The beauty industry doesn’t have it easy right now, and that’s especially true for the companies that aren’t backed by deep-pocketed conglomerates. It’s difficult enough to run a successful indie brand during an economic boom, but 2025 has come with a specific set of challenges for entrepreneurs — including, but not limited to, the widespread ripple effects of the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI, ongoing tariff uncertainty, global supply chain chaos and shrinking consumer spending.
All of this has put many founders of small and emerging indie beauty brands in pure fight-or-flight survival mode. Every leader has their own approach to weathering this rocky terrain, but a growing cohort is going full-transparency mode via social media and other platforms to shed light on their current, often surprising, realities.
BIPOC founders are often hit hardest by these types of challenges. Even under better economic conditions, they typically face higher barriers to entry for growth and financing when compared with their counterparts.
“Access to capital remains the biggest hurdle [as a POC founder],” Good Light Co-Founder David Yi tells Fashionista, discussing a topic he’s been quite open about online. “Only a sliver of venture dollars reach POC-led brands, so every purchase order feels like a high-wire act. Add in rising manufacturing costs, retailer charge-backs, algorithm changes that punish organic reach and the pressure to be both CEO and chief content creator, and ‘doing it all’ can feel literally exhausting.”
Some venture capitalist firms, like True Beauty Ventures, do make an effort to invest in indie, POC-owned businesses. Still, TBV’s backing wasn’t enough to sustain two once-buzzy labels: Ami Colé and Youthforia. In July, Ami Colé’s founder, Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye, shared in a personal essay for The Cut that the brand would close this September. In August, Youthforia also announced that it would be shuttering, albeit for different reasons.
Loyal shoppers, inclusive products, $3 million in VC funding, positive press coverage and prime Sephora shelf space weren’t enough for Ami Colé to keep up with operational costs. “As we tried to grow, our sales wavered,” N’Diaye-Mbaye wrote. “We made operational decisions that felt necessary at the time — like scaling up production to meet potential demand — without truly knowing how the market would respond. […] We’ve got this president, climbing tariffs and marketing costs that are brutal for small brands like mine.”
Many other beauty founders whose brands are still standing are getting real about these struggles on social media — and finding community among one another in the process.
Last summer, Oui the People Founder Karen Young uploaded a TikTok video urging her audience to rally behind Black-owned brands. She noted that access to resources had shrunk drastically (when it was insufficient to begin with), identifying a “recession” of capital, support and visibility.
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Looking back at that video a year later, Young acknowledges that, while these same challenges persist, consumers do seem more aware of them.
“The public is now seeing what founders have known for a long time: that support in fits and starts doesn’t replace the systems required to build lasting businesses,” she tells Fashionista. “This current environment, in particular, is akin to breathing through a straw — if there isn’t enough capital cushion to withstand blows like economic uncertainty and rising costs of doing business, they are going to fold, and Black-owned businesses were already breathing through a straw in terms of access to capital, sustained visibility and scaling challenges. I want to be clear: A lot of businesses will close this year and next, I just fear it may over-index on Black-owned.”
With these uncontrollable economic forces at play, speaking out on social media is Young’s way of taking control of the narrative and empowering other founders to do the same.
“Too often, we feel like we have to quietly carry the weight of these challenges,” she says. “But when we’re transparent, we give other founders language, validation and a sense that they’re not alone. In an age when everyone can turn a public moment into a think piece, I think it’s important for the consumer to hear directly from the founder as well. It’s no small feat that founders make products that end up in hundreds of thousands (millions at scale), of homes. We create real impact, often at the sake of our own emotional health and wellbeing, and we can use the same platforms to speak on our own behalf.”
This year, more beauty founders have come forward to speak their truths. Charlotte Cho, founder of Korean skin-care brand Then I Met You and K-beauty retailer Soko Glam, revealed in a heartfelt Instagram post that, while her business operations look smooth on the surface (it’s won awards, gone viral multiple times and has shelf space at retailers across the world), the reality isn’t nearly as glossy.
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“You don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes — until you’ve lived it,” she posted. “With news of brands like Ami Colé winding down and others fighting to raise funds in this tough economic climate, I’ve had to pause. As a founder of a brand newly hitting Sephora’s Next Big Thing Wall, I feel this deeply.”
Cho wanted to “pull back the curtain a little bit and share what honestly goes on behind the scenes,” she tells Fashionista. “The reality is, milestones of entering a retailer or raising money [don’t] mean things get easier. It’s a very competitive and saturated market and it is tough to survive.”
