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In 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the US and beyond, Nyakio Grieco became frustrated with the lack of mass-market black and brown-owned beauty brands. Grieco, who founded her eponymous skincare brand in 2002, says she appeared on lists promoting black-owned brands while at the same time watching retailers struggle to commit to 15 percent of their shelf space. with black-owned businesses, a goal put forward by The Fifteen Percent Pledge, a nonprofit founded by activist Aurora James.
“In my mind, I thought, it shouldn’t be that hard to get that much representation on the shelf,” says Grieco.
That year, Grieco teamed up with Patrick Herning, founder of plus-size retail platform 11 Honoré, to create a new beauty e-commerce platform that would provide retail opportunities for black and brown-owned brands and give them better access to the consumer market. Thirteen Lune launched in December 2020 as an online store where customers could shop and discover beauty brands founded by black and brown women.
Since then, the platform has grown to include more than 160 BIPOC-founded brands and is now expanding its partnership with US department store JCPenney. Thirteen Lune has raised $3 million from the Fearless Fund, a venture capital firm run by women of color. Other investors include Sean Combs, Gwyneth Paltrow, former US ambassador to the Bahamas Nicole Avant and British actress Naomi Watts. The platform has seen four-digit percentage growth year-over-year, according to Thirteen Lune, though the company declined to share specific sales figures.
The goal is to create long-term impact and change within the beauty industry and to be more than a passive retail partner, says Grieco. Thirteen Lune is working closely with beauty companies to help them break into the market by providing mentorship, connecting with founders and investors, as well as breaking into physical retail stores.
The BIPOC business should be considered outside of moments of “racial reckoning,” he adds, so that the focus on Black and Latino-owned brands isn’t a trend. “As a business, if you don’t focus on serving a consumer who has been underserved for too long, soon that consumer will be the majority,” she argues. “And you won’t be able to have a sustainable business without being truly inclusive.”
Inventory diversification
In 2021, after only a few months in operation, Thirteen Lune signed an agreement to expand into JCPenney stores as the lead partner for JCPenney Beauty, the retailer’s in-store beauty space previously occupied by Sephora. Now, Thirteen Lune is gearing up to make its own physical debut, with its first standalone store in Los Angeles expected to open early next year.
Source: news.google.com