How Tarte’s influencer marketing strategy fuels growth

As the global influencer marketing industry continues to grow at a rapid pace—according to research platform Statista, it was estimated to reach $32 billion in 2025, up 35% from the previous year—it’s no surprise that many consumer brands have joined the trend.

One brand that’s set a precedent for influencer marketing is beauty brand Tarte Cosmetics.

• In 2005, Tarte launched on QVC after starting from founder Maureen Kelly’s apartment in New York City. When she started the company in 1999, “magazines were the influencers of the day,” Kelly told the Today show in 2022.
• The brand was one of the first to start working with professional influencers through its “Trippin with Tarte” brand trips, which brought influencers together for an all-expenses paid trip.

“I guess you could say it was influencer marketing before influencer marketing even had a name,” Kelly said. “I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but we’ve created what’s known as the influencer brand trip. There was no playbook to follow. I was just following my gut and that philosophy still holds true today. You can buy reach, but you can’t buy relationships, and that’s why I’ve always focused on something deeper than a transaction.”

“Trippin with Tarte” is positioned as a full-on brand experience, with influencers decked out in Tarte merchandise staying in lavish accommodations decorated with Tarte logos and symbols and attending local excursions, all of which is curated in a way that makes for good social media content. The trips have attracted attention for their lavish nature, garnering speculation in prior years over its influencer marketing budget.

Inventing the brand trip

Tarte hosted its first brand trip in 2015 as the influencer landscape was taking shape. Kelly hosted the trip herself without an events team at a small rental house in Turks and Caicos and was what she described as “cheap and cheerful.”

Since the first event, “Trippin with Tarte” has grown both in terms of the trips themselves—they’ve taken place in locations like Dubai and Bora Bora, and included major influencers like Alix Earle, Monet McMichael, and Desi Perkins—and in social media virality. While Kelly said influencers are not obligated to post about the trip, Tarte extensively documented the brand trips “like a reality series,” Kelly said, with video and photo content shown across the brand’s social media platforms.

“It’s very episodic or bingeable and something our customers follow like a series,” Kelly said. “We’re leaning into that even more—treating it like ‘beautytainment’ and not just marketing. Since we invented the influencer program trip, we have to keep reinventing it. Every trip has taught us something new and that evolution is why we’re still leading the conversation a decade later.”

Turning influence into growth

Tarte’s brand trips and its influencer relationships have translated into measurable growth for the brand, according to Kelly, who says that Tarte sees spikes in traffic every time a trip takes place and “long-term brand lifts” of new customers discovering the brand and existing customers reengaging.

According to AI-powered brand performance platform Launchmetrics, Tarte’s most recent trip to Key Largo, Florida, generated $2.5 million in media impact value (MIV), which is the platform’s proprietary algorithm that assigns a monetary value to brand exposure. In 2025, Tarte generated $180 million in media impact value from its influencer relationships, which accounted for 75% of the brand’s overall MIV for the year.

“Over the years, brand trips have evolved into something more strategic than just a media moment, they've become content ecosystems in their own right that bring together a well-curated mix of voices to generate authentic storytelling at scale,” said Alison Bringé, CMO at Launchmetrics, in a statement. “Tarte’s recent ‘Trippin with Tarte’ trip to Key Largo is a strong example of that in action. The brand saw a 12% increase in MIV compared to the prior month, which shows how a well-executed brand trip can move the needle on overall brand performance in a meaningful way.”

Kelly said that since relationships are integral to Tarte, the trips aren’t viewed as a momentary event, but rather part of the brand’s long-term growth strategy. For instance, many of Tarte’s collaborations have been with influencers after they attend a brand trip, like Aspyn Ovard.

“Because we focus on relationships over one-offs, the impact compounds so that the same creators that come on trips continue talking about Tarte long after the trip ends,” Kelly said. “It’s not just a moment, it's momentum. Beyond the trips, a huge part of our strategy is building and maintaining a relationship through real personalization. Personalization, for me, is everything. It’s our love language and that’s what turns creators into lifelong brand advocates.”

As Tarte has evolved its brand trips and influencer partnerships over the last decade, Kelly said the root of the strategy has stayed the same: community and personalization. She thinks this mission will continue leading a successful influencer marketing strategy.