Topicals Closes $ 10 Million Series A
The company purports to be the fastest-growing skin care brand at Sephora.
Topicals, the skin care brand founded by Olamide Olowe in 2020, has added new investors to its roster.
The brand closed a $10 million series A funding round led by Cavu Consumer Partners. That brings the brand's total amount of funding to $15 million. Investors in the brand include Gabrielle Union,
Kelly Rowland and Hannah Bronfman, among others.
Olowe sought to reinvent the ointment category, as she put it, and said the brand's disciplined range of seven stock keeping units was resonating broadly. “We address the chronic skin condition market — things that you typically find in a Walgreens or CVS,” she said, adding that she aims to address skin concerns with a prestige flair. The brand's success is “a testament to how badly this kind of product suite was needed,” Olowe said.
Faded Serum for Dark Spots & Discoloration was the brand's debut product, and its assortment also includes a mask for sensitive skin, an ingrown hair tonic and an exfoliating body serum. Prices range from $18 to $34, depending on size. Topicals is sold at Sephora, where it claims to be the retailer's fastest-growing beauty brand, and on the beauty brand's website.
Though Olowe stayed mum about future innovation and concerns she's hoping to address, she said the infusion would help her scale the brand for international expansion. “Six or eight weeks ago, we launched into all of the Sephora Canada doors, and we started shipping from our website to the U.K.,” she said, noting a potential “expansion that could exist for us in the next two years to actually be on the ground in Europe.”
She expects Topicals to appeal to all demographics. “We've seen our customer really run the gamut across all types of ethnicities, and we want to get it to the rest of the world,” she said.
“That's the goal, as a company who's led by a Black woman — and typically, what we see with that is people think a brand led by a Black woman is just for Black folks.”
The brand's revenues tripled in 2021 and are slated to grow by more than 600 percent in 2022, it said.
Jenna Jackson, principal of growth at Cavu Consumer Partners, will also take a seat on Topicals' board. “Cavu seeks to democratize healthy living for all and as we looked at where the customer was going in trying to live healthier lives, they moved outside of food and beverage into what they put on their body,” she said.
“There aren't a lot of category creators and I loved that Olamide was on this mission to create and disrupt this void category that focuses on chronic skin conditions, but in such a way that they make it beautiful and fun with skin care ingredients you want to talk about,” she continued.