Leading personal care and beauty contract manufacturer Voyant Beauty tapped Chief Innovation Officer and indie beauty veteran Lorne Lucree to lead a new business unit built specifically to support the needs of emerging beauty brands in growth mode. Atelier by Voyant Beauty was informed by Lucree's time in the trenches of indie beauty brands and validated by 50 hours of blinded research with indie brands, founders, and investors.
"Having worked with 40+ contract manufacturers in my past at a fast growth indie brand incubator, I always thought there was an unmet opportunity to better link indie brands and contract manufacturers for a more frictionless development experience," said Lucree. "At Atelier, we can now provide the capabilities and supply chain expertise indie brands need to become a more attractive acquisition target."
Contract manufacturers have long struggled with fully capturing the potential of indie beauty. Lucree has spent years in product development and innovation roles for hot indie brands, so he has experienced firsthand the pain points of growth. This understanding informed the hypothesis and, ultimately, the business model for Atelier by Voyant Beauty.
"We are not an accelerator—that would imply servicing only one facet of growth: speed to market. Our proprietary research identified all the friction points indie brands face during periods of hypergrowth, and our model was built to address all of these, whether they be formulation, manufacturing, or contractual/terms related. This is how we have uniquely positioned ourselves as a formulation and manufacturing growth partner as well as a de facto operating partner to the investors in this space," Lucree added.
The service model of Atelier by Voyant Beauty removes the typical frictions that indie brands face as they scale, allowing them to focus on long-term growth. Once a brand gains traction, there is often an inflection point followed by the painful realization that you've outgrown your current vendors. Access to a manufacturing scale that can easily flex to enable future distribution, coupled with a supplier network and leverage to navigate supply chain disruptions effectively, has proven to be a competitive edge at this stage of growth.
Similarly, a founder's intuition is often the secret sauce of a brand's early success. Once you land a significant retail partner and take outside capital, the stakes are simply too high to rely on intuition alone—it’s time to gut check against actual data. Atelier provides exclusive access to proprietary research, intelligence, social media insights, channel sales, and demographic trends to help indie brands better inform ideas and briefs for innovative formula launches.
"Suppliers servicing indie beauty often treat it as an enigma, and for those that have been successful, it has most often been the result of chance and timing. We now have the unique ability to remove chance from the equation and can map an indie brand's journey, including key decisions and needs at each level of funding, giving us the unique ability to service these brands more intelligently and effectively see their future," explains Lucree. "This is why we say at Atelier that when it comes to indie brands, we don't see size—we see opportunity, and we don't see growing pains—we see a frictionless path to scale."
Owned by private equity firm Wind Point Partners, Voyant Beauty has 4,000 employees and 15 manufacturing facilities in the United States, Canada, and Europe. This scale provides stability, flexibility, and means to support brands with upfront formula ownership, flexible payment terms, and a credit line that enables room for growth and scale.
