Makeup Goes Millennial

How ColourPop is putting a new face on the online cosmetics business

- Sheila Marikar

Sibling entrepreneurs Laura and John Nelson launched ColourPop with a simple idea: makeup that would be native to Instagram, not drugstore shelves. It was 2014, and the duo—both working as executives at Spatz Laboratories, their father’s beauty industry supply company—saw Instagram and YouTube personalities posting makeup tutorials that were attracting huge audiences. The Nelsons also noted an uptick in overall cosmetics spending, which they attributed to excitement over those how-to videos and online product endorsements.

Taking advantage of Spatz’s high-volume manufacturing infrastructure, they created a company called Seed Beauty, which they hoped would serve as an umbrella for a range of new brands. The first of these was ColourPop, offering products specifically aimed at the kind of young people who were obsessing over, say, YouTube demos of how to do a cat eye.

Today, ColourPop and Seed are major players in the makeup business (ColourPop has more than 4 million Instagram followers—four times as many as Revlon). Seed now acts as an incubator and venture-capital fund for a range of makeup companies. Its highest-profile brand is Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics, and it produces lines for social media stars such as Jenn Im, Kathleen Lights, and Karrueche Tran. The company’s merchandise is developed and made on its 200,000-square-foot Oxnard, California, campus. On any given week, Laura says, there are at least 1,000 different products being manufactured across the enterprises.