I've audited dozens of beauty brands over the past few years, and the same inefficiencies show up repeatedly. This checklist covers the 25 most common problems - any brand can work through these in a quarter and see measurable improvement.
Content (1-5)
1. Audit your content-to-conversion ratio. Pull the last 90 days of content. How many pieces drove measurable sales? If you can't answer that, your analytics setup is the first thing to fix.
2. Stop producing content you don't measure. If you're posting to a platform without tracking performance, you're guessing. Either set up proper tracking or stop posting there until you can.
3. Build a repurposing workflow. Every hero piece of content should generate at least five derivative assets: a still, a short clip, a quote card, an email header, and a Story. If you're creating each of these from scratch, you're wasting production time.
4. Test before you invest. Before spending £3k on a polished campaign shoot, test the concept with rough creative. If the message doesn't resonate at low production value, higher production value won't fix it.
5. Automate product-on-white photography. This is the most repetitive, lowest-creativity content task in beauty. AI tools can generate consistent product imagery from 3D renders or reference photos. Free your creative team for work that actually needs them.
Creators (6-10)
6. Know your cost per acquisition by creator. Not cost per post. Not cost per impression. Cost per customer acquired. If you can't calculate this, your attribution is broken.
7. Diversify your creator roster. If more than 30% of your creator-driven revenue comes from a single creator, you have a concentration risk. Spread your investment across more partners.
8. Prioritise micro creators. Creators with 5k-50k followers consistently deliver better engagement rates and lower cost per acquisition than macro creators. Test a batch of 20 micro creators for the same budget as one macro partnership.
9. Build long-term relationships. One-off sponsored posts feel transactional because they are. The best creator partnerships are 3-6 month commitments where the creator genuinely integrates your product into their life.
10. Centralise creator management. If your creator information lives across spreadsheets, email threads, DMs, and one person's memory, you're one resignation away from losing institutional knowledge. Use a proper system.
Customer Journey (11-15)
11. Map the post-purchase experience. What happens between order confirmation and the next promotional email? If the answer is "nothing," you're losing repeat customers.
12. Build a replenishment flow. Know how long your products last with regular use. Send a reorder reminder before they run out, not after.
13. Match landing page messaging to traffic source. If a creator talks about acne and the traffic lands on a generic product page, your conversion rate is suffering. Create variant landing pages for major traffic sources.
14. Reduce checkout friction. How many clicks does it take to go from product page to completed purchase? Every unnecessary step costs you conversions. Guest checkout, saved payment methods, and express options should all be available.
15. Collect and use zero-party data. Ask customers about their skin type, concerns, and routine during onboarding. Use that information to personalise their experience. Most brands collect this data and never use it.
Operations (16-20)
16. Audit your SKU profitability. Not revenue per SKU - profit per SKU after all costs. You likely have products that are losing money. Decide whether to reformulate, reprice, or retire them.
17. Review your supplier agreements. When did you last renegotiate terms with your contract manufacturer, packaging supplier, or 3PL? Annual reviews should be standard.
18. Automate customer service basics. Order status enquiries, return requests, and FAQs can be handled by automated systems. Save your human customer service team for complex issues that need empathy and judgement.
19. Set up demand forecasting. If you're still ordering inventory based on gut feeling, you're either overstocking (tying up cash) or understocking (losing sales). Even a basic forecasting model improves capital efficiency.
20. Check your compliance documentation. Are your safety assessments current? Are your claims substantiated for every market you sell in? Is your labelling compliant? An annual compliance audit prevents expensive problems.
Strategy (21-25)
21. Define your customer acquisition cost ceiling. Based on your customer lifetime value, what's the maximum you can spend to acquire a customer profitably? If you don't know your CLV, calculate it before spending another pound on acquisition.
22. Identify your highest-value customer segment. Not your biggest segment - your most profitable one. Which customers buy most frequently, spend the most, and churn the least? Focus retention efforts there.
23. Evaluate your channel mix. Are you spreading budget across too many channels without meaningful scale in any of them? It's usually better to dominate two channels than be mediocre across six.
24. Set quarterly goals with measurable outcomes. "Grow brand awareness" is not a goal. "Increase repeat purchase rate from 28% to 35% by end of Q2" is a goal. Make every objective specific and trackable.
25. Block time for strategic thinking. The biggest inefficiency in most beauty brands isn't any single process - it's that the founding team is so consumed by daily operations that nobody is thinking about what's next. Block four hours every week for strategy. Protect that time ruthlessly.
Print this list. Work through it systematically. Fix three to five items per month. By the end of the quarter, your brand will be operating meaningfully more efficiently - and you'll have built habits that compound over time.