Meet Fāth Skincare, Clean Beauty’s Luxury New Player
Fāth Skincare, a small-batch luxury beauty brand, has landed its first retail partnership.
The brand is launching in Goop with a cleanser, a face oil and a moisturizer. Prices range from $82 to $180. Fāth Skincare technically launched last year on its website, which founder and chief executive officer Faith Appleton has described as the brand’s “stealth period,” but the brand has still garnered buzz.
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“We haven’t kicked off our big endeavors yet, and people are coming to find us,” Appleton said. “We are really looking to fill a hole in the market that consumers haven’t been able to find.”
Appleton saw the gaps in the market for luxury skin care that is “founder-driven, nontoxic, clean and that actually works,” Appleton said, adding that market research indicates 46 percent of consumers are “turning clean.”
The brand boasts a no-list of more than 1,800 ingredients, and sources from organic growers when possible. The products are all hand poured on Appleton’s family farm in Essex, Massachusetts.
Fāth Skincare currently offers seven products on its own website, including cleansers, moisturizers, a serum and a face oil. That assortment is resonating with the brand’s consumers, who skew female and range in age from 30 to 35.
“Launching d-to-c was so important to me because it removes any barrier from me and my client,” Appleton said. “I can hear what they have to say, and I can see what their buying power is…these are people that are very savvy that have found us.”
The overlap between Fāth’s consumer base and the Goop shopper is large, and Appleton is betting big on smaller specialty retailers in the clean beauty realm.
“Our strategy and our path is a very deep, but very narrow pathway to go to market,” she said. “We’re moving in this prestige, luxury space, and so it’s very tactical to be quite narrow, but deep in that offering.”
Appleton also isn’t a rush. The brand took roughly seven years from ideation to launch, with painstaking effort taken with each formulation. She added that each product went through at least 40 iterations, and although she thinks of its current assortment as the ideal daily ritual, she’s also created a robust launch calendar in the year ahead.
“I had a moment of, ‘we’ve done something really special, and we need to pull back a bit and have a real think about how we want to penetrate the market,'” she said. That’s when she built up a roster of investors, including Accomplice Ventures’ Ryan Moore, who has taken 27 companies to unicorn status, according to the brand.
“We were all very in line with our strategy and growth, and we’ve met some really interesting people we love,” Appleton said. “We have a tremendously supportive financial team in place, and very clear criteria about what our indicators will be when we kick off the next [funding round].”
Appleton didn’t comment on sales, although industry sources expect the brand to reach $3 million in net sales during 2022.
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