Investors are not the best at predicting fashion trends. Birkenstock’s initial public offering was panned, with the sandal maker’s preferred pricing of $46 a share viewed as “reckless” given that consumers might get tired of strappy footwear at any time; since then the stock has risen 45 percent as sales rose 20 percent last year. Meanwhile, Dr Martens shares soared in 2021 on their debut, with the brand valued at roughly $5 billion; today its market capitalisation is one-fifth that.

Golden Goose, which is expected to start trading on the Milan bourse on Friday, has the benefit of learning from its predecessors’ mistakes. Demand was strong for the company’s shares last week, but only after it priced them at €9.50 to €10.50 apiece, implying a roughly $2 billion valuation. Earlier this year, top shareholder Permira had reportedly been angling for north of $3 billion.

More importantly, the brand is setting itself up to be more than a one-hit wonder – or, as brands from Levi’s to Moncler have done, keep customers hooked by endlessly iterating on the hero product. Luxury sneakers are a crowded category, and demand is uncertain amid a broader downturn in high-end fashion. But expensive sneakers mostly exist as extensions of luxury brands; they might occupy a few tables in a Gucci store, or share a wall with the rest of the footwear range at Louis Vuitton. At Golden Goose’s 200 locations, they’re the main attraction. Golden Goose is leveraging this advantage with in-store customisations such as graffiti or hand distressing, the sort of flourishes that encourage repeat visits and can’t easily be duped.

Golden Goose is also ramping up its marketing efforts – pitching itself as a “cultural brand” like Louis Vuitton or Moncler. Collaborations and performances with Native American activist Quannah Chasinghorse, architect Fabio Novembre and K-pop musician Sunmi could help forge connections with niche communities and tell stories about something other than shoes. That will also reduce the brand’s reliance on mainstream stars like Taylor Swift choosing to lace up a pair of distressed sneakers to drive hype.

So far Golden Goose’s strategy has propelled a brand many dismissed as a flash in the pan to a €500 million a year business. The question now is whether customers will come back for a second pair. The brand says it has a healthy number of repeat purchases, but the key to long-term success is whether this formula will work in new markets, and new products, such as handbags.

Elsewhere This Week

Men’s shows continue in Milan, with Gucci on Monday having another chance to win over sceptics of the brand’s direction under Sabato De Sarno. On Tuesday, Louis Vuitton will top off the first day of Paris Men’s week, where attendees will need to add navigating their way through preparations for next month’s Olympics to the usual logistical challenges.

The Week Ahead wants to hear from you! Send tips, suggestions, complaints and compliments to brian.baskin@businessoffashion.com.

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Subscribe to the BoF Podcast here.

Background:

As a self-styled “image architect,” Law Roach has earned global recognition for the red carpet looks he has created for some of the most famous — and most photographed — women in the world.

But in 2022, when he suddenly announced his retirement on Instagram, writing “If this business was just about the clothes I would do it for the rest of my life but unfortunately it’s not! The politics, the lies and false narratives finally got me! You win… I’m out.”

While Roach continues to work with top clients Celine Dion and Zendaya — he was the mastermind behind Zendaya’s tennis-inspired “Challengers” press tour earlier this year — he’s also pursuing his entrepreneurial ambitions. Later this year, he will launch a new online learning platform to train the next generation of stylists.

“It was hours and hours of me talking with a script writer and being recorded to get out all my processes, from the way I set up a room to style and the psychology of choosing the right dress. So it’s super comprehensive and I’m super proud of it. And we’re launching it with me as the very first instructor.”

This week, on the BoF Podcast, Roach joins me to trace his career right from the beginning when he was selling thrifted clothes from the trunk of his friend’s car in the South Side of Chicago and to exclusively share the details of his new online learning platform and what he hopes people will learn from it.

Key Insights:

• Roach’s first memories of fashion are from his childhood in Chicago. “My first runway show was church on Sunday morning, watching those women with the hats and the outfits, but high fashion had always been something that was very aspirational but also seen very unattainable at the same time.” He then began his career selling vintage pieces from the trunk of a friend’s car before moving to a brick-and-mortar storefront. “That turned into a revenue stream for me and which then turned into a boutique, which turned into Kanye West coming in one day,” he said. That celebrity attention led to “global recognition about this little store in Chicago.”
• Roach has worked with his most high-profile client, Zendaya, since she was a teenager. Back then, he had trouble finding brands that were willing to dress her, which forced him to get creative. “She became one of the best dressed, most looked at stars on the red carpets and had not even worn any of these brands. So at that point I was like, ‘I kind of don’t need you.’ We had just worked so hard to make her this thing that everybody wanted without using the traditional tools of getting there,” he shared.
• With his new online learning platform, Roach wants to encourage greater representation and open up opportunities in the industry. “Ours is a comprehensive collegiate level, educational, educational coursework. Everything that I’ve used to become who I am is in there.”
• Despite the various challenges in his career, Roach’s unwavering self-belief has carried him to where he is today. “No matter how many doors are closed, no matter how many times people ask me to get out of my seat at a fashion show, no matter how many times people say no, I came to L.A. to be considered the best or one of the best, and there was no way that anybody could deter me from that. I really, honestly believed in myself.”

