Beauty brand longevity: The brands that don't depend on attention to survive
- Paula Ironside
- May 1
- 6 min read
On longevity, formulation, and the architectural choice most beauty founders never realise they are making.
There is a conversation moving through the wellness and beauty industry this week, kicked off by a piece in Beauty Independent, about a small group of indie clean beauty brands, Maya Chia, Laurel Skin and May Lindstrom, who have done something most of their contemporaries have not managed. They have stayed. More than ten years in, founder-led, formulating in-house, still meaningfully in possession of the thing they started with.
The framing the discourse has settled on is anti-Rhode, the slow, considered counterpoint to the celebrity-distribution model that produces billion-dollar valuations in eighteen months and dominates the cultural conversation about what a successful beauty brand looks like in 2026.
When I look at these three brands, though, what I see isn't a counterpoint to anything. I see the demonstration of a different architecture entirely. And the choice between those two architectures is sitting underneath every strategic decision a wellness or beauty founder is making right now, whether they realise it or not.
Two different games, played on the same field
The Rhode model and the Maya Chia model are not better and worse versions of the same thing. They are structurally different propositions, and most founders never sit with the difference long enough to choose which one they are actually building.
Rhode is a celebrity-distribution business. Hailey Bieber arrived pre-loaded with cultural capital, hundreds of millions of followers, a wedding, a face, a phone case. The brand is the apparatus that converts that capital into product velocity. It is brilliant at what it does. The billion-dollar exit is not an accident; it is the design brief executed flawlessly. But the model is not replicable without the celebrity, and the cultural capital that powers it is borrowed. It depletes. It has to be continuously replenished by the person, not the brand.
The brands at the centre of this week's conversation are doing something architecturally inverse. They are generating cultural capital from inside the brand, through formulation discipline, founder presence, in-house production, and a refusal to participate in the trends that would have given them faster growth. That capital does not deplete with use. It compounds.
This is what I think gets lost in the anti-Rhode framing. These founders are not defining themselves in opposition to anything. They are simply playing a different game, on a longer timeline, with a different definition of what winning looks like.
What ten years actually costs
Here is the part of this conversation that gets euphemised, and shouldn't.
The reason these brands are still here, founder-led, after more than a decade is not because they got lucky, or because they were in the right place at the right time, or because clean beauty turned out to be a durable category. It is because every single year for ten years, they made a series of decisions that cost them money, attention, and growth in the short term in order to protect something they understood would be more valuable later.
They turned down retailers. They declined collaborations. They refused to launch the product, the trend cycle was demanding. They watched contemporaries scale past them, get acquired, exit, become case studies on the conference circuit, while they kept doing the boring, expensive, unglamorous work of formulating in-house and selling slowly to the customer who actually understood what they were making.
That is the cost of admission. And most founders, when they say they want to build something that lasts, do not yet realise they are signing up for that. They think longevity is something you arrive at by being careful. It isn't. It is something you pay for, in declined opportunities, every quarter, for ten years, before the compounding starts to show.
The reframe I would offer, which is the one Rich Gersten was reaching for in our conversation when he said run a business like you're going to own it forever, is that this is not actually a sacrifice. It is a different business. The growth-at-all-costs founder and the longevity founder are not running the same race at different speeds. They are running different races, with different finish lines, on different terrain.
The mistake is comparing your pace to a runner who is not on your course.
Watch full interview with Rich here.
Formulation as moat, not marketing
One of the things that distinguishes these long-lasting indie brands from the wave of clean beauty that came after them is what they do inside the formula.
The market currently rewards a particular kind of formulation theatre, adding trace amounts of trending ingredients, just enough to put a hero claim on the front of the bottle, just enough to ride the current Google search demand. The product underneath does not need to change. The marketing changes.
The brands that have lasted ten years didn't do this. They formulated for the customer who would know. The one who would use the product daily for two years and notice what compounds. The one who would read the ingredient list with the eyes of someone who has read a thousand of them.
This is the same architectural logic Aesop applies to a hand wash. The same logic Byredo applies to a fragrance name. The product is built for inhabitation, not for acquisition.
And inhabitation is the only customer relationship that survives ten years.
What to take from this if you are building a wellness or beauty brand right now
Three things.
One. Your formulation is your moat, but only if you let it be. The temptation to compete on marketing claims will be enormous, because the market currently rewards that. It will not in 2030. The brands that will still be here in 2030 are the ones whose product gets better the longer the customer uses it. Build for that customer. The rest will follow her.
Two. Founder presence is not a content strategy. It is an architectural commitment. You cannot delegate it to a social media manager and you cannot scale past it without losing something structural. If your brand requires you in it to mean what it means, that is not a weakness to engineer around. It is the asset. Protect it, structure your business around it, and stop apologising for the fact that you do not scale like a celebrity-fronted brand. You are not building one.
Three. The most expensive decision you will make this year is not what you say yes to. It is what you say no to, when saying yes would have brought you growth you could measure. Learn to leave growth on the table when the conditions are not right. Write that sentence down. Put it where you make decisions. Read it before you sign anything.
A closing note, on what April was about
I have spent this month writing about Byredo's cultural fluency, about Aesop's refusal to be a content feed, about white space as a belief rather than a category, about Rich Gersten's pattern of brands that started with a North Star and built the product around it.
Watching the conversation around Maya Chia, Laurel Skin, and May Lindstrom unfold this week, what I realised is that all of those pieces have been circling the same question: what does it look like to build something that does not depend on attention to survive?
These three brands are the answer to that question, played out in real time, in real founders' lives, over more than a decade. They are the demonstration that a different architecture exists, has always existed, and continues to produce the kind of brands that the industry quietly relies on to remember what beauty was supposed to be about in the first place.
The choice between those two architectures is the most important one a founder will make. And it is not a one-time choice. It is the same choice, repeated, every quarter, for as long as the brand exists.
xx P
Hi I'm Paula, founder of H&F, and I work with wellness and beauty founders in a creative partnership that sits somewhere between strategy, storytelling, and art direction. It’s not consulting in the traditional sense, and it’s not built for speed. It’s for founders who are thinking in years, not launches, and who care as much about coherence as they do about growth.
If this way of building resonates, you can learn more about how I work here.
And if you’d rather stay in the conversation, Hunter & Florence is where these ideas continue, through monthly founder conversations and reflections on building brands that refuse to be forgettable. Subscribe to stay up to date.
Comments