A gigantic market with high profit margins and an apparent immunity to the impact of global crises—it’s no wonder beauty startups are becoming increasingly attractive to investors
When we think about billion-dollar ideas, we tend to picture social media mavericks and innovative new forms of tech. We don’t think about lipstick. However, thanks to a plethora of female-led businesses shaking up the US$675 billion beauty industry, skincare and make-up firms have become the new darlings of venture capitalism.
“Statistically, the startup world is really male-driven; that’s a fact,” says Pocket Sun, the co-founder of venture capital firm SoGal Ventures. “But slowly investors are starting to realise the very high price they’ve been paying for this bias. We work with female-led companies across all sectors, and there is a lot of money to be made in beauty. I’d suggest anyone deciding whether to invest in a beauty brand consider three things: whether they are offering a product people need and will continue to need, whether they connect with customers, and whether the product actually works."
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Ticking Off The Boxes
The women and companies that have rapidly become household names tick all three boxes. Pat McGrath Labs was awarded a billion-dollar-plus valuation by investors thanks to its unique formulations and clever brand marketing that targeted entirely new demographics. Drunk Elephant—which makes skincare products using only biocompatible ingredients—began as a small, home-run startup and was sold for US$845 million last year to Shiseido, which beat Estée Lauder in the very last round.
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And with a narrow product range that is focused mostly on skincare and some colour cosmetics, Glossier is arguably the leader in the field. All about celebrating customers’ natural beauty, its tagline is: “Beauty products inspired by real life”—and it has worked. Glossier’s US$100 million funding round last year gave the start-up a US$1.2 billion valuation.
“The success of Glossier is not just products,” says Sun. “They defined a new way for a beauty company to rise and represented a new narrative in beauty. This is not reserved for major beauty brands but is for smaller ones too—beauty startups shouldn’t see customers as consumers but as something more intimate than that. It’s important to provide a product that helps create a collective life experience that accumulates goodwill from a whole community.”
Beauty Unicorns
While fashion has some unicorns to its name, they are proliferating a lot faster in the beauty world. There are a number of reasons, but the biggest is that the mark-up on beauty products is a lot higher than on clothes, meaning there is more easy money to be made. Beauty companies also have far fewer returns to deal with and don’t need to worry about sizing. Beauty influencers also tend to get more followers on Instagram than their fashion counterparts, and so can whip up excitement for a product in record time. Tastes vary less widely internationally in beauty than they do in fashion, and it is being far less affected by the coronavirus, as people splurge on skincare products from home.
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