The beauty buyers’ club Beauty Pie has closed a $100 million funding round and said it is planning to expand its reach beyond its direct-to-consumers membership model and into retail stores, according to a Women’s Wear Daily report on Wednesday (Sept. 8).
“We are different from a lot of the [direct-to-consumer] startups that just kind of blow cash,” Founder Marcia Kilgore said, per WWD. “We’ve broken even already. So having proven that our model is one that can make a profit, while still bringing this incredible value to customers, now it’s just about expanding that out.”
This Series B funding round brings Beauty Pie’s total funding to $170 million.
According to WWD, the London-based company enjoyed steady growth in sales over the past year, to the point that it had to suspend its marketing as demand for its products outstripped supply. The new funding — led by Index Ventures and Insight Partners — will allow Beauty Pie to purchase more inventory and warehouse space. The company plans to experiment with offering its products in retail stores.
“While we weren’t necessarily thinking, ‘Oh, we should go raise money right now,’ because we still had quite a lot of our Series A money left in the bank, we realized that being able to take in a big new investment would help us step on the gas,” Kilgore said in the report. “If we want to expand, that inventory has to be sitting in the warehouses.”
Kilgore plans to eventually turn her company into “a Costco of sorts for luxury beauty,” offering everything from razors to hair products to serums at drug store prices points.
Read more: Retailers Embrace Post-Pandemic Beauty Trend, but Cosmetics Have Gone D2C
Beauty Pie is making these moves amid a shifting landscape for the cosmetics world. As PYMNTS reported in July, Target and JCPenney are both working on plans for in-store beauty shops. Target will partner with Ulta, and JCPenney will roll out its own shop-in-shop experience with Thirteen Lune, a beauty and wellness eCommerce platform.
Nyakio Grieco and Patrick Herning, co-founders of Thirteen Lune, told PYMNTS that the partnership complements the company’s direct-to-consumer (D2C) business “and allows us to scale quickly and reach more customers.”
“As the pandemic begins to subside, we see consumers being more thoughtful and selective in their purchases while doing their own research on the beauty products, brands and people behind the brands,” Grieco and Herning said.
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