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After 10 years of cutting her teeth working on makeup counters in her hometown of Glasgow, Jamie Genevieve built an online community of more than a million followers on Instagram and YouTube with tutorial-based content. In 2020, she launched cosmetics brand Vieve, first with an eyeshadow palette and selection of lipsticks and lip liners, later expanding into powder blushes, cream bronzers, lip oils, bath and bodycare, makeup brushes and more.
Four years later, she counts Harrods, Space NK and Brown Thomas as stockists, has three pop-ups across London and Glasgow under her belt, and has secured £5.5 million in series A funding.
Vieve is one of a plethora of influencer-founded beauty brands. But as the market has become increasingly crowded, brands that rely heavily on their founders’ followings for success have been falling out of fashion. In response, some influencer founders — including Genevieve, Jess Hunt (Refy), Susan Yara (Naturium), Jackie Aina (Forvr Mood), Patrick Ta (Patrick Ta Beauty), Deepica Mutyala (Live Tinted) and Chriselle Lim (Phlur) — are moving away from the label to ensure longevity. For the handful of influencers that can master this, the pay-off is millions in revenue, retail partnerships and global brand awareness.
It isn’t an easy path. “Not every influencer is capable of running a company, or their own personal brand isn’t strong enough to build a company on,” says Sara McCorquodale, CEO and founder of influencer intelligence platform Corq.
Vieve is developing its own playbook. The brand has just unveiled its first-ever foundation, strengthening its product portfolio — currently the face category accounts for 38 per cent of its total business across direct-to-consumer and wholesale. It is also gearing up to expand into the US next year.
Vieve launched with a small team of five, but has since grown to 27. Genevieve made the relatively unusual choice to bring in a CEO from the start, recognising that she may not have the skills required to build a credible beauty business from scratch. Her choice for the role, Emma Dawson, has an expansive background building brands at Estée Lauder Companies and L’Oréal, before establishing her own beauty PR company The Blanket Group. “I knew that the CEO role wasn’t something I’d be able to do justice — my strengths lie in product, brand, content and customer,” says Genevieve. “Emma started working on Vieve before we launched; her industry knowledge from decades of working in the beauty industry is like a superpower.”
Other influencer brands have appointed CEOs at the point of needing to scale. Yara named Francois Bonin as CEO of her skincare brand Naturium in March 2022, a year before selling it to Elf Beauty; in May 2024, Lim onboarded Elizabeth Ashmun as CEO of Phlur.
Distancing the talent from the brand
When an influencer launches an eponymous brand, it ties the adoration of followers to commercial opportunities. Founders with a strong personal look are more likely to find success, as it creates an instantly recognisable brand identity, particularly for millennial and Gen Z consumers, says McCorquodale. But it’s also risky: if the influencer’s popularity dwindles or they are hit by scandal, it could have a knock-on impact for sales.
The question of whether a founder should distance themselves from their brand divides opinion. Lim says her influencer status is the brand’s biggest asset and credits her digital savviness, storytelling skills, trend awareness and trust with her audience to the company’s “explosive growth on social media, which has translated to strong sales online”.
“Creators are uniquely positioned to excel in all of those areas as they go above and beyond to build loyal online communities,” she adds. “I’ve been building and nurturing mine for years, and developed a deep connection with my audience who trust me and value my taste, so at the same time, I’m amplifying Phlur’s reach and mission, which at the core, align with my personal values.”
However, Yara believes attaching too much of an individual’s identity to a brand could cap its growth potential. “If you want your brand to live on and become a legacy, nowadays, you need to have a brand that can be separated from the founder. I don’t want Naturium to feel like a brand that is attached to a person, if you discovered it in a store and it had the ingredients that you’re looking for, it doesn’t matter if you’re connected with the person behind it.”
McCorquodale agrees, arguing that the founders should embrace the position of a high-profile ambassador, leading as a specialist rather than a generalist.
