Enter today’s beauty specialist VC firms, like True Beauty Capital, Willow Growth and others, that aim to do the opposite of that. True Beauty, founded by Rich Gersten and Cristina Nuñez, has already invested in Aquis, K18, Kinship, Maude and other brands. They recently closed a $42 million fund that was propelled by the growth their early investments were seeing, they said. Ultimately, their goal is to help brands gain traction without spending wildly on marketing.
For Deb Benton, cofounder and general partner at Willow, distancing her investments from the traditional tech VC model has been important. She previously worked as the president and chief operating officer of NastyGal, the venture-backed fashion start-up that went bankrupt in 2017, and saw that the way VCs invested in beauty and consumer companies didn’t always work.
With Willow, her goal is to help founders build the businesses they want to build, versus focus on rapid scaling at the expense of margins, she said. She tells brands to be “maniacally focused on your margin profile” and on “bringing joy to your consumers’ lives” to drive repeat purchase. “We just don’t want to force these brands to have a billion-dollar exit to be successful, that’s irrational,” Benton said.
Venture capital is relatively new in the beauty space, but so far, few beauty companies who have grown via that route have had the billion-dollar exits their backers are seeking. “I can’t think of a single one that scaled a truly digital business,” said Ilya Seglin, managing director at Threadstone LP.
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