Janis Thomas, Managing Director at Look Fabulous Forever, talks about customer-centric marketing, eCommerce growth, and engaging the over-50s demographic for lasting success.

Janis' Career and Advice

Tell us about your career so far and the essential turning points that got you where you are today.

I’ve had a long and very diverse career. I spent most of my career in media and entertainment - film, TV, publishing, music etc. I did everything from build one of the first streaming platforms in the UK to organising Hugh Hefner’s 80th birthday party. Because I’d worked in a lot of subscription businesses, I saw an opportunity to move into subscription ecommerce initially and then into ecommerce more broadly. I started out in marketing, later expanded my remit into ecommerce both from a technical and commercial perspective and most recently stepped up to Managing Director.

Looking back at your career, what advice would you give your 20-years-old self?

Your career is potentially going to last for another 50 years. There’s no way you can anticipate the skills and experience you’ll need. So focus on getting as many different skills and experiences as you can. When I mentor people I recommend that they think of their career like a bingo card. Collect as many diverse skills and experiences as possible, because one day they will line up and make you uniquely suited to a role in a way that will set you apart from everyone else.

Marketing and eCommerce Lessons

You've worked across such diverse industries—from beauty to media and entertainment. What lessons have you carried with you from those experiences into your current role at Look Fabulous Forever?

Ultimately understanding your customer is absolutely crucial to success. At Look Fabulous Forever we listen to our customers formally, through our quarterly customer survey, soliciting reviews and monitoring on site behaviour. We also have lots of informal feedback, in particular, we have a private Facebook community where our customers share the details of their lives beyond their experience with our products. It’s a great way for everyone in our organisation to deeply understand what’s going on in our customers’ lives, what’s important to them and even what language they use.

We ask our customers what they want, rather than making assumptions. Are they on TikTok? Do they want buy now, pay later services? It’s especially important for our new product development. Before we start production on any new product, we ask our customers if they would buy it, what do they want it to do, how do they want it to work, what would they need to know about it before they decide to buy it, what price are they willing to pay? This ensures we’re designing every product to meet their specific needs, we know if there’s enough demand for it, at a price that we’re comfortable makes the right margin. It even inspires our launch content and marketing.

Customer research can’t give you all the answers. But a deep understanding of your customers lives, frustrations, needs and how they’re evolving will keep you heading in the right direction.

Having contributed to the growth of brands like Birchbox and Playboy, what’s one key marketing principle you believe applies universally across industries?

I think because I spent a big chunk of my career in subscription businesses, it made me particularly attuned to the fact that how you acquire your customer has a massive impact on how long they are likely to stay with you. In a subscription business, you can only be profitable if you acquire high value customers who are going to stay a long time. If your churn is high, your successful acquisition channels quickly become saturated and dry up. That’s really helped me as I’ve transitioned to ecommerce. At Look Fabulous Forever, we focus on providing useful and helpful content. We build trust with potential customers by helping look great, even if they’re not using our products. We might grow more slowly, but by investing in building a relationship that benefits the customer first, we are rewarded with high repeat order rates and customers who passionately advocate for us.

What’s been the most rewarding aspect of working with a brand that caters specifically to older women, and how do you think the beauty industry can do better for this demographic?

If you look at the data, brands who aren’t thinking about older consumers are missing a massive opportunity. Over 50s represent 40% of the UK population, they’re responsible for 47% of spending and over 55s control 70% of the UK’s disposable income.

It’s not just an issue for beauty brands. Older consumers want to buy fashion, luxury travel, homewares and so on are really frustrated when all their ads are for funeral plans and mobility aids.

One of the things that I absolutely love at Look Fabulous Forever is that we get huge levels of engagement with our ads. Because our consumer is so often overlooked or stereotyped, accurately portraying older women as colourful and vibrant with rich, interesting lives pays massive dividends.

What are the key components of a successful full funnel marketing strategy in 2025?

Ultimately customers can only buy from you if they know you exist and understand what makes you different. All the conversion optimisation in the world isn’t going to grow your business if you’re not getting new customers to discover and trust you. For us at Look Fabulous Forever, we know (from talking to our customers) that they discover us through our useful and helpful content. The techniques to apply makeup in a flattering way are very different as you get older. We start by helping potential customers, even if they don’t buy our products straightaway. We get cut-through and we are memorable because we portray our target audience in an authentic and aspirational way. Over time we build their trust, so when we do acquire them, they’re much more likely to come back and make a second purchase and to recommend us to their friends. We might spend more upfront in the short term, but that investment pays off in the form of a much higher customer lifetime value.

What specific tactics or channels have proven most effective for Look Fabulous Forever in customer acquisition and increasing lifetime value? Why is it the case in your opinion?

When you look at our overall journey to purchase and customer lifetime value, our YouTube content is by far our best investment. By providing helpful content that is designed around what our customer will find useful rather than what we want to say, over 80% of our customers say they want to receive an email from us every single day. That makes email hugely successful for us. Over 70% of our customers have recommended us and the vast majority of those conversations take place in person. Meta ads are very effective for us, especially since the launch of Advantage Plus Shopping. Because every one of our products is designed for a specific use case, different customers have different issues that we can help with, being able to run a hugely diverse spectrum of creatives means that our potential customers can see highly relevant ads.

What leadership qualities do you think are crucial for driving innovation and growth in today’s fast-moving eCommerce landscape?

For me, encouraging experimentation is really important. We have amazing products that our customers love. We want to have a positive impact on society, challenging the negative perceptions and stereotypes of older women. It’s also an infinite task that will never be complete. So we believe that growth is driven by continuously improving everything we do and trying new things every day. So we’re always trying new tools and technologies. Even when something doesn’t work for us, it’s a valuable learning experience.

Quick-fire Questions

• What is your favourite social media platform, and why?

I spend most time on LinkedIn, I follow lots of brilliant people who inspire me.

• What excites you most about where the industry is heading in the next few years?

I think AI is going to provide a great opportunity to reduce admin and repetitive tasks so everyone can do more interesting things.

• Is there a recent marketing campaign from any brand that really caught your attention, and why?

I love Snag tights - their ads are inspiring, bright and size inclusive, I always stop for a closer look

• How many unopened emails do you currently have in your inbox?

0 - what kind of monster has unopened emails in their inbox???

• What is one of your proudest moments in your career?

Speaking at Confidence Live last year - doing an inspirational rather than informational speech was so far outside my comfort zone!

• What is something you’re still looking forward to achieving in your career?

I think a big part of the reason brands overlook older consumers is because we fill our organisations with people 25-39, which is just 20% of the population. I’d really like to inspire more companies to change that.