Corinne Pipitone and the small detail that makes a big launch

A perfume bottle has a rather demanding social life. It must look good on a shelf, survive a close-up, suggest something about its owner and, eventually, dispense perfume. Corinne Pipitone has a favorite detail in this crowded little arrangement: the atomizer. When she celebrated the arrival of Squishmallows fragrances in September 2025, she singled out the bottles’ atomizers with the affection other people reserve for a beloved song. Amid the business of launching a toy franchise into beauty, here was a person pleased by the thing you squeeze.

That detail offers an appealing way into Pipitone’s career. She is Chief Creative Officer and Executive Vice President at CMM, the New York beauty and lifestyle communications agency. The title suggests big ideas. Her enthusiasm suggests an eye for the small, tangible things that make those ideas enjoyable. A fragrance launch needs a commercial plan; it also needs someone to remember that picking up the bottle ought to be fun.

The Squishmallows collection arrived at Ulta Beauty on October 5, 2025, through Blue Meadow Brands, founded by Joel Ronkin. Its first three fragrances translated familiar characters into bottles: Patty the Cow, Zumirez the Bat and Cam the Cat. A soft toy had acquired a dressing-table address. For Pipitone, the project also brought an old working relationship into a new, distinctly playful setting.

A career with familiar names and returning collaborators

Ronkin occupies a particular place in her account of becoming a fragrance person. She describes him as both a mentor and a longtime friend, tracing their work together back more than twenty years to his Elizabeth Arden days and brands including Juicy Couture. Their later collaborations included Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande fragrances. The products changed; the relationship continued. Squishmallows was another chapter in that partnership.

There is a business lesson tucked into this chronology. Publicity often appears to be a succession of arrivals: new bottle, new face, new announcement. A career behind those announcements can have a much slower rhythm. People learn one another’s judgment. They work together again. The next unfamiliar brief comes with a familiar collaborator. Pipitone’s own account makes that continuity central to her love of fragrance.

Her connection to the category is visible well before the plush characters appeared. In April 2017, she was CMM’s media contact for Designer Parfums’ new partnership with Jennifer Lopez. That announcement concerned the future development of an existing fragrance business, with international expansion among its ambitions. It placed Pipitone at the communications end of a venture involving celebrity, brand stewardship and distribution.

By August 2019, she was the named CMM vice president on Ariana Grande’s THANK U, NEXT fragrance announcement. The release scheduled an online Ulta debut followed by stores in the United States and Canada. Even the name carried a ready-made cultural association. A publicist working around that launch had a product, a musician and an audience’s existing attachment to a phrase sharing the same stage.

When recognition needs an explanation

Those associations are useful, but they leave a question unanswered: why should a familiar name belong on this particular product? Much of the interest in Pipitone’s work lies there. Her brand experience includes LolaVie, Haus Labs, Sol de Janeiro, OLEHENRIKSEN and KVD Beauty. These are different propositions, with different reasons for attracting attention. Recognition supplies an opening. A launch still needs a story worth following through that opening.

Consider LolaVie, Jennifer Aniston’s haircare brand. Aniston’s hair already had an audience. The communications task was to explain her involvement in creating the products, especially given her previous association with another haircare brand. CMM arranged seven individual interviews, sent editors product in advance and coordinated launch-day coverage. A social teaser preceded the reveal; wider outreach followed it.

The sequence is instructive. Advance access gave editors something to try. Conversation gave them a founder to question. A shared publication date gave the introduction a clear moment. Each piece served a different purpose, rather than asking one glamorous photograph to perform every task. CMM reported more than a billion launch impressions and over one hundred placements. Those figures describe the agency’s campaign, with Pipitone’s documented LolaVie experience forming part of the surrounding career story.

Impressions count opportunities to see coverage; they do not count bottles bought. The distinction matters because it keeps the result legible. The interesting creative decision here is the route from curiosity to explanation. Aniston could draw the initial gaze. Editors could ask what she had actually helped make. The product could then be encountered through something more substantial than the fame attached to its founder.

