Mila Mendez has spent nearly two decades building digital commerce for some of prestige beauty’s biggest names — Estée Lauder, Bumble and Bumble, Milk Makeup — and she’s convinced the hardest part was never the platform. At True Botanicals, she’s built a retention rate rumored to be double the industry standard, and makes the case that agentic AI is just the next version of a challenge brands have faced every five years: show up with a great product, get your information right, and be where the customer already is.
Behind the Expert
Mila Mendez has spent nearly two decades building digital commerce for prestige beauty brands, starting at Estée Lauder's nascent e-commerce division — employee number 35 in a unit that grew into a billion-dollar business over her roughly seven years there, fueled in part by Estée Lauder's early acquisition of the marketplace Gloss.com. She went on to build and scale e-commerce across a range of beauty categories, including the professional haircare brand Bumble and Bumble and the cult-favorite Milk Makeup, always looking for the next brand to help grow rather than settling into an established one. She's now VP of E-Commerce and Amazon at True Botanicals, the prestige clean-skincare brand, where she oversees direct-to-consumer, Amazon, and the brand's growing omnichannel retail footprint.
The Quick Hits
- Retention — rumored to be near 50%, roughly double the industry standard — rests on product efficacy first, consistent brand storytelling second, and retention technology third. No amount of offers substitutes for a product that actually works.
- True Botanicals treats "clean" as a self-imposed standard, not a regulated one, and defends the term's growing meaninglessness with specific, provable claims — like a Made Safe certification excluding 15,000 named toxins — instead of the word "clean" itself.
- Omnichannel is "harmony," not competition: physical retail and DTC each do something the other can't (in-person sensory experience vs. storytelling depth and data), so the goal is coordinating them, not picking one.
- Amazon is brand defense and demand capture, not a threat to DTC — being present prevents resellers and copycats from filling the vacuum and meets existing demand where a Prime member is already shopping.
- LLM/agentic shopping is genuinely risky because it draws on unregulated, sometimes flatly wrong information — brands need provable claims, because AI assistants will cite them whether they're correct or not, with no real-time chance to correct the record.
Two decades of building, not settling
Mendez's career has been a string of deliberate moves toward brands still figuring out their digital channel rather than ones that already had. She started at Estée Lauder when e-commerce was "this little new baby channel that kind of nobody really paid attention to" — the division grew from a few million dollars to a billion-dollar business during her roughly seven years there. She's since built digital commerce at Bumble and Bumble, a professional haircare brand, and Milk Makeup, before landing at True Botanicals.
Clean as a self-imposed standard
True Botanicals launched roughly ten years ago with quality standards Mendez describes as self-imposed, because "clean beauty" has no formal regulatory definition in the U.S. the way it does in some other markets. The brand committed early to a transparent, cradle-to-cradle supply chain regardless of what regulation required, and backs it with third-party proof — a Made Safe certification, for instance, meaning 15,000 specific toxins are verified absent from the product.
Retention starts with the product
Asked about the brand's retention rate — rumored to be close to 50%, roughly double the category norm — Mendez credits "all of the above": product, story, and technology, but insists on the order. True Botanicals was digital-first and available only through its own site or a single San Francisco store for its first five years, deliberately limiting distribution. Customers kept returning because the product itself delivered.
The one piece of the tech stack she says she'd never walk away from is the brand's auto-replenishment subscription model — a natural fit for a consumable category like skincare, where customers benefit from simply never having to think about running out.
Omnichannel as harmony
Mendez's framework for channel strategy comes from her time at Bumble and Bumble, a salon-first haircare brand competing directly with independent stylists. Her rule then still applies now: some parts of the experience simply can't move online.
That reframes retail and DTC as complementary rather than competing: physical retail delivers sensory experience and human interaction; digital delivers depth of story and data. Neither replaces the other, and Mendez is explicit that treating a new channel as a threat is short-sighted.
Amazon as brand defense
Mendez treats Amazon not as a threat to the DTC story but as unavoidable infrastructure — "the marketplace on the planet" — and a tool for capturing demand that already exists there rather than trying to redirect it elsewhere. The brand doesn't get much "real estate" to tell its full story on Amazon, but it captures shoppers who are already searching, and it plays defense against resellers and greenwashing competitors by being the verified, certified source.
Her approach to assortment mirrors traditional retail: just as a brand might offer different exclusives to Nordstrom versus Macy's, True Botanicals curates what it offers on Amazon differently than on its own site, minimizing direct channel conflict rather than duplicating the same catalog everywhere.
