Bootstrapped Brand ESW Beauty Gets More Accessible With Mass Retail Expansion And Price Reductions

ESW Beauty is improving accessibility on two fronts: location and price.

In advance of the holiday shopping season, which sees its sheet masks being snapped up for stocking stuffers, the brand is expanding in mass retail by landing at 4,500 Walgreens stores following a February entrance into 1,200 stores at Target, where it will be in side-cap displays at 50 stores in the fall and 250 stores in the winter. Outside of Walgreens and Target, it has wide-ranging distribution in Whole Foods, Anthropologie, Free People, American Eagle, Barnes & Noble, Natural Grocers, World Market, CIBO, Hilton and over 1,500 boutiques. Meijer is the next stop on its retail roadmap.

ESW Beauty is also trying to expand its reach into consumers’ baskets with price reductions on its sheet masks from $6 or $7 to $4.99 and lip treatments from $15 to $11.99. It joins a burgeoning group of beauty brands lowering prices in response to consumer caution and Target, Walmart and Amazon announcing price cuts on a slew of products. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the cosmetics consumer price index for urban consumers dipped slightly in July from June and a year ago.

“When we first started, we were a masstige brand, and we had to pick eventually if we were going to be prestige or mass,” says ESW Beauty co-founder and CEO Elina Wang. “I want to continue to create good products with good quality, but ultimately I want to make it affordable, where people don’t think twice when they buy our products. With a $6 mask, people say, ‘I love it so much, but I have to think twice,’ and I don’t want that to be the case.”

Adding ESW Beauty has been profitable from day one, Wang underscores the brand has enough margin to support price reductions without changing its formulas and packaging. Its compostable masks are constructed from cupro, a cellulose fiber made from cotton linter, a material surrounding the cottonseed that historically was discarded. They’re encased in recyclable low-density polyethylene packaging. Its lip treatment tubes have 50% post-consumer recycled content.

The lower prices could attract cash-strapped gen alpha consumers or parents not interested in spending lavishly on their kids’ beauty habits. Already, ESW Beauty’s customer demographics have shifted younger. It began with millennial shoppers as its core customers, but it’s increasingly connecting with a gen Z audience.

“I want to make it affordable, where people don’t think twice when they buy our products.”

Last month, Kylan Darnell, a TikToker with 1 million followers who’s part of the Bama Rush phenomenon, posted a video giving a tour of her college room that showed ESW Beauty’s Matcha Almond Milk masks in her bathroom. The brand hadn’t gifted her them or sponsored her.

“Gen girls are loving it,” says Wang. “Our brand definitely checks off all the boxes—it’s clean, vegan, cruelty-free and sustainable—and they want something that they know is clean, and the ingredients are good for them. Our ingredients are approved for the Whole Foods body care standards. At the same time, it’s really cute on their vanity, and it’s fun to do with friends.”

Wang came up with ESW Beauty’s concept of tying juices to beauty products after a battle with ulcers led her to incorporate healthier foods and beverages in her diet, and she became familiar with raw juices. Linking juices and beauty wasn’t completely novel. Not surprisingly, the brand Juice Beauty hinged on the idea of botanical juices in skincare, and food themes have been common in the beauty industry. Wang grew up acquainted with the industry through her mom, who previously ran a K-Beauty distribution company.

Wang secured a $25,000 bank loan to establish ESW Beauty in 2019. (Launched as Elina Skin, ESW Beauty is named for Wang’s initials. Her middle name is Sofia.) The brand’s early sheet masks remain its bestsellers, and a top set for them is the $24.99 Raw Juice Cleanse Mask Set with five masks: Green Reset, Pineapple Bliss, The Pink Dream, Strawberries & Cream and Deep Detox. Its latest products are the $4.99 Strawberry Matcha Latte Eye Patches and $4.99 Iced Chai Latte Patches.

“I truly just do what my gut tells me to do and what is inspiring me.”

Retail has always been at the heart of ESW Beauty. While she was still in college at Babson, Wang trudged to Cosmoprof in Las Vegas, where Kohl’s spotted ESW Beauty’s samples and issued a $100,000 purchase order for the brand to place it in 1,000 doors six months into its business. Wang remembers, “Then, I knew that OK, this is something that I can do. I know it’s crazy, and I know I’m 22, but let’s just do it.”

Today, industry sources estimate ESW Beauty is generating a seven-figure sales total annually. The brand is on Faire to get in front of boutiques and partners with UNFI to service natural grocers. Bootstrapped, it hasn’t received external funding and turns to factoring for retail rollouts.

“It helps a lot because you don’t need to worry about resellers not paying on time because you don’t work directly with them on that,” says Wang. “Yes, you have to give percentages to factoring agencies, but you can use it for R&D, and it’s better for the cash-flow cycle.”

At the outset of ESW Beauty, its primary marketing draws were its colorful packaging design and affordability. As it’s built its retail network, the brand has spent on geo-targeted Meta advertising to drive traffic to stores. However, it’s mostly focused on retail trade initiatives like sampling, reward programs and in-store promotional activities.

Looking forward, a big goal for ESW Beauty is to break into a beauty specialty retailer such as Ulta Beauty, and it aims to enlarge its presence with accounts in the hospitality and retail channels. To enlarge its assortment, ESW Beauty will double its collection of lip treatments in November to six. Next year, it’s planning to release a sheet mask line with a new material, bottled skincare, collaborations and licensing projects.

“I don’t do a lot of market research,” says Wang. “I truly just do what my gut tells me to do and what is inspiring me.”