Beechwood Capital

Dec 27, 2022

InnBeauty项目启动,旨在使affordable, sustainable skin and beauty products. Its founders, Alisa Metzger and Jen Shane, teamed up after working in the beauty industry together. The company has expanded into Sephora stores and just raised $12 million in new funding. InnBeauty Project's founders, Alisa Metzger and Jen Shane, first met working together at the skincare brand Tula in 2017. And they quickly identified an up-and-coming trend in the beauty industry: a focus on wellness and simple ingredients. "Beauty and skincare were talking about what they weren't including in their formulas, and how clean they were," Metzger said. But most of the brands that focused on simple chemical formulas and ingredients — such as the cult-beauty brand Drunk Elephant, which sold to Shiseido in 2019 for $845 million — were at too high a price point for most customers, Metzger and Shane said. Prices for Drunk Elephant, for instance, range from $14 for a mini size to $134 for individual creams and serums. "These skincare brands are amazing, but the average economic salary in the US is 45,000 a year, so they were pretty much unaffordable to the average consumer," Metzger said. So, Metzger and Shane set out to find a way to make skincare products at a more affordable price point. Between their combined experiences of working for several top beauty and skincare companies like Rituals, Tatcha, and Tarte Cosmetics, they decided to leave Tula in 2019 and work on InnBeauty Project full time. And despite the tougher fundraising market in 2022, Metzger and Shane stayed persistent through "a lot of nos," Shane said. The startup landed a $12 million Series A round on December 13, led by Alliance Consumer Growth with participation from the existing investors Beechwood Capital and the growth equity fund Strand Equity. Using their combined network in the industry, Metzger and Shane hired cosmetic chemists to help them build their skincare product formulas from scratch, they said. That approach is different from those of some other brands, like the $2.2 billion The Ordinary, that focus on singular ingredients. "We look at a formulation like a successful cocktail, and we don't expect them to have to mix all these products together to achieve a result," Shane said. And by calling on their network to help them find employees and develop products, they stayed below a luxury price point. Today, InnBeauty's products fall in a price range of $15 to $48. The startup attracted a cult following from social-media influencers like Christina Najjar, also known as Tinx, who promoted the products to her over 1.5 million followers. Since then, InnBeauty Project also raised a $4.5 million seed round in 2021 led by Beechwood Capital, whose investors helped them get in touch with the cosmetics retail giant Sephora for an in-store launch. The two hope to continue launching in more in-store and online retailers and expand their product offering in the new year, they told Insider. Check out the 14-slide pitch deck that InnBeauty Project used to raise $12 million in Series A funding: INNBeauty Project