The risk in how LLMs learn
Mendez's biggest concern about agentic and LLM-driven shopping isn't the channel itself — it's the quality of what these models are trained and grounded on: forums like Reddit, Wikipedia, and whatever else has been scraped, much of it unverified or simply wrong. She cites a conference conversation with a product-lab operator who described new brand founders arriving with "formulas" pulled from an LLM that were nonsense when actually tested.
Her conclusion is that the responsibility shifts further onto brands to make claims they can actually prove, since an AI assistant will fold a brand's claims into a shopping recommendation whether or not they're accurate, with little chance for real-time correction. Her counterweight is that True Botanicals' own customer — mindful, health-conscious, and deliberately researching what she puts on her body — isn't going to trust a single chatbot answer without cross-referencing elsewhere first.
Sound Bites
- “I don't like to be settled in any sort of way. So that's what's brought me to True Botanicals — the last and latest in that journey of building something in this evolving digital commerce world.”
- “Being a brand that really from day one didn't waver from the fact that we will self-police the way we produce, regardless of what the regulations are — that's the belief we're in.”
- “It doesn't matter how many offers I throw at you or how much I try to stock you in my retention marketing. You will not come back if you don't think you got great value for your purchase.”
- “Being in the right space also means you play brand defense — you're saying, this is the official place to buy, and if there's greenwashing or clean-washing out there, we're the brand that has all the certificates.”
- “She is not going to just trust ChatGPT for this. She's going to keep searching, and the better information we put out there as a brand, the more informed she'll be in multiple places.”
The Chord take
Strip away the skincare and this is a story about what actually survives a channel shift. Mendez has now watched commerce reinvent its primary channel multiple times — catalog to e-commerce, e-commerce to marketplace, and now marketplace to AI assistant — and her read each time is the same: brands that already have a real product, a defensible story, and disciplined execution absorb the shift, and brands relying on borrowed credibility (a vague "clean" claim, a channel-specific hack) get exposed by it. The specific risk with LLMs is sharper than past shifts, because an AI assistant can confidently repeat a brand's unproven claims into a shopper's decision with no one checking the work — which makes provable, documented substance a genuine competitive moat, not just good practice. That's the same principle behind Chord's own thesis: AI is only as trustworthy as the foundation you give it, and the brands treating this moment as "another five-year channel shift" rather than a reason to panic are the ones already doing the work that will matter regardless of where the shopping conversation happens next.
Put it to work
- 1Before investing further in retention marketing, audit whether the product itself earns repeat purchase — if it doesn't, no subscription mechanics or offers will fix it.
- 2Wherever your category leans on an increasingly generic term (like "clean"), find your own specific, provable claim to stand behind instead of the buzzword.
- 3Treat competing channels — retail vs. DTC, Amazon vs. owned site — as complementary roles in one ecosystem, and curate assortment per channel rather than fighting channel conflict.
- 4Make sure the specific claims your brand makes are documented and provable now — AI assistants will cite them, correctly or not, with no real-time opportunity to correct the record.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
Hey everyone, thanks again for tuning into another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce, working at iconic — or as I like to say, next-to-be-iconic — brands, and get a chance to talk about what's working, what's not working, and tell some honest stories. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Mila Mendez, VP of E-Commerce and Amazon at True Botanicals. Mila, thank you so much for joining me on today's podcast.
Mila Mendez
Thank you, great to be here.
Bryan Mahoney
Where am I finding you today?
Mila Mendez
I am in the East Bay of San Francisco — lovely sunny day today.
Bryan Mahoney
For those tuning in who don't know who you are, take a couple of minutes and tell me how you got to True Botanicals — I found your background super fascinating.
Mila Mendez
Thank you. It's been quite a journey. I started in beauty when e-commerce was just this little new baby channel that nobody really paid attention to, but knew was coming and had to be built. I started at Estée Lauder's digital division — at the beginning I was employee number 35, and seven years later I was 475, and we went from a few million dollars to a billion-dollar division. Estée Lauder was one of the first corporations that really invested in and saw the opportunity — they had an acquisition of Gloss.com, which was the marketplace at that time, and through that acquisition hired the initial employees in e-commerce. After almost a decade there, I continued my path in beauty across a variety of categories, always looking for that opportunity to grow something and build something — that's been the North Star for me with every role. I don't like to be settled in any sort of way. So that's what's brought me to True Botanicals, the last and latest in that journey of building something in this evolving digital commerce world.
