From $500K to $10M: How LYS Beauty Disrupted the Industry
Many entrepreneurs launch beauty startups because they see a glaring gap in the market. It’s only after they’ve formulated their products and launched them that they learn how incredibly difficult it is to turn a profit as a beauty business.
That wasn’t the case for Tisha Thompson, founder of LYS (short for Love Yourself), a clean cosmetics brand that is inclusive to all skin tones. Since launching the line in 2021, Thompson has grown LYS’s sales to upward of $10 million. And she did so in a counterintuitive way: by building a bootstrapped brand that launched immediately into Sephora with just $500,000 in startup capital.
Thompson’s success is remarkable, particularly because many other Black founders in the beauty industry are struggling. This summer, the popular makeup brand Ami Colé shuttered after three years in business. Founder Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye says she wasn’t able to find enough capital to stay afloat. Many other Black-owned beauty brands, including Beauty bakerie, Ceylon, and Koils by Nature, have also been forced to close.
For Thompson, it’s important to offer a counterpoint to these stories, and to show retailers and investors that it is possible to succeed as a Black-owned brand that targets Black consumers.
“There’s this narrative that Black-owned businesses are failing, and that’s really unfair because there are many white-owned businesses that are also failing,” she says. “Every brand has its own story, and I just want to show that a Black-owned business can be profitable. I want to tell the industry: Don’t give up on us.”
Identifying A Gap In The Market
Thompson has always loved makeup. As a teenager,she would spend gym class doing makeovers for her friends instead of running laps.But when she started her career in the beauty industry, she began to see that many companies did not seem to value her as a consumer. “for so long, makeup has left people who look like me-plus-size black women-out of the conversation,” she says. “They were not marketing to us at all.”
As she was coming up in her career, the clean beauty industry was taking off, and she got a job at Pür, a brand that formulates products without toxic ingredients. Brands like Beautycounter and retailers like Credo highlighted how unregulated the beauty industry is, and how many questionable ingredients are in our products. but it always struck her that the clean beauty industry was not targeting black women.
“They didn’t prioritize women of color in their strategy,” Thompson says. “They were predominantly marketing around an older white woman and selling products at a higher price point.”
Thompson realized there was a gap in the market for a more inclusive clean makeup brand. But knowing how expensive it is to launch a beauty company, she didn’t think she was in a position to start one. “I don’t come from money, and I don’t have access to money,” she says. “It seemed like an unachievable dream.”
Then in 2019, Thompson’s father died, and this changed her calculation. She decided to take the plunge and began writing up a
LYS Beauty: How a Bootstrapped Startup Disrupted Sephora and Clean Beauty
LYS Beauty, a clean makeup brand founded by Tisha Thompson, achieved remarkable success by strategically prioritizing product growth and leveraging influencer relationships over traditional marketing and staffing expenses. The brand quickly gained traction after launching on the Sephora website, ultimately leading to a full-scale rollout in Sephora stores.
Thompson recognized a gap in the clean beauty market: a lack of focus on Black consumers. Sephora’s merchants agreed, recognizing the potential of her business idea and initially signing LYS Beauty as a test on their website to gauge in-store viability. Thompson strategically allocated her startup capital towards product formulation, packaging design, and manufacturing to meet Sephora’s inventory demands.
Instead of investing in costly social media marketing campaigns or a large team, Thompson tapped into her existing network of content creators. “I had a lot of relationships with creators from my former life,” she explained. She contacted approximately 300 influencers who aligned with her brand’s mission,and a important number agreed to promote LYS Beauty organically. This resulted in a surge of YouTube videos announcing the launch of the first Black-owned clean makeup brand at Sephora.
The launch proved overwhelmingly successful. LYS Beauty sold four months’ worth of inventory within just 24 hours, prompting Sephora to rapidly expand the brand’s presence to its brick-and-mortar stores.
This story exemplifies a successful bootstrapping strategy, demonstrating that impactful marketing can be achieved through authentic connections and a strong brand mission.
About the Author:
Elizabeth Segran is a staff writer at Fast Company, covering fashion, retail, and sustainability since 2014. She has interviewed prominent figures in the fashion industry, including Virgil Abloh, Mara Hoffman, Telfar Clemens, Diane von Furstenberg, and Ulla Johnson.
Source: Fast Company