Luna Daily has secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding in a round led by Unilever Ventures, the venture arm of global consumer packaged goods conglomerate Unilever.
The funding comes alongside investment from the body care brand’s existing partners, Redrice Ventures and Joyance Partners, and new angel investors Peanut founder Michelle Kennedy, Indu and Feelunique co-founder Aaron Chatterley, Mintel chair of beauty and wellness Jane Henderson, and Dmg Ventures principal Taos Edmondson. Previously, Luna Daily raised $3.7 million in 2023 and a pre-seed angel round in 2021.
Last year’s funding supported Luna Daily’s Sephora and Boots’ retail entrances. Sephora in the United States carries 20 stockkeeping units from the brand priced from $12 to $56, including The Everywhere Spray-To-Wipe, The Everywhere Wash, The Everywhere Oil, The Repair Treatment And The Skin Support Oil. Katy Cottam, founder and CEO of the brand, says the fresh funding will “drive exponential growth and productivity within retail channels.”
In a statement, Anna Ohlsson-Baskerville, partner at Unilever Ventures, says, “We are excited by how Katy has elevated the consumer experience of body wash and care with her microbiome balancing formulations for all skin. She used her own experience to create an offering that cares for women’s bodies in their entirety and for all stages of womanhood. We think that is a powerful and empowering idea. Daily routines have now been transformed into desirable rituals.”
In addition to retail, Luna Daily will dedicate the funding to marketing. It’s reconfiguring its internal marketing team and marketing mix to reduce its reliance on traditional paid advertising. Cottam explains the shift will allow for increased influencer spending in an effort to build long-term relationships with influencers as influencer marketing is performing better than traditional paid advertising.
Luna Daily’s most recent product launch was the Motherhood Collection, a head-to-toe body care range priced from $14 to $42 containing five products such as Perineal Prep Oil and Post-Birth Soothing Spray. The focus on pregnancy and postpartum enables Luna Daily to strike partnerships with influencers creating motherhood-related content.
Cottam says, “Particularly that life stage is where we see more than any other that we’ve engaged with how much our community and other communities lean on figures of influence in the base, even more than brands, for recommendations.”
While many venture capital-backed CPG brands have run into trouble raising further funding of late, Luna Daily’s latest funding round was its easiest yet. It closed in three weeks versus 11 months for the prior round. In the $3.7 million round Luna Daily closed in 2023, the brand had originally set a goal of $1.25 million, but nearly tripled that number when Sephora picked up the brand after it was only on the market for about a month.
“The main differences were a true inflection point. That really helps,” says Cottam. “Last time I was fundraising, there was an element of, who knows what’s going to happen? Whereas this time around we truly are at an inflection point, and we could see that in the data…As we went through these discussions, we had more and more good news that was coming in.”
Body care products have been a strong propellant of skincare sales. For example, the market research firm Circana reports that, in the first quarter of this year, body spray was the top skincare gainer. In 2021, L’Occitane acquired a majority stake in the body care brand Sol de Janeiro, and the brand’s sales skyrocketed almost 200% last year. The success of Sol de Janeiro and body care generally has the market wondering about what body care brands could fuel lucrative future deals.
Unilever Ventures has been active in the beauty and wellness space in the past year. In November, it invested about $2.5 million in Indian mass personal care brand Wishcare and led clean fragrance brand The 7 Virtues’ funding round with True Beauty Ventures. It also reinvested in scalp care brand Straand in December and led supplement brand Perelel’s $6 million series A, another follow-on investment, in February.
Earlier in 2023, Unilever contributed to VC firm Selva Ventures’ $34 million second fund. Other beauty and wellness brands in its portfolio include Live Tinted, Beauty Bakerie, Bybi, Lemme, Exponent Beauty, The Nue Co. and Frank Body. Former portfolio brands Gallinée and Curlsmith exited in 2022.
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