Lush Grew to $982M Without Paid Social Ads — Five Years On

Lush pulled in £736.2 million ($982.3 million) in its 2025 annual earnings — up from £672.7 million ($897.5 million) in 2024 — despite spending nothing on social media advertising for five years. The U.K.-based beauty brand stopped posting and pulled ad dollars from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat in 2021, and quit X by 2023 after Elon Musk's takeover.

The 2021 exit was a protest, not a quiet budget trim. Lush acted after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed the platform's knowledge of harm to teen mental health. "We don't engage in any paid advertising on social media, in that we don't invest in paying the platforms for advertising," Julia Hamfelt, head of marketing for Lush North America, told Digiday. "We do still engage a large community of creators and influencers, but our philosophy really is to invest in people over platforms."

The brand's TikTok account makes the stance visible. Its single post reads "Be somewhere else" to 344,900 followers, and the page has been dormant for years.

What replaced the paid reach?

Lush redirected its marketing budget toward owned and people-driven channels. Hamfelt did not provide exact spend figures, but she detailed the results:

• The Lush mobile app has 2.8 million users
• Email marketing reaches more than 6 million people globally
• Cross-brand collaborations generated around £34 million (about $47.9 million) in sales, per the June earnings report, with collections including Wicked, Hello Kitty, Minions, Minecraft and The Grinch

For comparison, Lush Cosmetics North America's Instagram page has 3.6 million followers alone — an audience the brand cultivates without paying for amplification. "There was a period of time where we had to rebuild avenues and ways to directly connect with our customers," Hamfelt said.

The exit has limits. Lush launched its own Substack and joined Bluesky this year, and it maintains active organic presences on YouTube (at least monthly posts) and Pinterest. "There are some hard lines in the sand," Hamfelt said, "but there are also benefits in continuing to have a presence with and partner with platforms that are taking the right steps to change and protect user safety."

How unusual is this in a $117 billion market?

Very. Social media ad revenues hit $117 billion last year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report — more than search ($114.2 billion), digital video ($78 billion) and display ads ($81.6 billion). EMarketer predicts social networks will capture more than $3 of every $10 spent on advertising next year.

"Paid social is really about driving reach," said Jeremy Ekes, vice president of client service and strategy at January Digital. "That is the pro. You're buying a reach vehicle." He noted that abandoning that vehicle means losing eyeballs and finding alternative routes to shoppers. "We have definitely seen diversification across brands' media mix across multiple channels — especially as advanced measurement has brought clear perspectives on what's incremental to businesses and what is not," he added.

Two caveats temper the Lush example. Paid social was not a significant part of its ad budget even before the departure, and Hamfelt declined to disclose pre-2021 social spend. Lush has not yet reported financials for 2026.

Is the broader environment shifting?

Lush's stance tracks a wider reckoning with platform power. Meta was ordered last week to pay a $25 billion penalty in New Mexico in a data privacy case stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal a decade ago. Australia has moved to ban social media for children under 16.

"I think what we're seeing now is that conversation has hit the mainstream in a much bigger, more powerful way," Hamfelt said. "Companies like Meta are being held to account in a way we haven't seen previously." As regulatory pressure on platforms intensifies, Lush's owned-channel playbook offers marketers a tested case study in growing revenue — 11 consecutive months of solid growth in 2025 — without renting an audience.