Attendees of Sephora’s annual store managers’ conference held in Las Vegas received quite the surprise on Tuesday when Mikayla Nogueira appeared on stage to make a special announcement. In front of hundreds of Sephora US store and district managers, the TikTok beauty creator and co-founder of POV Beauty shared that her brand will be officially launching in all Sephora US doors and select Canadian doors on September 3.
Following her stage appearance, Nogueira took to her social platforms to share more details about the forthcoming launch with her community. “Get ready with me to make the biggest announcement of my entire career; something that is going to completely change my life,” she said in her most recent Instagram post.
The career-defining announcement also settled one of beauty's recent guessing games. POV Beauty's retail debut had long felt like a question of when rather than if–and all eyes were on the where. Nogueira—a powerhouse creator with over 20 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, according to Nectar Social—got her start behind the counter at Ulta Beauty, and industry watchers openly debated which retailer made more sense for the brand.
For co-founder and CEO Ani Hadjinian, the decision came down to a simpler question: What does a young brand need from its first wholesale partner?
“We didn't want to just become a creator-led brand. We wanted to be a legacy brand,” Hadjinian told BeautyMatter. “Looking back at the track record of who's been able to do that, it's undeniably Sephora.”
POV Beauty will bring its full lineup of skin prep essentials alongside product heroes Amp It and Contour It–a lip duo lip ampoules and lip pencils, respectively–into a single retail destination for the first time. It’s a major milestone for a brand that won’t even be two years old when it launches at the retailer. “I always knew wholesale was going to be a part of our future,” Hadjinian said. “The way Sephora serves as your distribution platform is very different from what your DTC does versus what TikTok Shop does. Having that diversity is really important as you build scale.”
POV Beauty arrives at Sephora with momentum. The brand launched in March 2025 with a tight skincare assortment and reportedly rang up $1 million in sales in its first seven minutes, selling out its first run within hours. Backed by Imaginary Ventures, the fund behind brands like SKIMS and Glossier, POV Beauty expanded into makeup last November with its Amp (K)its, tinted iterations of its Amp It lip ampoule paired with high-performance liners.
While Hadjinian declined to share revenue figures or projections for the partnership, she noted that business has been “profitable since day one.” Hadjinian was equally direct about what the retail partnership represents beyond sales. “This is obviously a sales channel, but a significant portion of it is also a marketing channel,” she said. “It’s a massive driver for us for new customer acquisition. With Sephora betting on us too, it really does equal three.”
For Nogueira, Hadjinian says, the retailer decision crystallized around peers and creator-founded brands already inside Sephora’s four walls. “I call it the ‘Scottie Pippen effect,’” Hadjinian said. “He was already amazing, but he got so good because he had [Michael] Jordan next to him. That’s the power of being around people of the same caliber who do similar things. [The choice] became very evident when she walked into a room where she admired [the people] or was peers with everybody around her.”
It's a room with a strong track record of creators turned founders. Patrick Starrr, who built his audience as a makeup creator before launching One/Size, has turned the brand into one of Sephora US's top performers, and was on track to earn $170-$200 million in revenue last year, with its hero setting spray that sells once every seven seconds. Summer Fridays, founded by influencers Marianna Hewitt and Lauren Gores Ireland, launched exclusively at Sephora in 2018 with a single face mask and now ranks as the retailer's #1 US skincare brand, per YipitData. And Desi Perkins’ Dezi Skin, self-funded and DTC since 2020, arrived on Sephora's site last August on the strength of 55% year-over-year sales growth in 2025—proof the retailer is still betting on creator-built businesses with proven traction. Plus, the retailer itself is on a run: LVMH's Selective Retailing division, anchored by Sephora, posted €8.41 billion ($9.69 billion) in first-half 2026 revenue, up 5% organically.
For its part, Sephora sees POV as more than another creator name on the shelf. “[Nogueira] has built an exceptional level of trust with her community, and POV has translated that credibility into high-performing, thoughtfully developed formulas that stand on their own—well beyond social media,” said Carolyn Bojanowski, Executive Vice President of Merchandising at Sephora US. “POV occupies a unique space at the intersection of skincare and makeup, with products that create the perfect base for makeup application. This positioning gives the brand a distinct edge in skincare today, while opening a seamless runway for continued expansion into makeup—a category we know [Nogueira] is extremely passionate about and holds credibility in with her engaged audience.” The impact of that engagement is significant. According to Nectar Social, over the past 90 days, Nogueira has amassed over 1.4 billion views across her own socials and another 78M views on user-generated content about her.
Behind the forthcoming launch is an operational sprint that Hadjinian, a beauty veteran whose resume spans Bobbi Brown, Estée Lauder, Tom Ford Beauty, and Augustinus Bader, describes as the hardest part of the story to see from the outside. In roughly six months, the brand’s team of 17 moved millions of dollars’ worth of inventory from its manufacturing base in Korea through its distribution center and into Sephora’s network, all while also setting up the analytics, education, and field sales infrastructure to meet wholesale demands.
“There’s a pretty significant capital investment—not only the inventory, but the fixtures, and there are other costs people don’t often realize,” Hadjinian said. “Your marketing budget effectively triples. Everything that happens on a launch needs a visual. You don’t just magically have a visual you can put in 700 window fronts for Sephora lying around.”
While the brand is launching in all doors on day one, roughly 35 will be key locations, getting two-bay gondolas. The rest will receive a single bay, plus front-of-store placement for both its skin prep and the Amp It and Contour It heroes. The supporting launch campaign will include store windows, a social takeover, and a Times Square moment. Then, Nogueira will hit the road for a personal-appearance tour that will stop at less-obvious cities like Boston, Miami, and Toronto. “Where she does the personal appearances and where we show up are cities that may not be on everyone's target list,” Hadjinian said. “It's important to include everyone in the conversation.”
The brand will also produce an IRL activation called “Beauty from Every Angle,” after its founding tagline of the same name. At the event, community members will be able to step into a photo booth that captures them from every angle, with the images displayed gallery style. The brand is deciding between New York during Fashion Week right after the launch—or Chicago, in front of “The Bean.”
Imaginary Ventures, which incubated the brand, stayed hands-off on the retailer decision, Hadjinian shared. “They're very founder forward. It was never a push,” but the capital demands of national retail have her thinking about the next chapter. “It's less about a need for capital, because we've been profitable since day one. It's more about how quickly do you want to do the things we want to do,” she said. “I do see worlds where we look at potentially raising soon.”
Twelve months from now, Hadjinian expects Sephora to be a “pretty good chunk” of the business, but is adamant the channels should feed one another. And as for how POV Beauty stays differentiated on a shelf increasingly crowded with creator names, Hadjinian’s solution is fairly simple: Mikayla Nogueira.
“You're not going to miss her,” she said of Nogueira. “Her personality is infused in the brand in a way that becomes unmissable. We stand out because of who she is.”
