When Herbivore first hit shelves in 2011, the skin-care brand’s signature candy-colored serums seemed tailor-made for the Instagram era. The social media platform had just launched the year prior, and the brand’s photogenic products became a regular fixture in skin-care “shelfies” featured on Instagram and blogs like Into the Gloss.
But what first made the brand stand out is now table stakes in the industry. Similarly colorful, botanical-forward skin-care brands like Drunk Elephant and Youth to the People launched in 2013 and 2015, respectively. And natural ingredients are no longer a novelty, but a category unto itself at major retailers like Sephora and Ulta.
“Looking back on it now, Herbivore kind of set that trend for what clean, cool, colorful beauty looked like. But fast forward to today, and that’s not enough anymore,” said Britany LeBlanc, who joined Herbivore as CEO in 2024 after a stint as Supergoop’s CMO. “We had to really take a hard look at ourselves and not be different from who we are, but dial up other aspects of the brand that are more relevant to consumers today.”
With the addition of The Estée Lauder Companies veteran Troy Puccia as the brand’s dual CFO and COO in July, LeBlanc believes Herbivore is ready for its next phase of growth. The brand is betting it can achieve a 20% sales bump by the end of 2025 and is aiming for triple-digit growth in 2026.
“We have a very strong digital business today, and the strategy and the thought process going forward is, ‘How do you build a sustainable ecosystem that can leverage that digital marketplace and how we talk to community?’” said Puccia.
Herbivore declined to share its most recent sales figures, but the brand reportedly generated $50 million in sales in 2019, back when it first received $15 million in Series A funding from Silas Capital. But LeBlanc acknowledged that some of the steps the brand has taken since then have deviated from its core identity. With its new executive team, Herbivore aims to return to the early vision of its co-founder, Alexander Kummerow, who remains with the brand, for high-performance plant-based products.
“Last year’s two hero launches were a sunscreen and lip balms in tubes, which are not things that felt like only Herbivore could do,” said LeBlanc. “We’re really holding ourselves to a higher standard of: ‘What does our core consumer love from us?’”
The mid-tier space occupied by Herbivore and its peers has faltered as customers have drifted to either affordability, in the form of brands like Bubble, or high-end performance-based brands like Augustinus Bader. Drunk Elephant, which was acquired by Shiseido in 2019, saw a 65% drop in sales in Q1 2025.
Rather than going after Gen Z and Gen Alpha, as numerous brands have in recent years, Herbivore plans to stay loyal to its core “Millennial Earth Mama” consumer with products that remain in the middle of the affordable and the luxury end of the market.
“I see a real opportunity to again bridge that gap and be something that is every day, while being effective, elevated and still aspirational, new and cool,” said LeBlanc. “Using her facial oil should feel like a bit of a retreat, a ritual. But it’s not enough if it just looks pretty and feels good;it actually has to do something for you.”
To communicate the brand’s benefits, Herbivore has recruited new faces and platforms that have emerged since its heyday in the early 2010s. That includes paid TikTok posts with influencer Toni Bravo, who commands more than 700,000 followers on the platform, to promote the brand. In addition, it enlisted makeup artist Lilly Keys to use Herbivore products on her clients, including Tate McRae and Emma Chamberlain.
But getting back to those core consumers means getting back to Herbivore’s roots — that is, those colorful serums that first caught consumers’ eyes back in the 2010s. In July, Herbivore launched its first new facial oil in seven years with the on-trend yellow Nova Glow Facial Oil, which retails for $88.
While the brand is stocked in Amazon and Sephora, LeBlanc said DTC e-commerce is its strongest sales channel. For now, she said, Herbivore wants to remain focused on reestablishing its core message rather than expanding through retail.
“That was something that I saw a lot of success with in the past at Supergoop, which was — instead of having too many messages and trying to be known for everything — really doubling down on what you’re best at, what you’re known for,” she said. “So we’re driving much more efficiency through our marketing by being hyper-focused. Next year, we’ll look to dramatic action in product development and in retail to drive much greater growth.”
Projecting triple-digit growth for 2026 is ambitious when beauty giants like Estée Lauder are contending with declining sales and U.S. brands face volatile tariff policies. Puccia is confident that Herbivore, whose products are made in the U.S., can weather such threats.
“The one certainty that I know is things are not going to stay stagnant, and there’s going to be the next crisis or the next whatever, and the supply chain needs to be flexible and dynamic to be able to support that,” he said. “That’s what we want to build here. We want to make sure that the supply chain and the supporting elements around that can really be adaptable and flexible to meet the changing world.”
