followers. Right? But you know that most of them don't actually see the content. Right? The algorithm more or less owns that relationship. So as I think about what we're building at Klaviyo, what you're doing, what you're talking about, I wanna understand, like, the trade off there. How do you think about the trade off of continuing to obviously invest in the rented relationship, even if you do get that follower as a subscriber in Klaviyo and you can then market to them on the channels you own? You know, that there's just a trade off in the investment and in the strategy. And once you have these solutions in place where you can get that follower into Klaviyo, how do you think that might change your approach?
[00:11:21] Kathleen: I think, you know, this just reminded me when you say it's rented space, it's almost like Instagram is the landlord that keeps raising rent every month.
[00:11:30] Brett: I love that.
[00:11:30] Kathleen: And so it's like, as soon as you have something nailed down, boom. Here you hit with someone. You know, you're having all these dinner parties, all the girls over, and then all of a sudden, no one shows up. They didn't get the message. Right? So I think it's one of those things where you have to be so agile. We also know from social media, a lot of people interacting with your brand, they don't actually follow you. So I'll see things all the time where I... I'm liking something or I, you know, I dwell. Right? I... I think people are constantly looking at things, but they're not necessarily following the brand because they're still seeing them. That's a huge one. I sat in your session earlier today about, you know, you're looking at a profile and you can see someone doesn't actually follow you. You should message them to sign up. I would love to chat to you, Brett, about how we give loyalty points for that. So, like, how can we say this subscriber doesn't follow us on social? Can we send them a message to get whatever loyalty points and bring them back? Show them why it's important for them to follow us on all of these different places because they'll ultimately get a better experience from... from the brand that the more they interact with us.
[00:12:34] Brett: I mean, it's not just following. Right? So even... even, for example, the comments. Right? So somebody may be on your Klaviyo list, and they're not engaging with email this... this most recent, you know, few months. You might think that they're... they're no longer an active customer, but then you actually notice they're commenting on your content. They're actually posting content about your brand. Those are the kind of signals that we can now unlock. And so as you talk about the use case earlier in that example with that campaign, I just... I'm just so excited that we're able to build these products for those use cases. Okay. So to bring us home here today with the conversation, I want to just give you an opportunity, you know, people out there, they're always asking me like, what are some good examples of campaigns, things that you've done on social that your brands you've spoken to have done on social that really struck a chord, really, really moved the needle. So are there any examples besides the one you shared earlier that you feel like you'd want to share and others can learn from?
[00:13:24] Kathleen: Definitely. I think for us it's using the different types of content very strategically. So Aimee is our North Star. She knows everything about education. She could look at you and say, you are 2.75 in Cream Cushion Foundation, and she would just nail it. I think for us, the social team is funny. They have so much fun. So they'll post, you know, dance videos or something with a hook on top to make people really engage with this. Where we hit the nail on the head with this one, I'd say, we did a service station pop up in both Dublin and in London, and we invited our customers to come sign up for our Sculpted Society membership so that they could earn points. And we brought what we would normally do online into real life. So we were shade matching there. We were encouraging people to come. People are dropping in the comments that they were so happy to have met the team. And we just got such a great response from our community, but also grew the community. So we ended the day with hundreds of new followers. We had 500 new broadcast channel members just from this event. So I would say using your unique selling points in a strategic way in the right place. So for us, is a dancing video going to go on the grid every single time? No. But it's a fun thing to draw people in to then close that loop, to show up in real life and treat the customer like they're our friend. So show up for them, encourage them to be part of our community, and we're going to continue to build from...
[00:14:54] Brett: Yes. I'm so happy you said this one because being so closely tied to social, like what really makes it magical, right, is that authentic connection with your customers. And like the way you said, like a friend, right? Like that is the kind of connection you can't get in other mediums as easily. But on social, if you do it right, if you're actually like authentic, you're in person, like I think a lot of brands might steer away from the in person approach, but there's something special and magical about bridging that... that gap between just digital and in person. Then, you know, there's... there's benefits to having both together. Great example. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you again for... for the conversation today. I really... I really enjoyed it.
[00:15:28] Kathleen: Thank you.