Bryan Mahoney
I love the term evolving. I've been in commerce since the late '90s, had a short stop in beauty that I adored — I remember at Glossier we used to look at Estée Lauder and some of the brands under that umbrella and be very inspired. I know you also spent time at Milk, and we really appreciated Milk's approach to being cult without being niche — being something that everyone wants to be friends with, but still having reach. There's this assumption today that commerce is a solved problem, and you just said after two decades it's still evolving and you're always learning. Before we get into how you've seen the landscape change, tell me about the origin story of True Botanicals.
Mila Mendez
It's fascinating, because I remember the brand launching ten years ago and being blown away by the high quality standard that was self-imposed, which is rare, because beauty product-making, at least in the traditional way, is such a commodity. To see a brand come to market with a steadfast, different point of view and stand firmly in its brand belief was something the rest of us in the industry started paying attention to. And when I say self-imposed, it's because in the U.S., clean beauty is not yet fully defined the way it is in some other markets — which confuses the consumer as a result. Being a brand that really, from day one, didn't waver from the fact that we will self-police the way we produce, regardless of what the regulations are — that's the belief we're in. We wanted to build something standing on its own, cradle to cradle, before all these bodies of understanding around clean beauty and sustainability existed. The industry has made strides — there's a clean beauty section in a lot of marketplaces now — but it's still fairly unregulated. True Botanicals really stands for that pioneering, truly clean supply chain that's transparent and gives back. I always try to think about whether the brand I work for, and the people I surround myself with, stand for something — are we different, do we give back the way we need to. From my first day at Bumble and Bumble, a haircare company built for professionals, every brand I've worked for has stood for something different, and True Botanicals is one of them. As I've grown in my career and life, you also try to pay attention as a consumer to what you consume and whether you can support and give back. So I finally have the opportunity to work for a brand that believes in everything I do on a personal level too — there's no other joy than combining those two.
Bryan Mahoney
It must feel fortunate to work at a brand where you're so aligned with its values — you're not just trying to sell a customer a product, you're telling the story of what you stand for, getting them to try it, and getting them to come back.
Mila Mendez
Correct. And the brand has really resonated on that sense, because there's such great retention, and proof that's been important for the brand to stand on — that there is efficacy and potency in the product, just as much as any non-clean skincare. It's important to keep putting that message out: yes, you can be clean and effective for your skin. There's no trade-off.
Bryan Mahoney
It's not a trade-off — actually one supports the other. You mentioned retention — I heard a rumor about your retention rate being nearly 50%, which, if that's in the ballpark, is close to double the industry standard. Without divulging numbers, what's the secret? Is it retention marketing, the product, the brand story, all of the above?
Mila Mendez
It's definitely all of the above. It's also not something to take lightly that the brand was digital-first for five years — you could only get it in its own environment, online or in its own store in San Francisco. Distribution is still very limited, which is of course an opportunity for growth. If the products weren't good and efficient and delivered on the promise on the packaging, people wouldn't come back. So the quality of the product, no matter how good your storytelling is, matters at the end of the day — the experience, the efficacy, the value the customer feels they got for their purchase, and the firm belief in how you produce and introduce new products. Every step matters. Retention happens from that product experience first. Then in my world, technology helps make that stronger if you build the right steps into your ecosystem. But the product and its efficacy is really at its core first and foremost, because it doesn't matter how many offers I throw at you — you will not come back if you don't think you got great value for your purchase.
Bryan Mahoney
It starts with the product — I don't think it's as simple as offer after offer, that's kind of fake retention, and I don't think you can fake numbers like yours. Is there one step in that formula you couldn't live without from a technology point of view — the one thing you'd never go without?
Mila Mendez
It's definitely the auto-replenishment model we put in a while back, which made it very simple for consumers to stay loyal to the product and not think about ever running out. That works for a product where replenishment makes sense — you wouldn't do that for a mattress company, it doesn't work the same way — but for skincare, it just makes everything easier. I'd never take that out of our tech stack. Then it's about having the right pulse and nurturing that continuously, and figuring out how to scale it.
Bryan Mahoney
You're also scaling beyond direct-to-consumer — Amazon, and beyond that, becoming omnichannel. Is that part of being where the customer already is, now that you've built this pull toward the product? How do you think about that through the lens of digital?
