Kiehl’s and Brittany Cartwright have something in common. Despite one being a 174-year-old skin-care brand and one being a Bravo reality star, both went through public breakups in 2024: Kiehl’s ended its partnership with luxury gym chain Equinox to the disappointment of many fans, and Cartwright separated from her husband and “Vanderpump Rules” star Jax Taylor.
For Kiehl’s, that makes Cartwright the perfect person to reveal its new relationship: On Wednesday, the L’Oréal-owned skin-care brand announced its new role as the official amenities partner for the luxury fitness chain Life Time with a social media campaign led by Cartwright. Beginning in the summer, Kiehl’s products such as its Grapefruit Body Wash and Creme de Corps lotion will be available at nine New York City Life Time locations, which the company calls “athletic country clubs.” The partnership will be Kiehl’s first foray back into the fitness space since it ended its relationship with Equinox.
“There are so many things working for this campaign. It’s like a triple threat of excitement with Brittany’s dating life, Brittany on Bravo’s new season [of “The Valley”], and then Kiehl’s and Life Time’s partnership,” said Guillaume Monsel, U.S. head of marketing at Kiehl’s. “It’s really four different conversations that we’re tapping into as a brand.”
To connect those conversations, Kiehl’s recruited Cartwright into a playful social media subterfuge. A week prior to announcing the “hard launch” of the Kiehl’s and Life Time partnership on Wednesday, Cartwright teased a “new man” on Instagram, sharing to her Instagram Stories a photo of herself with an anonymous man playing pickleball. Celebrity gossip account Deux Moi also posted photos of Cartwright with the anonymous man on the streets of New York.
Kiehl’s has also tapped Instagram humor accounts Overheard New York, Nolita Dirtbag, the Fake Rothko and the Dewy Dudes to announce the partnership on their social feeds in the following days. The brand hopes the strategy will result in 1 million social media engagements across paid and organic content by June.
“We’re looking to grow the number of people who are aware of Kiehl’s,” said Monsel of the motivation behind the campaign. “In the U.S, our awareness is fairly low; we’re under 30% in aided awareness of Kiehl’s. So we want to grow that.”
The rollout takes a similar strategy to a campaign from fellow L’Oréal-owned brand La Roche-Posay, which launched a tennis-themed campaign in the spring with a rollout of Instagram posts from players like Taylor Fritz and social media influencers like Sabrina Brier to create a “web of posting.” Such a widespread posting strategy is necessary to break through a saturated market, Monsel said.
“It’s so saturated in terms of the ads you see on social and the amount of conversation. So to really create buzz, it’s really about taking over platforms,” said Monsel. “The new way of marketing is building a whole ecosystem. We’re creating different moments for consumers to engage with, and we’re getting them excited by what they want to see and know, which is the latest news.”
Life Time was founded in 1992 and announced plans for rapid expansion on its 25th anniversary in 2017. The fitness company went public in 2021 and in May 2025 announced an 18.3% growth in revenue for the first quarter of 2025. It now operates 180 locations across the U.S. and Canada. While the launch begins with New York City, Kiehl’s plans to expand to Life Time’s West Coast locations in Q3 of 2025 and launch a spa experience in early 2026.
But time will tell if the new relationship can steal focus from Kiehl’s former partnership with Equinox, which replaced Kiehl’s products with Grown Alchemist to the fury of many Equinox members in 2024. Monsel said Kiehl’s still sees thousands of users posting about the ending of the partnership.
“[Wellness customers] expect high-quality products that deliver an experience,” said Monsel. “An experience can be sensorial, it could be smell, it could be benefits. And you really see that what Kiehl’s delivered for years and years is exactly that, because now consumers feel when they leave the brand, they’ve lost that.”