Additional Resources:

• The Business of Being Law Roach: The celebrity stylist has built a business that goes well beyond the red carpet, from magazine covers to judging reality television competitions and getting billionaires seated at couture shows. He spoke with BoF about his approach to building a multi-hyphenate empire.
• Black Stylists Form Collective for Support and Advocacy: Co-founded by Law Roach, Jason Rembert, and Lacy Redway, The Black Fashion & Beauty Collective will serve as a kind of “black glam union” for behind-the-scenes creatives.
• What Makes a Red Carpet Moment in 2024: The race to dress fashion’s biggest stars has gotten tighter — and brands are deploying fresh, social media-friendly tactics to generate buzz.

Welcome back to Haul of Fame, the weekly beauty roundup of new products, new ideas and a sustained shoutout to Sabrina Carpenter.

Included in today’s issue: Boots, CFCL, Dime, Gisou, Glossier, Grown Alchemist, Isle of Paradise, Jenny Patinkin, Laneige, Osāna, Prada Beauty, Saltair, Savor Beauty, Solawave, U Beauty, Westman Atelier and National Public Radio.

But first

It’s all happening.

After decades of music acts turning summer into their own personal tour season, beauty brands are following suit. Fittingly, it was a pop star Ariana Grande, who really sparked the trend, with her R.E.M. Beauty tour, which made stops in Paris and Los Angeles, this spring. It included Instagram photo set-ups, product testing stations and a chance to meet the future Glinda herself.

But Grande has her own movie tour for “Wicked” gearing up, which means other brands are stepping up to the mic in her stead. On June 12, Charlotte Tilbury took over Sephora in Herald Square, Manhattan and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On June 14 and 15, Westman Atelier is holding a meet-and-greet for their new blush at 10 Nordstrom locations, including stores in Oregon, Tennessee and Phoenix. And Chantecaille Beauty, is hyping its Just Skin tinted moisturiser with a pop-up in SoHo, New York, plus summer visits to London, Hong Kong and Seoul.

The New York event, which takes place on June 15, will be held in a converted Airstream, with a live floral installation and makeup artists matching Just Skin shades with complexions in real time. But Chantecaille could make pretty videos and shade-matching tutorials on TikTok. Why the schlep for some added face-time with clients? “We want to convert the beauty-obsessed person who may not know us,” said Chantecaille CMO, Julia Frankenberger, noting that potential buyers “need to feel and touch” formulas to fully appreciate their quality and pigment payoff. “We also want to pique the interest of that chic New York woman or chic visitor.”

Also gearing up for the road is haircare line Ceremonia. They’re on a “Guava Summer” tour at Sephora through June 29, which takes the brand to California, New York, Florida, and Puerto Rico.

Candid interactions are the big benefit of these summer beauty tours, especially for mid-size labels that know building relationships is key to creating a sustainable revenue stream. Meeting customers where they’re at — as those customers are strolling through wealthy parts of cool cities — is a brilliant way to conjure the “authentic” experience that so many beauty companies claim to foster with their fans. It’s the “Omigod, how funny, I just bumped into her!” of branding.

Ceremonia founder Babba Rivera added that meeting customers is often phase one of new product development. “We love hearing our customers’ hair concerns, and the questions they ask,” she said. “These conversations are quantitative inputs that we incorporate into everything we do the rest of the year, including product development, kits and marketing campaigns.”

Chantecaille is currently at 650 beauty counters, including those at Bergdorf Goodman and Bluemercury. They’ve got about 250,000 Instagram followers. (Frankly, it’ll likely have more once its social channels feature a wider range of skin tones.) Ceremonia has a slightly smaller footprint, albeit with a “cool” factor that helps. In both cases, their formulas are excellent.

It’s telling, then, that they want to go back to basics: meeting fans one-on-one. As Google’s enigmatic parameters and TikTok’s infinite dopamine swipes continue to consume online shoppers’ attention spans, we’ll see even more brands rely on face-to-face contact to spread their pretty-girl gospel. (Especially ones with dynamic, but not famous, founders.)

Skincare

If you’re not an Equinox member, you’ll have to get Grown Alchemist like the rest of us at Sephora. On June 10, the label introduced Hydra-Restore Eye Serum, which has ectoin, an amino acid found in extreme heat and dryness that some scientists call “highly cell-protectant.” It’s $50.

