The GRWM Industrial Complex: Why Get Ready With Me Still Prints Engagement
Written byAnanya Ali-Patel • Digital Marketing Intern
Video - April 2026
I've heard Get Ready With Me declared dead roughly once a year for as long as I've been paying attention to this stuff, and every single time it just keeps outperforming whatever format was supposed to have replaced it. I used to nod along with the death predictions because they sounded reasonable. A format that simple, that repetitive, surely has a shelf life. Then I actually sat down and pulled the numbers on a handful of accounts still posting them, and I had to admit I'd been wrong for years without noticing.
What changed my mind wasn't the content itself. It was realizing the format works because of what it structurally is, not because of what any individual video happens to be about, and that distinction is the whole difference between a brand using it well and a brand producing one because a competitor did first.
A GRWM has a built in narrative arc with a guaranteed payoff baked into the premise. Someone starts unfinished and ends finished, and the viewer sticks around because they want to see the result, the same way you'd keep reading a recipe you have no intention of cooking just to see how it turns out. That's a complete story delivered in under sixty seconds, and almost no other short form format hands you that for free. Most content has to manufacture a reason for someone to stay through the middle. A GRWM has one built into the routine itself, which is why it survives creator mistakes that would sink almost anything else. The activity is quietly doing the retention work so the creator doesn't have to.
It also solves the hardest problem in short form content, which is figuring out what to actually talk about while something is happening on screen. The physical routine gives the viewer a floor of visual interest, which frees up the audio entirely, so the creator can talk about something that has nothing to do with makeup at all. That's how GRWMs became a vehicle for storytelling, gossip, personal confession, whatever the creator actually wants to say that day. I didn't fully get this until I watched one where the creator spent four minutes talking through a breakup while doing a skincare routine, and I realized the skincare wasn't the content. It was scaffolding that let her say something else.
Once you see that, the strategic point becomes obvious, and I genuinely think most brands still miss it. The routine doesn't need to be about your product at all. It needs to exist so something else can be said over it, which flips the whole brief backward from how most brands approach this.
There's an intimacy piece too that I underestimated for a long time. Watching someone perform a private routine creates a closeness a straight to camera video just can't manufacture, because you're being let into a moment that's normally unobserved, and that signals trust whether or not any real trust exists between you and the person on screen. That's why a product mention inside a GRWM lands so differently than the same line delivered as a straight ad read. Nobody's being addressed directly, they're being included in something, and inclusion lowers a person's guard in a way that direct address never quite manages to.
The most common mistake I see is a brand treating the format as a product demonstration wearing a costume. If the routine exists purely to showcase the product, the viewer feels it almost instantly, and the intimacy that makes GRWMs work collapses back into an ad. You can usually spot it by the pacing alone. A genuine routine moves at the speed of someone actually getting ready. A product demo pauses on every item, holds it up to the lens, describes it out loud like a shopping channel host. The second that pause happens, the illusion breaks and the viewer knows exactly what they're watching.
The version that actually works has the product show up incidentally, in a routine that would have happened anyway, used the way it would normally be used, getting roughly the attention it would get if nobody were being paid a cent for the mention.
Over production kills it just as fast. A GRWM shot on a proper camera with three point lighting and a full set isn't a GRWM anymore. It's a commercial dressed up as one, and the entire premise of the format depends on the viewer believing they're watching something real. I get why brands push toward better lighting anyway. Their instinct and their budget both pull in that direction, and it took me a while to accept that making it look more polished is exactly what makes it work worse.
Scripting does the same damage. The rambling, occasionally incoherent quality of the audio isn't a flaw waiting to be cleaned up in the edit. It's the actual reason people stay through the whole thing. A scripted GRWM has all the warmth of a rehearsed statement, and the imperfections that a script would remove are load bearing, not accidental.
So the brands that get real results tend to do a few unglamorous things well. They work with creators who already make these videos on their own, because the format rewards someone with an established routine and a real voice, and someone attempting their first one for a paycheck usually produces something visibly stilted. They place the product exactly where it would genuinely appear in the routine, mentioned in passing rather than held up and described. They let the audio wander into something unrelated, which sounds counterintuitive until you've seen it work. And they accept far less creative control than feels comfortable, because nearly every instinct a marketing team has about this format turns out to be wrong once you actually test it.
What I find most interesting now isn't the beauty version, which is genuinely saturated to the point that audiences can spot the brand partnership rhythm from the first three seconds. It's watching the structure migrate into categories that haven't touched it yet. Cooking, work routines, gym prep, parenting, none of these are about makeup, and none of them needed to be, because the mechanism was never about the product category in the first place. It was about a process with a visible beginning and end. A hardware brand or a financial services company running an honest, unscripted, GRWM shaped piece of content right now would be doing something that works structurally and that nobody in their category has bothered trying yet, which is a rarer and more valuable position than being the ninetieth beauty brand chasing a format everyone's audience is already tired of.
Ananya works on digital marketing at Proach Media, focusing on the creator economy and the business side of brand partnerships.