Key Takeaways:
As venture capital for consumer brands tightens and institutional expectations harden, beauty founders are increasingly being forced to rethink how, and from whom, they raise capital. Beauty’s categories are already burdened by high COGS, long development cycles, and inventory risk, with traditional venture pathways often failing to reflect the operational realities of beauty. It also takes time to build a brand. After the launch or retailer exclusive (usually 1-3 years), brands have to build a business not predicated on newness, but retention.
What is occurring instead is a more pragmatic, fundraising playbook—a playbook that prioritizes traction, repeat purchase, and community leverage over speculative growth narratives. Conversations with founders across beauty and wellness reveal that the most effective fundraising “hacks” are not shortcuts, but structural decisions that shift power back to the operator.
For Robbie Salter, founder of dandruff-focused haircare brand Jupiter, early fundraising success hinged on demonstrating that the opportunity extended well beyond personal frustration. “We were very deliberate about proving that what we were experiencing wasn’t just a founder problem,” Salter explained to BeautyMatter. Entering a category historically dominated by a small number of incumbents, Jupiter, which has had a slew of successful rounds, needed to show that dissatisfaction with the status quo was both widespread and durable.
That validation came through data. Before raising, Jupiter funded and ran a nationwide consumer survey to understand what people were actually using, how they felt about those products, and where the category fell short. While topline statistics helped frame the opportunity, Salter noted that “what stood out were the responses in consumers’ own words.”
Signal Before You Pitch: Why Visibility and Credibility Matter
For early-stage beauty founders, capital is often raised before robust data infrastructure or full product–market fit is in place. In these cases, signaling becomes a function of conviction, velocity, and credibility. For Seoul Beauty Club founder Leo Park, the brand’s first raise was driven almost entirely by vision and execution speed. “Because this was our first round before we achieved product–market fit, it was more hustle and vision than numbers,” he said to BeautyMatter. “We had only been in the market for three months, and we didn’t really have a reliable data infrastructure.”
What changed investor perception was momentum. While fundraising, the company reached a $1 million Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) run rate, an inflection point Park said gave investors confidence that the model could scale.
That emphasis on credibility before metrics echoes the experience of the founders behind sustainable self-care brand Hivessence, who leveraged decades of experience in technology and media to establish trust early. Having worked at broadcast.com and Yahoo, co-founder David Burrow entered fundraising with an established track record, but still had to prove they could execute in consumer beauty. “I needed to show I could also successfully launch and scale a consumer brand,” Burrow told BeautyMatter. Hivessence has raised over $300,000 from friends and family strictly from crowdfunding, with plans to expand further this year.
While warm introductions remain table stakes, founders consistently noted that traction ultimately dictates fundraising velocity. What converts interest into capital is belief in the founder’s resolve. Park’s first angel investor relationship began years before Seoul Beauty Club existed. After hustling his way into a private UCLA event, he met an experienced founder–investor who later offered to fund his future journey, on one condition.
“He told me, ‘I will fund your journey, but only if you promise that you’ll come back to me after you fail,’” Park recalled. That investor became the first call Park made when Seoul Beauty Club launched. “Before Series A, your story, passion, and vision matters more than numbers,” Park said. “Wise investors look at your eyes more. They try to understand who you are and what you live for.”
Divya Gugnani, co-founder of the recently exited Wander Beauty and CEO of the Sephora-endorsed fragrance brand 5 Sens, agreed, but with a caveat. While founder credibility opens doors, traction accelerates outcomes. She advised founders to build relationships early, but to let results do the heavy lifting. “If you focus on traction, they will likely find you versus you having to solicit them,” she said to BeautyMatter.
The Metric Investors Trust Most: Repeat Purchase
Across brands at different stages, three non-financial metrics repeatedly surfaced as decisive: repeat purchase, organic reach, and community engagement. For Gugnani, repeat purchase is non-negotiable. “Repeat purchase is a critical metric both as an entrepreneur and an investor,” she said. “It shows product–market fit.”
