Can Meredith Duxbury help Morphe tap Gen Z?
The TikTok star has joined forces with the beauty company on a limited edition makeup collection featuring six products including an eyeshadow palette, a foaming face primer, an all-over gloss for the face, lips, and eyes, a lip liner, and a brow-sculpting wax and brush duo.
“I am incredibly proud of my new @morphebrushes X Meredith collection. 🩵🫶🏻 I’ve been working on this for over a year and put so much effort into designing and creating each and every product for all of you to love,” the creator wrote on Instagram.
As one of the biggest beauty creators on TikTok with over 18 million followers, Meredith is best known for creating eye-catching videos where she uses nearly half a bottle of foundation on her face every time she glams.
Some feel this was a missed opportunity for Morphe to release an ultra full-coverage foundation with Meredith, or even a super-sized foundation bottle.
The Morphe x Meredith Duxbury collection comes as the brand’s parent company, Forma Brands, emerges from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings with new owners.
Interestingly, this collaboration contrasts Morphe’s reported brand strategy moving forward. In April 2023, Forma Brands president Simon Cowell said that Morphe’s “evolution really is now focused on what I call a product first beauty brand, not an influencer first beauty brand.”
Doug Jacob, co-founder of &vest, which helped acquire Forma Brands following its bankruptcy filing, mimicked this sentiment.
“From the outside in these high-level influencers that wanted to partner with Morphe was because Morphe was actually a special brand itself. But what ended up happening is we became the influencer as opposed to the brand developing what its core values are, which is why we’re stepping back. We’re still leveraged like every beauty brand with partners, we have fantastic partners in the celebrity space, but this brand itself deserves to stand on its own just like other great brands in the space,” he said.
However, Forma executives did note that Morphe’s new influencer strategy would be primarily focused on TikTokers— which is where Meredith comes in.
After a shaky start to the year, it appears that Morphe’s taking big steps to tap the Gen Z consumer by using their signature influencer collaboration strategy with TikTok stars. We presume Meredith is just the start of this new era.
You can shop the Morphe x Meredith Duxbury collection on Morphe’s website from July 20th.