I Think You Should Work In Beauty

If you work in the health and fitness space, should you be focused on helping your clients be more beautiful?

Maybe it depends on whether you help people with some form of physical transformation

But then we get into the ‘Is that what makes people beautiful, anyway?’ kind of arguments…

Are you the right person to help people with their beauty?

Well, I’d argue you’re better placed than a high street coffee chain.

And yet, rumours persist that Starbucks are entering the beauty space

(They’ve just hired someone from E.L.F, potentially to head up the beauty line)

‘Why would Starbucks go into beauty - what’s that got to do with coffee?’

Starbucks want to sell more, they want to be more relevant

They already do lots of things brilliantly - they don’t struggle with repeat custom, as lots of customers will spend with them daily.

They have successfully positioned themselves as a social hangout between home and work, rather than just a coffee counter

(Former CEO Howard Schultz picked up on this concept after visiting Italian espresso bars and seeing people lingering, using coffee shops as neighbourhood living rooms)

They have locations in city centres, campuses, airports, malls and train stations so it becomes the default meeting spot

‘Let’s meet at Starbucks’ being the coordination script for people

The experience is standardised, people know what to expect in terms of environment and social cues

The next frontier for them?

Average order value

Sell more, be more relevant and increase how much customers spend

They’ve proven this is possible with cup and mug sales - but there’s a cap to how many of these things people can buy.

So once you’ve had your fill of pink sparkly cups, bear cups or water bottle charms - what’s next?

Will the beauty move work? If it happens, who knows.

They’ve indirectly shaped beauty for years - trend-forecasting agencies observe what Gen Z orders and collects at Starbucks - seasonal cups, flavour profiles, packaging aesthetics. Pumpkin Spice, Matcha and Dragonfruit have migrated into lip glosses, candles and body scrubs

It will certainly give them a chance to react quickly to trends, to collaborate with a new group of influencers and to give people something to look at whilst they’re in the queue.

Now, your business shouldn’t learn from this directly - please don’t try and get your customers to spend more by offering sparkly protein shakers (… unless?)

But there are a number of insights here that can be used by coaching companies.

Starbucks have realised that they were shaping beauty without trying, so they just had to pay attention to the votes of their customers

You can look at what your clients share beyond what you do - podcasts, books, side frustrations. If enough people ask ‘Do you know anyone who helps with X’, that’s a signal. Track them, and think about how you can position yourself to help, or collab with someone else who could.

Test small, read the signal, resource the winner.

Full programmes, services and courses are time and labour expensive. Test ideas fast - run a single paid workshop, a one-off lead magnet or even multiple long-form / short-form pieces of content. Treat them as hypotheses - if the market responds, invest time, energy (and money) into servicing the interest.

Leverage existing brand trust to de-risk

When you expand beyond your current offering - a new audience, new topic, new format - anchor in the credibility you’ve built. Your exisiting clients are the lowest-friction buyers for a new product, so ask ‘What would they expect me to offer next?’ rather than ‘What random trend should I chase?’

Position extensions around culture and identity

Often coaches are too focused on what they deliver, and less focused on the culture and the identity they’re building. Lead with the story and identity shift you enable, not just the features.

Accept some risk

Starbucks are under pressure - sales have slipped, competitors are closing the gap and the ‘third place’ identity is fraying - staying the same would also be their riskiest move. The beauty bet is a risk, but doing nothing carries more risk.

Don’t play safe - test fast, move fast, and think ‘What’s the cost of standing still while the market moves?’ over ‘What could go wrong?’

There’s so much that we can learn from big businesses - those doing well as well as those struggling!

Drop me a reply if this has made you think about anything you want to grow, change or test in your business - or if you’re not sure, let me know and we can brainstorm how you can apply these principles.

