.png)
Vogue Business - Refy, Dieux and Youthforia have built fast-growing businesses since the pandemic with product innovation and youthful marketing strategies. They might have gone viral, but can they stand the test of time?
When beauty brand Refy’s founders, influencer Jess Hunt and beauty entrepreneur Jenna Meek, met on the set of a photoshoot in 2017, Meek was fascinated by Hunt’s elaborate routine to achieve her signature fluffy brows.
“I had three different brow gels from different brands, two different brushes, and then I'd use a pomade and a pencil just to get that full brow look,” Hunt says. “We went for lunch that day and we were talking about my brow routine and what the ideal brow product would be.” By the end of the lunch, the duo had sketched out their now hero item, Refy Brow Sculpt, a brow setting wax with a built in brush and comb.
After two years of testing and perfecting the formula and packaging, the product was launched in July 2020, seeded to around 200 of Hunt’s influencer connections and on her own social channels. Two years on and multiple product launches later, Refy hit £10 million in revenues for 2021, and this is expected to double by the end of 2022. It’s stocked at Sephora (US), Net-a-Porter and Selfridges.
Refy, Youthforia and Dieux are part of a swathe of TikTok-first beauty brands launched during the pandemic, with innovative products that reflect the latest in beauty trends, marketed with relatable and community-focused video content. With young founders, focused product assortments, strong direct-to-consumer operations and a growing list of stockists, these labels are seeing explosive sales growth over the last two years.
Still, while aligning with beauty trends can send a label viral, tapping into very specific trends or beauty movements can also see them fall out of fashion. (Like Glossier, which is undergoing a repositioning after championing “barely-there” minimalism and struggling to reposition as makeup and skincare trends changed course.) With such reliance on social media and hero products, it remains to be seen if today’s young founders can avoid falling victim to hype.
Staying relevant as beauty trends wax and wane
During the height of the pandemic, as consumers became focused on self-care and responsible consumption, US-based skincare brand Dieux launched its reusable Forever Eye Mask, an under-eye mask featuring the Dieux logo, which can be reused again and again when covered in creams or serums. The product went viral on TikTok for its multiple uses, says co-founder and CEO Charlotte Palermino, who co-founded the brand with Joyce de Lemos and Marta Freedman. “It’s treatment for under eyes, catches makeup fallout, helps you do a cat eye, is reusable for years and looks cute on,” she says, “TikTok loved it and we had a feeling they would. This helped us build our email and text list which is our bread and butter for product launches.”
Dieux, which reached seven-figure revenues this year, doesn’t use any trend prediction platforms for product development, Palermino says, and timelessness is a focus for all launches. “If you’re creating trends it’s wasteful, they come and go. We want products that have staying power so we don’t worry so much about hype cycles and we don’t use them for inspiration. We’re happy to say the repeat purchases are proving this theory,” says Palermino.
Twenty-four-year-old Hunt, herself Gen Z, is aware of the breakneck speed of beauty trends, and she and Meek are constantly developing ideas and holding focus groups with customers in order to stay ahead of the curve.
“I don't think we'll ever eliminate categories based entirely on trend but we are open to reformulating or developing products based on feedback from our consumer,” Hunt says. “Say the team and our customers are talking about skinny brows next week, then we probably need to start thinking about it — we would definitely look into it.”
Beauty trends are moving faster than ever in our social media landscape, says Yarden Horowitz, co-founder of beauty intelligence company Spate, which uses AI to analyse Google search data. Skinny brows are trending upwards, according to the platform: searches rose 10 per cent to 18,000 per month from 2021 to 2022, with further growth predicted over the next 12 months. Bigger brows are also holding strong for now: brow gel is up 10 per cent over the last year, to 80,000 searches per month, the biggest increase in the brow category. While search for brow mascara, similar to Refy’s Brow Sculpt, is expected to grow 56 per cent over the next 12 months.
Refy’s goal is to become more brand-first, rather than product-first, to build in longevity and loyalty, Meek adds. DTC represents 70 per cent of total sales, but in the US, most people discover the brand through its retail partners, placing a lot of emphasis on the product rather than the brand universe. This is something the duo hopes to evolve, as product-first brands are arguably more victim to the trend cycle. To do this, they plan to build out their social media and DTC presence in the US, and boost their lifestyle, brand-building content in the UK.
“In the UK I reckon they probably see Jess, they see the lifestyle, they see the influencers using it, they might have the experience in Selfridges and then they might check out in the DTC,” says Hunt. “In the US at the moment, they might go into Sephora and say, ‘Hey, I want a fluff brow and be directed to Brow Sculpt’.”
