Tree Hut’s ice skating holiday pop-up is one of the brand’s most buzzed events, generating 235,000 social media engagements. Pop-up events are essential to boost brand awareness for the personal care brand, CMO Luis Garcia said.
Without its own stores, Tree Hut uses pop-up events as a way to engage with consumers in real life, build brand awareness and boost sales, said Chief Marketing Officer Luis Garcia.
The personal care products brand hosts about four pop-up events a year that rely on invited influencers to build buzz on social media. Experiential marketing events that are open to the public are key to Tree Hut’s goal of doubling consumer awareness by the end of 2026, Garcia said.
“Tree Hut has around 25% aided awareness, which means that only one in four shoppers of personal cleansing and skincare in the U.S. know about the brand,” Garcia said. “We need to have more events. We need to do quite a bit more of media investment, which we are going to do starting on Christmas Day.”
Ice Skating Holiday Pop-up
For the 2025 holiday season, Tree Hut hosted a two-day ice skating rink pop-up in New York City called Sugarplum Skate Social. The brand hosted30 influencers for the event to promote and attend the event at Domino Park in Brooklyn. Tree Hut took the influencers out to dinner and then hosted them at the rink, which was also open to the public. Around the rink Tree Hut had a “wonderland” activation where consumers could take pictures at different stations and sample products, with the aim of them posting content on social media.
“The most important thing for us is to continue to generate that chatter and communications in social to stay active,” he said.
Tree Hut is happy with the results of the event, as 1,705 consumers ice skated at the rink, 16,445 consumers passed through the event, and 2,640 consumers interacted with a brand ambassador at Domino Park, the brand said.
Garcia ranks the Sugarplum Skate Social in the top three pop-ups the brand ever done in terms of engagement, attendance and impressions. Tree Hut, consumers and influencers posted more than 100 pieces of content from the event, which generated 5.1 million views and 235,000 engagements.
Sampling is Key for Tree Hut
Beyond increasing awareness, which is a top goal, Tree Hut also aims to drive conversion and loyalty with these events, Garcia said. The brand does not sell products at the event — as it wants to keep the focus on community building — but it does give out samples. At the Sugarplum Skate Social, it distributed nearly 11,000 product samples. Plus, the nearly 2,000 consumers who skated at the event received a full-size product to take home.
“When they have product samples, they try it, they like it, they go and find it,” Garcia said.
In the three to four months after an event with samples, Tree Hut notices a bump in conversion of its products both online and at physical stores. Tree Hut sells its products at mass merchants Target, Walmart and Amazon, and at drug stores.
Tracking Pop-Up Attendees
When shoppers sign up for the event, Tree Hut collects their email addresses, which then goes in the brand’s customer relationship database. The merchant then sends them promotions, which is then how it tracks conversion. A consumer who receives a sample and a coupon after at in-person event has a substantially higher conversion than a consumer who receives a promotion from a different channel, Garcia said.
“When we get them from the events and then we hit the same people retargeting, we do see almost three times the conversion compared with an email,” he said.
For this event, of the 1,700 consumers who signed up to ice skate, Garcia expects roughly 80% of the emails to be valid. Of the valid emails, he estimates based on previous pop-ups that about 20% will convert in the next few months. What’s more, about 70% of those emails were ones that it did not have in its database. This means the shopper is likely a new consumer and the event is driving brand awareness.
It also gauges the success of the event based on spikes in social media commentary and engagement with its brand.
“We have a propriety method to see whenever we start seeing a certain level of social posting going up, we see it on the point-of-sale data,” Garcia said. “When we start seeing an event that has great conversation online with great influencers posting about it, we do see the sales attributed to it. It’s hard to quantify exactly like, ‘Oh, it’s because this person went there to here.’ But we do correlate the spikes.”
Connecting with Gen Z Consumers in Real Life
Events have become an important marketing initiative for Tree Hut especially to engage with Gen Z consumers. Tree Hut wants to provide physical space for these consumers to gather and talk about its brand because that’s what they are looking for, he said.
“We try to do it as unique of an experience as possible. Give them something better, that way they can engage, they can chat, they can do stuff, rather than just pick up a sample bag and then go,” Garcia said. “They want to engage; They want to chat; They want to talk to people like them. Providing that environment proves very successful.”
While physical stores can provide this, from a marketing and cost perspective, the pop-up has a better return, Garcia said. Pop-ups allow brands to change geographic regions to reach more customers. Pop-up events can cost anywhere from $200,000-$500,000, Garcia said.
Tree Hut Looks to 2026 to Compete with Bigger Players
Garcia joined Tree Hut roughly a year ago and has worked to get the brand ready for a “big glow up” in 2026.
“We need to step in the big stage,” Garcia said. “We were a smaller brand: we went from $40 million to $400 million in sales in four years. So it was an incredible growth. But now that we are getting to this level, we’re finding out that we’re playing with the big guys.”
Garcia declined to reveal specifics but said the brand is taking its “media investment to the next level” for the first three months of 2026 and will invest in above the line media for the first time, plus other surprises.
Naterra International owns Tree Hut and Baby Magic.