Mila Mendez
I always try to look at everything as an ecosystem, a harmonious relationship. It reminds me of my first role in e-commerce, at Bumble and Bumble, a hair brand that started as a salon brand founded by a hairdresser. Being in e-commerce, you were in direct competition with a small, on-the-shelf mom-and-pop hair salon. The one thing I always said to my team and my retail partners was: the one thing I can't do is give you a haircut. You can buy online, I can teach you how to blow-dry your hair with a video, but nothing replaces the in-real-life experience of having great hair. Same with any physical product that has a sensory experience — you can't replace human interaction online, and you can't smell and touch and feel the product. So it's a harmony of being in the right retail space, with the right retail support to continue that message and sensory experience, while the consumer still has full choice of purchasing then and there or discovering online. It's a full-circle ecosystem, and it's harmonious if done the right way. Commerce evolves, and brick-and-mortar retail isn't the same as it was a hundred years ago, and it's not going to stay the same either — so I try never to forget that initial backlash moment of 'oh my god, you're a threat,' and instead find the way of saying, actually, we're complementary, an extended part of the same experience.
Bryan Mahoney
I think it's short-sighted to think of them as a threat — your own channels are where you get to tell the story you want and take care of customers your way. I like the term harmonious — it's not a thoughtless wholesale strategy, it's where do we want to show up, where can these channels align with our brand values and strengthen the story. Let's talk about Amazon — I know people who are excited to be on it and people who are terrified. It's clearly an important part of your strategy, it's in your title. How do you find that harmonious balance between your owned channels and your Amazon presence? How do you tell the True Botanicals story there?
Mila Mendez
As we know, Amazon cannot be avoided — it's the marketplace on the planet, and ultimately the consumer has a choice of where she wants to shop. If you want to spread the message that clean skincare is available, it's better to be where there's a lot of choice, where you might be unexpected in a sense, but also where the customer shops anyway — why not be in a space that gets a lot of eyeballs and traffic just by being the biggest marketplace in the universe? You may not have real estate to tell your full brand story there, but you have the opportunity to capture demand that already exists — if the customer is looking for you and Amazon comes up as a place of purchase, and she's a Prime member buying something else at the same convenient time, why not? So it's about what kind of customer journey you're enabling, not forcing — it's where she shops anyway, so you find that balance. Being in the right space also means you play brand defense — if there are resellers, you're saying this is the official place to buy, and if there's greenwashing or clean-washing out there, we're the brand with all the certificates, the right place to invest in clean skincare. I look at it as an immense opportunity to capture demand if somebody types 'True Botanicals' into Amazon — I'm there, available, and it's a convenient way to capture the consumer. It can be scary, but you can also play it as another extension, another brand store, and it's about curating the right assortment — just like you'd curate different exclusives for Nordstrom versus Macy's, you can have an exclusive assortment for Amazon. A lot of brands figure out how to play nicely in the sandbox based on what each channel can do for you.
Bryan Mahoney
I love that answer, and it might scare people in that the harmony you're describing doesn't happen organically — it's real work. In the era of performance marketing, it felt like pulling levers, arbitraging what a customer's worth. I think the mistake younger or less experienced brands make is thinking channel management works the same way — just pull a lever here or there. What you're describing is: you're in that channel every day, thinking about assortment, making sure you're the authority. There's no secret lever — you show up in the right channel, learn how it works, and evolve as it evolves. Is that fair?
Mila Mendez
Yes, and you have to walk in with the homework done on what you need this channel to be for you as a brand. In some cases it's the primary channel and others are smaller, or not a priority. It starts internally with what's the strategy, where's the biggest opportunity to gain the consumer, what does that look like for replenishment, and what investment you have at your disposal. It's working within your distribution ecosystem on what your brand stands for and where you need to tell certain stories — because let's be honest, certain brands in beauty don't have much of a story to tell, so they don't need to be as discerning as True Botanicals.
Bryan Mahoney
Let's talk about storytelling, because True Botanicals is known as a pioneer of clean beauty, but I feel like the more people say the word 'clean,' the less it means — it gets dragged toward meaninglessness, kind of like 'agentic' is becoming today. As you think about moving the conversation beyond just 'clean,' how do you balance staying where the customer is searching against creating a new category without coming across as preachy? I imagine it's a delicate balance given the brand's position.