On June 11, Savor Beauty debuted its Radiant Rose Collagen Face Cream. The brand’s MO is their small-batch production methods, which often happen by hand with local ingredients. That means this $125 cream is very limited edition, and like a Gap x Doen drop, once it’s gone, that’s it.

Skincare in New York’s West Village for under $5? Believe it! Until July 3, Osāna Naturals will be on-shelves at Bonberi Mart, founded by “Body Harmony” author Nicole Berrie. Besides Osāna’s $5 shampoo, conditioner and body wash, it is launching an exclusive vetiver and lemon verbena hand soap for $3.97.

Isle of Paradise’s Beautifully Balanced Body Oil Cleanser and Body Butter launched on June 10. Both products promise softer, smoother skin for about $25 each.

Saltair debuted a KP Body Smoother scrub with 10 percent glycolic acid, volcanic sand and microcrystalline cellulose to “smooth bumps and textured skin” on June 6. The KP stands for “keratosis pilaris,” the condition where tiny bumps form on the skin. It often fades when people hit their 30s, which might hint at who’s buying 33-year-old Iskra Lawrence’s brand.

Solawave’s new 2-in-1 Skincare Mini hit shelves on June 13. It’s a teeny $89 gizmo with “red light therapy, near-infrared light and therapeutic warmth” that promises to tighten skin and boost glow. And it looks like a little UFO, which is very fun.

On June 14, Dime Beauty’s Décolletage Defining Serum debuted. It’s $48, with imagery that includes younger and older models in tube tops. Pretty!

Cosmetics

Just a month after Sabrina Carpenter used Supergoop sunscreen in her blockbuster Espresso video, Prada Beauty is featured in the new Please Please Please video. Carpenter uses the brand’s colour-changing moisture lip balm as she struts out of jail, which is a hoot. And while it’s fun to see stunt beauty go from TikTok content to actual pop culture sensation, it’s even more fun to see Carpenter and her team at CAA hack the music video game — the subject of Haul of Fame’s very first column! — for added revenue. In the wake of paltry streaming fees and taxing tour schedules, built-in beauty fees would be a coup for musicians like Carpenter, who influence what their fans are buying anyway. Also, is there an espresso perfume coming? My Magic 8 ball says, “Duh.”

If you need designer blush before then, Westman Atelier is taking over Sephora’s NYC Meatpacking location on June 14 and 15 with their Baby Cheeks line, and launching two new shades.

On June 11, Jenny Patinkin revealed The Big Reveal, an eyelash curler engineered to address hooded and deep-set eyes. It has a flatter curve and more upright angle than typical curlers. It’s $20 at Amazon Beauty, which feels reasonable!

U Beauty is fronted by OG fashion influencer Tina Chen, who still has a ton of credibility with affluent, style-forward women. Because of that, the brand has never needed a ton of celebrity or influencer wattage. Still, the skincare label announced its first-ever collab on June 5. It’s with TikTok darling Tinx, who’s made a blushy pink shade of their Plasma Lip Compound called “Rom-Com.” Tinx describes it as “the ultimate just-kissed lip shade,” which should get a lot of mileage with the Sephora teens.

Speaking of those girls, they can now buy their current lip gloss obsession, Laneige, at Boots in London starting June 12. If they happen to score a place on “Love Island,” they can also steal Laneige from the Villa, where it will be available to contestants. Genius product placement, honestly.

Also in lip gloss land, Gisou’s new Coconut Frost shimmer lip oil dropped on June 10.

Way back in December, I talked about “nipples as beauty’s final frontier,” along with the indie brand Flirte Beauty, which launched lip liners that supposedly matched one’s nipple shade. On June 10, Glossier dropped a very similar concept with their eight new shades of Lip Line.

Haircare

There’s this trend we can call the “spa-ification of everything.” It’s when you call something a “spa” in hopes of tapping into the wellness trend that lets you rebrand beauty as a higher virtue. Calling a regular beauty joint a “spa” began with nail salons and tanning centres; now botox jabs and teeth whitening sessions are also “spa” activities. On June 11, Rossano Ferretti’s Hairspa opened at the luxe Park Hyatt hotel, with amenities like the “Deluxe Hair Treatment” for dry, damaged hair, as well as the signature “Ferretti Metodo cut,” known as the “Invisible Haircut.”

Fragrance

Is incense a beauty product? It’s certainly getting more upscale. On June 11, a new scent called Evoke dropped from CFCL by Yusuke Takahashi, the former menswear director at Issey Miyake. It comes in the form of a burnable stick. True to fragrance’s new trend to make every product sound like slam poetry, Evoke “is a unique scent inspired by the colour of the sky after rain, with notes of lavender and fennel.” It’s $24.50.

Also on June 11, Lake & Skye debuted 11 11 Azure, a fragrance oil in a rollerball that “captures the sheer power and energy of the ocean, blue skies and azure waters.”

