SuperStay Lumi Matte: foundation, reframed.
Waking up a category that had stopped being curious — and turning a single foundation launch into the engine of Maybelline's base-makeup growth for the year.
- Role
- Brand Manager, Face
- Client
- Maybelline New York
- Category
- Foundation, mass
- Timeline
- Launch Q3 2024
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Contribution to Maybelline's foundation category growth — an unusually high share of incrementality for a single base-makeup launch.
Foundation is a category where most launches earn cannibalisation, not growth. Consumers have their shade, their formula, their habit; they don't enter the aisle looking for a surprise. By mid-2024 the mass-foundation conversation in Romania had flattened into a choice between matte and dewy, and every new launch — ours included — had been presented as one or the other.
Why the category had stalled
The shopper research was unambiguous. People who wore matte were bored of looking flat. People who wore dewy were tired of looking wet. Both camps were compensating with a second product — a highlighter, a setting powder — to hit a finish neither formula delivered on its own. The opportunity was the hybrid, but the word “hybrid” was already exhausted.
The reframe
I pushed to brief Lumi Matte not as a new finish but as a decision consumers no longer have to make. One promise: “matte that catches the light.” Concrete, visible, testable. Creative was directed to show the product on a face in motion — the exact moment light moves across the cheekbone — rather than as a still-life beauty shot. If the claim couldn't be proven in three seconds of video, it wasn't in the cut.
“Categories don't get reframed by new products. They get reframed by new sentences.”
Pricing and placement
We priced at premium-mass to protect the claim — a hybrid that's also the cheapest foundation in the aisle has a credibility problem. Placement negotiations at dm and Kaufland prioritised eye-level facings adjacent to incumbent SuperStay SKUs, so the shopper could see the upgrade path without being forced to hunt.
Outcome
Lumi Matte delivered 65% of Maybelline's foundation category growth in its launch window. Incrementality was high — we didn't eat our own matte SKUs on the way — which is the measure I care most about, because it tells you the category actually grew rather than just shuffled.
The spill-over
The biggest surprise was upstream. Lumi Matte's share of voice pulled attention back to the broader Maybelline Face line, and two adjacent SKUs saw double-digit lift without additional media. A well-briefed launch doesn't just sell itself; it drags the rest of the portfolio along with it.