Senior Vice President of Marketing and Creative Carley Caldas explains how the cosmetics brand’s ‘scrappy’ social team finds creators who will connect its products to culture on social media and in person. Plus, how Eos measures success at events.

In-person activations are a main marketing pillar at cosmetics brand Eos, said Carley Caldas, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Creative.

After the pandemic, Eos noticed consumers craving in-person connections, and so it ramped up hosting activations. In 2026, Eos has 12 activations planned, including sponsorship of the Spring Fling at Howard University and a brand collaboration around the Coachella music festival.

“We’re always looking for those opportunities,” Caldas said. “How can we get to: it’s right for the community, it’s right for a brand product story, and we can maximize the scale with just the conversation that’s happening culturally.”

A recent iteration of that was co-hosting a tennis clinic with former professional tennis player Ayan Broomfield in conjunction with the U.S. Open. Broomfield is the founder of Ayan Aces, a mission-based organization aiming to make tennis more inclusive. Eos and Broomfield invited 100 women of color for a tennis lesson and an introduction to Eos products.

Eos became connected with Broomfield — who is also an influencer and the girlfriend of tennis star Frances Tiafoe — when the marketing team realized she used one of its products, the Vanilla Cashmere body lotion.

“We’re always scouring social and scouring the internet to see who’s using Eos,” Caldas said. “I don’t even know if she had tagged us, but we saw her using our body lotion in content.”

Eos contacted Broomfield, sent her some product and established a relationship with her. This is a common way the brand finds content creators, Caldas said.

“I truly could not count the number of creators that we have started working with just because we saw them authentically, organically using our products,” she said.

The Eos Social Team Is ‘Chronically Online’ Listening, Looking

The social team of five “scrappy” employees spends time on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and Substack, which has active fragrance channels. There, the team learns what consumers care about, what they talk about and how they view the brand.

“Our consumer is chronically online, so our team is chronically online,” Caldas said. “We spend a lot of time consuming the same content that our end consumers are, to find those organic moments that make sense for us to activate on.”

Another example of this is a party Eos hosted called “Bush on Main” with two creators known as “Grant and Ash.” The event was the day before Valentine’s Day, when many consumers are shaving their intimate areas. The activation made sense for the brand because it sells shaving creams and oils. In addition, a popular social media conversation among young people at the time — including Grant and Ash — centered on feeling empowered to show pubic hair.

Consumers received the event well and appreciated that Eos didn’t take itself too seriously, Caldas said.

The brand works to ensure that its community “feels heard” and that all of its activations stem from something the team has heard during social listening, she said.

“We have a lot of amazing ideas, but if the idea isn’t connected to a truth from our consumer, it’s just a beautiful, wonderful, cool idea, we’re not going to do it,” she said.

Measuring Success of In-Person Activations

The tennis event performed well on Eos’ success metrics, including engagement on social media, earned media value, coverage in consumer press and positive conversation from event attendees, she said. Eos often surveys attendees after the fact to hear their feedback, but it didn’t survey attendees of this smaller activation.

“Most importantly, when we’re doing in-person activations, it’s the social sentiment and the conversation that we see in the comments or in the DMs about what it meant to people that we were activating in that space,” Caldas said.

These softer metrics make attributing sales directly to the event challenging, Caldas said. But that’s never the end goal of an event, she said. Whether the brand views an activation as a success does not hinge on a sales bump or the number of impressions it generates.

“The truth is, with most brand activations … there isn’t a calculation and a metric that you can have an actual ROI. You can’t get a ROAS,” she said.

Creators Pull Their Marketing Weight at Eos

While in-person brand activations are a growing part of Eos’ marketing strategy, content creators are a larger piece of it.

For any given campaign, Eos will have six to 15 creators posting about it. On average, Eos has two to four campaigns each month.

In addition, the brand has a group of 20 creators that it calls its “brand besties.” For the past two years, the brand has taken a subset of them on educational trips about fragrance. The inaugural trip was to New York, where the brand introduced the creators to fragrance houses, and the second trip was to Grasse, France, known as the world’s perfume capital.