After posting, Cho says she was reassured by the boost of encouragement from Then I Met You’s community. She’s also found a solid support system among fellow founders.
“Founders like Dieux’s Charlotte Palermino, Naturium’s Susan Yara, Tower 28’s Amy Liu and Good Light’s Yi have been open about their journeys and supportive behind the scenes,” she says. “We check in with each other, share intel and celebrate each other’s wins.”
“I’m a part of this underground Ulta indie founder community,” says Yi — who regularly posts about the highs and lows of his entrepreneurial journey. “It’s a dozen of us who meet monthly to talk through challenges. I also routinely check up on my founder friends. […] I want all of us to win.”
It’s not just moral support that founders find with one another; it’s also actionable resources. “There’s a real sense of ‘I see you’ that happens behind closed doors: sharing resources, vendor referrals, even just late-night DMs when things feel hard,” says Young. “That doesn’t mean it’s gotten easier, but there’s strength in the shared experience. And that’s been essential.”
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Hyper Skin Founder Desiree Verdejo is also relying on her community now more than ever this year. Thanks to tariff hikes and supply chain turmoil, the brand was dealing with sold-out products it couldn’t replenish. Rather than suffer in silence, Verdejo took to Instagram in May.
“Last month, I had to ask myself if Hyper Skin could make it in 2025,” she wrote. “I stood in my empty warehouse, staring at shelves that usually hold thousands of your favorite products. The emptiness was painful. The truth is, 2025 has tested us in ways I never imagined.” Customers were still begging the brand to restock top-selling products. Verdejo responded by launching a campaign encouraging shoppers to pre-order their favorite items.
“We decided to come to our community and try to get in front of this conversation to really ramp up our cash reserve so that we can order [product re-stocks],” Verdejo told Fashionista’s Steph Saltzman at the time. “As a small business, we don’t have a big team for customer service and for getting back to people. So this was a really great way to let people know where we are.”
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In addition to consumers eagerly participating in the campaign, Hyper Skin’s Instagram post also received messages of solidarity from founders of brands like 54 Thrones, Dieux, Melayci Cosmetics and Ami Colé. (Topicals founder and CEO Olamide Olowe placed an order for herself, per Verdejo.) In July, the brand announced on Instagram that it met its pre-order campaign goals and is now fully back in stock. It celebrated by hosting a pop-up event with hair-care brand Ceremonia.
This sense of industry togetherness extends beyond the screen into real life: At Maed’s recent Sephora launch event in New York City, founder Denise Vasi delivered a heartwarming speech about N’Diaye-Mbaye and the importance of “holding space” for struggling beauty brands and acknowledging the realities of the industry, even while celebrating milestones for one’s own brand.
Beyond strengthening community, this commitment to transparency can also be beneficial from a numbers perspective: It may help brands acquire funding and new customers.
Take, for example, Redoux Co-Founder Asia Grant: At the end of July, the perfumer uploaded a video to Instagram revealing how tough it has been running the six-year-old fragrance brand. Initially, Redoux was quite the success story: It won $100,000 from the 2020 Glossier Grant Program for Black-owned beauty brands, received over 150 earned press pieces and won four awards across beauty and design. However, that wasn’t enough to sustain sales long-term.
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“Like many small businesses, keeping the lights on got very, very hard,” Grant said in her video. “I wasn’t able to pay myself and I personally ran out of money as well as the business. So, in 2024, I made the hardest decision of my life, which was to pause the operations of Redoux. But I never shut it down, I never made a public announcement because Redoux is core to my life’s work.”
Now, she’s writing Redoux’s second chapter: The perfumer reapplied for the Glossier Grant Program, which is now open to alumni, and is gradually resuming operations by taking pre-orders of its best-sellers. To be clear, Grant is making all of these decisions on her own terms. Reopening Redoux’s orders isn’t for Glossier’s approval, nor is pity marketing. Grant wants to “prove that people still care about what we’re building,” she says. “This is not about charity; this is just about us continuing to run our race.”
Consumers increasingly expect authenticity from the brands they shop, and it doesn’t get more genuine than company founders coming forward to share the good, the bad and the ugly of the beauty industry. And as these entrepreneurs trek forward, they can find solace knowing they’re not in this alone.
“Transparency invites consumers to become stakeholders in our journey; it also chips away at the myth that every founder wakes up to instant sell-outs and venture checks,” says Yi. “By naming the obstacles — cash-flow crunches, retailer terms that favor the already-huge [names] — I hoped to give other founders permission to be honest too. We owe it to ourselves, our partners and community to do so.”
Source: Fashionista.com
