How Black Beauty’s Class of 2020 Is Navigating a Tough Market

It’s a striking statement in 2025’s troubled beauty landscape: “This has been our best year yet,” said dermatologist and beauty founder Rose Ingleton of her namesake skincare brand.

Ingleton was speaking on a video call with The Business of Beauty alongside fellow Black beauty founders Aasiyah Abdulsalam of wig brand The Renatural and Vernon Yancy of men’s grooming label Soss. All three had just received their second round of funding — $75,000 each — from Glossier’s Beauty Grant Program, a fund for marginalised founders.

Their experiences capture both the promise and peril of being a Black beauty founder in 2025. All three launched their brands amid the social justice fervour of 2020, when emerging Black-owned labels were catapulted into buy-Black listicles and onto the shelves of major retailers. As support ebbed they’ve learned some of the beauty industry’s hardest-earned lessons: how to raise capital, the perils of over-expansion and the difficulty of finding reliable manufacturing partners.

Soss spent part of 2024 recovering after its main manufacturer shuttered — a blow that could have derailed the startup had it not quickly secured loans and ramped up marketing of “supporting actors” as inventory on its hero product, a “beard soufflé,” ran low, Yancy said. The Renatural’s 2024 became “terrifying,” Abdulsalam said, after she reinvested capital from a $2 million pre-seed round, a Glossier grant and another from Harvard Business School into R&D to expand beyond its debut “wig fix” — a long-term bet that temporarily pushed the company into unprofitability for the first time.

Still, they are among the few still standing. Others, including the once-promising Ceylon, The Established (both former Glossier grantees) and Amí Colé, have shuttered despite the buzz around them.

Glossier itself has weathered volatility, including several executive departures over the past year as the brand tries to recapture its 2010s-era momentum. It’s one of a dwindling number of brands and retailers that has continued to provide financial support explicitly intended for Black founders as the Trump administration has pressured corporate America to back away from diversity initiatives. The programme, now focused on past awardees, has evolved in step with the needs of Black beauty founders, said Veronika Ullmer, Glossier’s global head of corporate and consumer communications, partnerships and impact.

“We decided, against this backdrop, to support the alumni, who are in one of the toughest economic climates,” she said. “Support has to be not only funding … but the community, the visibility, the network — and stepping up at a time when the larger ecosystem isn’t necessarily there for them.”

Survival of the Fittest

Not every Black beauty brand that got the 2020 bump was built to last.

A shakeout, industry insiders say, was inevitable. As the broader beauty market has undergone a correction, it helped to lay bare which founders were delivering true innovation, uniqueness and storytelling, and which were not.

“This is normal — beauty in general was overextended,” said Tomi Talabi, founder of The Black Beauty Club, a community for Black founders, creators, working professionals and beauty enthusiasts.

Among the survivors, many say they’d already internalised the well-worn saying that Black people in business must work twice as hard for half the results. Their resilience had to be radical, and their ideas disruptive.

“It’s about having persistence,” said Yancy, who identified white space in grooming for men of colour with thick or textured facial hair. “The climate is never really set up for us to win — we always have to remember that [and] tap back into that why.”

Abdulsalam said her first product, a wig-affixing headband, was the first wig-related invention to be patented in decades. Though the odds of securing venture capital remain vanishingly slim — less than 1 percent of funding typically goes to female founders of colour each year — she saw it as proof “it’s possible.”

Chaneve Jeanniton, another Glossier grantee, saw an opening for prestige skincare that felt “clinical without the whitewashing.” An oculofacial plastic surgeon, her brand, Epi.Logic, is built on years of formulating custom treatments for patients using ingredients like stem cells and peptides.

She also had data supporting what many Black hair-care founders know: Black consumers aren’t a niche, but the starting point for formulations with broad appeal.

“The way I’ve approached formulation is you centre the most inflammation-prone, reactive skin types — and that, by default, is skin of colour,” she said. “When [you do that] you’ve made a product that is truly inclusive and effective for all skin tones [and] types.”

Still, the demise of some post-2020 brands came as a surprise — and in many cases ran counter to the assumption that only the strongest survive. Jeanniton cited Amí Colé, known for lip oils that popped on darker skin tones, as an example.

“Amí Colé absolutely rocked my understanding,” Jeanniton said. “I cannot name a Black-owned brand in the past couple years that has launched with such beautiful products, messaging [and] marketing.”

Building a New Toolkit

For many Black beauty founders, the biggest lesson echoes what Glossier itself has learned: Rapid expansion and big venture capital infusions won’t guarantee success. Sustainable, deliberate growth is emerging as the smarter bet.

Ingleton said she spent much of 2024 restructuring, focusing on Sephora as her sole retail partner and channeling more resources into Meta ads to target her core audience.

“At one point, I was in eight retailers,” she said. “But I learned that there was no support coming with that. They just wanted to be able to brag that they had you on the shelf and the stuff just sat there and gathered dust.”

Ingleton also got smarter about scaling, bringing on part-time marketing and finance executives to steer her growth while conserving resources.

At Soss, Yancy said he’s focused on keeping the business lean — and filtering the advice he receives.

“Some of the programmes that we went through [alongside] people freely giving us information, they’ll just say, ‘You’re a grooming brand, here’s a bunch of information you need,’” he said. “But [I realised] they don’t know my numbers, market, demographic, [nor] the details.”

Today, he only takes insights from those willing to get under the hood of Black male grooming.

Similarly, Epi.Logic’s Jeanniton said she’s keeping growth “intentional” and slow. Her brand is now generating just under $1 million in revenue without raising outside capital.

“There are only so many hours in the day, and if I have a million phone calls with [investors] that just want to connect early, I’m not working on my business,” she said.

‘Proof Over Perception’

For Black beauty brands that have survived the post-2020 cull and are ready to scale, Talabi says the next phase will hinge on building “operational excellence” — mastering fundamentals like gross margins, velocity, retention and brand lift — and looking beyond the media hype concentrated in New York and Los Angeles.

In other words: “Proof over perception,” she said.

She pointed to a growing list of Black-founded brands — including Topicals, Danessa Myricks, LYS Beauty, BeautyStat and Juvia’s Place — that have built sustainable businesses without relying on “hype machines” or inflated narratives of success.

Glossier’s 2025 grant recipients (who are also getting mentorship and advising from Glossier executives) say they’re still in the process of building that foundation — though they’re clearer on what not to do.

Jeanniton will use the funding to shore up her supply chain. “We go out of stock often,” she said. “We’re using this money to bolster our infrastructure.”

Yancy is focused on “restabilising” production after securing a new manufacturing partner and then reinvesting in marketing.

Abdulsalam is planning a series of “immersive pop-ups and community experiences” in New York to let consumers “touch, test and feel” the technology behind her wigs — and to gather feedback for design updates.

Ingleton sees the market gradually opening to the value Black founders and consumers bring.

“There’s much more awareness of the need to do clinical testing on [skin of colour],” she said. “The fact that it’s [becoming] standard practice now gives me hope.”

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