With hundreds of beauty launches each week, it takes a lot to excite today’s consumers. But when five-year-old makeup brand Soshe Beauty launched at Ulta Beauty roughly two weeks ago, shoppers were excited enough to drive to their local stores—sometimes before the brand’s display had even been installed—to purchase the products and film their reactions.
“There are so many creators, micro-influencers, who are making videos and super excited about [this launch],” Jennie Pham, a creator known as @greeneggsandglamm on TikTok, where she has nearly 293,000 followers, told BeautyMatter. Pham met the co-founders a few years ago at an AAPI beauty event hosted by Meta. She was among the creators who filmed herself seeking out Soshe at Ulta Beauty, where she bought a full face of products despite regularly receiving countless gratis products from other brands. Her first of three posts, in which Pham filmed her trip to Ulta Beauty to purchase the products, saw over 120,000 views. “I really like seeing smaller creators pick up [smaller] brands like this because there's like a level of organic interest and authenticity,” she said.
Soshe Beauty was born at USC, where co-founders Sahar Rohani, Junyi Wu, and Aidan Maddox met through LavaLab, a student-run product incubator. They developed the concept for a refillable beauty brand, with Maddox creating the refillable mascara packaging that the company still uses on a 3D printer in his dorm room.
The brand launched the mascara at the end of 2021. By 2022, Credo Beauty was interested in carrying it, but one ingredient did not meet the “clean” beauty retailer’s standards. So, as the founders reformulated their first SKU, they also studied Credo’s consumer IRL.
“We would go into Credo [stores] and we would ask [Credo shoppers] what they were missing, … [We] don't go in with the idea that [we] know everything already,” Rohani told BeautyMatter.
What was missing most, they found, was a waterproof eyeliner and a tubing mascara. That strategy of filling white space in the market proved successful: Within six months of its launch at Credo, Soshe became the fastest-growing color brand in the retailer’s history. It remains Credo’s only brand offering a tubing mascara.
Although all of Soshe’s products are still refillable, that feature is no longer the brand’s focus. Instead, it has leaned into differentiated shades, specifically by focusing on olive skin tones, which are commonly underserved. This is true not only of its recently launched complexion product, the $34 Ectoin Multi-Use Concealer, but also of its blush and bronzer.
Recently, the founders decided to discontinue the brand’s lipstick. Initially, Rohani said, the shade range had been inspired by how other brands created their ranges. “We said, okay, every brand seems to have one peach, one pink, one red … and that just seems standard.” As it turned out, standard as it might be, that method didn’t work for Soshe.
It was, after all, the Speakeasy shade of the lipstick that became a hit—the one shade that had been truly singular. Speakeasy is a “dusty mauve” color, inspired, Rohani said, by “the shades my mom used to mix together in the '90s to create her perfect mauve.” Both the shade and its story wound up resonating—as did the fact that it worked well for olive skin tones. Speakeasy now shows up across the brand’s collection, and its success informs the brand’s shade development.
Its new approach has proved successful. ”Now, every time we've added a new shade, it's become a bestseller … because we're adding shades based on feedback, not because we're just trying to mimic another brand's range,” Rohani said.
Soshe’s founders first connected with Ulta Beauty at an industry event in June 2025. They met with the retailer virtually in July of last year, then traveled to its Bolingbrook, Illinois, headquarters in November.
“We’d made it a very specific point to not reach out to any retailers until we felt like [we were] ready, or they reached out to us. That was important for us because we knew that you kind of have one shot, and if they're ready, it moves really quickly. We wanted to have our community in place, we wanted to have our product assortment in place, and we wanted to have new product development locked in,” Rohani said.
From the first call, the retailer seemed invested. “They all came to the call with a full face of Soshe on. It felt like such a great fit from the very first chat.” Rohani said she could tell Ulta Beauty had done its due diligence before the meeting. They knew the shade range and had already played with the products.
Pham, a former Ulta Beauty manager herself, agreed the retailer was a good fit: “Ulta has super loyal customers [who] go on Ulta.com every day and look at the new releases,” Pham said. "I feel like the excitement, especially for smaller brands, is so much more palpable at Ulta Beauty [than Sephora]” she said.
