The brand is a mid-market UK skincare company with roughly £22m of annual direct-to-consumer revenue, selling into a specific niche within the broader skincare category (I have agreed not to name it, at the brand's request). The head of content — call her Ola — has been at the company for four years, and has run the brand's TikTok programme since early 2023. The programme she runs now, in mid-2026, looks substantially different from the programme the industry's default advice would have produced.
The studio
The team, at full complement, is six people, all full-time employees of the brand rather than contractors or agency staff. There is a videographer who leads production, a second videographer who works primarily with a mobile setup, an editor whose primary responsibility is post-production but who also does some on-set direction, a scriptwriter, a sound designer (part-time, shared with the brand's other channels), and Ola herself, who runs commissioning and editorial.
The team has a dedicated space — a converted room at the brand's small London office, with basic lighting, a green screen, a couple of camera positions, and enough soft furnishing to permit filming in a natural, non-studio-looking setup when that is what the piece calls for. The equipment budget across the studio's life to date has run to somewhere in the region of £45,000 — cameras, lighting, audio equipment, editing hardware, and the modest built environment. This is a small figure by broadcast standards and, on Ola's own analysis, has fully paid for itself many times over on the videos it has enabled.
The team's output, at steady state, is somewhere between 8 and 12 finished videos per week, running to somewhere north of 400 per year. Most of these appear on TikTok; a substantial share are also re-cut for Instagram Reels and, less commonly, for YouTube Shorts. The team does not, deliberately, produce for CTV, YouTube long-form, or any other format that would require substantially different production standards. Focus, in Ola's stated view, matters more than platform coverage.
Why in-house
The decision to run the programme in-house rather than through an agency-plus-external-creators model — which is what the brand had been doing before Ola started — was, in her retrospective view, driven by three specific factors.
The first was operational speed. External-creator content, by its nature, involves a briefing round, a shooting round, a review round, a revision round, and a scheduling round before it hits the platform. On the brand's previous programme, the median time from brief to published piece was somewhere in the range of 18-32 days. On the current in-house programme, the equivalent median is 3-6 days. On a platform where trend cycles turn over in weeks, the operational speed difference is, on Ola's numbers, worth substantially more than the direct cost differential would suggest.
The second was product knowledge. The brand's product is technical enough that external creators, on the previous programme, produced content that was frequently either technically wrong or technically over-generalised. Ola's team, being permanently embedded at the brand and working directly with the founder and the product development function, can produce content that engages with the technical specifics of the product line. The audience response to this technically-grounded content has been, on her tracking, substantially better than the response to the previous external-creator content.
The third was creative continuity. The in-house team has, over three years, developed a specific creative voice for the brand's TikTok account that is legible to the audience. Individual videos vary in format and subject, but the voice — the specific tone, the specific set of visual signatures, the specific relationship with the audience — is consistent across the output. External-creator content, by its nature, does not produce this voice consistency.
"We are not, in any conventional sense, a marketing team producing TikTok content. We are, functionally, a small documentary studio that happens to be embedded in a skincare business. The distinction sounds pretentious. It is, however, the reason our per-video economics look completely different from the peer brands we compare against."
The economics
The full-loaded cost of the in-house studio, on Ola's honest calculation, is approximately £520,000 per year. This includes salaries for the six team members (weighted by full-time-equivalence for the two shared-role positions), the physical space and its running costs, equipment amortisation, and a small budget for occasional external contributions.
At the current output cadence of roughly 400-450 published pieces per year, the per-video cost is approximately £1,150-£1,300. This is substantially lower than the brand's previous agency-plus-external-creators cost (which had been running at £3,200-£4,800 per piece) and is meaningfully lower than the mid-market industry norm for equivalent-quality content (which is, in our audit sample, somewhere in the £2,000-£3,500 per-video range).
The attributable revenue, on the brand's post-purchase surveys and MMM analysis, runs at approximately £4.8-£5.6m annualised — roughly ten times the studio's operating cost. This is a substantially better ratio than the brand's paid social produces, and it is, on Ola's tracking, one of the strongest per-unit economic performances of any line on the brand's marketing P&L.
The constraints
The programme is not, however, universally replicable. Two specific constraints are worth naming for any brand considering the same structure.
The first is that the in-house studio requires a category where the brand has genuine technical or editorial substance to convey. In skincare, where product formulation is complex and consumer understanding is often incomplete, there is enough substance for a small team to produce three to five years of consistently interesting content. In categories where the product is more commodity-like, or where the technical substance is thinner, the same team would run out of content within twelve to eighteen months. Brands considering the studio model should honestly assess whether their category can sustain the ongoing content demand.
The second is that the studio requires a team with a specific hybrid skillset that is genuinely difficult to hire. Ola's videographers are people who can operate at documentary production standards but understand short-form video conventions. Her editor can cut for both TikTok and Reels without becoming a specialist in either. Her scriptwriter has both marketing experience and a genuine editorial sensibility. This specific talent stack is not, on Ola's own hiring experience, well-served by the current creator-economy pipeline; most candidates she considered were either broadcast-trained people who did not understand short-form or short-form specialists who could not produce at documentary quality. She built the team over eighteen months of patient hiring, with two miscasts along the way.
The programme has, over its three-year life, produced consistent enough results that the brand's finance team have come to treat the studio's operating cost as a fixed rather than variable line — closer to an editorial or R&D commitment than to a marketing expense. This framing, Ola thinks, is the one that makes the model sustainable. Treating the studio as a marketing cost to be optimised on quarterly performance would produce pressure that would break the model within a year. The brands that could build a similar studio, on her strong view, will only do so if their finance functions can accept the same framing. Most, at least at first, will not.