For many early-stage beauty founders, getting onto the shelves at Sephora is the ultimate goal. Now, the LVMH-owned beauty giant has revealed which brands and founders may represent the next wave in beauty. On Thursday, Sephora announced the eight brands whose founders will participate in the 2025 Sephora Accelerate Program. Beginning in January 2025, those early-stage beauty entrepreneurs will receive a crash course in fostering a successful brand.
The 2025 class includes Jade Beguelin and Sabrina Sadeghian, founders of the minimalist skin-care line 4AM; Hye Young Kim, founder of K-beauty-inspired skin-care brand OliviaUmma; Merian O, founder of textured hair-care line Bounce Curl; Aziza El Wanni, founder of climate-adaptive natural hair-care brand The Potion Studio; Christal Alert, founder of sun-care-first makeup brand Tonal Cosmetics; Funmi Monet, founder of fine fragrance brand Influxious; Navneet Kaur and Fatema Raja, founders of South Asian-inspired fragrance brand Ruhveda; and Judy Koloko, founder of scalp-care brand The Steam Bar.
“The Sephora Accelerate program appealed to me because the program is focused on providing support to BIPOC founders,” said Influxious founder Funmi Monet, a fragrance and beauty influencer with close to 800,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. “As a young brand, we felt that this program would help provide the tools necessary for the long-term success of our brand.”
The Sephora Accelerate class will participate in a six-month course covering topics ranging from early-stage financing to supply chain management and digital marketing. To be eligible, applicants must lead a North America-based beauty brand at an early stage in its development, which Sephora considers as brands that have yet to receive VC funding and are not widely distributed. The program is primarily digital but includes opportunities to attend in-person events at Sephora’s San Francisco offices.
Founded in 2016, Sephora Accelerate was originally open to companies and vendors across the beauty industry. For its 2021 cohort, Sephora revamped the program to focus exclusively on product-based brands from founders of color as part of its commitment to the Fifteen Percent Pledge. Founded by Aurora James, the pledge asks major retailers to dedicate 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned brands.
“We have a very diverse consumer base. Where the consumers are interested is when these brands address concerns specific to them, be it hair or skin or even makeup,” said Priya Venkatesh, global chief merchandising officer for Sephora. “Like developing nude shades that work for darker-skinned people, these are the unmet needs.”
This year’s class is also reflective of beauty’s most dynamic categories — namely, hair care and fragrance. According to market analysts Circana, fragrance and hair care were the fastest-growing categories in prestige beauty during the first half of 2024, with fragrance sales up 12% and hair care sales up 10% compared to the same period in 2023.
Brown Girl Jane founder Malaika Jones was among the indie fragrance boom when she participated in the 2023 Sephora Accelerate class. Her line became the first Black woman-founded fine fragrance brand to enter Sephora when it joined the retailer in March. She said the peer-to-peer feedback and community were especially valuable in her cohort.
But while the beauty industry has put a spotlight on diversity in recent years, Jones said she finds access to capital remains a major roadblock for emerging brands and especially founders of color. According to data from Crunchbase, Black beauty founders received just 5.6% of total beauty funding in the U.S. in 2024, down from 9.56% in 2022.
“We’re seeing more retailers create dedicated programs and shelf space, but there’s still access to capital and distribution that remain significant challenges for a lot of [early-stage] founders,” said Jones. “I would say [we need] more diverse funding opportunities and more mentorship programs that understand the unique challenges by minority founders.”
Sephora is not the only beauty player that offers grants and mentorship programs to emerging brands, particularly those from underrepresented communities. Glossier created the Glossier Grant Program for Black beauty entrepreneurs in 2020, while Maesa announced the participants in its second Maesa Magic Incubator in October.
But the retail giant’s Accelerate program offers a uniquely attractive proposition to participants: a potential pipeline to Sephora shelf space.
Tonal founder Christal Alert said this was her third time applying for the Sephora Accelerate program, having previously won grants from Glossier and BeautyMatter. She hopes the Sephora program specifically will prepare her sun-care-focused makeup brand for retail expansion.
“I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the financial expectations that come with scaling. As we prepare for retail and look to fundraise for this expansion, we want to ensure we’re fully equipped to meet the demands of growth — from budgeting and pricing strategies to managing inventory and enhancing the in-store experience,” said Alert.
While many brands like Brown Girl Jane have gone on to launch at Sephora following the Accelerate program, an ongoing retail partnership is not guaranteed. And for many new brands and founders, it may not be the ideal next step.
“Getting into Sephora is exciting, but if you don’t have the inventory to support staying on shelves and staying in stock, then it can go bad really, really quickly,” said Nancy Twine, founder of Briogeo. Twine teaches a finance and operations workshop for Sephora Accelerate members and, in February, launched the Dream Makers Founder Grant, a $1 million grant aimed at female and BIPOC founders in the consumer goods sphere.
“It helps to level the playing field,” Twine said of the Accelerate curriculum. “I don’t think anyone should be disadvantaged with launching at Sephora because they didn’t have access to information.”
No matter their end point, many incubator programs and grants attempt to parse out the beauty founders with true potential at a time when it is perhaps easier than ever to launch a beauty brand — and, subsequently, harder to succeed.
“[Beauty] has never been more competitive than it is today,” said Tower 28 founder Amy Liu. Liu unsuccessfully applied for the Sephora Accelerate in 2019, however she launched her brand online at the retailer that same year. She founded her Clean Beauty School mentorship program in 2020 and now teaches a marketing session to Sephora Accelerate members.
“Early on, you don’t have those [consumer feedback] cues,” said Liu. “You need something that says you should keep going. And that’s what I think these programs are — like, ‘Hey, I see something in this. I believe in you. Let me invest my time in helping you get to the next step.’”
In a saturated beauty landscape, 4AM founders and 2025 Sephora Accelerate participants Jade Beguelin and Sabrina Sadeghian say they would like to see more emphasis on long-term, sustainable growth rather than immediate success.
“There are a lot of resources for ‘how to start a brand,’ which often leads to an overemphasis on having rapid growth in a short period of time,” said Beguelin. “I think it’s OK to take your time truly defining your brand, refining your product offering and understanding your key customer.”
Alisa Carmichael, partner at investment firm VMG Partners, has helped develop beauty brands ranging from Drunk Elephant to Briogeo and acts as an advisor to Sephora Accelerate members. While access to early-stage funding is key to growth, particularly at the retail level, she said a non-negotiable for sustained success is finding a point of differentiation.
“A lot of the brands that have been successful have a very clear point of view,” said Carmichael. “I often say to founders I engage with, ‘If you can’t tell me why your brand is different than the other brands in the competitive set, then the consumer is never gonna see it.’”
2022 Sephora Accelerate participant Fara Homidi said the program gave her confidence that her makeup brand was on the right track and offered a chance to connect with industry professionals ranging from lawyers to investors at an early stage. She launched her namesake makeup brand on Sephora’s online channels this year, with plans for a brick-and-mortar rollout in 2025.
“If they’ve offered you one-on-one sessions with anyone who’s presented, don’t be shy. Take them up on that and speak to those people,” Homidi said. “Take advantage of every opportunity that they give you, because it’s truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have access to that as an indie brand.”
While new brands are often competing against each other for early-stage grants and funding, Homidi advises participants to keep in mind that once they’re on the shelf, they’re no longer only up against fellow indie brands.
“You are playing with the big boys. Once you’ve launched, you’re up against everyone,” she said.
