On Friday morning, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley posted a note to her Instagram elucidating the future of Rose Inc., the beauty brand she launched in 2021.
Rose Inc. was built in conjunction with the one-time incubator Amyris, which declared bankruptcy in August 2023. Prior to becoming a beauty line spanning makeup, skin care and body care, the first iteration of Rose Inc., launched in 2018, was Huntington-Whiteley’s editorial venture.
When Glossy reported on the brand’s venture into products in 2021, the site employed 30 people. At the time, Huntington-Whiteley said of the crowded celebrity beauty landscape, “We see a lot of people launching brands all the time. Some feel authentic, and some don’t. There has to be that trust, authenticity and integrity built between you, your consumer and your audience. … I wanted to build a site to get across my passion for beauty, to learn, to build a community — and I was also looking for the right partner to build our beauty brand with.”
At the time, Amyris was quickly rolling out incubated beauty brands on top of its squalane-based hero asset, Biossance. JVN, its hair-care venture with Jonathan Van Ness, essentially launched concurrently with Rose Inc. in the summer of 2021. A little over a year later, in October 2022, it launched Stripes, a menopause-focused skin-care line in collaboration with Naomi Watts.
But things took a turn when Amyris filed for bankruptcy. At some point, Huntington-Whiteley took the brand out of her Instagram bio, signaling a shift in her association.
Before Friday, she had not directly commented on the fate of the brand, even after it was sold to AA Investments (HK) Ltd., a Hong Kong-based asset management firm, for $2.5 million in December 2023. “The brand is now under new ownership, and moving forward I am no longer involved or affiliated with its operations, products or promotional activities,” she said in the statement on Instagram.
Speaking about her continued commitment to authenticity, she said, “Authenticity and integrity are paramount to me in any business endeavor on which I embark and therefore, it is time for me to close this chapter and pursue new adventures.”
While Huntington-Whiteley has chosen to disengage from the brand she helped launch, other Amyris-adjacent founders have not. Francisco Costa of Costa Brazil bought his brand back and relaunched it in February. That month, he told Business of Fashion that “the brand was bought for $4.5 million in claims including a cash portion of $350,000.”
Van Ness remains involved in JVN Hair, too, which was purchased by consumer-focused investment firm Windsong Global at auction for $1.25 million. The same firm also purchased Amyris’s baby brand, Pipette. He told WWD that, before the new ownership, he did not have equity in his brand, and under the new ownership, he did. “We will be profitable now, basically,” Van Ness told the publication in February 2024.
Huntington-Whiteley’s post has been met with praise. Perhaps most notably, Van Ness himself commented, “🫶🫶🫶🫶 the lessons we have learned.”