“What initially caught our attention with Soshe was how intentionally the founders had thought through the entire makeup experience, from rethinking traditional approaches to shade ranges to how a product is formulated, packaged, and ultimately living in a guest’s routine,” said Kaitlyn Rinehart, Ulta Beauty’s Vice President of Merchandising. “Sahar and the team recognized nuances in undertones, including the opportunity to better serve olive complexions, and built coordinated shade families across lips, cheeks, and complexions that take some of the guesswork out of finding colors that work together. That level of thoughtfulness is exactly what we look for when evaluating what a brand can add to our assortment and solve for our guests.”
Initially, Ulta Beauty offered Soshe space on its Sparked tower, an in-store display dedicated to new and emerging brands in roughly 700 stores. The trio had hoped for a dedicated display in 100 to 150 locations, but agreed, not wanting to miss their opportunity.
But then, several months later, the offer expanded. Wu told BeautyMatter, “We got an email and the [Ulta Beauty] team was like, we can't stop thinking about your products, your story. In addition to the Sparked endcap, we want to launch you guys on 150 of these three-foot inline gondolas.”
Sasha Srain, Ulta Beauty’s Divisional Merchandise Manager (DMM) of Prestige Cosmetics, “basically said everyone is really loving Soshe products, and she was willing to place a bet in a group of stores that are specifically curated to give three feet of space in addition to the Sparked [towers]; it wasn’t a part of the plan, just a hunch based on the Ulta [Beauty] team’s feedback, and then found 150 doors to really test it in,” Rohani said. The brand is in discussion with Ulta Beauty about adding more doors but could not provide further details yet.
The co-founders had already shown Ulta Beauty what their gondola could look like. “Our method of wooing them was planning ahead as far as physically possible and planting the seed [of what could come next],” Maddox told BeautyMatter, explaining that the Soshe team wanted to preempt any questions or concerns the retailer might have. “So, after they realized, ‘Oh we're loving this product. Like, I've been using this concealer every day,’ it’s like, I already know what [the display is] going to look like … There was never a moment where [they had to] wonder if the Soshe team could do X, Y, Z because they'd already seen us tell them how we were going to do it if we had the opportunity to do it.”
To date, Soshe has received no institutional funding, raising capital only from angel investors, friends, and family. Nor does it have a splashy founder face or creator promoting it, at a time when celebrity- and creator-founded brands capture large amounts of consumer and media mindshare.
So, when Ulta Beauty said yes, Rohani decided to build anticipation with a 100-day countdown. “I'm not Hailey Bieber. I'm not gonna have people lining up outside of Ulta [Beauty] at 5 a.m. to buy our products,” she said.
With a little over three months until launch, Rohani began documenting the final stretch on her TikTok account, where she has nearly 23,000 followers; Soshe’s account has 36,000. She asked followers to weigh in on graphic-design details for the Ulta Beauty gondola, documented sending the concealer for claims testing, and shared behind-the-scenes footage from photoshoots.
Since the launch, she has already pivoted to documenting the brand’s first 100 days in stores. “It's been really amazing to see that people have been, I think, craving this level of transparency with a beauty retail launch,” she said. Some TikTok followers have even gone to their local Ulta Beauty stores and educated staff about the products after becoming experts on social media.
As followers asked where they could find Soshe in person, Wu built a tool that identifies which Ulta Beauty locations stock the brand. Meanwhile, Rohani has remained active in the comments, addressing questions about product availability, upcoming shade expansions, and a handful of comments about products that had melted in transit.
While the TikTok hype machine is working in Soshe’s favor, the brand is also experiencing predictable growing pains. Pham rated the new concealer a 6.5 or 7 out of 10, criticizing how it wore throughout the day, though she gave the blush and bronzer perfect scores. Monica Ravi-Conway, a creator with more than 965,000 TikTok followers, known for her own focus on olive skin, feels the brand needs to add shades for deeper olive complexions to be truly representative, noting that its olive range is not “evenly distributed.” Rohani acknowledged the criticism, explaining that, for now, the brand’s product team consists of only her and Maddox.
Still, Pham feels Soshe is offering something different:
“Consumers are so inundated with celebrity launches, cash-grabby things … dupe culture is super heavy right now … so seeing a brand not really follow any trends … sets it apart for me,” Pham said, adding that “[Soshe doesn’t have any of] these liquid blushes or liquid highlighters or bronzing drops. None of those highly trendy things are in their line. They're just doing things that [they felt were] missing in the space.”
The noise on social media appears to be paying off. Wu said, “We can share that within the first replenishment order, [Ulta Beauty] has already ordered more than their original entire year's forecast.” According to Rohani, Soshe expects revenue to triple year over year to approximately $10 million in 2026.