A decade ago, the beauty industry offered founders a seductive promise. Build a slick direct-to-consumer brand, speak fluent Instagram, wrap it all in the language of ‘clean’, and scale fast enough for Sephora, Ulta, or a strategic buyer to come calling.
For a while, that formula worked. Glossier turned community into a business model, raising more than $250 million, and reaching a $1.8 billion valuation at its peak. The Ordinary made ingredient transparency feel radical. Herbivore Botanicals helped define the ‘shelfie’ era. Huda Beauty turned social fluency into global demand. Blockbuster deals followed: Coty bought 51% of Kylie Cosmetics for $600 million in 2019; Shiseido acquired Drunk Elephant that same year for $845 million; and Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) eventually spent roughly $1.7 billion across multiple deals to acquire Deciem, The Ordinary’s parent company.
But as many of the first-generation, Instagram-era beauty brands hit the 10-year mark, the moment looks less like a victory lap than a stress test.
Beauty is still growing. NielsenIQ data shows the US beauty and personal care market reached $123.6 billion in the latest 52 weeks, up 11.4% year-on-year, with online sales now accounting for nearly half of the market. But that growth is being driven by a very different retail and media environment than the one these brands were built in: one where Amazon is the largest beauty retailer in the US, TikTok Shop is reshaping discovery, and the cost to run ads and acquire customers on Instagram has skyrocketed.
This shift has quietly broken the original direct-to-consumer (DTC) playbook. “When all of those brands launched, it was very possible to do this all DTC,” says NielsenIQ beauty industry analyst Anna Mayo. “You would start your website, use Meta and Google to target customers, and keep going.” That model, she adds, is now “a lot less” viable, as rising acquisition costs and privacy changes fundamentally reshape how digital commerce works.
The implication is not just that growth is harder — it’s that the underlying model many of these brands were built on no longer works in the same way. What replaces it is a far more fragmented, less predictable playbook.
From breakout to recalibration
The trajectories of these first-wave beauty brands have diverged sharply, but most follow a similar arc: rapid early growth, a moment of peak cultural relevance, and a period of recalibration. What that looks like varies. For some, it has been existential. Becca Cosmetics shut down in 2021, while Bite Beauty — once a Sephora favorite — also closed in 2022, after struggling to maintain momentum.
Many others are still standing, but in very different forms than they were at their peak. Kylie Cosmetics, which helped define the monetization potential of the Instagram age, reached a $1.2 billion valuation when Coty acquired a majority stake in 2019. In the years since, sales have been uneven and the brand has undergone a series of repositioning efforts, underscoring how difficult it can be to sustain momentum beyond an initial surge of hype.
Glossier is the most visible example of that cycle. Founded in 2014, it quickly became the blueprint for DTC beauty: a brand built on community, minimalism, and direct customer feedback loops. Its early success translated into aggressive expansion — a growing product line, a network of highly designed retail stores, and a valuation that peaked at $1.8 billion in 2021. But in the years since, founder Emily Weiss stepped down as CEO (she’s now the executive chairman of the board) and the company has faced layoffs, executive turnover, and a broader strategic reset, including the appointment of Colin Walsh as CEO in 2025 and Nicole Solorzano as CMO this April.
What that reset has looked like, in practice, is a shift away from the idea that Glossier could be its own ecosystem. The brand has scaled back its retail footprint, closing most of its stores while refocusing on a smaller number of flagship locations. It has also streamlined its assortment, placing greater emphasis on core products like Boy Brow pomade, Cloud Paint blush, and its Glossier You fragrance while pulling back on categories like eyeliner and shadows. At the same time, it has leaned into wholesale — most notably its launch at Sephora — reflecting a broader shift toward reach and accessibility over DTC purity. The strategy now is less about building a closed-loop community and more about meeting customers where they already are, while rebuilding brand affinity through a tighter product focus and more consistent storytelling.
Herbivore Botanicals followed a different but somewhat parallel trajectory. Launched in 2011, the brand became an early defining name of the clean beauty movement, with its colorful glass packaging and ingredient-led positioning, making it a natural fit for Instagram. Its 2018 to 2019 expansion into Sephora marked a high point, pushing the brand into global visibility. But that visibility didn’t translate into sustained momentum.
“When I came in, I was like, ‘Where did this brand that I loved go?’” says CEO Britany LeBlanc, who joined Herbivore Botanicals in 2024 from Supergoop. The issue, she says, was not awareness, but relevance — the brand had not evolved at the same pace as the consumer. “I think the consumer is just much more educated,” LeBlanc says. “We had to pull forward more of the ‘why’ — what these ingredients actually do.”
