Talk to any Gen Xer who lived in New York City during the “spa boom” of the 1990s and early 2000s, and they will remember the Bliss SoHo flagship. Largely credited with starting said boom, Bliss democratized the exclusive spa experience into a fun (think R&B instead of forest rain and mini brownies and cheese plates in the waiting room), accessible luxury experience.
For Gen Xers who wandered Manhattan listening to Wu-Tang Clan and danced to Mark Ronson’s Monday-night sets at Lot 61, Bliss’s latest campaign may feel instantly familiar. The 10-part Instagram series brings the iconic Bliss Girl from the brand’s catalogs to life, though it’s certainly intended to tap into millennial nostalgia as well.
Throughout the series, the once-cartoon Bliss Girl comes to life and wanders the streets of New York in her towel wrap, listening to her Walkman, in celebration of the brand’s 30th anniversary this year.
In its heyday, Bliss had opened up the traditionally exclusive world of spas to consumers, bringing cheeky language and a playful color palette to the category. By 2001, the wait for a Saturday facial at Bliss stretched two to three months, according to The New York Times. “What Bliss did for the entire industry is put the word ‘day spa’ on everybody’s Rolodex,” fellow spa owner Richard Calcasola told the newspaper at the time.
In its 30-year lifespan, Bliss has changed hands five times, with each owner altering its distribution, target consumer, and marketing strategy. Most recently, AS Beauty acquired the brand from L Catterton in 2023. Its first order of business: Get the spa-born brand out of retail. It pulled Bliss’s products from just about every major retailer and began a full reset—it would sell solely on its own website and on Amazon.
When LVMH acquired a 70% stake in the company in 1999, Bliss consisted of a single New York spa, a catalog, and a small product assortment; founder Marcia Kilgore retained the remaining 30% and remained actively involved. Under LVMH leadership, the brand expanded its spa footprint, opening its 57th Street location, which remained a flagship for approximately 26 years. It also expanded internationally, opening the brand’s first London spa and further expanding its catalog business.
In 2004, Starwood Hotels & Resorts bought Bliss for $25 million, placing its spas and products inside the chic early-aughts W Hotels. This transformed the brand once again by immersing the W Hotels’ cosmopolitan guests into Bliss World with in-hotel spas and Bliss’s iconic Lemon & Sage amenities in every guestroom.
The partnership made Bliss a hospitality brand in its own right even as Starwood continued to grow the spa business, eventually expanding it to 21 locations. Hotels have since become valuable real estate for beauty brand placement, suggesting Starwood's move with Bliss was ahead of its time.
Five years later, spa operator Steiner Leisure paid $100 million for the business. Under Steiner Leisure, Bliss became part of a wider group of spa brands including Elemis. Steiner Leisure looked to expand Bliss’s spa footprint by quickly integrating the products into its massive retail distribution channel, which included spas on the company’s 128 cruise ships, 60 hotels and resorts, and 26 third-party licensed properties. Simultaneously, Bliss remained in W Hotel locations, too.
Private equity firm L Catterton acquired Bliss as part of its $925 million purchase of Steiner in 2015. Under L Catterton, Bliss underwent its most dramatic repositioning. The private equity firm installed new leadership and relaunched the brand in 2018 with a smaller, reformulated assortment, prices roughly half of what they were, updated packaging, and mass distribution. The strategy greatly expanded Bliss’s reach but also recast the former prestige-spa pioneer as a trend-driven, accessibly priced skincare brand—a shift that would later leave its new owner working to clarify its intended audience.
By the time AS Beauty acquired Bliss from L Catterton in 2023, the brand was sold in more than 30,000 retail doors, including Target, Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, Ulta Beauty, and Amazon, and its assortment had grown to more than 200 SKUs.
Rather than attempt another refresh within that sprawling footprint, AS Beauty made the riskier decision to retreat. It pulled Bliss from nearly every major retailer, sacrificing reach and near-term revenue as it reduced the assortment and tried to determine which products, customers, and brand elements were still worth building around.
That contraction fits AS Beauty’s broader playbook. Founded in 2019, the company has built its portfolio by acquiring established beauty brands in need of reinvention, including Laura Geller and Julep, both of which it acquired from bankruptcy. Its turnarounds have often begun by stripping a brand back to its strongest products and customers before pursuing growth again.
Bliss had lost touch with its identity, Emily Woods, who joined the brand as General Manager just over a year ago, told BeautyMatter. “We were so over-assorted and had kind of lost who the customer was, and [now] we're getting to a better place with a much tighter assortment, [understanding] what our key products are and what Bliss really stands for again,” she said.
“The brand was feeling lost on the shelf, assortment was often disjointed, and we didn’t have cohesive storytelling across retailers. If we were going to be successful at retail, it would have taken a total revamp, which is slow and expensive,” Woods said when asked why the brand was willing to take the risk. “On the flip side, AS Beauty has a proven track record in scaling consumer-centric brands digitally with Laura Geller and has the infrastructure to do it. We knew if we brought focus to the Bliss assortment and sales channels—in our case, this means a digital focus—we could test and iterate more quickly, scale the brand up more profitably, and have a closer connection to our customer.”
