Beautycounter is back — sort of.
After the clean beauty label was sold to private equity group Carlyle in 2021 at a whopping $1 billion valuation, the brand fell into foreclosure in 2024. Founder Gregg Renfrew could have walked away forever. Instead, she bought it back.
“This is a brand and a business model reimagined. This is a new company. This is not the old company,” Renfrew told The Business of Beauty exclusively.
Following an earlier announcement that her new label Counter will debut on June 25, Renfrew shared details on what’s different this time around. For those wondering if this is Beautycounter 2.0, Renfrew is adamant it’s not. Some constants remain — the new name references its predecessor, and the label is sticking to the clean beauty ethos it helped pioneer in 2013 with a similar, albeit smaller, lineup of products with prestige positioning. The aesthetic has been recast with a bolder logo, new bottle designs and an updated colour scheme. Its biggest change, however, is the brand has done away with its former upline-downline compensation model typical to multilevel marketing companies.
Valued at $1 billion when its majority stake was sold to Carlyle Group, Beautycounter had always floated between the worlds of direct selling and traditional retail. The brand had cultivated a devoted group of 60,000 direct sellers drawn to Renfrew’s advocacy for regulation of cosmetics ingredients. It simultaneously sold direct-to-consumer, in its own store and through various retail partnerships including Target and Ulta Beauty, but those different sales channels often came into tension with one another. The brand’s 2023 Ulta Beauty launch sparked backlash from sellers frustrated with the new competition. It shuttered within the year, before Renfrew bought its name, assets and formulas to revive it along with a group of investors whose names are undisclosed, but some of whom previously invested in Beautycounter, she said.
Counter has reimagined its relationship with sellers, whom it calls “brand partners,” as one that looks more like standard influencer marketing: Partners will earn commission off links they share with their followers and enjoy perks like invites on brand trips and to in-person events.
“We will have a community of people who will be able to represent the brand in a new way that’s not looking back to the old model, which was too complicated,” said Renfrew.
A Fresh Restart
Renfrew, and her brand, have argued against any association with multilevel marketing models, emphasising that sellers could not buy inventory to sell and Beautycounter’s variety of sales channels — the largest of which relied on an upline-downline format typical of MLM companies. While this practice has always existed in beauty commerce, and proven successful through brands like Avon or Mary Kay, the model’s more exploitative tendencies have been highlighted through recent docuseries like Amazon’s “LuLaRich” and podcasts like “The Dream.”
A fleet of direct sellers was a major factor in Beautycounter growth, which was pulling around $400 million in annual revenue at the time of the Carlyle sale, according to a source familiar with the brand’s finances. As of the earliest companies in the “clean beauty” movement, it captivated a devout group who were inspired by Renfrew’s activism on Capitol Hill for greater cosmetic safety regulations and support for the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act signed into law in 2022.
Under Beautycounter’s old business model, sellers would make commissions off the products sold by the “teams” they had recruited. The business model required continued loyalty to facilitate recruiting new sellers.
That setup is gone with Counter. Under the new model, which Renfrew calls “community commerce,” brand partners will earn commissions by linking to products, with higher incentives of 40 percent for capturing first-time customers. (Despite the resemblance of “community commerce” to affiliate link marketing, Renfrew says the model is distinct because Counter partners “can also be part of a community,” noting that brand trips and events will be part of the perks for them). They can also still earn money from referring new brand partners, but Renfrew emphasises the fact that the payment is a one-time bonus. The previous $50 signup fee to sell is gone within Counter’s new strategy.
To win back sellers, Renfrew has been on a tour of the US, giving talks to former sellers in Minneapolis, Dallas, Nashville and Charlotte. The initial group of brand partners will be former sellers from the old brand, which Renfrew said was intentionally limited in number. The brand currently has a waitlist.
“People join businesses, represent brands for a variety of different reasons,” said Renfrew. “Sometimes they just love the product. Sometimes they want to earn a little bit of money. Sometimes they want to do both.”
Entering Its DTC Era
Beyond winning back partners, Counter is entering an intensely competitive market for DTC brands.
It’s relaunching with 19 of its original best-selling skincare and makeup products (out of 245 in the old collection) with plans for a total of 31 SKUs by the fall. Prices will be consistent with the old iteration but with some tariff-related increases on select products, including both its Countertime franchise and its All Bright Vitamin C Serum.
Renfrew hopes to focus on traditional retail in the near future, saying more standalone stores could be in the works after the brand reopens its Nantucket store this month, as well as future retail partnerships.
Counter is still leaning into clean beauty at a time when “clean” has become significantly more common, thanks to the movement Renfrew helped create. But the definition of “clean” still lacks consensus, and some retailers have moved away from heavily marketing the term.
“Where I see an opportunity as the pioneer of clean beauty is to come in today and say, ‘Here’s what clean really needs. Here are the standards that I’ll be working toward,’” she said.
The label is also looking to widen its customer base — the name “Counter” is meant to have more unisex appeal by removing “Beauty” from the name, and its branding evokes Gen-Z-friendly lines in the market like Rhode or Topicals.
Renfrew noted that the new brand will be in a learning phase, and is keeping possibilities open for its business model. She’s not ruling out adding a future signup fee to be a brand partner in its community.
“I am so unbelievably committed to, as a woman, the emotional and economic empowerment of women,” Renfrew said. “The reason why I say emotional is because, across the board, in general, women lack confidence. And through economic opportunity, what I have seen is them gain a sense of confidence about doing work that matters.”
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