How Nocturnal Skincare created a spring campaign for under $100

Digital Marketing Redux // May 25, 2026 How Nocturnal Skincare created a spring campaign for under $100 By Gabriela Barkho Nocturnal Skincare For Nocturnal Skincare, launched in 2024, co-founder and creative director Daniel Kiyoi says the brand’s approach to creatives is to look “handmade” in an era marred by AI-looking imagery.

A recent example of a DIY campaign came this spring for Nocturnal, in which Kiyoi shot the brand’s Sakura Season campaign for under $100. Nocturnal Skincare’s branding revolves around the “Japandi” concept, which blends Japanese minimalism and Scandinavian functionality.

It currently sells one flagship product, the Polar Night Renewal anti-aging serum, which Nocturnal says was designed to work with the body’s nightly circadian rhythms.

The Sakura Season campaign not only reflects the founders’ Japanese and Scandinavian roots, but it’s also an example of founders personally taking on all of the tasks needed to create a seasonal campaign on a budget. The campaign was launched with a promotion that gifted the brand’s serum with the purchase of its viral Japanese-inspired knot bag.

Kiyoi said that as a new brand in a crowded category, it is especially important to lean into the “handmade look and feel” when creating content, as the generative AI backlash gains momentum. The campaign’s cost is also in line with Nocturnal Skincare’s overall approach to marketing spend, as it mostly relies on organic content and runs very few ads.

But even without using AI, Kiyoi said it’s possible to generate high-quality imagery with some creativity. “Obviously, I would have loved to go to Japan and shoot content there, but we couldn’t do that because we’re a small brand,” he said. That trip would have cost thousands of dollars and a long travel time.

“So I went to the next best place, the Huntington Gardens in Los Angeles.” It helps that Kiyoi was able to leverage his background in creating beauty campaigns for a number of brands. Kiyoi, a former creative director at Tarte Cosmetics, also runs his own indie beauty brand incubator, Magic Dusk.

Kiyoi said that, despite staying in Los Angeles, he wanted the campaign to look and feel as if it were set in an authentic Japanese garden. So he captured raw footage walking around the garden, including some featuring Nocturnal Skincare products in the foreground.

“I didn’t want it to just be us in the studio putting up a few cherry blossom flowers and calling it a day,” he said. The biggest portion of the shoot’s budget went to Kiyoi’s entry ticket to Huntington Gardens, which was $34. To shoot products separately afterward, Kiyoi also purchased cherry blossoms for an additional $25 along with some art materials.

The rest of the cost was the time and labor involved in taking the supplementary photos. “I literally rolled out a sheet of seamless paper on my kitchen counter and shot it there,” Kiyoi said. “Then I hand-wrote our headline in Japanese ink and scanned it digitally.”

Nocturnal is currently sold primarily through its direct-to-consumer website and is available on Nordstrom’s marketplace. The brand also recently launched on Amazon.

According to Kiyoi, about 82% – or eight out of 10 customers – who purchased during the Sakura Season Sale were new to Nocturnal, representing the brand’s largest single-event new customer acquisition to date. The company also saw a single-day order record, surpassing last year’s Black Friday-Cyber Monday by 65%.

The Sakura Season Sale generated Nocturnal’s highest order volume for any promotional event in brand history. The Sakura Season campaign also reached nearly 190,000 people across social platforms in the first seven days. But perhaps most important, Kiyoi said, was the post-purchase engagement.

Kiyoi said Nocturnal’s four-email post-purchase series, which is still ongoing, is averaging nearly 50% open rates among Sakura Sale customers, roughly twice the industry benchmark. Kiyoi said the other component of the campaign — which helped drive actual sales — was promoting the $46 Japandi bag and offering a free serum with it.

The Japanese-inspired bag design became a surprise hit for the brand and was brought back by popular demand following a viral video of the knot design posted by Kiyoi in late 2024. “It was definitely a long-term bet to give them [serum] away,” Kiyoi said, because there was no guarantee that the brand would profit from the sale immediately.

But one month later, Nocturnal is already seeing a portion of those new customers come back and start a subscription for its serum. Kiyoi said the gift-with-bag trial is part of Nocturnal’s plans to release more Japanese and Scandinavian-inspired items. The brand is selling a handmade nail brush made by a family in Tokyo.

As a small brand with limited resources, Nocturnal Skincare’s approach to creative shoots is reflective of the reality for