This is an episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the beauty and wellness industries. More from the series →
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Few beauty brands have had an evolution quite like Southern California-based ColourPop cosmetics.
Launched in 2014 at the height of the DTC era, the brand once released around 40 collections per year. “That’s how consumers were shopping,” Vivian Weng, ColourPop brand president, told Glossy. “For a number of years, consumers were looking for the latest launch … and looking to get their hands on limited quantities of something that was very, very specific and timely.”
Flash forward to its eleventh birthday this month and things look very different. “[Beauty shoppers] are looking for newness, but in a different way,” Weng said. “The consumer has evolved, and we’re trying to evolve with that community.”
So far, ColourPop’s omnichannel evolution has become a case study for formerly-DTC brands: The brand launched into Ulta Beauty in 2018, then every Target store in 2023, and has cut its annual launches in half.
“Especially post-Covid, consumers were starting to get fatigued with so many launches,” Weng said. “It felt very cluttered and noisy, and they were looking for more core, hero products.”
But hero need not mean boring: ColourPop’s top seller in Target is a $9 body glitter gel ,and its super-pigmented $7 Super Shock pressed eyeshadow is the retail’s No. 6 top eyeshadow, Weng told Glossy. The latter is also the first product the company ever made and continues to be its bestseller.
“We like to say that ColourPop is an overnight success story 70 years in the making,” Weng said. That is, the brand was born in Spatz Labs, a family-owned contract manufacturer in Oxnard, California.
ColourPop co-founders Laura and John Nelson, whose father started Spatz Labs decades before, grew up watching the top cosmetics in the country being quietly made in their family’s factory. Seed Beauty, the parent company of ColourPop, is also well-known for being the original manufacturer of Kylie Cosmetics’ first Lip Kit. However, due to the demand of ColourPop, Weng told Glossy that Spatz Labs no longer contracts for the industry.
Weng joined the company in 2022. Previously, she held executive roles at Anastasia Beverly Hills and L’Oréal; she got her start at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey & Co.
In today’s episode, Weng discusses the brand’s strategic evolution, the challenges along the way and the future of the prolific beauty brand. But first in today’s episode, hosts Lexy Lebsack and Sara Spruch-Feiner discuss the top headlines of the week. This includes Walmart’s plan to test new high-touch beauty bars in 40 stores, the growing marketing opportunity at Formula 1 events, the rise in clinical testing among leading supplement brands and MET Gala highlights.
Excerpts from the conversation, below, have been lightly edited for clarity.
On ColourPop’s origin story
Weng: “We like to say that ColourPop is an overnight success story 70 years in the making, because before there was ColourPop, there was Spatz Labs. Spatz was a contract manufacturer focusing in the cosmetics industry, serving some of the largest cosmetics brands in the world. Through that experience, [co-founders] John and Laura learned so much but saw an opportunity to do things differently. They had this idea of democratizing beauty and redefining luxury beauty, and just saw a different way to do things than what they had seen in the industry. So in 2014, they basically took all this knowledge they had acquired over decades of running this business in their family, and Coloupop was born. It’s interesting, because we’re turning 11 years old this year — but really, that knowledge and that experience comes way before.”
On evolving with the consumer
Weng: “A great example [of where we needed to evolve] is with launches, and the cadence of launches. At the time when we launched, we were dropping new products basically every week … [because] that’s how consumers were shopping. It was something that was very disruptive. This idea of having very limited life collections and very limited quantities that were coming to market every week was not unique to ColourPop. If you fast forward to 2020, 2021 and 2022, especially post-Covid, consumers were starting to get fatigued with so many launches that felt very cluttered — it felt very noisy — and they were looking for more core hero products. And we hadn’t quite caught up to that cadence yet. So I just saw [a new way to think about the] business model, and the founders were very much aligned. [We said], ‘Let’s not move away from the core DNA of the business’, which is amazing beauty products at really accessible prices. Let’s instead tweak the business model so that we’re capturing what the consumer is looking for today.”
