How Lush Quit Social Ads and Still Hit £736.2M Revenue
Lush quit paid social in 2021 and still grew to £736.2M in 2025. The psychology: owning customer relationships beats renting reach.
The post still pinned on Lush’s TikTok says it in two words: “Be somewhere else.” To the 344,900 followers on that account, it is an empty shop window. The U.K. beauty brand stepped away from paid ads on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat in 2021, soon after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed the platform’s internal findings on teen mental health. It stopped posting on X in 2023 after Elon Musk’s takeover.
Five years later, Lush has not returned to those platforms with paid or organic posts, said Julia Hamfelt, head of marketing for Lush North America. The strategy was deliberate: shift money away from platforms and into channels the brand controls.
Where the budget went instead
Lush rebuilt its reach through owned and human channels:
- Mobile app: 2.8 million users
- Email: reaches more than 6 million people globally
- Creators and events: a large community of creators and in-person activations
- Cross-brand collaborations: roughly £34 million in sales, per the brand’s June earnings report
Lush has not vanished from the internet. It launched a Substack, joined Bluesky this year, and keeps an organic presence on YouTube and Pinterest—unpaid, by choice, Hamfelt said.
Hamfelt put the philosophy simply: “We don’t engage in any paid advertising on social media.” The brand still works with creators, she added, but it prefers to “invest in people over platforms.”
Owned reach versus rented reach
For most marketers, paid social is a reach machine. Jeremy Ekes, vice president of client service and strategy at January Digital, described paid social as “really about driving reach.” The trade-off of leaving is losing eyeballs and finding new ways to get in front of shoppers.
Lush accepted that trade-off and turned reach into a relationship. The app and email list are direct lines to customers that an algorithm cannot suddenly throttle. Cross-brand collections such as Wicked, Hello Kitty, Minions, Minecraft and The Grinch also carried the brand into new audiences without paying Meta or TikTok for the introduction.
To be fair, paid social was not a large share of Lush’s ad budget even before the exit, and the brand has not disclosed exact figures.
Why the timing looks smart
Lush’s stance now looks less eccentric. Meta was recently ordered to pay a $25 billion penalty in a New Mexico data privacy case tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Australia has moved to ban social media for children under 16. Meanwhile, social ad spending is still climbing: $117 billion in the U.S. last year, ahead of search at $114.2 billion, according to the IAB.
The lesson is not that every brand should delete its ad accounts. It is that paid social rents attention, while email, apps and communities own it. A brand with a strong owned channel can weather platform scandals, policy shifts and price hikes.
What to steal
Start by auditing one paid channel where reach is expensive or undifferentiated. Move a slice of that budget into an owned channel, such as email onboarding or app-only content. Then let creators amplify the message, so the audience returns to a channel you control.
Lush’s bet is paying off. For its 2025 annual earnings, the company reported £736.2 million, up from £672.7 million in 2024, with 11 consecutive months of “solid growth,” per its earnings report.
Source: Digiday
