How a Beauty Brand Loses Its Cool — and Gets It Back

The beauty ecosystem of the 2010s revolved around one question: What would a cool girl put on her face?

The answer would go on to inform the launches of the era’s most disruptive brands, like Glossier, Fenty Beauty and Milk Makeup. The latter, which launched in Sephora and Urban Outfitters in February 2016, was perhaps the ultimate cool-girl label. Born out of the editorial production studio Milk Studios, it debuted with skin tints, chubby sticks and pigment tubes designed to be applied with fingers, and was geared towards a New York-ish, on-the-go type — someone likelier to do their makeup in the back of a cab or the reflection of a storefront window than in a bathroom mirror. The brand’s original tagline: “Milk girls do their makeup quick.”

Perhaps too quick. In the nine years since, the brand has seen sales rise, then explode and eventually slide. When parent company Waldencast acquired the brand in 2021, it was doing $46 million in annual sales. It’s grown significantly since then — last year, the brand brought in $125 million — but recent months have presented more of a challenge. Milk’s sales grew in the first half of the year, then dropped 20 percent, according to Waldencast’s latest earnings.

In many ways, Milk Makeup is in step with its peers. The issues it’s facing are shared by many in the cohort of Millennial beauty labels, including Glossier, Drunk Elephant and Herbivore. While all have grown into new products, formats and retailers, they’ve strayed from the values that once made them singular. In turn, they’ve been embraced, and later abandoned, by fickle Gen Z consumers.

While Milk’s situation is far from dire, the sales dip was enough to prompt some rethinking ahead of its 10-year anniversary in 2026. After a few months of discussion, Waldencast chief executive Michel Brousset recruited co-founder Mazdack Rassi to return in October in hopes of realigning the cosmetics label with its transgressive, creative roots.

“For me, it was very simple,” Rassi told The Business of Beauty. “It’s really back to the studios, the concept of creativity and why we created these products.”

The future of Milk — and for any name whose shine has faded since its glory days — depends primarily on recapturing the magic it originally had while creating brand-new relevance in an industry all too happy to move on.

“At this stage, we need to pull back to the roots of the brand,” said Brousset. “And Rassi is our North Star.”

Strengthen the Core

Perhaps no beauty brand launch of the 2010s was as audacious as Milk Makeup, which arrived to market in February 2016 with a whopping 82-piece collection, including a set of blotting papers that doubled as smoking paraphernalia and a cannabidiol-infused Kush mascara, which became an early hit at Sephora.

Looking to its next chapter, Rassi’s top priority is to reestablish a clear connection to Milk Studios.

“Milk Studios [gives] us a lot of credibility around artistry, and we want to make sure that our community and our consumer base understand where we come from,” Rassi explained. The brand is revisiting its top-of-funnel marketing strategy to incorporate content creators, and rebuilding its makeup artistry programme to reinforce its creative authority.

Brand marketing can help keep a brand relevant, but the machine has to say consistent — and always be turned on.

“You have to see a piece of content 11.4 times from a brand before you convert,” said Sedge Beswick, a consumer goods consultant. Brands today need to consider “how you keep that ticker of content going through social and storytelling … that builds trust and keeps people coming back.”

Milk Studios has always granted its makeup subsidiary access to some of the best editorial talent in the world. That lends itself to gorgeous imagery but doesn’t always translate into sales.

Art and commerce can be a tricky balancing act. Look at Glossier, which sprang to life from the beauty blog Into the Gloss; Glossier’s name comes from dossier, which referenced the wide trove of cool-girl interviews that informed its early product offering. As those launches became more frequent, they felt less inspired. As The Business of Beauty recently reported, new CEO Colin Walsh plans to pare down 2026 launches to focus on its winning franchises: Boy Brow, Cloud Paint blushes and the You fragrance.

Milk has already whittled its collection before, discontinuing its range of lipsticks, glosses and stains.

“We don’t compete in many categories,” said Brousset, offering the example of liquid foundation. “It’s the largest category in makeup. … We’re not just going to launch a me-too liquid foundation. It has to be very special and very charismatic.”

Don’t Forget Your Customer

A common pitfall for these Millennial labels was a pivot to Gen Z consumers, who are essentially brand love bombers.

“Gen Z engages deeply with brands — and moves on just as quickly,” said Ali Furman, consumer markets industry leader at PwC. “They’re digital natives who love the in-store experience but remain budget conscious.”

The hottest launch of Milk’s recent past was the Jelly Tint Blush, a squat stick formula with a gummy texture that took off on TikTok and among Sephora tweens in 2023. But as its novelty faded, so did its popularity.

It recalls the fate of Drunk Elephant, which enjoyed strong sales thanks to demand from the young consumers drawn to its candy-coloured packaging, even if the products inside were decidedly for adults. Parent company Shiseido is now gearing up for a brand repositioning in 2026, as chief executive Kentaro Fujiwara told analysts in November, and one that will almost certainly focus on recapturing defected Millennial consumers.

“When you think about the brands who are still relevant, it comes down to understanding who it is that you’re speaking to,” said Beswick. She offers the example of Merit, which was founded in 2021 and trades consistently on minimalist products that are marketed for their ease of application. “The focus became around being foolproof.”

Reintroduce Your Brand’s Best

Sometimes, a brand simply falls out of step with the times. Herbivore Botanicals, a premium skincare brand focused on “clean” formulations, thrived in the 2010s with its shelfie-friendly suite of products like the Lapis face oil. Recently, though, the label has struggled as “clean” has become less of a selling point for shoppers.

When former Supergoop CMO Britany LeBlanc joined Herbivore Botanicals in 2024, with a mandate to refresh the brand, her first priority was to shore up its clinical credentials.

“Clean is now table stakes, and something being shelfie-worthy is no longer enough to meet what consumers need,” she said.

The brand has since relaunched its 2019 Bakuchiol Bio-Boost Serum with a souped-up reformulation, and will unveil refreshed branding on Dec. 15 with a 15-piece body-care collection organised by Herbivore’s longstanding franchises — Coco Rose, Lapis and Nova — in exclusive partnership with Ulta Beauty. (The body category nods to the brand’s origins as an Etsy soap shop.)

“We weren’t talking enough about the plant, active ingredients, the efficacy, that the products do really work,” LeBlanc said, adding that 98 percent of the formulas are “net new in some way” — with added actives or natural fragrance. “It was a nice exercise to clean up, elevate, bring consistency, but not lose the beauty of what the Herbivore brand always had.”

Milk, for its part, hasn’t spoiled. Its textures and formulations are still innovative; even its design codes, like the Rhode-esque white type on grey packaging, still feel cool almost 10 years later. One of Milk’s refreshment strategies involves hiring regional leaders who can tailor the brand’s approach to different geographies. The label is also doubling down on in-store sales staff in key growth markets like Europe and the Middle East.

The irony of Milk’s global-local strategy is that it still relies on a very specific idea of its core young Millennial customer.

“It’s important for our consumer base to have context of where we come from,” Rassi added. “But we don’t want to just live in the past. We want to live in the future.”

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