Key Takeaways:
Venerated microbiome bodycare brand Luna Daily is entering its Ulta Beauty era, come March. This move will represent the most consequential inflection point in the brand’s short but accelerated history, and a meaningful test of whether its reframing of intimate care as everyday bodycare can scale within mass prestige retail.
Founded in 2022 by former Charlotte Tilbury Global Head of Brand Marketing Katy Cottam, Luna Daily operates across bodycare, wellness, and intimate skin health, while deliberately rejecting the “feminine hygiene” category altogether. The Ulta Beauty rollout will unfold in phases. It already began with an early online preview and will pivot to front-of-store hero placement before a full merchandising unit lands across the retailer’s US doors in March.
For Cottam, Ulta Beauty is a strategic accelerator aligned with Luna Daily’s long-term ambition. “If my mission is to normalize full bodycare for all ages and stages, you have to meet consumers where they are,” she said to BeautyMatter. “And for me, the expansion with Ulta [Beauty] is all about accessibility.”
Rejecting the “Feminine Hygiene” Playbook
Luna Daily was born from what Cottam described as a structural disconnect within the personal care industry; one that has historically separated “normal” bodycare from intimate care, both in formulation and in cultural perception.
After an intensive course of antibiotics at age 19 left her with long-term skin sensitivity, Cottam found that conventional body washes and soaps were no longer suitable, particularly for intimate areas. “From that moment onwards, I wasn’t able to use traditional bodycare products, [whether] body washes, oils, or soaps for my now really sensitive skin,” she recalled.
What followed was a forced migration into a category she felt fundamentally underserved consumers. The available options were, in her words, “niche, synthetic, highly stigmatized, quite outdated” and overwhelmingly positioned as clinical solutions rather than daily-use personal care. The insight crystallized years later during a conversation with a close friend who revealed she, too, hid her intimate care products out of sight. “It was that moment, two shared women’s experiences at very different life stages, that really got me to quit my job and set out to create Luna Daily,” Cottam said.
Rather than attempting to modernize intimate care within its existing constraints, Cottam chose to dissolve the category entirely. Luna Daily’s core proposition is that intimate skin is simply skin and should be treated with the same level of care, safety, and design consideration as the rest of the body.
At the center of Luna Daily’s positioning is an explicit rejection of how the industry has historically marketed products for intimate use. “For decades, women have been sold a very fragmented approach to care,” Cottam said. “Either these harsh body washes for normal skin, or these secretive niche products that are ‘down there.’”
She argued that this fragmentation has been sustained by misinformation, particularly around the female anatomy, and that the industry has little incentive to correct it. “I believe the industry has really encouraged the misinformation and the confusion because confusion sells,” she said.
Luna Daily’s solution is a unified bodycare system; one that includes microbiome-balancing products designed to be safe for use everywhere on the body, including intimate and sensitive skin, without signaling shame, secrecy, or medicalization. The brand’s tagline, "head, vulva, knees and toes," is deliberately provocative in its normalization of language that has traditionally been euphemized or avoided entirely.
Retail as a Behavior-Change Mechanism
From its launch, Luna Daily has taken a retail-first approach, treating physical distribution not merely as a sales channel but as a mechanism for shifting consumer behavior. “The fact that you can buy Luna Daily, a bodycare product you could use everywhere, including your vulva, next to a facial skincare product and a makeup product, does so much for helping change consumer narrative,” Cottam explained.
Today, direct-to-consumer accounts for approximately 15% of the business, with the majority of revenue driven through retail. In the UK, Luna Daily is stocked at Sephora, Boots, Cult Beauty, and Marks & Spencer, as well as at Sephora across the Middle East. That strategy has delivered rapid commercial results. The brand, which can be found in up to 3,000 doors and is sold on Amazon, more than doubled revenue in 2024, doubled again last year, and is planning to triple in the year ahead.
Cottam attributed this growth in part to a disciplined approach to distribution. “This isn’t about being a land grab and being in every single market,” she said. “We’re still an early-stage growth brand, and we have to really carefully work out where we’re going to use our resources and our time.”
Ulta Beauty: Scale, Accessibility, and Alignment
Luna Daily launched in the US with Sephora and continues to view the retailer as a key strategic partner. It launched into Sephora US in 2023 in about half their stores, and this remains today. It also launched in Sephora UK in 2023 and is now in all 11 stores. Ulta Beauty, however, introduces a different dimension of scale and a materially broader consumer base. “When the Ulta [Beauty] team said, ‘Our mission is to cater for women through every life stage,’ it was so symbiotic to what our mission is,” Cottam said.
She also pointed to Ulta Beauty's increasing investment in bodycare and wellness, both in terms of floor space and educational infrastructure. “They’ve really doubled down on giving these categories significant space in-store,” she said, noting that visibility is critical to communicating Luna Daily’s proposition across its full assortment.
The rollout strategy reflects that focus. Beginning in January, Luna Daily will appear at the front of the store, with its top-selling Everywhere Spray-to-Wipe launching chain-wide, ahead of the full merchandising unit in March. The brand will anchor its presence around hero SKUs, including the Everywhere Spray-to-Wipe, the newly relaunched Everywhere Wash, and its all-over deodorants.
Unlike many fast-growing beauty brands, Luna Daily has not relied on heavy paid media investment to drive awareness. Instead, its most effective marketing channel has been organic creator advocacy. “The most successful marketing channel we’ve had has been organic creator and influencer partnerships,” Cottam said. She attributed that success to the deeply personal nature of the category. “They genuinely fall in love with the mission behind the brand, often because it’s a personal experience for them,” she explained.
A viral moment occurred when BeautyMatter 2025 Person(s) of the year, Alexis and Christina, known as The Lipstick Lesbians, discovered Luna Daily’s Everywhere Spray-to-Wipe while queuing at Sephora. “They so believe in the brand mission that we’ve formed a brilliant relationship,” Cottam remembered, describing how advocacy has evolved into a long-term partnership.
As the brand scales in North America, its focus is shifting toward retail marketing, local community activation, and its newly launched PHRESH Squad, a city-by-city ambassador program designed to support store-level education and engagement.
Investor Support and Category Confidence
Luna Daily is backed by Unilever Ventures and Redrice Ventures, raising $3.7 million. The company is not currently raising additional capital, although it recently welcomed US based, beauty focused VC Cult Capital as new investors. Cottam remained optimistic about investor appetite for brands operating within bodycare, particularly those that offer clear differentiation. “Investors are wanting to invest in new categories,” she said. “And within bodycare, they’re looking for a real point of difference.”
She also argued that Luna Daily’s positioning strengthens its investment case rather than complicating it. “If we’re launching into a bodycare category, the retailer wants us to be incremental,” she said. “And we are.”
Rapid growth has brought operational challenges, particularly around forecasting and supply chain management. “It’s really hard to forecast growth when your business is doubling,” Cottam noted, pointing to sell-outs and tariff pressures over the past year. People, however, remain the most critical factor. “You can have a phenomenal brand and product,” she said, “but ultimately growing that brand will come through people.”
Recent senior hires, including a CFO, have allowed Cottam to step back from day-to-day operational oversight and focus on long-term strategy. At the same time, she is intentional about building an internal culture aligned with Luna Daily’s external values. “I really want to be proud of building a business where people really enjoy coming to work,” she shared. “And that it doesn’t feel like a drag.”
As Luna Daily prepares for its Ulta Beauty debut, the expansion will serve as a litmus test, both for scale, and whether a brand built on dismantling stigma can sustain its clarity as it moves deeper into mass prestige retail.