Jaimee Lupton knows cool—and more importantly, she knows how to bottle and sell it. Lupton also knows that what’s cool today could be “cheugy” tomorrow, which is why she’s wasting no time bringing her latest brands to market.

In late December, Lupton launched two new brands on the same day: Laura Polko Los Angeles and DAISE. Laura Polko Los Angeles, a millennial hair brand created with celebrity hairstylist Laura Polko, launched in Target stores nationwide. DAISE, a bodycare and fragrance brand developed for Gen Alpha, debuted in Ulta Beauty and will enter Target later this month.

Although the two brands launched simultaneously, Lupton explained to BeautyMatter that it was unintentional. Retailers have a limited timeframe for getting new brands onto store shelves, which means both brands had to launch on the same day.

"With Laura Polko being in Target and DAISE being in Ulta and Target, it’s just the way the cookie crumbled for us,” she says.

While launching two brands in a single day might seem overwhelming to some, Lupton, a seasoned beauty entrepreneur, knows what she’s doing. In the last six years, she’s launched six brands under the ZURU Edge beauty umbrella, including MONDAY Haircare (which recently landed on BeautyMatter’s 2025 FUTURE50 list), Being Haircare, Osāna Naturals, and Châlon Paris.

Everything Lupton touches turns to gold: MONDAY Haircare's revenue for 2025 is projected to reach between $300 and $400 million. The brand was an instant success when it launched in New Zealand in 2020, selling through six months worth of product in six weeks and outselling Pantene Haircare in the first seven weeks. Today the brand is available in 75 countries and over 80,000 retailer doors.

Using MONDAY Haircare as a roadmap, Lupton's subsequent brands have followed a similar trajectory. Launched exclusively at Walmart in 2024, Being Haircare anticipated $20 million in retail sales during its first year. Lupton's two newest brands, DAISE and Laura Polko Los Angeles, are expected to generate $60 million in retail sales this year. DAISEis projected to reach $50 million, and Laura Polko Los Angeles is expected to reach $10 million.

Lupton’s secret to developing successful profitable beauty brands involves a few key elements. First, the brand itself must be “different and dangerous,” which helps it stand out in a saturated market like beauty. While none of the brands are available direct-to-consumer (DTC), they all carry a very distinct DTC beauty vibe in terms of packaging design and overall branding.

From there, Lupton says her “secret sauce” is crafting a strong retail strategy to get the products on shelves and in front of consumers. Most beauty entrepreneurs develop beauty brands in the hopes of one day landing in retail stores. For Lupton, brand and retail strategy go hand-in-hand.

“We show up as if we're a DTC brand in our communications and marketing, but we use the scale of retail,” she tells BeautyMatter. “With MONDAY being the success it was, retailers were really open to partnering with us again.”

Lupton often works with retailers to develop brands that address unmet consumer needs in the market. In the case of Laura Polko Los Angeles, there hadn’t been any disruption in the professional haircare category at Target in a few years, since Kristin Ess was first introduced in stores in 2017. The brand launched with a range of shampoo and conditioners, which was strategic on Lupton’s part to build consumer trust with high-quality bathroom staples before introducing styling products.

“The foundation of any great style starts with what is happening in the shower,” Polko tells BeautyMatter. “Our initial focus was on building a strong relationship between the consumer and the brand.”

Polko is known for creating effortless, lived-in hair looks that embody the coveted “it girl” aesthetic for clients including Gigi Hadid, Bella Hadid, Chrissy Teigen, and Charli D'Amelio. Laura Polko Los Angeles bridges the gap between luxury, celebrity-inspired style, and accessibility, offering professional stylist-quality products at mass-market prices. Between Polko’s celebrity connections and the brand’s high-performance products geared toward low-maintenance-loving consumers, it was an instant match.

“Retailers saw the white space where the brands are missing the mark, or have maybe been in the market too long, which allowed us the opportunity to come in and disrupt that consumer,” says Lupton.

The partnership between Polko and Lupton has been as effortless as the hairstyles Polko creates. Both Polko and Lupton are fluent in “cool,” which is something that can’t be taught but can be sold.

“Some people get it, and some people just don't, and she's such a rare find that she just gets it,” says Polko of Lupton.

While DAISE was not co-created with any retailers, both Target and Ulta jumped at the opportunity to add a brand that speaks to Gen A to their shelves. Lupton spotted a white space and immediately got to work developing a brand primed for retail.

“DAISE is different in that there's not really any brands that truly speak to that Gen Alpha consumer in the space we're playing in,” says Lupton.

“There are players like Bubble in skincare, and Shai [Eisenman] has done a fantastic job in growing that sequence for skincare, but it was not showing up in body care or fragrance specifically for Gen Alpha.”

Most digitally native brands prioritize selling on their own DTC websites for better profit margins. Lupton, however, takes a retail-centric approach to DTC. All brands under the ZURU Edge beauty umbrella have DTC websites, but they redirect customers to purchase from the retailer.

“It's really hard to complete with a Target, which has thousands of stores that enables you to get your brand in front of hundreds of thousands of people a day,” says Lupton. “In DTC, you're acquiring that customer one by one, which is, in my opinion, a lot harder.”

DAISE will enter multiple retail doors, using a similar distribution strategy to MONDAY, according to Lupton. The brand had a record-breaking debut at Ulta in December 2024, selling 25,000 units per day, before launching in-store and online at Target in early February.

“We know what worked for MONDAY, we know what didn't, and we just replicate it, adjusting it slightly for different target audiences,” says Lupton.

Both Laura Polko Los Angeles and MONDAY target a millennial audience, however, MONDAY's audience skews younger, under 30. TikTok is a major sales driver for both brands, and MONDAY's position as the top haircare brand on the platform globally provides Lupton's marketing team with insights that can be applied to Laura Polko Los Angeles. The target audience also determines which platform the brands utilize.

“DAISE is on Snapchat, Laura Polko Los Angeles is not, because that’s where the younger consumer is,” says Lupton. “It’s also in the way the brands show up online: DAISE is more playful, whereas Laura Polko Los Angeles is more serious, talking about the innovation of the formula and featuring the celebrities Laura Polko works with.”

Lupton's retail-centric strategy has resulted in successful partnerships with almost every major retailer, which has led to her being sought after for new opportunities and white space within these retail partnerships. Lupton is currently working alongside Target to bring a brand to life that it believes is missing from its shelves. This process happens quickly— typically 18 months from the initial seed of an idea to launching in-store.

“We fire a bullet, and then we build a cannonball behind it once it’s a success, says Lupton.

This can only happen as quickly as it does because all brands are vertically integrated with an innovation and development lab based out of China. This facility has the capacity to produce four Olympic-sized swimming pools of formulation a year. It gives Lupton and her team complete control over the development and manufacturing process, from product development to packaging to the filling of every bottle. This results in an incredibly lean production process, allowing cost savings to be passed on to retail partners and, eventually, consumers.

“Our speed to market is like nothing else,” she says. “That's exactly what we did with MONDAY, and that's allowing us to scale quickly in these other brands.”

Timing is everything when it comes to creating a brand with excellent product-market fit. Big beauty conglomerates can take up to five years to develop and launch a brand, by which point consumers might have already adopted a new trend. Lupton works at the speed of culture to create beauty brands for Gen Alpha and millennials and bring them to mass retail shelves in under two years—all in an effort to “democratize beauty.”

“We want to scale and partner with mass retail so that everyone's able to purchase these beauty products,” she says. “We don't think anyone should be cut out based on price point—it's about making beauty both affordable and accessible.”