How Tracee Ellis Ross Built a Beauty Brand That Became a Cultural Movement

The beauty market is flooded with new launches and celebrity-backed brands. Therefore, few manage to break through with both cultural credibility and real business results. Yet Pattern Beauty, founded by Tracee Ellis Ross after a decade of rejected pitches, is one of them.

Recorded live at Brandweek, in this episode of Adspeak by ADWEEK, host Imani Ellis speaks with Christiane Pendarvis, Co-Chief Executive Officer at Pattern Beauty, and Kristen King, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of ATTN:. Together, they discuss how a challenger beauty brand leveraged culture, comedy, and community insight to achieve 50 million impressions and drive 200% growth in customer site traffic.

What You'll Learn:

• How Pattern Beauty challenged outdated industry testing protocols
• Why comedy became the brand’s creative differentiator
• How a Girlfriends reunion cameo helped generate over a billion earned media impressions on a modest budget
• What it means to build a brand where culture is the strategy

About the Guests:

Christiane Pendarvis is the Co-CEO at Pattern Beauty. Joining the brand a little over two years ago, Christiane has led Pattern through a key growth phase: spearheading mass awareness campaigns, overseeing the launch of Pattern Body, and pushing the beauty industry to rethink standards that have historically excluded textured hair consumers. Under her leadership, Pattern has landed in the top 10 fastest-growing beauty brands in social influence and overall brand popularity, while staying deeply rooted in the community it serves.

Kristen King is the Executive Vice President and Managing Director of ATTN:. Kristen partnered with the Pattern Beauty team to develop the brand's breakout Pattern Lounge campaign, which repositioned Tracee Ellis Ross from model to facilitator, leaned into sitcom-style comedy, and incorporated the iconic Girlfriends reunion, all on a limited media budget. Her approach centers on creating work that earns cultural conversation rather than buying its way into it, and she views the agency-brand relationship with Pattern as a rare case of instant creative chemistry that elevated the work from the start.

Host and Guest Resources:

• Imani Ellis on LinkedIn
• Christiane Pendarvis on LinkedIn
• Kristen King on LinkedIn
• Pattern Beauty Website
• Blue Hour Studios Website
• ATTN: Website
• ADWEEK Website

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