Finding funding
Investment is a tried-and-tested route to scale, but the stakes are higher now. After some high-profile collapses, investors have become wary of influencer-founded beauty brands. An impressive follower count is no longer enough: financiers now expect influencers to build engaged communities that are genuinely excited about and invested in the products being offered. “It’s about building an authentic connection, creating value and ensuring that your brand resonates deeply with its audience,” says Mutyala, who has raised $15 million to date for her beauty brand Live Tinted. “Only then can a brand leverage its following into a loyal consumer base and sustainable growth.”
While most influencers don’t have experience running a business, an established audience provides years of data insights into their communities and how they shop: “Even in the very beginning, without them even knowing, I was seeding ideas and to get feedback through polls, Q&As and comments. It played a huge part in getting feedback on brand logos, colours and aesthetics,” says Refy co-founder Hunt.
When seeking investment, Dawson and Genevieve were careful to position Vieve as having the authority of its makeup artist founder, who has built a digital community — steering clear of being labelled as an ‘influencer line’, simply focused on “drops and selling out”. “By the time I started building Vieve, I knew exactly what my audience were looking for in a beauty brand and the high standard of product I had to deliver,” says Genevieve. “My audience knows me as a makeup artist, and the organic growth of my socials over many years has allowed me to have a really strong connection with my community.”
Securing retail partnerships
While direct-to-consumer offers more control over a brand’s image, profit margins are smaller because of distribution and marketing costs. Retail partnerships allow brands to scale nationally and even globally, and when a brand’s CEO comes with a large online following, it is cultural capital that can drive footfall and sales.
Partnering with a retailer is mutually beneficial, believes Melissa McGinnis, head of beauty buying at Selfridges, who has introduced Refy, Phlur and Filter By Molly Mae into the store over the past three years. “Most brands will launch direct-to-consumer, allowing them to tap into their existing audience, however, we know that the majority of customers want to engage with products in person,” she says.
A physical presence in stores also attracts shoppers with no previous awareness of the influencer; simply a desire for new and exciting products that solve a problem or offer an innovative take within established product categories. She points out that influencer founders are experts in content creation, too, which they can leverage to promote new launches and activations with low-cost marketing efforts to increase footfall. “Whenever we launch an influencer-led brand with a significant activation, we see a massive influx of the influencer’s community coming to the store to experience the pop-up and attend the event,” she says.
Vieve’s external investment accelerated its retail growth, which now accounts for 25 per cent of the total business. Genevieve leant on existing relationships from her influencer work with online retailer Cult Beauty to secure exclusivity upon launch in 2020, which provided the “rubber retail stamp” of authenticity. “We were courted by retailers across the board, from really mass to really luxury, from all aspects of the retail spectrum, people can see us serving their customer,” says Dawson. Vieve’s partnership with Space NK was inked in September 2022, launching into its flagship store in the newly developed Battersea Power Station. Since launching, its customer base has increased six-fold, she reveals, as have continued partnerships with prestige retailers to solidify Vieve’s higher-end branding.
Retail partnerships are not a guarantee of success however, and come with risks, says Neil Saunders, managing director and retail analyst at Globaldata: “The downside of retail is the potential loss of control and the need to conform to standard retail practices such as rebates, stocking fees and so forth. It just makes the business more complex. The danger is partnering with a brand that is centred around an individual, as retailers become very dependent on that one person to drive sales.”
Sustainable growth can be the biggest challenge of all in a saturated market. A successful initial launch can drive high awareness and court retailers, but long-term success is harder to achieve, especially if a product line is too trend led. For longevity, Saunders says, “the influencer needs to be respected, have a product that is desired and be sold at the right price point — the influencer is the mouthpiece but they do not replace the need for other commercial aspects to be in place”.
The common thread running through the most successful influencer-led brands is three things: mass retail distribution, a brand identity separate to its founder and an existing, engaged community that can drive repeat sales after launch and beyond. “That core community is going to keep the brand making money throughout its entire existence,” says McCorquodale.
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