About the episode
You don’t start with the product name. You start with the concept. Carmine Montalto named 150 products at Kiehl’s exactly that way.
Carmine joins Mike on The PIMS Influence for a candid conversation about product naming, brand voice, packaging copy, and AI in copywriting. He walks us through exactly how a product becomes a name: start with the insight (guys think their skin looks dull and tired), write the concept, then take a big black notebook to Madison Square Park and ideate until the name shows up. That’s how Facial Fuel was born.
He also names the most overrated words in beauty, from exosomes to eye cream, retells the all-pink shelfie that pushed him to build Skincarma, and explains why he made it his mission to be the copywriter who knows how to harness AI. He’d take the Borg microchip, too.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Carmine Montalto on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carminemontalto/
Carmine Montalto Ink.: https://www.cminknyc.com
Skincarma: https://www.skincarmanyc.com
The Skincarma Pod: https://skincarma.substack.com/podcast
Skincarma on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skincarmanyc/
Skincarma on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@skincarma
Chapters
0:00 – Intro
5:34 – The road to Kiehl’s first copywriter
11:37 – Brand voice and the anti-aging ban
13:44 – How Facial Fuel got its name
21:00 – Beauty’s most overrated words
23:00 – Visuals vs words on packaging
28:47 – Reaching the new beauty consumer
35:48 – The pink shelfie behind Skincarma
42:06 – Why copywriters must harness AI
ABOUT CARMINE MONTALTO
Carmine Montalto is the creative director of Carmine Montalto Ink. (CM Ink), a studio specializing in naming, branding, and copywriting for beauty brands including Dr. Jart+, Living Proof, Florence by Mills, and Pavise. At Kiehl’s, where he arrived as the brand’s first professional copywriter and served as AVP of Brand Voice and Identity, he named more than 150 products, Facial Fuel among them. He also runs Skincarma, a skincare education platform and podcast built on pushing back against beauty marketing nonsense.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carminemontalto/ | https://www.cminknyc.com