Connections

• [[Boring or Interesting]] — Starbucks entering beauty is the opposite of the “boring or interesting” strategy. It is a breadth play — become more relevant to more people by expanding into adjacent categories. The “boring or interesting” approach is a depth play — become indispensable to fewer people by going deeper. The Starbucks insight (“they were shaping beauty without trying”) suggests a middle path for coaches: pay attention to what your audience already does around your core offering, and you may discover you are already shaping adjacent behaviours without trying. But the strategic question remains: expand into them, or double down on the core?
• [[The Red Queen]] — Starbucks’ beauty move is a Red Queen escape attempt. Sales have slipped, competitors are closing the gap, and the “third place” identity is fraying — staying the same is the riskiest move. This is the same pressure coaches face when their core offer plateaus. The Red Queen says: running harder on the same treadmill (more content, better hooks) just maintains parity. Starbucks is trying to change the game entirely. The coaching equivalent is not “offer more of what you already do” but “offer something adjacent that your existing trust makes credible.”
• [[Higher status is desirable]] — The observation that Starbucks has “indirectly shaped beauty for years” through trend-forecasting — seasonal cups, flavour profiles, packaging aesthetics migrating into lip glosses and candles — is status signalling at the brand level. Starbucks cups became status symbols (the pink cup, the seasonal launch). If beauty products carry the same brand, they inherit the same status signal. For coaches, the parallel is direct: your existing brand trust is a transferable status signal. A new offer from a trusted coach inherits the credibility of everything that came before it.
• [[Senior developers get more from AI than juniors]] — The “test small, read the signal, resource the winner” framework mirrors the senior developer’s advantage with AI. Seniors get more from AI because they know what to ask for and how to verify the output. Coaches who test new offers get more from their experiments because they already understand their audience deeply enough to interpret the signal. A novice coach running the same test would generate the same data but lack the domain expertise to read it correctly. Testing is only as good as the interpreter.
• [[Hierarchy Moving]] — “Position extensions around culture and identity” maps onto the five hierarchy pathways. Starbucks is not selling beauty products — it is selling Starbucks identity in a new format. The Personal and Authority pathways in the hierarchy taxonomy work the same way: what the audience buys is not the product but the identity association with the person selling it. A coach expanding into adjacent offers succeeds not because the new offer is good but because the audience wants to remain in the coach’s identity orbit.
• [[How CrossFit is so brilliantly engineered and how Hyrox works in the same way - Identity]] — Starbucks’ “third place” positioning (between home and work) is structurally identical to CrossFit’s identity engineering. Both create a social space that customers define themselves through. Starbucks’ beauty extension is an attempt to carry that identity beyond the physical location — the same way CrossFit extends identity beyond the gym through apparel, nutrition, and lifestyle signalling. For coaches, the lesson is not “sell more things” but “understand which identity your clients are constructing through you, and ask what else that identity demands.”

Tensions

• “Leverage existing brand trust to de-risk” assumes the trust transfers. Starbucks selling beauty products may feel natural to brand strategists, but customers may experience category confusion — “why is my coffee shop selling lipstick?” Brand trust is domain-specific, not universal. A nutrition coach expanding into mindset coaching may discover that their audience trusted their nutritional expertise, not their general wisdom. The trust may not travel as far as the strategy assumes.
• “Test fast, move fast” can become an excuse for strategic incoherence. The spark advises running single paid workshops, one-off lead magnets, and content experiments as hypotheses. But too many hypotheses tested simultaneously fragments the brand and confuses the audience. Starbucks can afford to test beauty because they have thousands of locations and millions of customers absorbing the noise. A solo coach running three experiments at once risks looking scattered rather than entrepreneurial.
• The Starbucks analogy may flatter more than it instructs. Starbucks is a $100-billion corporation with global supply chains, trend-forecasting teams, and marketing budgets that dwarf most coaching businesses by several orders of magnitude. Telling a solo coach to “learn from Starbucks” risks importing strategic frameworks that only work at scale. The mechanism (pay attention to adjacent behaviours) is sound, but the execution (hire someone from E.L.F. to head your beauty line) is not transferable.