In January 2026, Marie Chollet put four capitalized words at the end of a LinkedIn post: “FACE WINTER!” The line announced that First Aid Beauty would be the Official Skincare of Team USA at the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Milano Cortina. It also did something more useful. It compressed a sponsorship, a product benefit and a hostile climate into a phrase small enough to remember. For a chief marketing officer, that is the job in miniature: take a large apparatus and leave the customer with one clean idea.
Chollet is the New York-based chief marketing officer of First Aid Beauty, the skincare company founded in 2009 and acquired by Procter & Gamble in 2018. Her public profile is compact. It lists P&G, a six-year stretch at Université Paris Dauphine from 2005 to 2011, and native or bilingual proficiency in French and English. Her recent work, however, is visible in the moves around the brand: a wider acne range, a redesigned package system and the Team USA platform.
Those moves can look separate on a marketing calendar. One belongs to product development, another to design, another to partnerships. A customer does not experience departments. She sees a jar, a post, a shelf and perhaps an athlete holding the same pale-blue package. The strategic question is whether those encounters add up to one memory. Chollet’s current chapter at First Aid Beauty is interesting because the pieces do.
The hard part of looking new
In July 2025, Chollet introduced First Aid Beauty’s expanded acne collection in a post that treated the formulas and the new visual identity as a single launch. The products included clearing pads, a body mist and a resurfacing lotion. Her language paired efficacy with sensitivity, then immediately turned to the “refreshed, more elevated packaging” as a signal of where the brand was heading.
That pairing matters. Packaging is sometimes discussed as if it were a jacket placed around the real business. In beauty, the jacket lives in bathrooms, travels in bags, appears in shelf photographs and does much of the brand’s daily speaking. A redesign changes thousands of tiny encounters. It has to attract someone who has never bought the product and reassure someone who has bought it for years.
First Aid Beauty’s campaign found a neat way to state that two-sided brief: “New Look, Same Trusted Results.” The first half asks for fresh attention. The second protects accumulated confidence. The line acknowledges an uncomfortable truth about brand renewal: novelty and recognition pull in opposite directions. Push too far toward novelty and loyal customers meet a stranger. Push too far toward recognition and nobody notices the work.
“This new collection also debuts our refreshed, more elevated packaging.”Marie Chollet, introducing the 2025 collection
Chollet’s visible play is controlled change. The package can become cleaner and more current while the promise remains practical. The range can widen while the organizing idea stays narrow. This is less glamorous than declaring a revolution, but it is often better brand management. A familiar name represents stored attention. The marketer’s task is to spend enough of that attention to move, without spending so much that the name loses its advantage.
When the setting writes the brief
The Team USA partnership made the same logic larger. First Aid Beauty supplied its Ultra Repair Cream to Team USA and Olympic and Paralympic athletes for Milano Cortina 2026. Snowboarder Jamie Anderson and Para cross-country skier Sydney Jo Peterson joined as athlete partners. The winter environment did not need a mood board. Cold, wind and altitude gave the hydration message a setting with built-in friction.
This is what separates a useful partnership from a logo exchange. The event dramatizes the product’s reason to exist. Athletes bring a performance standard. Winter brings the obstacle. The cream brings a response. “Face Winter” is effective because the words describe both an attitude and a literal act. The line sounds like a command on a locker-room wall, but it points back to the daily object in the campaign.
For Chollet, the partnership also stretches the brand without changing its center. The stage is international and the athletes are elite, yet the consumer action is ordinary: prepare for cold weather. That bridge is important. Aspirational marketing often floats above the product until the two barely know each other. Here, the large occasion makes the small routine more vivid.
“We’re committed to delivering high performance hydration to FACE WINTER!”Marie Chollet on the Team USA partnership
A partnership earns its keep when the setting explains the product. If the connection needs a presentation, it is probably too loose.
The choice also shows how a smaller label can use the reach of a large parent company without becoming generic. P&G’s skincare portfolio includes First Aid Beauty alongside brands such as Olay, SK-II, Farmacy and Tula. Scale can provide distribution, research and operating infrastructure. Distinction still has to be maintained brand by brand. First Aid Beauty needs a particular promise, not merely a place on a corporate chart.
A marketer between two systems
Chollet’s bilingual French-English profile and route from Paris Dauphine to New York place her between cultures as well as systems. One system is the global consumer company, where repeatable processes and portfolio logic matter. The other is prestige beauty, where taste, texture, community and visual codes move quickly. Her role requires the operational discipline of the first and the sensitivity to signals of the second.
The recent brand work suggests a way to manage that tension: keep the center fixed and let the expressions change. The center is a problem-solving identity. Around it, the team can add a product category, update the pack or enter an Olympic setting. Each move is different in form, but each should answer the same customer question: why does this brand belong here?
That question is more demanding than it sounds. A product can be commercially sensible but blur the brand. A beautiful pack can win design attention but break recognition. A famous partner can deliver reach but confuse the proposition. Coherence comes from refusing opportunities that cannot carry the same idea. It is partly a creative skill and partly an operating habit.
There is a useful restraint in this approach. Chollet’s public posts credit the collection and the partnership rather than turning every launch into a personal leadership parable. The work remains the subject. Even the most quotable phrase, “Face Winter,” points outward, toward the consumer and the campaign. It is a small indicator of how the brand wants to communicate: direct, brisk and attached to an action.
The compound memory
Marketing teams live by calendars. Customers live by accumulation. They may encounter a pale-blue package in a store, a collection online, a post featuring an athlete and an old jar already at home. Over time, those fragments become a belief about what the company means. The strongest marketing move is often not the loudest fragment. It is the one that helps the other fragments make sense.
This changes how a launch should be judged. The first week can measure attention, but it cannot measure the entire memory being built. A customer may notice the color before the claim, the athlete before the cream, or the new product before the redesigned wordmark. Consistency lets those incomplete encounters finish one another. The shelf answers the post. The partnership explains the benefit. The package brings the whole sequence back to mind. For an operator like Chollet, the creative result depends on coordination: different teams agreeing on which idea deserves to survive every handoff.
First Aid Beauty’s current chapter works as a system. The refreshed package creates a common visual field. The expanded assortment gives that field more substance. Team USA supplies a memorable context for performance. None of the elements has to carry the entire story alone. Together, they repeat it from different angles.
That is the practical idea to borrow from Chollet’s work. Before asking whether a launch is exciting, ask whether it improves the whole. Before buying attention through a partnership, ask whether the setting clarifies the product. Before changing the package, write down what a loyal customer must still recognize in one second. A brand can move a long distance when every step points in the same direction.
“Face Winter” was built for a particular campaign, but it also captures the larger assignment. Markets change. Shelves change. Visual codes change. The CMO cannot stop the weather. She can give the brand a clear reason to walk into it.