US-based makeup brand Youthforia’s founder Fiona Co Chan left her career in tech and launched her makeup brand in 2021, regularly posting tutorial or explainer content on TikTok. Focused on fusing skincare and colour cosmetics, Youthforia’s tagline is “makeup you can sleep in”, with products that aim to protect the skin from pollution or bacteria. “I was never a content creator before, I didn’t have any resources other than my phone,” Co Chan says. “After two weeks, Youthforia started to go viral.”
The company hit $2 million in annual sales this year, quadrupling its 2021 revenues. It’s stocked at Ulta Beauty, Credo and Revolve. Beyond the aspirational, ultra luxe marketing of many makeup brands, Co Chan acknowledges that sometimes she and her customers go out partying and don’t come in and wash their face.
Co Chan agrees that it’s impossible to build a brand solely on trends, especially in today’s social media climate. “The trend cycle on TikTok is barely a day now. It used to be a week! When I think back to all my favourite brands growing up, they all had really strong hero products and that's definitely something I want to do.”
TikTok-first is an advantage for now
TikTok has become the primary communication channel for many young beauty brands, who produce relatable, tutorial-style content that spotlights their founders and/or diverse groups of creators using their products.
“The bigger, more established brands are still caught up in traditional media, shooting advertising campaigns for the products with high production values,” says Permele Doyle, co-founder and president of digital marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy. “I think the younger brands get that using creator content and social content is going to work so much better. It makes sense that they’re taking market share away from the older, more established players.”
In the first year, Refy was going after every social channel “at one hundred miles an hour”, Meek says. “We’ve now grown so much, there's a maximum you can actually do,” Four months ago, the brand stepped back from other platforms to focus on TikTok. “It’s gone like that,” she says, gesturing a steep upward curve.
Dieux regularly posts tutorials from its founders and its community members. One of the brand’s most-viewed videos lately was CEO Palermino coaching users on how to “moisture sandwich” with Dieux products. The brand also benefits from organic, non-beauty related content, “We’ve seen so many videos go viral of creators talking about something unrelated to the masks but they’re wearing them and it’s a beautiful reminder that we made something that works for so many people.”
Focusing on one platform is a risky game in today’s tech climate, Doyle says. Think Apple’s iOS changes, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, Instagram’s algorithm changes and Meta’s decline. Meek acknowledges the danger: “TikTok is another scary platform and there’s a lot riding on it for us — hopefully a new TikTok will emerge in the next three to five years!”
Youthforia fell victim to the Apple iOS privacy changes a year ago, making its paid advertising “pretty unprofitable”, Co Chan says. We were extremely resource-strapped and so it wasn't something where we could have really scaled. We kind of always had to rely on organic content just as a means to grow.” TikTok’s algorithm, which blasts successful content to all who it thinks will enjoy it, was a great springboard for the label without having to pay to target consumers.
Product innovation is key
While major players are more focused on churning out products in every makeup sub-category, young brands are launching with one or two hero products and building their assortment gradually based on consumer feedback.
Youthforia’s hero item, its colour-changing blush oil, is widely known as the first blush oil on the market. “One day it really hit me, why don't we just try a colour-changing blush in an oil that adapts to your skin? No one's ever done that before,” Co Chan says. “After testing, when you get that wow factor, you're like, okay, this is going to be something that’s fun and it’s gonna be really different.” The blush oil sold out two hours into Cyber Monday on new stockist Ulta’s website. Despite Youthforia ranking low on Spate search data overall, it leads in the blush oil search term, even as other players emulate the product.
At Refy’s four-day London pop-up in November 2021, which had fans queuing out the door, Hunt heard many of her customers say they loved the brand’s highlighter for the face and wanted a body glow. Refy launched its body glow in June this year and has sold out of various drops.
“A lot of brands will send an existing product from another brand to their factory and say, make me this, tweak it slightly,” Meek says. “All of our products are developed from scratch, so we do not benchmark. It takes us one or two years minimum to do anything before we can even go into production, we make less so we can make better. That’s what makes our customers come back.
It’s important to continue improving methods, says Palermino of Dieux. “Packaging is a huge issue to solve as it’s so wasteful and carbon intensive. We are looking to shift our packaging to non-mined aluminium with reusable components and offering larger sizes for our most bought formulas so you buy less often and ship less, reducing overall emissions.”
Some of the early DTC beauty giants like Glossier, Olaplex or Kim Kardashian’s shuttered makeup brand KKW Beauty, reached high valuations very early. Refy might already be at eight figures but Hunt isn’t looking for unicorn status anytime soon. “Is it worth being at a billion-pound brand in 10 years if I’m stressed, Jenna is stressed and we haven't got half of the team that we started with?” she asks. “I don't think so. I think I want us to be able to enjoy this journey.”
Key takeaway: TikTok beauty brands launched during the pandemic have benefitted from viral products and popular content. While they do correspond with current beauty trends, the founders are focused on product development and building brand loyalty with relatable content, in order to beat the hype.
Comments