Mila Mendez
It's definitely complicated, because we don't have a regulatory standard to stand behind together with everybody else, so the consumer experience has gotten muddled in this space. You have to figure out what you have that no other brand has, and get more and more specific instead of using the generic term 'clean.' It starts to resonate when you look at the audiences you need to speak to in their life journey. As people become more informed, they realize a brand like ours saying 'we have a Made Safe certificate' means something concrete — 15,000 toxins do not exist in our products, versus a regular product from another brand. We can stand behind those specific words, and that becomes our edge, because we no longer need to just say 'clean' and stand in the same muddled waters as everybody else — we have concrete proof and facts to lean on. We laser-focus on that and tell our story through it, and we end up resonating with audiences who are also focused — we match each other in a much more meaningful way, because the consumer is searching specific terms and we're answering with the exact things she's searching for. That's where the storytelling differentiates us from this massive, undefined term called clean.
Bryan Mahoney
It's pretty easy to just say 'clean' — it's something else entirely to back it up with science and claims, and lean into education without going too far, since customers are curious about what they're actually putting in or on their body. That storytelling, versus just putting another offer in front of someone — I'd imagine real brand building is finding that harmony, a mix of both.
Mila Mendez
Yes, it's always image plus words, commerce and story — same as in real life.
Bryan Mahoney
Let me wrap up on agentic, because using the idea that there's no governing body for 'clean' — the LLMs are going to become the governing body when someone searches 'find me the best clean beauty brand' instead of doing the research themselves. Now we've got agents doing that research, and in some cases you can already buy directly from those channels. I'd be curious how you're thinking about the harmony there, and your storytelling and content strategy, such that you have some honest influence over how these LLMs interpret your role in the clean beauty movement.
Mila Mendez
It's an interesting time, because what worries me is where the LLM is getting its information — Wikipedia, Reddit, whatever platforms allow them access. That's the danger, and I think that's where regulation and self-regulation need to happen. They're also immensely incorrect. I was recently at a conference where a person who runs a very successful product lab said that new brand founders are coming in saying, 'here's a formula I got from an LLM, can you make this' — and then they try it in the lab, and it's horrifying, it's just nonsense. So as we're in this new era, we have to be even more careful and mindful about what we're putting out there as a brand, and where these conversations are happening with people who now have access to putting this information out. It's a responsibility on the brand side to stand behind what we're producing — if we're saying 15,000 toxins, we'd better prove it, because we'll get cited whether we like it or not, and that information gets pulled into a summary in somebody's ChatGPT shopping list with no chance of it being corrected — or some other brand fills the gap claiming the same formulation when they can't actually back it up. At the end of the day, the responsibility is on whoever is producing the product and putting it into the marketplace to make sure it's the safest and right choice. As for how the ecosystem will work, that's always evolving — like ten years ago you had a choice to invest in paid or SEO or both. But the consumer isn't only getting information from an LLM — she's still going to try to back it up within her community, or read something else, and our True Botanicals consumer especially is really mindful and discerning that way. Unless she's really sure, she's not going to click buy right away — she'll keep searching, and the better information we put out there as a brand, the more informed she'll be in multiple places. That's where the real puzzle behind the closed doors of the brand matters — who's doing what in each department, because that's the information going out into the universe, whether internet, word of mouth, or in-store, that gets pulled into the human experience of making a purchase decision. Eventually LLMs will become just another ad space marketplace, and we'll shift our budgets — but that's nothing new, that happens every five years. I look at it as a change of where the budget goes, and if you're producing a really good product with enough information to back it up, you just have to work hard getting the message out there, understand your competition, and use your budget to rise above it. The wellness consumer, the person really mindful of their health and what they're putting in their body, is also the one most careful about the information out there. She's not going to just trust ChatGPT for this — she's going to keep searching.
Bryan Mahoney
What I've learned from this conversation is that has to be because you have a great product and you tell a really solid story consistently as you look for harmony across these channels. I talk to a lot of people who are somewhat panicked about this channel, and you're saying, this is the same thing we've been doing for the last five, ten, fifteen years — it's another channel, we have to show up authentically, tell our story, know our customer. It's very difficult to find harmony if you're trying something different in every channel instead of just being a great brand with a great product. Hearing you talk about how the brand has grown, how you think about these channels as opportunities, but keep coming back to the product and the message and not being afraid to take chances — I sincerely appreciate all the knowledge and honesty you've shared today.
Mila Mendez
Thank you, I enjoyed sharing the latest journey — it's something very, very complex. Thank you, Bryan.