Work Moss Theory and Plainlight
Two beauty brands. One year. No use of the word “glow.”
Moss Theory started with no accounts. Plainlight started with friends and family. Twelve months later, social had sold $1.18M of their product.
$1.18M
in social-attributed revenue across both brands in their first twelve months. $710K for Moss Theory, $470K for Plainlight.
The problem
Clean beauty is the loudest category on the internet.
Every brand in it uses the same five words. Clean, nontoxic, glow, ritual, self-care. Put two of them in a caption and you've written the same post as ten thousand other brands that morning.
Moss Theory is a body oil and bar soap company from Boulder. It launched in December 2025 with no audience, no accounts and a founder who'd never posted for a business. Plainlight makes mineral sunscreen in Denver. It had 14,900 Instagram followers, most of whom knew the founder personally.
Two small brands, two different products, no overlap, one shared problem. Nobody can hear you in that category unless you stop sounding like it.
What we did
We banned five words and said what the products do.
Both brands got the same rule on day one: no clean, nontoxic, glow, ritual or self-care. Not in captions, not on packaging, not in creator briefs. It made every post harder to write and easier to notice.
- clean
- nontoxic
- glow
- ritual
- self-care
What's in it, plainly.
We built the brand's visual identity first, then a TikTok series that held each ingredient up to the camera and said what it is and why it's there. Sunflower oil. "It's oil. From sunflowers. It's the first ingredient because it does most of the work." Short, dry, a little funny. The episode on why the soap has no fragrance did 2.4M views.
The UV index, in Denver.
Denver sits a mile up and the sun is harder than people think. We posted the real UV index at the moment it peaked, most days, with the time and one line. "11:40. UV index 8. You put it on at 8 a.m. Put it on again." Followers started screenshotting it. Then they started tagging friends who don't reapply.
11:40. UV index 8. You put it on at 8 a.m. Put it on again.
Creators on a flat fee.
Forty creators across both brands, paid a flat fee to use the product for a month and post what they actually thought. No scripts. No commission. A few said the bar soap was too plain. We reposted those too, because it's true and it's the point.
We banned five words on day one. Every post got harder to write and easier to notice.
What happened
$1.18M from social, in year one.
Both brands are staying for year two. Neither has used the word “glow.” We check.