Ami Colé had everything a beauty brand could want: venture backing, buzz, viral products, and the ultimate prize: distribution at Sephora. Four years later, founder Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye announced she was shutting it down.
The question isn’t how a Sephora brand could fail. The question is why we’re still surprised when it happens.
For beauty founders, getting into Sephora has become the ultimate validation. It’s the moment you celebrate your retail debut, speak at industry events, and feel like you’ve “made it.” But behind the Instagram moments lies a brutal reality: Sephora can be more of a curse than a blessing for emerging brands.
The $5 Million Death Valley
Here’s what beauty founders don’t talk about: most Sephora brands are “loss leaders” until they hit $5 million in wholesale revenue—equivalent to about $9 million at retail. And most brands never make it to that point.
The math is unforgiving. You’re competing for shelf space against corporate-backed giants while operating on razor-thin margins. Smaller brands typically secure 40-45% margins, while established players like Rhode command closer to 50/50 splits. Everything depends on the power dynamic, and when you’re new, you have none.
The Hidden Costs Stack Up:
- Aggressive marketing spend to hit sales targets
- Extensive imagery and content requirements
- Inventory for shade ranges you can’t afford
- Product development dictated by retail demands
As one industry insider explains: operating at Sephora is like being in constant competition. The retailer isn’t trying to destroy brands, they’re running a business that demands certain performance metrics most emerging brands simply cannot hit.
The Innovation Trap
Perhaps most damaging is how Sephora’s influence shapes product development. The retailer collaborates closely with brands on product strategy, which explains why so many similar products launch simultaneously across different brands.
For Ami Colé, this created an impossible choice. The brand became famous for its exclusivity—specializing in foundations and tints specifically for darker skin tones. It was their entire value proposition and competitive advantage.
But Sephora’s business model demands broader appeal. The mass market retailer pushed the brand toward becoming just another complexion line, forcing them to compete in a space where they couldn’t leverage their uniqueness. When you’re pressured to abandon your USP to meet retail demands, you lose the very thing that made customers choose you over established competitors.
Industry experts suggest that focused brands often face pressure to expand their shade ranges in ways that serve retail performance rather than their core customers, creating products that drive overall sales but don’t resonate with the brand’s authentic audience.
This is the paradox in action: succeed at Sephora by abandoning what made your brand special in the first place.
The Complexion Category Curse
Ami Colé’s focus on complexion made their challenge even steeper. Complexion is the hardest, most expensive category in beauty, where product development, inventory, and marketing are uniquely capital-intensive.
To do complexion right, brands need extensive shade ranges regardless of what’s selling. You can’t just stock your best-performing shades, you need the full spectrum. For a venture-backed startup burning cash while building market share, this inventory requirement becomes crushing.
Meanwhile, viral beauty trends shift monthly. TikTok can make lip oils explode overnight (Ami Colé was early to this trend), but maintaining relevance requires constant innovation and inventory investment that complexion brands simply can’t match.
The All-or-Nothing Gamble
The brands that truly succeed at Sephora—Rare Beauty, Summer Fridays, Makeup by Mario—make Sephora their entire universe. Their marketing, product development, and brand strategy revolve entirely around the retailer.
This all-or-nothing approach works for some brands but destroys others. Once you’re positioned as a Sephora brand, expanding to other retailers or direct-to-consumer becomes exponentially harder. You’ve built your entire business model around one relationship.
The Hard Pill Founders Need to Swallow
This brings us to the uncomfortable question every beauty founder must answer: Are you looking for a fast exit or trying to build a long-term brand?
The Sephora path often appeals to founders seeking quick validation and potential acquisition. But unless you’re heavily VC-backed with the capital to sustain losses while building scale, it’s nearly impossible to build a sustainable brand within a megalith like Sephora. The unit economics simply don’t work for bootstrapped or lightly funded brands.
Ami Colé’s story illustrates this perfectly; a brand that built its reputation on exclusivity and specialization was pushed to become generic to satisfy mass market demands. When you lose your differentiation, you lose your reason for existing.
The Pattern Beyond Ami Colé
Ami Colé isn’t an outlier, it’s part of a broader pattern. The beauty industry has gone from massive valuations and acquisition interest to what many describe as an oversaturated market with venture-backed brands shutting down despite impressive backers, distribution, and buzz.
Industry sentiment has shifted dramatically. After years of massive valuations and M&A interest, reality is setting in. Having Sephora distribution doesn’t guarantee success, it often guarantees a specific type of struggle that many brands can’t survive.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Sephora has created billion-dollar brands and transformed the beauty industry. But for every success story, there are countless failures we don’t hear about; brands that burned through venture capital trying to hit impossible targets while competing against corporate giants with vastly superior resources.
The paradox isn’t that Sephora is bad for beauty brands. The paradox is that the industry’s ultimate symbol of success can be a trap that destroys exactly what made a brand special in the first place.
For beauty founders, the question isn’t whether you can get into Sephora. The question is whether you can survive it.
Before you chase the golden ticket, make sure you understand the real price of admission, and whether your brand can pay it without losing its soul.
Thanks for reading this week!
Xx
Camille
P.S. For the exact framework for branding and social media I use with some of the biggest brands in the world, you can access my Masterclass here.