The holiday shopping season is the Super Bowl for most consumer brands. But in order to succeed, brands need to be training all year long, according to Traackr CEO Pierre-Loïc Assayag.
“This is a year-long effort. There’s no such thing as succeeding during a period of time without having done the legwork beforehand,” he said. “For a creator post to resonate with their audience, there needs to be a sense of authenticity.”
For its 2025 Holiday Shopping Report, the influencer marketing platform tracked the top brands according to VIT, Traackr’s proprietary metric for visibility, impact and trust, for the 2024 holiday season and found they were the same five brands that led in VIT from Q1 to Q3 of that year. That included L’Oréal Paris, Rare Beauty, Rhode, R.E.M. Beauty and Kylie Cosmetics.
Looking at the top beauty brands in VIT from Q1 to Q3 of this year, Traackr found L’Oréal Paris, Rare Beauty, Rhode and Kylie Cosmetics still leading the way, with Huda Beauty newly cracking the top five.
While many of those brands rely on a celebrity founder, Assayag said celebrity-backed brands able to sustain momentum need to expand their social media presence far beyond their star founder.
“Those that succeed at scale and dominate the rankings typically have already outgrown the celebrity founder,” said Assayag. “I wouldn’t say that it would be the same with or without the celebrity founders. However, their role is probably much smaller than what you would imagine, in [terms of] the contribution they have to the success of the brand.”
Rare Beauty has been busy promoting its holiday gift sets and Pinterest gift guide on its TikTok and Instagram pages in recent weeks. While founder Selena Gomez remains a prominent face of the brand, Rare has been expanding its network in 2025 to include numerous collaborations with the likes of Tajín and Béis.
When it comes to the volume of their creator network, many of the leading brands, according to Traackr data, don’t have a celebrity founder. L’Oréal Paris, E.l.f. Cosmetics, Maybelline, Nyx and Mac led the top five in creator volume for Q1 2025 through Q3 of 2025. To win during the holiday season, Assayag advised brands to expand their networks year-round to include creators with as few as less than 1,000 followers.
“The size of the creator community, as a rule, really matters in order to get to critical mass,” said Assayag. “Everybody used to talk about the nano-creators. Now, we have pico-creators that are even smaller. So, you have very small creators and very big ones, and everything in between. And so, looking at the mix of creators that the brand will engage with and creating sort of a pyramid of engagement is part of the ordeal here.”
Rhode, which cracked the top eight beauty brands, in terms of creator volume, for 2025, is one such brand that has frequently utilized creators of all sizes. Though led by celebrity founder Hailey Bieber, Rhode often features creators with a range of followers on its social pages, plus its viral pop-ups drive creators large and small to post about the brand. Its 2024 holiday campaign featured Swedish influencer Matilda Djerf, though it has yet to showcase its 2025 effort.
Whether or not they stand to benefit from the 2025 holiday shopping season, Assayag advised brands to think ahead about their creator strategies for 2026. With social shopping and affiliate models on platforms like TikTok Shop still developing among Western audiences, he said the time to start working out those new models is now.
“The elephant in the room for most companies that have built creator programs is how they monetize them,” he said. “So, get started on affiliation and in the TikTok Shops of the world much sooner than you might think in order to work out all the kinks early in the year and be ready for the holiday season.”
