When Sol de Janeiro first arrived at Sephora in 2016, body care was far from a hot category in beauty. Color cosmetics like YouTube-viral eyeshadow palettes still reigned supreme, and body lotions were dominated by the drugstore aisle. But eight years and a viral wolf spider conspiracy theory later, Sol de Janeiro became the top-selling brand at Sephora, dethroning Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty.
“From early on, [founder Heela Yang] wanted to pursue categories which really didn’t exist in prestige beauty, like body mists, which was exciting to us,” said Carolyn Bojanowski, evp of merchandising at Sephora U.S. “Sol de Janeiro has put prestige body care on the map, introduced millions of new customers to beauty and Sephora and broken the record for being our biggest brand in the skin care category.”
A decade after Sol de Janeiro first launched in 2015, the beauty landscape has changed, however. The prestige body-care category that Sol de Janeiro helped create is now rife with competitors nipping at its heels. And though Sephora has been instrumental to its success, Sol de Janeiro expanded to Sephora’s chief rival, Ulta Beauty, at the start of 2024. Staying on top is a different game than being the hot new thing on the block.
“[Sol de Janeiro] hit those Gen Zers very, very early on when everyone else was just trying to figure out how to get them,” said Paula Floyd, founder of retail agency Headkount, which worked with Sol de Janeiro around eventing on its Badalada body lotion launch in May. “How do you keep going back and winning the World Series? That’s the question, at the end of the day: You’re in Sephora, you’re winning the World Series year over year. How do you continue to win?”
Sol de Janeiro believes the answer lies in listening to its customers. And in its early days, Sol de Janeiro’s customers said they were obsessed with the scent of the brand’s original hero product, the gourmand-scented Brazilian Bum Bum Cream, leading the brand to release the scent in a standalone fragrance in 2020.
“Everything product that we’ve done comes from, ‘What does a customer tell us?’ They love the scent of the original Bum Bum cream, which we call Cheirosa 62,” said Anne Talley, Sol de Janeiro’s president of Americas, U.K. and APAC. “And so that’s how the mist got started: We bottled this incredible fragrance, and then we just expanded from there.”
Sol de Janeiro expanded to fragrance in 2020 shortly before the Covid pandemic. At the time, body splashes were dominated by mass mall stalwarts Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works. Sol de Janeiro’s fragrances, created by perfumers like frequent Byredo collaborator Jérôme Epinette, offered an elevated take on the category.
Piper Sandler’s Taking Stock With Teens report found Sol de Janeiro climbed from the No. 3 fragrance brand for teen girls in 2023 to their second favorite brand behind Bath & Body Works, with 19% mindshare among teen girls, in fall 2024. Among upper-income teen girls — those with an annual household income of $83,000 and above — Sol de Janeiro was the No. 1 fragrance brand, with 23% mindshare.
According to Talley, awareness among Sephora’s beauty insiders grew from under 25% in 2022 to 75% in 2025. Sol de Janeiro has grown its presence at the retailer through avenues like the Sephora birthday rewards program, which it participated in in 2020, and the launch of travel sets like its Jet Set kits. And then there was that wolf spider conspiracy theory.
In 2023, Sol de Janeiro’s Sephora page was flooded with one-star reviews claiming its Delícia Drench body butter attracted wolf spiders. The brand turned the fearful reviews into positive content, however, with TikTokers like Sephora Squad member Hamsha Thavaseelan posting sponsored content to debunk the rumor that the scent attracted spiders.
“We have to keep exciting our customer so that she’s coming to us, and so that, when she’s making her choices, she’s excited about what we’re offering,” said Talley. “We also have to do the storytelling behind our products.”
But after years as a Sephora exclusive, Sol de Janeiro has expanded its retail presence. It arrived in Dufry duty-free stores in 2023 and, in 2024, it expanded to Ulta Beauty.
“We were quite big, and we built our awareness to a point where we felt like we were not serving our customer by not opening the distribution,” said Talley. Sol de Janeiro, which was acquired by Swiss group L’Occitane in 2021, reported net sales of €686.1 million ($780 million) in 2024. “We were fairly large by the time we made that decision [to expand to Ulta], and it was really driven by the customer.”
Inside Sephora, Sol de Janeiro faces new competitors, too. Hand sanitizer pioneer Touchland expanded to body and hair mists in January, while fellow Sephora brands like Phlur and Ellis Brooklyn have doubled down on their gourmand body mist offerings with launches like Heavy Cream and Banana Milkshake, respectively.
While body mists are now Sol de Janeiro’s top-selling products, the brand has returned to its roots this year. In May, the brand launched its first body lotion format in the pump-friendly Badalada body lotion. The launch is exclusive to Sephora and Sol de Janeiro DTC customers.
“We didn’t have a body lotion in the line, so we both felt this was a very big idea. So then we said, ‘What’s the biggest thing we could do at Sephora?’” said Talley. “And the biggest thing is to have a global first-at-Sephora launch. This is not offered to every brand, and it basically involves them rallying all of their stores around the world to put focus on this and support this product as one of their key priorities.”
Sol de Janeiro is confident in both the IRL and online buzz around the launch. According to the brand, the Badalada body lotion has earned more than 8 million impressions on social media since its launch and more than 400,000 engagements on posts.
Keeping products exclusive to Sephora is a valuable way to maintain a healthy relationship with the retailer that supported it early on, even as Sol de Janeiro expands to competitors, Floyd said. And even with body mist and body care competitors saturating the market, she believes there is still plenty of room for Sol de Janeiro to innovate in its core categories.
“Body is now like color,” said Floyd. “There are really long legs to fragrances, body scrubs, hair scrubs. There are all kinds of things to play into.”
