Fenty Beauty is jumping into marketing with agentic AI platforms, because the consumer shift is here, said Sapna Shah Parikh, Chief Digital Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Kendo Brands Inc., the owner of Fenty Beauty Brands.
“Being in this industry for so many years, you know when you’re seeing a seismic shift on how consumers are engaging within ecommerce as well as online. The agentic channels are showing that,” Parikh said. “The numbers show that we’re seeing that shift.”
For Fenty Beauty Brands, the traffic from ChatGPT grew two to three times in 2026 compared with 2025, Parikh said.
“That’s a pretty sizable shift in terms of traffic coming from a specific channel,” she said.
And that means Fenty Brands needs to develop a strategy on how to best have its brand show up in agentic platforms and serve shoppers who are browsing and researching with these platforms, Parikh said.
Fenty’s AI Marketing Strategy Has Three Pillars
The brand currently has three pillars it is focusing on:
- Being present on Reddit, as large language models have previously disclosed it is a critical factor in how they rank brands.
- Increasing its public relations efforts and how it drives mentions for its brands. This has always been a core part of its SEO strategy, especially because artist Rihanna is a part owner in Fenty, Parikh said.
- Indexing its product data on its ecommerce sites so the agentic AI platforms can appropriately see and source its product catalog. Fenty is doing this with its own teams and with using the tools from its Shopify ecommerce platform.
Fenty Works to Showcase Products to AI Agents
This final piece of indexing its products is becoming even more important as the agentic platforms are allowing in-app purchases, she said. Through Shopify’s Agentic Storefronts admin tool, ChatGPT can easily find Fenty’s products to suggest to shoppers, so they can click on them and buy.
Similar to when TikTok and other social media platforms started allowing checkout within that app’s platform, sales for brands started small and then slowly grew. Brands that were able to test and pivot quickly when they saw the spark had a leg up, Parikh said.
Brands that are a first mover in technology, like now for shopping within agentic platforms, get the advantage of being visible where consumers are and are already building their rank with the platform, she said.
“We have seen sales … it’s just new,” she said. “So the experience from the consumer side, they don’t go into ChatGPT and think that they can buy something. They don’t go into Gemini and immediately think that they can buy something. But similar to social commerce like TikTok Shop, we’re seeing adoption of it. And so it’s very important for us to be there as that starts to unfold and people get a little bit more used to shopping in app.”
Fenty ‘Hustles’ To Determine Reddit Best Practices
For Reddit, Fenty is trying to determine how it can meaningfully show up as a brand on the platform, as it is not the standard place brands typically go in and take over, she said.
“We’re trying to build it,” Parikh said. “To be honest, we’re testing to see what can work first, and then we’ll figure out a plan on how to support. But right now, we’re hustling.”
Fenty Beauty is using its current marketing resources to come up with a strategy before it invests a significant amount. In general, brands have to ensure that they are showing up in community platforms like Substack and Reddit, in a way that is authentic so that it’s not losing the meaning of what those platforms are supposed to be, Parikh said.
“We have to test and learn and see what’s actually going to move the needle before we go in and invest in it,” she said. “We’ll have a hypothesis of what’s going to work, we implement it and then we rank it. Did it work? Did it not work? And if it did, okay, let’s lean in.”
Because this is new terrain, Parikh said she typically seeks inspiration from partners, like Shopify or other industry leaders.
Similar Tactics Applied to a New Channel
Overall, the AI optimization marketing strategies are not too dissimilar from search engine optimization best practices, she said. Google SEO has always been a “critical part” of Fenty’s marketing plans. In fact, Parikh credits this strong strategy for Fenty ranking well within ChatGPT.
“We’ve consistently been one of the top makeup brands to be noted in ChatGPT,” she said. “What we’re really trying to do is keep that rank as more brands are starting to optimize.”
Another related initiative Fenty recently launched is an agentic conservational chatbot within the WhatsApp chat app. This tool, which Fenty calls Rose Amber, allows shoppers to text for makeup tutorials, product recommendations and reviews. It uses similar technology to an on-website agentic chatbot, which could go live on the Fenty ecommerce site in the future.