At Seoul Beauty Club, investors were initially most persuaded by content reach. “The fact that we were able to create viral organic content on social media was the most important non-financial metric,” Park said, particularly in a post-ATT (App Tracking Transparency) environment where overreliance on paid acquisition has proven fragile. Park, however, emphasized that content is only a proxy. “Community is key,” he added. “When you have a community, you get to watch organic behaviors very closely. Often while watching, you get an idea.”
For Jupiter, the most persuasive early signal came directly from product performance. “When investors tried it, the difference was immediately apparent,” Salter said. Many were already users of dandruff brands or premium haircare, making the contrast intuitive. That product experience quickly showed up in retention data, with strong repeat purchase behavior and early subscription attachment.
Hivessence similarly prioritized engagement over scale in its early stages, building resonance around environmental impact and sustainability. The brand’s storytelling, focused on pollinator preservation and circular production, generated loyalty across demographics and served as an early indicator of long-term retention.
Founders were also increasingly explicit about what storytelling should and should not do during fundraising. “I think the line is pretty clear,” Park said. “You shouldn’t lie to or manipulate your customers. Brand story should really embrace the core value of the founder and the team.”
For Seoul Beauty Club, that meant positioning the business as an education-first platform rather than a transactional marketplace. The brand’s mission to translate the philosophy of K-beauty for Western consumers became both its narrative foundation and its commercial logic.
At 5 Sens, storytelling functioned as differentiation, but only because it was supported by rigorous category analysis. “Storytelling gave us differentiation, but commercial credibility gave us legitimacy,” Gugnani explained. Hivessence’s model integrated storytelling directly into operations through its nonprofit arm Arkearth, creating a closed-loop system where sustainability claims were supported by tangible infrastructure rather than marketing language.
The Most Underrated Fundraising Hack: Community Capital
For functional wellness brand Deon Libra, the most effective fundraising strategy bypassed institutional capital altogether. “We started with group pitches,” said COO Brit Kirkland to BeautyMatter. “We invited five to 10 people to a single call—customers, manufacturing partners, friends.” Those sessions expanded organically as attendees invited others, allowing the brand to reach investors beyond its immediate network.
Crucially, Deon Libra rejected minimum check thresholds. “Whether someone was investing $1,000 or $10,000, we allowed them to sit at the table,” Kirkland said. “They knew firsthand the quality and efficacy of the products.” That approach reshaped the cap table into a functional support network, bringing in legal expertise, operational insight, and long-term alignment alongside capital.
“Raise when you need to, not when you think you should,” Gugnani advised. “When product–market fit and a distribution channel are working, fundraising is fast and efficient,” she continued. Park goes further, offering a checklist for founders considering institutional capital: Do you have product–market fit, typically signalled by a $1 million revenue run rate? Do you know exactly how capital will translate into growth? “If the answer is no,” he said, “don’t take institutional capital.”
For Deon Libra, discipline also meant declining misaligned capital. “We decided that we weren’t going to take any more calls from institutional investors,” Kirkland said. “We also get to say no.” That restraint is echoed by Burrow, who cautioned against exit-driven narratives. “Don’t focus on the exit,” he said. “Investors want to know you’re in it for the long haul.”
Reflecting on the process, Salter noted that fundraising revealed an important truth: there is no single definition of a “good” business. Different investors prioritize different signals—growth, retention, brand, capital efficiency—often shaped by their own experience rather than objective hierarchy.
“The goal isn’t to contort the business to match every investor’s lens,” Salter said. “It’s to run the strongest, most disciplined business possible.” Over time, he learned to separate preference-driven feedback from fundamental insight, allowing the company to remain focused while still benefiting from external pressure testing.
In today’s market, fundraising success in beauty is less about access to capital and more about leverage. Founders who understand their metrics, control their narrative, and mobilize their communities are increasingly able to raise on their own terms, often with better outcomes than traditional venture routes allow.
The real fundraising hack, it turns out, is building a business that doesn’t rely on permission to grow. For early-stage beauty founders, capital is often raised before robust data infrastructure or full product–market fit is in place. In these cases, signaling becomes a function of conviction, velocity, and credibility.