What it was
Social for a beauty brand that was also lobbying Congress — and treating political advocacy as content its customers actually wanted.
My role
Strategy and editorial programming
Disciplines
Beautycounter — Advocacy & Education
The received wisdom is that a brand should keep its politics quiet and sell. The highest-performing piece of content in Beautycounter's history was a voter advocacy slide. Not a product, not a founder story, not a discount — a call to act on federal regulation of the personal care industry. It reached the Explore feed and travelled far beyond the existing audience.
The situation
Beautycounter's mission was federal regulation of the personal care industry. Most brands keep politics away from the feed on the assumption it costs them commercially — that advocacy is a tax the product content subsidises. The open question was whether advocacy could carry its own weight, or whether it had to be paid for by everything around it.
The thinking
Advocacy got the same treatment as product. It was given a Hero slot in the monthly plan alongside launches and store openings, not an afterthought slot once the commercial calendar was full.
BC Votes used Instagram's "I Voted" sticker, which surfaced polling locations for anyone who tapped it. That was a functional choice as much as an editorial one — the sticker pushed the story into the Instagram Story Explore feed, which put it in front of people who didn't follow the brand.
Education ran in parallel on two franchises. Good to Know answered the questions the community was already asking, on a fixed template every time: why we made it, what makes it cleaner and safer, our point of view, and who it's actually for. Come Clean filmed new HQ staff switching to clean beauty at their own desks rather than in a studio — deliberately unpolished, closer to Everlane's transparency work than to beauty content.
Results
The BC Votes slide reached 46K impressions, the highest of any single Instagram Story slide the brand had ever shared, and travelled well beyond the existing follower base. Good to Know generated roughly 100 DMs per episode from people requesting which product to feature next.
The finding worth stating plainly: the most commercially off-brand content the brand produced outperformed everything else it posted. That's a useful thing to know about a values-driven community, and it isn't what the category assumes.