Four years alongside Haus Labs

In September 2025, Pipitone marked four years of working alongside Haus Labs. Her description of the brand joined performance and innovation with kindness. That last word is revealing. In a business where a campaign can be judged by its reach, she chose to include a quality that concerns how people behave. It gives her account of the partnership a human texture beyond the usual arithmetic of publicity.

Haus Labs was then sharing its We Love Foundation campaign, which ran across more than four hundred digital screens in New York on September 12. The campaign also extended into street-level placements in New York and London. Pipitone’s public support establishes her connection to the brand; the screen count belongs to the brand’s campaign. The distinction preserves the scale of the work without assigning every part of it to one person.

The client relationship is unusually explicit in a testimonial from Haus Labs marketing leader Kelly Coller. She calls Pipitone and CMM her “ride-or-die PR partners” and describes a team capable of offering alternative ideas rather than simply agreeing. That is a useful compliment for creative leadership. Agreement is pleasant. A considered alternative can be more valuable, particularly when everybody in the room wants the launch to work.

“ride-or-die PR partners”

Kelly Coller, on Corinne Pipitone and CMM

Three women, three kinds of responsibility

Pipitone’s creative role now sits inside a shared leadership arrangement. In September 2026, CMM described five years of leadership by Pipitone, Carolanne Coviello and Carolyn Marquez after the loss of founder Stacey Miyamoto. The agency’s account assigns each a distinct responsibility: Pipitone carries creative vision and storytelling, Coviello client relationships and communications, and Marquez the operational work that keeps the business and its teams moving.

It is a useful division for understanding the executive half of Pipitone’s title. An idea needs people able to sell it, refine it, schedule it and execute it. Creative judgment can start a conversation; client leadership and operations help determine whether that conversation becomes a campaign. In this arrangement, the person shaping the story shares leadership with people responsible for the relationships and structure around it.

The group’s account includes disagreement, mutual support and a considerable amount of laughter. That combination sounds more plausible than the immaculate harmony often presented in corporate biographies. A shared business requires decisions. Three experienced colleagues will occasionally see those decisions differently. Their description makes room for that ordinary friction while explaining how they continue to work together.

The recognition behind the recognisable brands

CMM won Best Public Relations Agency at the 2023 BeautyMatter NEXT Awards. Its announcement named Pipitone, Marquez, Coviello and Jennifer Keel as the agency’s leadership group at that time. The award belonged to the firm. That collective credit fits the nature of communications work, where a visible result may depend on many people whose names never appear beside the product photograph.

Pipitone also received individual recognition in Women We Admire’s lists of women chief creative officers in 2024 and 2025. Those profiles describe a practice spanning PR, influencer work, celebrity programs and marketing. The range helps explain why her title carries both creative and executive responsibilities. A brand can require a media conversation, an event or a digital campaign, sometimes within the same introduction.

In September 2026, CMM announced that its leadership team was a BeautyMatter Awards finalist for Leadership Team of the Year. That recognition concerned the people directing the business as well as the work leaving it. For Pipitone, it places the more visible brand portfolio alongside the quieter responsibility of helping an agency continue, make decisions and give its teams a workable direction.

The pleasure of the thing itself

Her professional story returns, rather neatly, to the bottle. Celebrity fragrances, haircare and cosmetics offer plenty of occasions to talk about audiences and exposure. Pipitone’s enthusiasm for an atomizer reminds us that a product will eventually belong to somebody who has no interest in the campaign meeting. That person will pick it up, use it and decide whether they like having it around.

Her expressed ambition is to bring beauty to a broad audience, including the pleasure of new ideas and products. It makes sense beside a career that connects pop stars, familiar beauty brands and, more recently, collectible characters. The names may be the first attraction. The task is to give people a reason to remain interested once the name has done its work.

There is something charming about an executive who can celebrate a nationwide launch and still pause over the mechanism on the bottle. It brings a large undertaking down to the size of a hand. In Pipitone’s career, long relationships and coordinated campaigns lead toward that encounter: somebody notices a product, reaches for it, and discovers a detail worth enjoying.