Maesa CEO shares how its beauty brands find success in mass

While brands like Rare Beauty, Fenty Beauty, and Haus Labs have become darlings of the celebrity brand category in prestige, another company has a lock on the celeb brands in the mass set.

Maesa, founded in Paris in 1997, refers to itself as the “world’s No. 1 beauty incubator in mass.” Its roots are in developing private label lines for retailers, but in 2013, it debuted its first brand, Drew Barrymore’s beauty line Flower Beauty. It’s since expanded to several celebrity-backed lines like Kristin Ess, a haircare brand founded by the eponymous celebrity hairstylist in 2017, and Ashley Tisdale’s wellness line Being Frenshe, which debuted in 2022. This branded side now accounts for the largest percentage of its business, CEO Piyush Jain, a 20+ year Unilever vet who took the reins at Maesa in 2022, told Retail Brew.

• Maesa continues to produce private labels for beauty retailers like Sally Beauty along with retailer-exclusive lines like the TikTok viral Fine’ry, a fragrance line launched at Target last year. The company also introduced the Maesa Magic Incubator last year to support entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities.

While there’s been a proliferation of beauty brands—celebrity and otherwise—that have come and gone over the last few years, Maesa said it has managed to double its revenue from 2020 to 2023, and produce its own brands that have captured shelf space at major retailers for over a decade.

Hair raising: With so many beauty brands debuting every year, standing out is a tricky task, especially as consumers have become more savvy about what they’re looking for in a beauty brand.

“I always say that brand incubation in beauty is probably one of the hardest things to do,” Jain said. “So many new brands launch but at most, 1 out of 10 new brands survive.” Meanwhile, “more than 2 out of every 3 brands we launch thrive,” he added.

Its brands—all sold in mass retailers like Target or Walmart, drugstores like CVS, and the mass aisles of Ulta—focus on offering “affordable luxury” products, Jain said. It’s done so across a number of categories, from color cosmetics to haircare to fragrance to home care, without the aim to be a cheaper version of products already on the market.

“We never really look at what’s happening in the market and what’s successful and try fast to follow; we create our own new niche and unique spaces,” Jain said. For example, when Kristin Ess debuted, there were plenty of hair stylist-led brands on the market, but the majority of stylist-led brands with more prestige pricing were by men, Jain noted. So the company created the brand with an appeal of “quiet confidence,” that put the woman stylist at the forefront, Jain said.

Retailer-made: Maesa has been able to establish strong partnerships with retailers like Target largely because its brands like Kristin Ess and Being Frenshe have found success by offering products consumers “didn’t even know existed or [they] needed.” For example, Being Frenshe’s Hair, Body, and Linen Mist—a product that doesn’t have any clear competitors in the market—has become one of Maesa’s top selling products and is beneficial for retail partners because it doesn’t cannibalize other offerings.

• Its product innovation cycle can vary between nine and 18 months, but new brands are typically faster, with a goal to launch them 9–12 months after the initial idea.

“If you can partner well with the retailer, they lean into the mix as well because it is meeting a specific need for them, and that drives category growth,” Jain said. “For retail, it’s really important that new brands that are coming in are actually driving growth versus only stealing share from each other.”