An Instagram Beauty Brand Navigates a TikTok World

Kristen Noel Crawley would like to reintroduce herself.

Crawley, formerly a model for clothing retailer American Apparel and a jewellery designer, was one of the first beauty influencers to expand into product with the launch of her brand KNC Beauty in 2016. It was a boom time for direct-to-consumer beauty labels. She plugged the brand on Instagram, at the nucleus of the digital beauty conversation, and a platform where she already had hundreds of thousands of followers. Beginning with a single product, a lip mask coated in an “all natural” moisturising serum, she was able to capitalise on the mid-2010s popularity for sheet masks and obsession with super-plump lips.

But while it started with a bang, KNC Beauty has remained small and independent, with only a handful of launches and limited wholesale distribution. Crawley said that personal matters — a new baby, a cross-country move — claimed some of her focus. Annual sales, which hit around $1 million by 2020, have more or less stayed there since.

Recently, Crawley has decided to turn the page. She plans to double her current product offering — with a reusable eye mask and serum duo, a set of cryotherapy sticks (tools that harness cold temperatures to soothe the skin) and a foray into lip glosses — and usher the brand into a new stage of growth. Her goals include securing cash investment, amplifying her brand’s visibility, and landing a blue-chip wholesale partner like Target or Ulta Beauty.

“I’m back to business now,” she said. “The golden age of Instagram beauty, that 2015 to 2020 era, I’d love to get my brand back in that position.”

But that golden age is over, and Crawley will have to reckon with a completely different landscape for selling beauty products online — one that she admittedly isn’t as well-versed in. “I’m still trying to figure out TikTok,” she said.

Added competition from A-list celebrities and makeup artists and a dizzyingly rapid beauty trend cycle represent hurdles. But Crawley believes KNC can overcome the odds, in part by returning to the brand’s best asset: Herself.

Street Smart

It’s common enough today for celebrities, influencers, and beauty editors to start minting cosmetics indiscriminately, but in 2016, Crawley was a triple threat.

Born and raised in Chicago, Crawley found an entry into the world of celebrity after she and her husband, the designer Don Crawley, opened RSVP Gallery with Off-White founder Virgil Abloh in the city’s West Loop. The connection to Abloh and later, Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West placed Crawley in the Kardashian orbit, which helped raise her own profile at a time when Instagram was taking off. She gained industry recognition, too: In 2015, she was tapped by Julie Schott, the co-founder of acne sticker brand Starface who was then a beauty editor at Elle, to write a column called “KNC Beauty Crush.”

Crawley discovered the concept of the lip sheet mask while on a press trip in Tokyo; KNC Beauty was the byproduct of her attempt to reverse-engineer the mask with “all natural” ingredients. The launch timing was serendipitous: At the time, lips crowded the beauty conversation, thanks in large part to Kylie Jenner’s viral “lip kits” and speculation over her use of filler. In 2016, the category grew over 13 percent, according to a survey conducted by cosmetics conglomerate L’Oréal.

Its cartoonish appearance was made for Instagram. The product was a quick hit, earning KNC Beauty an early supporter in Cassandra Grey, whose influential beauty retailer Violet Grey has stocked KNC Beauty since launch. Grey included KNC’s lip mask in a mailer she sent out to artists during award show season, which is how it wound up on Emma Stone’s face — and her makeup artist’s Instagram — shortly before she won the Golden Globe for “La La Land”.

Cute and quirky product design became the brand’s signature. In 2018, KNC debuted its Star eye masks made with a retinol alternative. While under-eye masks were starting to trend, the shooting star shape of KNC’s version was optimised for selfie photography.

“I knew I couldn’t pay people to post,” Crawley said. “So I thought about, besides formulation, efficacy, what can I do to make my product stand out?” To date, the Star eye masks are the brand’s highest-selling SKU.

Crawley’s point of view has been at the centre of the brand, part of the reasons why she’s kept her product assortment small and stuck with niche collaborative partners, like streetwear event ComplexCon, where she launched her “Self-Care” reusable eye masks, and smaller-footprint retailers like Cos Bar and Violet Grey. She refers to her customer as “the girl who wears Jordans with Chanel.”

KNC Beauty has what Cassandra Grey considered “legacy brand material.” “Kristen is just born-this-way cool,” the Violet Grey founder wrote.

But KNC is only one of a few legacy brands Crawley promotes on her Instagram, where she also partners with companies like Revlon and Dior. Crawley has a higher rate of engagement compared to those with similarly sized followings, according to an analysis from the influencer marketing firm Billion Dollar Boy. “Her sponsored posts perform well, sometimes better than her personal content — which is a great sign for brands wanting to collaborate,” said Andrea Ahern, senior vice president and head of accounts at Billion Dollar Boy.

A Star Is Born

Since KNC Beauty’s 2016 launch, other the success of influencer-led brands has been a mixed bag. Influencer Susan Yara’s skincare brand Naturium, born out of an accelerator, was acquired by E.l.f. Beauty for $355 in 2023. Meanwhile, TikTok-turned-pop star Addison Rae’s ill-timed makeup line Item Beauty went on an indefinite pause two years after its debut.

And while Crawley’s business was well suited to the Instagram age, which operated at the speed of a leisurely scroll, the brand has struggled to keep pace with the churn of TikTok, where virality can blow through an unsuspecting brand’s inventory in moments. When KNC’s monstera leaf-shaped eye masks went viral earlier this year, it took nearly eight months to get them back in stock.

This was a new problem for KNC Beauty, even if it was also kind of a champagne one. “You make all these sales from going viral,” Crawley said, “And then you wait months and months to restock your best-selling products.”

Maintaining steady distribution and a tight product assortment has helped keep KNC’s brand identity intact, but it’s also strapped its growth, Crawley acknowledged. Today, the brand is stocked in over 150 stores across North America, including a number of boutiques, but Crawley expressed her desire to ink a bigger box wholesale partner in 2025.

The brand may also benefit from getting in front of consumers who weren’t around on Instagram in the 2010s. A platform like TikTok Shop could help KNC “access to that Gen-Z audience that she hasn’t tapped into yet, because she’s targeting me, who shops at Net-a-Porter,” Ahern said.

KNC is also expanding its product lineup to meet current trends. The lip market continues to bloom, with growth rates reported between 7 and 12 percent thanks to product extensions. Crawley wants to keep the brand’s focus tight, and will be continuing to focus on eye and lips. More eye masks, a lip scrub, and a lip gloss are forthcoming.

Crawley also wants to grow her team — and is hoping to take on investment to do so. Still, she intends to remain fully in the drivers’ seat.

“There’ve been a lot of people that have come in and tried to tell me what to do, and I feel like because I know myself, my brand, and that I have the best intuition,” she said. “But I’m always open to ideas.”

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