From UGC to R&D: POV Beauty’s Ani Hadjinian on leveraging community for every product launch
Ani Hadjinian spent most of her career helping shape some of beauty’s most recognizable brands, including Bobbi Brown, Estée Lauder, Tom Ford Beauty and Augustinus Bader. Now, as CEO and co-founder of POV Beauty, which launched in March with TikTok mega-creator Mikayla Nogueira and is backed by Imaginary Ventures, she’s applying that expertise to a different kind of playbook. The brand’s breakout launch, which sold out its first run within hours and drew waitlists in the tens of thousands, reflected the way the rules governing the next generation of beauty companies are being rewritten in real time.
Speaking at The Future of Commerce — a virtual event hosted by Modern Retail and sister publication Glossy, in partnership with Swap — Hadjinian explained the mechanics behind the new approach. The biggest difference she sees between building a brand a decade ago and doing it now is the structure of influence itself, she said. “Ten years ago, if you didn’t have the big brand name or department store distribution, it was almost impossible to break through,” she said in the session. “Today, the ecosystem is completely different.”
POV Beauty sits at the center of this change. Despite Nogueira’s well-known makeup expertise, the beauty brand didn’t launch with color. Instead, it debuted with a “skin prep” range, made up of a serum, a cream and a primer, and rooted in high–performance K-beauty formulations developed in partnership with Korean manufacturers. The products were designed to appeal to both makeup enthusiasts and skin-care-first shoppers, while providing Nogueira and the brand with a versatile base for content. POV’s social channels have rapidly grown since its launch, with its TikTok approaching half a million followers. And the fans that have been following Nogueira (17.4 million TikTok followers) for years have responded well to POV’s formulas, which have proven to be sensorial, demonstrable and built for short-form video.
According to Hadjinian, Nogueira’s creator mindset informs decisions at every step of the development process. Hadjinian used the example of Tribute, the brand’s hydrating serum. “Originally, it was supposed to be in a pump, but for her it was really important to put it into a longer pipette because it has to be highly demonstrative,” she said. “You have to make sure you see the drip coming out.” Hours were spent adjusting suction and volume to ensure the product dispensed in a way that felt clear and credible on camera.
Hadjinian said this approach has extended to secondary details, too; Nogueira has considered how everything will translate to her followers, from the size of the lipstick component to the visibility of shade labels on the product, to the product’s ease of fitting into the acrylic organizers her followers often use at home. These considerations are embedded in the brand’s R&D cycle, which updates frequently thanks to a high volume of community feedback on social media. “Mikayla wants [her followers] to see it and have an opinion, because then it formulates our next launch,” Hadjinian said.
While Nogueira is the brand’s face and creative anchor, Hadjinian emphasized that POV was intentionally not named after her. The brand’s long-term goal is to expand the creator circle rather than rely on a single voice. “The intention was to allow other people’s points of view into the brand,” she said. PR boxes and early samples go not just to press and top creators, but also to community members chosen from waitlists and the brand’s event attendees. According to Hadijnian, recent POV events have been structured around small-group education and product testing, blending influencer activations with grassroots consumer engagement.
POV’s business fundamentals reflect Hadjinian’s background in global operations. The formulation partners in Korea, the early focus on skin-care-adjacent products and the investment from Imaginary Ventures, which has also backed Skims and Glossier, all point toward a brand built for scale rather than one-off virality.
Hadjinian said a lot of the brand’s success and speed also comes down to its internal culture. Internally, the team operates with “user guides,” or documents that outline each employee’s working style, decision-making patterns and preferred communication approach. “You can’t do what we’ve done in the past seven months without your ‘A’ players,” she said.
Looking ahead, Hadjinian sees the brand’s social commerce accelerating, particularly through TikTok Shop, where POV has already seen strong conversion. “Purchasing from the person who influences you just makes sense,” she said. At the same time, she views physical retail as inevitable. “There’s something about being in a store and trying something you’ve heard of. It builds trust.”
POV Beauty’s early trajectory shows how quickly a brand can scale when it merges operational discipline with creator intuition. In Hadjinian’s view, the future of commerce isn’t simply influenced by creators, but it is also shaped, tested and accelerated by them — and brands that understand that shift will define the next era of beauty.
In the full session, below, Hadjinian breaks down how creator intuition, community feedback and social commerce are reshaping beauty’s growth playbook.