Upon Woods’s arrival, one of her first orders of business was to commission a study to help Bliss understand who its customer was as well as who its customer could be.
“We learned a lot about the brand through this whole process: what to hold on to, what to double down on. Some of the big things were [that] our legacy customer loves Bliss. They've been shopping Bliss for 15-plus years,” Woods said, noting that while that consumer base obviously isn’t growing, they also haven’t “budged an inch.”
On the other hand, Bliss had a newer, younger consumer base with potential for growth, but “We just weren’t talking to them the right way,” she acknowledged. “They were reading the brand as young instead of fun and cheeky, which is really the core.” So she set out to tweak the brand’s language and visuals, which, she said, have been working. This consumer, she noted, “loves that it was a New York City brand, [they] love the spa-backed element.”
Some of Bliss’s collection remains unchanged, so that those loyal customers can stay loyal. As Woods said, they still love their Lemon & Sage body wash and body butter; after all, it was once the scent of the spa. The Lemon & Sage universe is one of three buckets Woods divides the brand’s products into. In fact, at press time, the brand’s DTC site was promoting a nostalgia-infused repack for the body butter, with banner copy that read, “We brought Lemon & Sage back to its roots with a new look that's a nostalgic nod to the '96 soft-skin staple.” Woods knows Bliss can’t abandon these icons. “If you say Lemon & Sage to them, they know exactly what you're talking about. So that's another big part of the strategy. We know that this scent is like beloved … I want this to be like [the Sol de Janeiro] Bum Bum cream—everyone knows what Bum Bum cream smells like.”
That said, it’s not turning away from trends or newness either. The second bucket is filled by an entirely new collection, dubbed Bliss Pro, debuted in May. It has been so successful that it already accounts for 50% of Bliss’s DTC business. In tandem with introducing these new products, the brand moved away from “anti-aging” language and toward more timely “longevity” language. The “Pro” collection includes buzzy and K-beauty ingredients and formats: a set of reusable eye patches with micro cups to boost circulation, which the brand said are first-to-market, a “salmon DNA” (otherwise known as PDRN) moisturizer, microneedling gel masks (which use the technology referred to in K-beauty as spicules), a serum using the same technology, and an NAD+ peptide serum.
Woods and her team call the final bucket “everyday skin.” “Bliss is known for having effective and affordable everyday skincare products, and that's where most of our legacy stuff is still living,” she said, referencing products like the brand’s Vitamin C Serum, Drench & Quench Hyaluronic Acid Moisturizer, and its Fab Foaming Exfoliating Cleanser, which was once in every W Hotel. The moisturizer maintains a 40% repeat purchase rate on Amazon, she said.
On Amazon, Bliss’s turnaround is a work in progress. Pattern, an e-commerce firm with expertise in Amazon marketplace data, estimates that Bliss’s Amazon revenue declined about 13% year over year on a trailing 12-month basis. Unit sales fell about 31%, with the decline deepening to roughly 41% in the most recent quarter, while a 24% increase in average selling price—rising to approximately 33% in the latest quarter—partly offset the lower volume.
Bliss attributed the contraction to a deliberate reduction in advertising spending while it works through its rebrand. The company said its Amazon business nevertheless doubled between AS Beauty’s 2023 acquisition and the end of 2025. Pattern identified Bliss’s Glow & Hydrate Niacinamide Face Serum as a bright spot, with sales up approximately 38% year over year, while Bliss said its Vitamin C Serum remains its highest-volume Amazon SKU. The latter briefly ranked among Amazon’s 10 best-selling serums last year, according to the company, although it has since fallen out of the top 10. Pattern’s data also indicates that Bliss products maintain an average rating of 4.4 stars across approximately 270,000 Amazon reviews.
Now, Woods said, as it seeks to gain ground, Bliss is borrowing from its sibling brand, Laura Geller, which has also accomplished an impressive turnaround under the stewardship of AS Beauty. Woods noted that Laura Geller’s growth accelerated when the company centered on a mature shopper already buying the brand and adjusted its marketing accordingly.
Bliss must now do the same. The brand is still “finding its footing,” Woods said, balancing the loyalty of its longtime Lemon & Sage customer with the need to win over a younger, ingredient-savvy audience—a task the Bliss Pro collection appears to be advancing. And if the Bliss Girl campaign does its job, a marketing blend of current popular strategies—humor and nostalgia—will give the brand another boost, too.
A return to brick-and-mortar retail might eventually play into its growth strategy, but it is not imminent. Woods said Bliss is not currently pitching retailers, although the company would consider a partnership with the right assortment and customer fit.
Bliss will take that renewed identity offline in October with both a consumer pop-up and a 30th-birthday party, part of a broader marketing ramp-up. For Woods, the shift suggests the brand has finally rediscovered how to speak to its audience. “I think we’re finally starting to talk to the customer in the right way,” she said.
