Key Takeaways:
It's a busy season for Jacob St. John, founder and CEO of Navigo Marketing, a full-service marketplace agency that has worked with beauty and personal care brands including Lancer, Fur, Rom&nd, Halsey’s About-Face, and Esker.
The holiday season may be over, but the start of a new year means brands are in strategy mode: How will they scale? How can they turn their growth into profitable growth? How can they maximize their budget?
By recognizing that the old way of doing business no longer translates to success, the Navigo team breaks down the silos of traditional beauty businesses. Once Navigo strips away all the layers of obstacles—bloated media spend, disconnected creative, demand decay, lack of margin discipline—it leaves behind a core of connected commerce.
By leveraging one team across all retail channels, Navigo weaves a connective thread through all retail channels (TikTok, Meta, Amazon, Ulta, Sephora, Google, Walmart, Target, and DTC) by bringing all performance and planning into one connected view.
The Navigo team adheres to a simple process: demand generation begets demand capture.
BeautyMatter sat down with St. John to find out how Navigo is burning down the house of traditional beauty commerce and changing the way beauty brands conceptualize their businesses.
BeautyMatter: Jacob, you talk to so many brands. What is the common thread between these businesses, in terms of problems they’re hoping Navigo can solve?
Jacob St. John: I see lots of businesses that have all the right teams in place, but the data is siloed. By connecting the individual channels like DTC, Amazon, Ulta, Sephora, and TikTok Shop, our team enables brands to be more agile in their decision making.
BM: What real-time decisions are brands failing at when they don’t have connected commerce?
JSJ: Without connected commerce, teams focus on optimizing their own channels rather than the business as a whole, which amounts to a lot of missed opportunities. We harmonize those six or seven different channels: Shopify, Amazon, Ulta, Sephora, Meta, TikTok, etc., so that vital decisions are not lost in the noise.
BM: I know you told me Navigo uses 37 different metrics as a simple scoring system for demand generation. What questions are brands looking to answer with this data?
JSJ: The scoring system gives businesses a chance to take a good, hard look at their customers and how they shop. Are they getting people to look for their brand and are they capturing demand? How do they get people to actually buy from their brand? Our team uses our platform, NaviOS, like a dashboard. It’s a connected environment that gives our team and our brands clear visibility into performance, planning, and execution across channels.
BM: So this goes back to helping brands make real-time decisions…
JSJ: Exactly. Our team handles Amazon inventory forecasting, for example. So, if we see that a post is performing really well and it's starting to ramp up, our team and the brand can see across channels where the most conversion is happening. By this time, our team is already communicating internally to get more inventory flowing into Amazon. With connected commerce, we are turning what could have been a week-long decision into same-day results.
BM: I imagine the Navigo team like a connected commerce pit crew for these brands: leveraging creative cross-channel content, assembling the fragmented funnel pieces, cutting the ad spend waste, leveling up consumer growth, and then sending off the optimized car to win the race.
JSJ: Sometimes we do get clients who need drastic changes in a short time span. Last year we worked with a bodycare brand that partnered with us in the middle of peak season. Our team quickly stabilized the business, cutting ad spend 31% while improving ROAS by 40%, delivering an 84% lift in net profit versus Q4 the previous year. We also unlocked new customer growth by identifying a new target consumer and built targeted creative around it, which drove new customer CPA down 38% YoY and improved on-site conversion rate by 43%. And we connected their funnel with high-performing cross-channel creative assets and designed paid social media to drive demand creation that haloed into marketplace sales.
BM: Given how quickly products go viral on TikTok and other social media, I would assume sometimes brands are sometimes taken by surprise and have to scramble. And if their commerce channels aren’t connected, it must be tough to meet that kind of demand.
JSJ: One of our clients, a rapidly growing beauty company selling on Amazon, Ulta, TikTok, Meta, and Google, had tried to leverage its virality into scaling its business, but couldn’t do it because their channels were crossing wires instead of working together. Their revenue was down 42% YoY and profits had plummeted by 79%. Their bloated media spend was cannibalizing Amazon and Ulta traffic instead of protecting it. We saw demand decay, high-cost creative assets that were not being leveraged across channels, and a lack of margin discipline.
We went in and immediately reset the brand’s entire operating system: everything from budgeting and funnel structure to creative usage and SKU prioritization. Every decision our team made was to prioritize profitable new customer acquisition and lay the groundwork for steady scale.
BM: What were the results from this campaign? Was Navigo able to turn the business around?
JSJ: Yes, we were able to turn the company’s 79% profit collapse into 520% profit growth YoY. By reducing ad spend by 60%, bringing their new customer CPA down 66%, and reducing their MER by 54%, we showed that cutting waste does not equal cutting growth. And we taught them that to successfully scale they needed to be disciplined, fixing what was broken before trying to grow.
BM: Jacob, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today. Would you be able to leave our readers with the most important takeaways about Navigo’s capabilities?
JSJ: Yes, of course. The biggest takeaway is that connected commerce isn’t a buzzword, it’s an operating model. Navigo brings every channel under one strategy and one team, so brands can move quickly, protect margin, and scale with discipline. We connect demand generation and demand capture across marketplaces and platforms, and we do it with the same rigor whether a brand is launching into the US or scaling as a category leader.