The brand’s response has been both product-led and operational. Herbivore has reformulated a number of its hero products to improve efficacy, while also investing more heavily in clinical testing and clearer messaging — a shift away from the looser “clean” language it was built on. It has also reset its retail strategy, exiting Sephora for Ulta, where it is now in roughly 850 doors, with a stronger focus on in-store education and merchandising. The reset has also included co-founder Alex Kummerow stepping into a more active creative role after a period of external management, in an effort to restore some of the brand’s original identity.
RMS Beauty’s trajectory is longer, but reveals a similar pattern. Founded in 2009 by makeup artist Rose-Marie Swift, the brand was also early to clean beauty, positioning itself as both high-performance and ingredient-conscious at a time when “natural” makeup was still seen as niche. That early differentiation helped it build a loyal, almost cult-like following. But as clean became mainstream, that positioning became less distinctive.
“What wasn’t in our products used to be enough,” says chief strategic officer Elaine Sack. “Now, consumers want to know what is in them and that it works.”
The brand’s response has been to sharpen its offering rather than expand it. Product development has become more disciplined, with fewer launches and a greater emphasis on hero franchises like Un Cover-Up and Luminizer, supported by updated formulations and clearer efficacy claims. On the business side, RMS has leaned into its partnership with Highlander Partners, a Dallas-based private equity firm, to professionalize operations — expanding into Ulta and investing in its supply chain. At the same time, it has adjusted its marketing mix, pulling back on paid social in favor of affiliates, community-first gifting and retail-driven discovery as acquisition costs rise.
“The cost of acquisition for customers — it keeps me up at night,” Sack says. “I remember when it was $8. Now it’s insane.”
Huda Beauty followed a similar arc, but with a more explicit break — and recovery. Founded in 2013, the brand leveraged beauty influencer Huda Kattan’s audience to build early momentum, developing products like high-impact eye palettes and full-coverage complexion ranges that lent themselves to tutorials, transformations, and repeat use on social media. “We didn’t have marketing dollars, so it was all about, ‘How can we get as many eyeballs on as possible?’” Kattan says.
As the business scaled, that instinct translated into a model built around fewer, more impactful launches, supported by a content engine that still runs largely through Kattan herself — tutorials, product demos, and trend-driven looks designed to generate conversation and be widely shared across social media. But the brand’s evolution has not been linear. After taking on outside investment, Huda Beauty went through what Kattan describes as “a period of misalignment”: investors brought in leadership that “was not good for the business”, and the brand lost some of its momentum.
Instagram content
In 2025, Kattan bought back the minority stake held by private equity firm TSG Consumer, returning the company to full founder ownership and reasserting control over its direction. Since, the business has been restructured with a clearer focus on profitability — reducing SKU complexity, being more selective about retail partners, and pacing launches more deliberately rather than feeding constant newness into the market.
For Kattan, that shift is in part a response to the broader dynamics that defined the last decade. “I don’t believe most investors actually understand business,” she says. “A lot of them are much more short-sighted.”
What these brands share is not a single outcome, but a common reality: the original model required adjustment. The difference lies in how early those changes were made — and how much of the original DNA was preserved in the process.
Consistency as strategy
Not every brand from this era has needed to rethink its model in the same way. In some cases, the fundamentals have largely held up, even as the market around them has changed. Brands like The Ordinary, Drunk Elephant, and Supergoop have maintained a tight product assortment and consistent positioning as they’ve scaled.
Launched in 2016 under Deciem, The Ordinary built its identity around ingredient transparency and accessible pricing, a direct challenge to the opacity of traditional prestige skincare. “You would see face creams that are $10 and $200, and it wasn’t immediately clear what you were paying for,” says Deciem’s head of brand, Amy Bi.
That positioning has translated into meaningful scale. The brand is estimated to generate between $500 million and $1 billion in annual sales this year, placing it among the more commercially significant businesses to emerge from this cohort. It has also continued to grow, delivering mid-single-digit gains even as the broader ELC portfolio declined, underscoring its stability in a more volatile market.
The same logic has carried through into how the brand has scaled. While many of its peers expanded quickly into adjacent categories, The Ordinary has largely stayed within a defined set of skincare basics, building out depth within ingredients franchises rather than constantly introducing new formats. Its assortment remains organized around concerns and ingredients, mirroring how consumers actually shop rather than chasing trend cycles.
Its retail strategy follows a similar pattern. The brand is now widely distributed across its own doors, department stores, Sephora, Boots, and Amazon, but the core proposition remains unchanged — a consistency Bi says is deliberate, so consumers are getting the same understanding of the products wherever they encounter the brand. Even on TikTok, where discovery is increasingly driven by novelty, the brand has leaned into explanatory content rather than trend participation, reinforcing the same positioning it established at launch.
