Can Summer Fridays Be Beauty’s Next Legacy Brand?

Summer Fridays is launching a bodycare category, with the debut of its Body Fragrance Mist and Body Butter Balm. The new products are the latest in a roadmap that influencers-turned-founders Marianna Hewitt and Lauren Ireland hope will help Summer Fridays last beyond the early buzz of its 2018 launch.

“We really think of ourselves as the next global legacy brand,” says Hewitt. “A few years in, we felt confident with the business that we were building, the brand, and the team that we have. Now, eight years in, the goal we had of being around for decades to come, we feel more certain about it.”

The bodycare category is booming as more brands enter the space and players such as L’Oréal’s Bold and Advent International invest early.

Can a new legacy beauty brand be created in 2026, when trends are fleeting and competition is fierce? Hewitt and Ireland — both of whom were influencers at the time they launched the brand — think so. Summer Fridays launched with the viral Jet Lag mask, a hero product that set the tone of the brand around hydrating skincare and a forever summer dewiness. The brand then released the also-viral Lip Butter Balm in 2020, and has steadily expanded its collection since, introducing some cosmetics that fit the brand’s ethos, like bronzer and blush balms and a lip liner. The new body butter and mist follow the Summer Fridays’s push into fragrance earlier this year, as well as past tests in the category like a belly oil and lotion.

“What I’ve learned about longevity is that it comes down to two things, whether someone reorders in year five and whether you’ve built a company capable of delivering that,” says Ireland. “Supply chain, partners, forecasting, a field team, real operators in the building; none of it is visible from the outside and all of it determines whether you’re still here. The other piece is being honest about who you’re for. Our sweet spot is the millennial and older Gen Z, and she’s told us clearly what she wants.”

The brand sells on TikTok Shop, Amazon, its own direct-to-consumer (DTC) site and in stores like Sephora, which was its retail launch partner. Rather than taking a social or DTC-first route, the brand debuted with the retailer after friend Jen Atkin, the founder of beauty brand Ouai, connected Hewitt and Ireland with Artemis Patrick, Sephora’s CEO of North America, who at the time, was the retailer’s chief merchandising officer. Patrick helped guide the brand through its early days, offering insight on the products, consumer profiles, and shopping habits that allowed it to stand out in a competitive beauty environment. The launch with Sephora was an intentional early decision to not get typecast as an influencer brand, the founders say.

“We knew going into it that people had a preconceived notion of what a creator brand might be, that maybe the formulas weren’t efficacious,” says Hewitt. “And to have a partner like Sephora really gave credibility to our products and our launches. We knew that we had this really great community online, but that Sephora’s audience was much larger than ours and that people at the time really did want to experience the product in-store.”

But the formula of succeeding at retail has changed. No one wanders into a Sephora store and asks an associate what to buy anymore, Hewitt flags; people come armed with shopping lists informed by extensive online research or inspired by their favorite influencer’s latest recommendation. One of the biggest challenges facing young beauty brands today is the speed at which new products are churned in and out of consumers’ routines, put aside in favor of the newest viral TikTok trend.

The goal now is not to have viral hits, despite the early, social media-driven successes of the Jet Lag mask and the Lip Butter Balm. “Viral products today are very different from viral products in 2018,” says Hewitt. “I think moving forward, we don’t necessarily want to create viral products, because you don’t want something to spike, people buy it one time and then never purchase again. We want to create something that you do see online that does perform well in content, but that you still want to repeat purchase for many years to come.” The brand says that one Jet Lag mask sells every minute and one Lip Butter Balm sells every four seconds globally.

The brand doesn’t shy away from viral moments, like when New York Knicks forward OG Anunoby mentioned wearing Summer Fridays’s Jet Lag eye patches during an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, following the Knicks’s post-win celebrations last season. Hewitt also works on the brand’s influencer team, where the brand seeds product to a variety of creators to feature in their videos. But the brand is also treating its retail strategy as a reactive, rather than a passive, sales outlet. Summer Fridays has a dedicated field team that goes to each of Sephora’s best-performing doors globally to man the brand’s in-store gondola, helping to answer customers’ questions and recommending purchases.

“[One] signal I trust most is going into retail stores,” says Ireland. “I spend a lot of time with our field and sales teams doing store visits and you learn things standing at a display that never appear in a deck from what she picks up and puts back down, the question she asks before she buys, which product she came in for versus which one she leaves with.”

That will play a key role as Summer Fridays evolves into a cross-category beauty brand across fragrance, skincare, cosmetics, and now, bodycare. The roadmap is building on the foundation that was already created, Hewitt says. But what does that look like?

“A legacy brand today needs to be globally relevant. Growing an international business has been really important to us,” says Hewitt. In addition to Sephora stores in North America, Europe, the UK and the Middle East, Summer Fridays is sold at Mecca in Australia and at Space NK in the UK, and recently launched a travel retail business.

“It also means having products that can lean into trends, but are not ‘trendy’ products. So products that people want to repurchase each year,” Hewitt says. “Our core products are important to people. And I think the things that are behind the scenes of building a really great business and team are very important. It’s really not possible if you don’t have the infrastructure to make it.”

“We have four categories that work and a customer who keeps telling us she wants more from us inside them — the opportunity is to build those out properly rather than chase the next category. Beyond that, it’s global. The brand name and the feeling behind it translate in a way we didn’t fully anticipate when we chose it, and there are markets where we’re only beginning,” Ireland adds. “And it’s people. The most valuable thing we can do now is keep hiring the best team who see this as a forever brand rather than a moment. Everything we want from the next 10 years depends on that more than any single product.”