Sky High: a hero that kept climbing.
Sustaining a flagship SKU's velocity into its third year at shelf — the point in a hero's lifecycle where the graph is supposed to bend the other way.
- Role
- Brand Manager, Eyes
- Client
- Maybelline New York
- SKU
- Sky High mascara
- Timeline
- FY 2024–25
0%
Category share at dm Romania · two times year-on-year value — in the SKU's third year on shelf, when most heroes begin to soften.
Every hero SKU has a third year. It's the year the cultural velocity slows, the TikTok edits get reposted instead of posted, and the planning conversation quietly shifts from "how do we grow this" to "how do we protect it." The safe play is to manage decline gracefully. I didn't want to manage decline.
Diagnosis before plan
The first thing I did was stop looking at the share report and start looking at the checkout basket. Sky High was still being bought — frequently — but increasingly as part of a multi-product basket where another brand's foundation was the anchor. That's not a Sky High problem; that's a Maybelline Face problem dragging the eye SKU's conversion down by association. The fix had to be cross-category, not within mascara.
Three changes, in order
First, media mix: shorter, conversion-weighted creator edits replaced the longer brand film in the media plan. Fifteen-second cuts with a visible product-in-hand moment did roughly twice the ROAS of thirty-second brand work, and we didn't lose brand equity that I could measure. Second, the in-store story: a single unambiguous benefit — length — dominated the hero shelf. No micro-claims, no secondary messaging; length, repeated everywhere. Third, we negotiated Sky High into a co-location with Lumi Matte at dm, which re-anchored the basket.
"Heroes don't plateau because consumers get bored. They plateau because the brand stops briefing them as though they could grow."
The content engine
We ran Sky High through the same test-and-read discipline I use for launches. Every creator edit was tagged; every paid amplification was measured against the unpaid baseline; anything that didn't lift was cut within two weeks. Over a quarter that gave us a short list of six edit formats that consistently outperformed, and those became the media spine for the rest of the year.
Outcome
Year three closed at 80% category share at dm and 2× year-on-year value. The growth was almost entirely from existing-consumer frequency, not new consumers — which is the right shape, because it means the hero still has acquisition headroom we haven't spent.
What it taught me
Treat heroes like launches, just without the naming decision. The discipline is the same.