How a 9-Person Team Competes With Lancôme & Maybelline

Most brands lack the stamina to stay truly consistent in positioning, communication, and visual identity over years. Hickap leveraged repetitive, simple processes across all company functions to build momentum that's difficult for competitors to replicate. When you're tired of your own messaging, that's exactly when customers are just starting to recognize your brand. The compounding effect of consistency in brand associations over time creates outsized returns that new campaigns can't match.

In beauty and other visual categories, creative excellence in campaigns and product presentations signals product quality to consumers. Customers intuitively understand that brands investing heavily in creative execution are likely making similar investments in product development. Hickap uses high-effort creative campaigns for major launches to communicate trustworthiness and care for excellence, particularly for flagship products like their annual Advent calendar.

Traditional marketing wisdom separates customer events from influencer activations, but Hickap deliberately combines them. By inviting regular customers to influencer events and treating both groups with equal importance, they reinforce that no one is more valuable than their actual customers. This approach builds authentic community and creates content showing real customer enthusiasm alongside creator endorsements.

Hickap surveys customers about which products they want to see launched next, then systematically works through that prioritized list. This approach ensures product-market fit before development begins and creates emotional investment from customers who see their requests become reality. For smaller brands competing against legacy players, this customer-driven development process provides direction that large competitors can't easily replicate.

Understanding that Advent calendars have stronger cultural resonance in Scandinavia than elsewhere, Hickap made their annual Advent calendar their flagship launch—not just a sales driver but a marketing engine. This single product generates €2.3 million in turnover and sold out in six days, demonstrating how leaning into culturally-specific traditions can create outsized returns in regional markets.

Operating in smaller markets like Scandinavia, Hickap invites actual customers to parties, listens to their criticism like advice from friends, and maintains ongoing dialogue. This proximity creates competitive moat against larger brands who can't operate at this level of intimacy. The "treating customers as friends" philosophy transforms transactional relationships into genuine community bonds that drive retention and word-of-mouth.

Despite AI's availability for content creation, Hickap deliberately limits its use to maintain authenticity. They recognize that consumers can detect AI-generated content and that in beauty—where trust and personal connection matter—authentic human-created content outperforms efficient but generic AI output. Being selective about where to deploy AI maintains the human touch that differentiates smaller brands.