Just last week Jessica Alba opened an Honest Beauty pop-up shop at The Grove, a retail complex in Los Angeles, California. Alba’s new brand launched online last month. And, Sam Reed hints in her article for the Hollywood Reporter that the shop may be a test run for the brand’s eventual expansion into storefront retail.
Alba is in good company as a celebrity beauty entrepreneur. Tyra Banks’s direct sales color cosmetics business TYRA Beauty moved into full swing recently, recruiting representatives—Beautytainers—to sell the brand across the US. Company press material highlights the fact that TYRA Beauty is self-funded.
Banks, Alba, and Gwyneth Paltrow (Juice Beauty) are among a new wave of spokespeople doing a lot more than lending their image to a brand. They “are involved financially and creatively” with the companies, as Cosmetics Design reported this summer.
Updated partnerships
How celebrities team up with brands is shifting too. Mariah Carey has joined forces with MAC for the company’s Beauty Icon collection.
PopSugar shared the partnership announcement last week, and Carey’s comments suggest the color pallet will resonate with multicultural consumers. “We’re a mixed group of people, and MAC has so many great color options for biracial people,” Carey told that publication’s Lauren Levinson.
The full collection will be on the market early next year. But MAC is launching Carey’s first product, a champagne lip color, in time for holiday 2015. She believes “this is going to be something that a lot of different people will be able to feel like they can wear, and it will look good on them because I kept that in mind when we were working on it,” reported PopSugar.
Founder as celebrity
Consumers eager for real-life role models are engaging with indie beauty founders through conventional and social media, thereby elevating these business people to celebrity status.
The same way that Estée Lauder and Helena Rubinstein were trailblazers in business and beauty, so today are women like Bobbi Brown and Charlotte Tilbury. And, take Anastasia Soare of Anastasia Beverly Hills as another example. Her social following, of well over 6 million, is very much part of her brand’s claim to fame. And her followers are just as likely to connect over career and entrepreneurship topics as beauty topics.