“We don’t follow trends,” Bi says. “What we choose not to do is just as important as what we choose to do.”
What year 10 actually looks like
These brands don’t illustrate a single path forward, but a shift in what’s required to sustain one. The playbook of the past hasn’t disappeared. It just no longer works on its own.
Today, brands are operating across a far more fragmented system. Distribution now spans Amazon, TikTok Shop, physical retail, and DTC, each playing a different role in how customers discover, evaluate, and repurchase products. This has made growth less linear and far less controllable.
At the same time, the economics have changed. “Ten years ago, all investors cared about was your revenue number and your revenue growth,” says NielsenIQ’s Mayo. Now, she says, profitability and consistency matter more — a shift reflected in how deals are structured, with more minority investments and staged acquisitions rather than all-in bets.
That shift shows up most clearly in how brands are operating day to day. If the first phase of digitally native beauty was defined by expansion — more SKUs, more channels, more marketing — the second phase is about editing.
At the product level, that has meant a move away from constant newness toward a tighter focus on what already works. RMS has shifted to what chief strategy officer Sack describes as “fewer, better launches”, rebuilding around products like its primer and Hydro Powder blush that consistently sell through at retail.
At Huda Beauty, a similar realignment has taken place — but more explicitly. “We were ignoring some of our bestselling products,” Kattan says. “Easy Bake [powder] was always a top product for us, but we were giving it zero love.” Looking at the data, she realized that several of those products were consistently ranking among the brand’s top sellers, despite receiving little marketing support. The response was to shift focus back onto those core franchises — not just continuing to sell them, but actively building authority around them through more deliberate communication and product extensions.
The same kind of recalibration is happening in distribution. The idea that a brand could scale primarily through its own channels has largely given way to a more pragmatic mix. Glossier’s move into Sephora marked a turning point not just for the company, but for the broader model it once represented. Herbivore’s exit from the retailer in favor of Ulta reflects a different kind of reset — one that gives the brand more control over how it shows up, from product strategy to in-store presentation, while aligning more closely with categories it sees as core to its growth, including bodycare, rather than responding to retailer-driven priorities around trend cycles and newness. And for brands like The Ordinary, the challenge is no longer where to sell, but how to maintain a consistent proposition across all of its environments.
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Underneath those decisions is a more fundamental shift: growth is no longer the primary metric, at least not in isolation. Profitability, or a clear path to it, is. “The industry has shifted from ‘growth at all costs’ to ‘longevity at all costs’,” Sack says.
The shift is also reshaping how brands think about marketing. Customer acquisition has become significantly more expensive and less predictable, particularly as paid social becomes less reliable as a conversion engine. In response, brands are pulling back on broad, top-of-funnel spend and becoming more targeted — leaning into affiliates, community, and retail-driven discovery rather than relying solely on paid channels.
Even the role of virality has changed. A spike in attention, whether from TikTok or a creator mention, is no longer assumed to translate into sustained sales. As Sack tells it, even a positive review from a top-tier creator doesn’t guarantee lift. What matters more is whether a product earns a place in a customer’s routine — something far less visible and harder to manufacture.
At the same time, consumer expectations have shifted. The language that once defined the category — “clean”, “non-toxic”, “free-from”— is no longer enough on its own. Brands are now expected to articulate specific benefits and back them up. “We went more from talking about what wasn’t in our products to really moving toward everything good that was in our products, and how there was efficacy with everything we were doing,” Sack says. “We always have to be prepared that the customer is just as educated as the best chemist on our team.”
All of this has led to a more constrained kind of decision-making. Brands are no longer trying to do everything at once, but choosing where to be consistent — in product, in messaging, in distribution — and where to adapt.
“Ultimately you can’t change everything,” Kattan says. “You’d become a very reactive brand.”
What emerges is not a single blueprint, but a narrower range of viable approaches. The brands that are holding their ground tend to share a few characteristics: a clear product hierarchy anchored by repeat purchases, a distribution strategy that reflects how consumers actually shop today, and an operational model that can sustain itself without relying on constant external capital or aggressive marketing spend.
A decade ago, the opportunity in beauty was to move quickly and capture attention. Now, the challenge is almost the opposite: deciding what not to pursue — which categories not to enter, which trends not to follow, which channels don’t make sense.
The Instagram era made it easy to start a beauty brand. What this moment is making clear is how difficult it is to sustain one.
Correction: Emily Weiss did not leave Glossier, she is now executive chairman of the board. (April 17, 2026)
