How Siia Cosmetics Is Rethinking Prestige Beauty Distribution
The brand, which found a massive white space for prestige products in beauty supply stores, tapped James Kaliardos as its brand ambassador.
A new cosmetics brand has its sights set on untapped markets — and untapped channels.
Siia Cosmetics, which launched direct-to-consumer earlier this summer, has ambitions to bring prestige color cosmetics into independent beauty supply stores, a channel often overlooked by prestige beauty.
The brand’s initial offerings range from a lipstick, a mascara, eyebrow pencils, eyeliners, concealers, contour sticks, lip glosses, primers and setting sprays. Prices range from $16 to $28. Sales are said to reach $7 million at wholesale in its first year on the market, and more than $30 million in its first three.
The brand’s cofounders came upon the white space while manufacturing wigs and hair extensions. “It’s actually a multimilliondollar market that isn’t thought of by or front of mind for most of the beauty industry,” said Megan Rein, cofounder.
“It’s the segment with the highest-spending consumer base in the world of personal care and beauty, so it’s an incredibly important market from a business standpoint.”
The line, which is formulated with skin care ingredients like jojoba and sunflower seed oils, will see coming category expansions. “Our next step will be to add powder, cosmetics to setting powders, eye shadows, blushes, powder and highlighters. But since we do have our routes of production in South Korea, skin care is a huge thing to bring in,” Rein said.
Rein clarified that, despite focusing on beauty supply stores now, the brand hasn’t ruled out any future channels or means of distributing its products. “Our mission is to bring the highest-quality luxury cosmetics to the most number of people possible,” she said. “So every channel is open and it’s something we’d be interested in.”
Given the company’s goal of reaching large swaths of consumers, it also brought on celebrity makeup artist and Visionnaire cofounder James Kaliardos as brand ambassador.
“The brand is all-inclusive in that their focus is to reach women and give them high-quality products in places that don’t always have luxury products,” Kaliardos said. “These beauty stores around the country are also often independently owned by women.”