Kiana Basu
“I love turning data into a story. If you can't distill the insight into one sentence or one slide, then we're not there yet.”
Before her recent turn as Head of Digital at D.S. & DURGA, Kiana led digital commerce strategy for major beauty brands including Estée Lauder, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Rose Inc., and Makeup By Mario. With a background spanning digital strategy, brand building, growth marketing, integrated marketing, and analytics, she brings a uniquely holistic approach to modern commerce.
Kiana is known for balancing high-performance ecommerce with long-term brand equity, ensuring that rapid growth never comes at the expense of meaningful storytelling or consumer trust. She’s spent her career championing inclusive, resonant brand experiences and designing digital ecosystems that feel as human as they are high-touch.
You had all kinds of jobs before working in the beauty industry, including Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign. How did that shape your use of language when connecting with others?
All the experiences I've had outside of marketing, and e-commerce more specifically, taught me the importance of communication directly with the audience or the customer or whoever you're talking to, even a stranger. That communication is intended to make a connection, and that connection is really the broader, bigger purpose of everything we do.
In e-commerce, you often get sucked into being really focused on the numbers, revenue, and commercial success. But your purpose is to build a community and build trust. I learned early working in journalism, politics, and other jobs that you have 30 seconds to make someone care about what you're talking about. You have to be clear and empathetic to break through.
What's something good about AI and other technologies as they reshape the digital retail experience?
When I first started, the homepage was everything. There was so much focus on how your homepage looked as the first touch point on the customer journey. That's completely changed. The homepage, in a lot of ways, is dead now.
That's really not how customers are discovering your products anymore. Customers are discovering products everywhere else but your homepage, whether it's through AI, ChatGPT, TikTok, or even their group chat. The focus needs to be on the entire ecosystem of how customers discover your brand.
AI will definitely reshape how we advertise, reach customers, connect with customers, and draw them in. There's a lot of fear and anxiety around that, just as paid media upended traditional advertising. But we can make digital feel emotional again through AI.
Personalization can be much more empathetic because we can use AI to read your tone and past purchase behavior, then curate your experience as a personal stylist that truly gets you. There's a lot of value in that.
What's a buzzword in the beauty/lifestyle world that needs to go away?
On the advertising side, the industry has become hyper-focused on ROI and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend), which, of course, is essential. But if you're spending a dollar and getting $2 back, that's not really driving your business. You need to look at other metrics connecting your efforts with actual results, and not just the return on the dollar.
Also, I don't want to hear about clean beauty anymore. I think it's lost all meaning, and I don't think we need to moralize our moisturizer, we just need to talk about it honestly. We need transparency. We need to talk about the results, responsible formulation, sustainability, and the sensory joy you get from the products.
“Data is a language, and language is supposed to communicate something. That's what I think of when I'm considering how to speak to a broader audience.”
What do you tell peers about digital strategy, and the industry at large, that's different from what you said even 2-3 years ago?
I've been fortunate, because in many of the roles I've held at various brands and companies, I've been asked to do something new and different. They always want to innovate and reinvent the wheel when it comes to the website, and add tools, features, and functionalities to really stand out.
The truth of the matter is that the sites that perform the best do so because they're doing what's tried and true. You should always be trying to improve the experience and not just take the best practice for granted, and you should always try to push the envelope and test. But the reason a lot of sites have the same experience, UX, and design is that that is what works.
The first few years of this decade were really intense in beauty. But now something different is happening in the market. We always thought of beauty as recession-proof, but it's taken a hit. Fragrance is the one vertical that's still growing, but skincare and color cosmetics are having a tough time right now.
That doom and gloom can take the joy out of working in beauty. I'm passionate about connecting with people, building communities, and empowering consumers to express themselves and feel confident about themselves through beauty. That's the greater purpose.
You spend a lot of time interpreting data, how do you convey that data in accessible ways to non-numbers colleagues?
I love turning data into a story. If you can't distill the insight into one sentence or one slide, then we're not there yet.
Even I, as a data person, don't want just to be told percentages for an hour. It doesn't resonate. I want to know what the customer is doing. They're coming onto the site, and then within 15 seconds, they're dropping off because they're not engaged. Why?
Data is a language, and language is supposed to communicate something. That's what I think of when I'm considering how to speak to a broader audience. I enjoy that process, and I enjoy writing. It's therapeutic. It helps me process my thoughts, think more strategically, and refine my tone and point of view.
What is something creative you've never done but want to do?
I come from a really musical background, and music is such a powerful way to cultivate emotion. So I’ve always wanted to learn how to produce music. And to DJ, because my gift to everyone is making the perfect playlist for every occasion, every event. I want to take that a step further.
But in terms of what I do professionally, I would love to produce a mixtape or soundtrack for a product launch or campaign. You can really convey what you want the audience to feel through music.
Especially in digital, you're trying to get someone to invest in a luxury perfume online without ever smelling it.
So how do we do that? I love the idea of releasing curated playlists with every single product that we launched to really immerse that person. And not just via the music, but also through videos and imagery. It's such a creative, original way to bring a scent to life and enter the world of that fragrance.
Who’s an artist in any genre you admire?
I don't know if I would say this person is underrated, but I really look up to Rick Rubin as a figure who's not obviously a pop celebrity by any means, but who's had a large part in creating many pop celebrities. I find him to be brilliant, not just musically, but philosophically.
I recently read his book, which offers a lot of insights about life and creativity. He cracked the code on how to be commercially successful while staying grounded and not losing sight of what life is about.
A lot of people in pop culture, or in any world, can easily lose the meaning of what it's all about. He's been so successful at helping so many other people succeed, and that's so admirable.