Brands team up on gift sets to widen their reach this holiday season
With the holidays around the corner, brands are joining forces to co-create products that stand out in a sea of gift ideas.
This year in particular, brands are competing for a tight wallet share among their customers. One way they hope to appeal to gift-givers is by offering limited-edition drops in partnership with other like-minded brands. For example, the hair-care brand Tangle Teezer has partnered with Kim Kardashian’s Skims on a detangling brush collection that is geared toward Skims’s fashion-conscious customer base. And last week, Béis and Rare Beauty teamed up for a travel accessories drop featuring products like a makeup brush pouch and a blush case. The strategy not only helps create newness in these brands’ respective assortments, but it also widens their reach beyond their core customer base.
Collabs as a lifestyle play
In October, Josh Cellars released a Prosecco and candle gift set in partnership with Hotel Lobby Candle.
Dan Kleinman, chief brand officer at Josh Cellars, told Modern Retail that, this year, the wine maker’s ambition is to become more of a lifestyle brand. Kleinman said that Hotel Lobby Candle, founded by former Town & Country editor and influencer Lindsay Silberman, was a great match for Josh to capture new wine drinkers.
“The primary reason we did this [partnership] was to recruit younger drinkers into the brand,” Kleinman said. “With Lindsay, we thought, ‘Let’s get someone out there who is motivating to this audience and can frame wine in a fun, energetic way.’” The gift set is also a way to capitalize on the spike in sparkling wine sales during the holidays.
Josh is also coming off a series of viral moments from the past year. Currently, nearly 50% of Josh Cellars’s growth comes from millennials, and the company wants to continue building on that. Alongside the holiday collaboration, Josh Cellars recently launched custom wine labels, branded merch and a rewards program.
With the wine category stagnant among new drinkers, Kleinman said these efforts align with lifestyle branding, which he hopes will help frame Josh Cellars as more than just an affordable wine brand.
Tangle Teezer is also teaming up with a buzzy brand among young women to reach new audiences. The company partnered with Skims to create a limited-edition version of its detangling brush, which is being sold on the Skims Holiday Shop. Tangle Teezer created the exclusive brush in Skims’s signature nude tones, with each colorway in the collection corresponding with a different hair texture.
Florence Kings, Tangle Teezer’s vp of commercial for North America, said the $20 brush is part of Tangle Teezer’s 2025 holiday marketing strategy, which centers around “Naughty or Nice.” This is a play on tangled hair and also the idea of choosing between gifting a loved one the brush or self-gifting. The campaign is being promoted across the brand’s social media pages, including via holiday hair tutorials and affiliate creators’ content.
“The [Skims] collaboration lends itself really well to the concept,” Kings said. Much of Skims’s holiday offerings include other brand collaborations, such as with the hair-care brand Slip. “And based on the overwhelming reaction to the collection so far, we have a sneaky feeling a lot of people are choosing to self-gift this one.” Since the collection dropped on the Skims site and in Skims Stores, it has sold out due to high demand from followers of both brands. Customers are now awaiting restocks and distribution expansion through the rest of the year.
Kings said Tangle Teezer had been in talks with Skims for a couple of years, having done some small sampling opportunities together. “Then, in early 2025, we were invited to be involved in their upcoming Holiday Shop,” she said. The co-branded brush required additional R&D effort. “The brush is a core line for us. However, there was quite a process to ‘Skimsify’ it,” Kings said. “We had not engraved the brush before beyond our own brand logo, so perfecting the Skims logo took several attempts.”
Collaborations to promote new sales channels
For other brands, collaborations serve as a way to promote their availability in emerging sales channels. This holiday season, for example, the personal wipes brand Dude Wipes is testing collaborations with other brands to build out its TikTok Shop presence.
This season, Dude Wipes and Goli Nutrition teamed up to create the Gut & Butt Kit, a limited-edition bundle that is exclusive to TikTok Shop. The $29 box, which launched on the platform in late October, includes two bottles of Goli Pre+Post+Probiotics Gummies and one pack of Dude Wipes Mint Chill.
To date, the two brands have sold a combined 4 million-plus units on TikTok Shop and hope the co-branded set will further their reach on the app.
Dude Wipes co-founder and CMO Ryan Meegan told Modern Retail that the company doesn’t necessarily lean into Q4 and the holidays for sales. However, the collaboration is part of the company’s strategy to build out its TikTok Shop, which it began at the start of last year. Between 85-90% of people buying Dude Wipes on TikTok Shop are new to the brand. “We’re mainly using TikTok Shop as a marketing and sampling channel, so we’re constantly looking at ways to optimize it and make it more profitable,” Meegan said.
While Dude Wipes has partnered with other brands on social media contests and giveaways over the years, this is the first co-branded set of its kind. “It’s a fun pairing within the same ecosystem,” Meegan said. “Both of these are usable items, especially for people who take their gut health seriously.”
Both companies are currently promoting the bundle in their respective livestreams and shoppable videos. Meegan said over 1,000 affiliate creators have requested samples in the first week, and over 400 units sold on TikTok Shop that first week. The bundle is also outperforming Dude Wipes’s individual products on the TikTok Shop. “We expect to sell over 20,000 units by the end of the year,” Meegan said.
Josh Cellar’s Kleinman said the wine company will decide whether to engage in future collaborations based on how the Hotel Lobby Candle set performs.
“We expect the sales to start coming in around Thanksgiving time,” Kleinman said. But so far, he said, the gift set has generated buzz through media coverage, influencer interest and user-generated content. “That is exactly what we were hoping for in doing a partnership of this nature.”