How Tree Hut used AI to turn customer feedback into product insights and quadruple social engagement

The bath and body care brand, which boasts 3 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, has spent the past year using an AI-powered community management tool to analyze comments, direct messages and other social interactions across its channels. What began as a way to respond faster to customers has evolved into a broader system for identifying product demand, measuring sentiment around launches and informing innovation decisions. Since implementing the AI tool, Tree Hut has seen a 430% year-over-year increase in social engagements, according to the company.

Tree Hut is part of Naterra, a family-owned personal-care company based in Coppell, Texas, whose portfolio includes Baby Magic, Splash and Bdy.

In an interview with Modern Retail, Sarah Craig, associate director of integrated media at Naterra, shared how Tree Hut is using AI to analyze community feedback, and how those insights are shaping everything from scent selection to future brand experiences. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How is Tree Hut using AI today?

“It started as a very straightforward initiative, which was to leverage AI to help us stay more actively in touch with our community across social channels. Tree Hut is a community‑first brand with a massive cross‑channel audience and organic reach, so we needed to be faster and more efficient at responding to DMs, comments and questions. We enlisted an AI tool to do that.

With this tool, we built a system that’s embedded in the comments and conversations our audience is having — things like new products or scents they want, different formats and collaboration ideas. Over time, we were able to build a large database of those recurring requests. That let us go beyond basic community management and start using the AI insights to strategically inform product development, innovation and our new‑launch strategy.”

Can you give an example of how AI insights influenced product development?

“A great example is Cinnamon Dolce. It’s a vault scent that our community absolutely loves. Historically, we brought it back seasonally during the holidays in our Shea Sugar Scrub, which is our hero product.

For years, people have asked us to bring it back full time, bring it back nationally and bring it into other forms like shave oil or body wash. We always knew there was interest, but with AI, we could finally quantify the demand. We were seeing thousands of mentions and requests.

By using the AI to tie mentions to specific scents and formats, we could see the volume was overwhelming. That allowed us to line up those insights with our spring launch and actually expand Cinnamon Dolce into more formats, including Hydroglow Body Lotion and Foaming Gel Wash.“

What about marketing?

“Cinnamon Dolce is actually featured at the end of our Super Bowl ad. That moment really exists because of the findings we gleaned from our community through AI.”

How else is Tree Hut using AI beyond product decisions?

“We’re also using AI to understand sentiment around our launches and marketing activations. It lets us see, in a much more granular way, how people feel about what we put into market — often from day one, before we ever see sales data. That helps us track how a launch is progressing in real time, and it helps us understand what adjustments could be made in the next cycle.

For example, we did a collaboration with Peanuts in the fall. What we saw was an overwhelming request for more customized collectible units that were specific to the collaboration partner. That helps us know the level of investment or exclusives we want to then pay forward to other brand or IP collabs.”

How do you see AI shaping Tree Hut’s strategy going forward?

“What we did with Cinnamon Dolce is now the template for how we build future launches and experiences around what our community is actually asking for.

We see this specific use case — gleaning insights from our community and turning them into more niche, finite offerings — as something we’ll bring into not only product offerings, but also experiences and opportunities — for example, IRL activations, content and entertainment.”