milieu

Milieu makes personalized skincare built around your skin's own microbiome, using an at-home swab test and an AI platform to build routines that actually adapt to your biology. Our team's job was to get that idea in front of college women, a group Milieu hadn't really reached yet.

The starting point was pretty simple: Milieu wanted to reach college women who care about their skin and are open to trying something new, and sorority networks looked like the fastest way to get there. If a handful of sorority sisters started using it and liked it, that kind of word-of-mouth spreads on its own. So we built the plan around two things: content that actually sounds like it's coming from a college student, and an in-person event to get people trying the product firsthand.

The content side started with a full night of filming. We reviewed Milieu's brand kit and moodboard first, got shot lists and video concepts approved by the client, and figured out the logistics, location, filming dates, who's doing what between our creative and research teams. Then we gathered props (a lot of matcha and fruit, kept cheap on purpose) and shot from 7 to 10 PM, since that was really the only stretch of time that worked for everyone's schedule. In three hours, we came away with six-plus content concepts: testimonials, a skin ecosystem quiz, a truth-or-myth series, an ingredient guessing game, a taste test, and swatch footage of the products themselves, plus behind-the-scenes clips we hadn't even planned for.

We got feedback on those clips partway through, and it shifted things. The early cuts leaned more toward quick, trend-chasing content, and Milieu wanted something that actually explained what the product does, the skin's living environment, why personalization matters, that kind of thing. So we reframed around what we started calling "education through experience," basically real creator storytelling that still teaches people what Milieu is instead of just being a fun video for its own sake. We tightened the clips, leaned into the science-meets-emotion angle, and made sure every video pointed back to what actually makes Milieu different.

The event side had its own set of problems. Getting sorority attendance high enough was harder than expected, so we didn't just rely on sorority sisters themselves, we worked directly with each chapter's social chair and president to push a sign-up link through email, posters, and Snapchat, plus posters around campus and Milieu's own social channels. That work turned into an actual event: Milieu & Sisters, held December 5th at 255 E Liberty St, an evening of drinks, desserts, skincare samples, and content creation built specifically for the sorority audience we'd been targeting.