And Finally

For a NPR segment on the fragrance boom this week, Morning Edition made its own signature scent. (According to producer Nina Kravinsky, it smells like citrus and “being fresh out of the shower.”) NPR isn’t selling the fragrance anywhere, but during their next fundraising drive, shouldn’t they think about it?

I half expected to receive an emergency alert when the embargo lifted at 12:05 pm on Monday afternoon for the launch of Rhode’s Pocket Blush. The brand’s first entry into colour cosmetics is a mini stick blush that is meant to be used on-the-go and debuts in six shades such as Piggy (baby pink) and Spicy Marg (bright coral). The product won’t be available for purchase on the brand’s website until June 20, but a spate of outlets from consumer sites (Vogue, Grazia, Cosmopolitan) to trade (WWD, Glossy) fervently published the news within minutes of the press release.

Hailey Bieber’s last major category expansion, a cleanser called Pineapple Refresh, received similarly fanatical attention in January.

Since launching in 2022, beauty’s obsession with Rhode and its founder has only grown. While the initial assortment — a serum, a moisturiser and peptide lip balms — led with Bieber’s skincare-first, doughnut glazed ethos — its her subsequent teases into makeup, tinted versions of her peptide lip treatments and now, blush, that confirm Bieber’s stickiness with beauty trends and online fandom.

A-list talent can typically guarantee a big launch, but celebrities have a relatively short window to prove their validity once a line hits the market. Otherwise, these brands quickly fade away; even Jennifer Lopez, universally known for her body, can’t seem to sell body cream.

Whatever your opinion on the role of glazed doughnuts is in beauty, it’s undeniable that, to her many fans, Bieber has credibility to spare.

Since pivoting from her Covid-era “Who’s in My Bathroom” YouTube series, where she invited celebrity friends into her bathroom to cook, Bieber has gone all-in on beauty. Her content either starts beauty trends (i.e. strawberry makeup) or she is able to make viral trends her own (think: the clean girl aesthetic, or latte makeup). She also talks about and uses beauty products that cool girls love, from Summer Fridays sunscreen and Make Up For Ever lip liners to Kosas concealer.

That she is seemingly as obsessed with beauty as real beauty enthusiasts seems to be her secret weapon, said Kirbie Johnson, host of the beauty podcast Gloss Angeles.

“Hailey has proven that she is a beauty girl,” said Johnson. “She was doing skincare ‘get ready with me,’ makeup videos long before her brand launch. When you have a celebrity brand launching every single day … it [can be] hard to believe that they actually use these products regularly and believe in them.”

Consumer data firm Spate found that monthly Google searches for Rhode Beauty have grown by 66.9 percent from a year ago. The most popular searches for her label are the “Rhode Lip Balm” and “Rhode Phone Case” which have also increased to 40,500 and 14,800 monthly searches, respectively. According to those close to the company, the brand is expected to hit $100 million in revenue this year. And that’s without major wholesale presence, though that’s said to be coming in 2025.

Right now, there may be bigger names in celebrity beauty – Fenty, Rare – but blush might be the product that vaults Rhode into a higher echelon. It is the right and most obvious way for Rhode to enter colour cosmetics, given that Bieber’s long made heavy use of the product to achieve her signature all-over healthy glow. If you go back to the launch of Rhode’s Krispy Kreme collaboration in August 2023, she was flushed with strawberry glaze cheeks on social and throughout campaign images.

Multiple executives at The Business of Beauty Global Forum hyped up Rhode’s marketing prowess to me in side conversations. And they’re not wrong; in many ways, beauty hasn’t seen marketing this savvy since E.l.f.

Bieber has said she is taking a skincare-first approach to beauty, which could be a hurdle since legitimacy in one category doesn’t guarantee it for another. But some of the best new foundations and lipsticks have “skincare benefits” and you could even argue that mascara could fall into Rhode’s purview, given that whole “skinification of hair” conversation brands keep pushing on. If anything, being skincare-first doesn’t exclude her from extending Rhode into most cosmetics products.

I expect Bieber to ride the blush wave, likely introducing more shades and possibly, even new formats. Just last week, Bieber teased a pink shade of her viral phone case. With a 200,000-plus waitlist for the grey version, Bieber has become adept at giving people want before they even know it.

Plus, hear from inaugural class of The Business of Beauty Global Awards winners

1. Conserving Beauty Shows Sheet Masks Don’t Have to End up in a Landfill

With Elle Macpherson on its board, Conserving Beauty has brought sheet masks and zit stickers into the push to combat beauty product waste.

2. D’you Shakes Up India’s Beauty Start-Up Scene

The India-based brand targets premium shoppers with science-based skincare.

3. Fara Homidi Elevates the Artistry-Led Makeup Brand

Balancing ease of use with professional-grade formulas, Fara Homidi Beauty creates formulas that can go the distance, without compromising on clean credentials.