At a time when most of us were probably kicking back with a cup of spiked eggnog, Beauty Concept Brands founder and Chief Executive Officer Karina Sulzer remembers Christmas 2022 as an altogether stressful moment. That’s when she got word that her brand PaintLab’s first shipment to Walmart was stuck in transit. After a lengthy overseas journey from China, the last leg of the trip—to the brand’s third-party logistics operator—was in jeopardy.
“We’d decided to actually take a day off, and we get an urgent alert from our truck driver, who was moving palettes from the port to our 3PL,” Sulzer recalls. “There was a big snowstorm. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is our Walmart launch. What are we gonna do?”
What Sulzer did, aided by Beauty Concept Brands Chief Operating Officer Asher Hardt, was to just keep calm and carry on. And some nine months later, the duo is thrilled to share that PaintLab’s debut as part of the Bentonville. AR-based retail behemoth’s “Walmart Start” beauty accelerator has been a solid success.
In fact, according to industry estimates, PaintLab’s first-year sales at Walmart could exceed $2.5 million.
Not bad for a brand Sulzer basically concepted from her couch during COVID, when she kept finding her mother’s fake nails tucked into every available nook and cranny of her LA apartment.
“My mom’s an avid user of press-ons,” says Sulzer, a first-generation American. “When we moved here from Ukraine, we really couldn’t afford the nail salons.”
Emboldened by their success with Skin Gym, an active-lifestyle brand of skincare, body care, and tools targeted to the workout-obsessed that launched in 2016, Sulzer and Hardt were confident in their product development and supply chain skills. They also knew they were filling a genuine white space with PaintLab: well-made, trend-forward press-ons for a fraction of what you’d pay for a blinged-out salon mani.
“We were serving an under-served community with high quality press-ons with cool styles, while also maintaining an affordable price point,” says Hardt. “There was a gap in the marketplace in regard to quality and style.”
By August 2021, PaintLab, which also offers false lashes and face stickers and gems, was in soft-launch mode on its own website, and then expanded to Urban Outfitters, its first retail account.
Within a year, Sulzer and Hardt decided to roll the dice and enter PaintLab as contender for the 2023 Walmart Start beauty accelerator. As Walmart Vice President of Beauty Creighton Kiper told BeautyMatter earlier this year, the program, now in its second year, seeks to elevate “small, diverse, indie, and direct-to-consumer” brands.
PaintLab seemed like a slam dunk, especially given the relatively small size of the press-ons category when compared to, say, skincare.
“I think being in this niche category, we were able to stand out,” says Sulzer. “The nail category itself is very difficult. But we’re not making polishes; we’re making press-on nails. And we’re trying to stay on-trend and be reusable and eco-friendly.”
With a focus on press-ons sold in packs of 24 for $9.99, and just a smattering of lashes, PaintLab landed in roughly 900 Walmart doors in February 2023. Supported by a splashy neon green and hot pink display unit featuring a picture of Sulzer and the selling points “Female Founded,” “Small Business,” and “Family Owned,” the collection has been a TikTok video fave from the second it arrived at the store, racking up a staggering 36.4 billion views so far.
According to Hardt, some of the best-selling styles, including So Strawberry and Lavender Butterfly, will carry over into 2024, joining 11 new styles and the brand’s innovative QUICKSTAY nail glue. In addition, the brand will boost its Walmart door count by 25%, a development Hardt says the brand is “grateful” for.
Gratitude is a word that pops up frequently when the PaintLab crew describes its Walmart Start adventure.
“It’s been a really exciting experience,” says Hardt. “We were sitting down for weekly Zoom calls to literally learn every in and out of the Walmart business. It’s such a behemoth from a supply chain perspective, that it can be challenging for small indie brands to launch successfully.”
In addition to virtual learning, the duo visited the Walmart headquarters twice. Once for a nose-to-the-grindstone day of “academy” learning, and once for Sulzer to join in on a video featuring the founders of the 2023 class of Walmart Start brands.
“The cool part about the academy was that we sat down and we literally learned from other brand owners,” Sulzer recalls. “And we learned from every high-level person at Walmart in different arenas,” from marketing and supply chain to operations.
“They have so many different levers, and so many different layers of business,” says Hardt. “We’re so appreciative of the opportunity because it really opened our eyes to understanding doing CPG at scale, at mass. And it was such a unique opportunity for us to really learn how it’s done by the best of the best.”
If all goes according to plan, PaintLab will eventually make its way to Walmart’s total universe of 5,000 doors.
“We’ve worked really, really hard,” says Sulzer. “We’re a small team but we’re mighty.”
