When your beauty brand is ready to scale, you know it’s time to upgrade your creatives. But choosing the wrong creative agency can do more than damage your appearance. It can dilute your identity, waste budgets, and delay your launches.

This article breaks down the five biggest mistakes beauty founders make when picking a creative partner, backed by industry insights and examples. We’ll show you how to do it right.

Mistake 1: Choosing a Generalist Agency Instead of a Beauty Specialist

“They did an ad for a food delivery app; they’ll figure out lipstick.”  No, they won’t.

A generalist agency might understand storytelling or brand strategy, but beauty is a different beast. You’re selling pigment, payoff, and packaging. Your audience buys with their eyes first and their wallets fast. Without cosmetic experience, your agency might:

 Ask your agency to show beauty-specific work. Not lifestyle, not fashion. Actual palettes, swatches, tubes, demos. If they can’t, move on.

Mistake 2: Falling for the Big-Agency Deck Without Real Delivery

Some agencies present stunning decks during pitches, glossy mockups, marketing lingo, and even fake campaign ideas. But once the contract is signed, you’re handed off to a junior, timelines balloon, and the quality drops.

Here’s how you spot the trap:

A Clutch.co report found that 56% of startup founders were disappointed with the execution phase of agency partnerships, often citing overpromising and underdelivering.

What to ask before signing:

Mistake 3: Prioritising Aesthetics Over ROI

Yes, pretty matters. But pretty that doesn’t convert? That’s just expensive art.

Too many founders choose agencies based solely on aesthetic alignment, glossy fonts, sleek photography, and minimal palettes. But the ultimate metric is conversion. Did your visuals move product? Did your launch reel improve sell-through? Did your packaging design stand out on-shelf and in scroll?

Don’t be fooled by moodboards. Ask for:

Mistake 4: Not Checking for Beauty-Ready Infrastructure

Creative is more than mood; it’s workflow.

Beauty brands have unique needs: packaging previews, shade accuracy, launch timelines tied to ingredient shipments, quick-turn festive promos, 3D product visualization… and a lot of stakeholders. Your agency needs the right tech, tools, and thinking to keep up.

Yet many founders sign agencies that:

According to BeautyMatter, over 40% of beauty brand delays are caused by creative bottlenecks—from missing packaging files to late campaign assets.

What you need instead:

Mistake 5: Treating the Agency as an Outsider, Not a Partner

The best creative results come from collaboration, not just delegation.

We’ve seen it repeatedly: founders outsource the creative with little brief depth, no strategy sync, and then wonder why the output feels “off-brand.” Your creative agency should work with you, not just for you.

Mistakes here include:

In contrast, brands that treat their agency like a true partner see:

Bonus: How Admigos Solves All 5 Problems

If you’re a beauty founder reading this with a pit in your stomach, you’re not alone. The agency world is noisy, and the beauty world is fast. That’s why Admigos was built from the ground up for cosmetic brands.

Here’s how they've structured their model to eliminate these common founder mistakes:

Final Word: Don’t Just Choose an Agency. Choose a Creative Ally.

The beauty category is visually saturated, algorithmically ruthless, and consumer-led. You don’t just need pretty pictures, you need a creative agency that knows what the lip oil market looks like in Gen Alpha’s TikTok feed, and how to render your tube in a way that stops scrolls.

Avoid the mistakes above, and instead ask:

“Can this team speak beauty? Can they scale with me? And can they show me real results?”

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