EXCLUSIVE: Shay Mitchell’s Béis Hits $120 Million in Profitable Revenue
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Béis founder and actress Shay Mitchell has a lot to celebrate.
For one — offering luggage, bags and accessories — she’s releasing the company’s colorful spring drop on Wednesday, the “Sherbet Collection.” She’s also getting ready to toast Béis’ fifth anniversary in October. But, more significantly, Béis hit upward of $120 million in profitable gross revenue in March, WWD has learned exclusively. Business is on track to break $200 million its next fiscal year.
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With design, practicality and affordability in mind, Mitchell came up with the idea for Béis.
“I’ve been very fortunate to travel in my life at a young age,” said Mitchell, who’s originally from Canada. “My parents always took my brother and I on trips. I love traveling. It was my first love. And then as I got older, obviously I was buying my own luggage, my own bags, and every time I was on the road, I’d be like, ‘This is missing something’ or ‘I wish there was a compartment for this’ or, like, ‘if I could only design this bag.’”
It was on a press trip for “Pretty Little Liars” that she imagined designs on cocktail napkins, she said, one of which becoming the blueprint for The Weekender, the brand’s bestseller (costing $98 for the mini).
“And then I had, you know, a call from my agent and my team,” she went on. “They’re like, ‘Hey, beauty is this next big thing. Do you want to get into beauty? Do you want to get in fashion?’ But I just never really had my heart in it. I love hair and makeup. I love fashion. I love it all, but it just wasn’t my thing.”
It was after the TV series wrapped that Mitchell, now a mom, envisioned Béis: “I was like, ‘Wait a minute. Luggage!’ There was a white space here. I saw what was out there. There wasn’t really anything that met fashion and function at an affordable price.” (Luggage is priced starting at $218.)
Fans of Mitchell, who is highly active on social media — sharing content that has landed with followers (35.9 million on Instagram, 7.4 million on TikTok and 4.15 million on YouTube) — were accustomed to seeing her travel diaries. From photos to videos, she gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at her life on the road. When she wasn’t filming, she was exploring.
Mitchell has driven the marketing and creative at Béis, leading a team with the help of incubator and venture company Beach House Group, as well as brand president Adeela Hussain Johnson — who’s been there from Day One.
“I’ve been working in retail and merchandising for over 15 years,” said Johnson. “It’s such a different world when you have the kind of passion behind the category that Shay has. It’s so authentic.…It was a melding of experiences from both of us, and we could complement each other so well. There was an absolute need in the marketplace.”
She went on, “Also [direct-to-consumer] in this category was relatively new. There’s another four-letter word brand that had kind of started to pave the way there, but that was still a relatively new concept. And there’s no brand, and I still believe there is no brand, that is doing this today well outside of us that’s bringing a fashion component to this category.”
Sales in November and December of 2022 were up 220 percent to the year prior, with four holiday promotional days. Béis also grew its combined social audience by 122 percent last year, gaining more than 365,000 net new followers, according to the company, with an average engagement rate of 8.8 percent throughout the year. Content views increased by 1,334 percent, reaching 120 million views on video content across channels.
“Everything is designed in-house,” said Johnson of the products. “In terms of production, we have one that’s overseas in Asia and then one here in the U.S. One of our big priorities is to diversify our sourcing capabilities. We’re also starting to gain a strong point of view on sustainability and what that means and how we integrate that into our design process. But everything from a design standpoint starts and ends here in California.”
Moving forward, they plan to grow the team. There are 24 employees and by the end of the year there will be 40.
“As I look to team building and as I look to resource building — because I don’t think it’s always people,” continued Johnson, “it can also be technology and process and different things that help scale an organization efficiently. But as we look to grow in terms of people and team, the big focus right now is zeroing down on the areas of our strategic priorities, which is our areas of differentiation, so content, design and production, and then our operational structure. So, how do we just now become more efficient? That’s really where we’re focused in the next year and those are the areas we’re going to be adding quite a bit of headcount. Last year, the focus was in marketing and in digital, because those were the two areas last year that were the most critical in getting us to this point.”
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