Our strategy wasn't built for beauty execs

And that's a good thing. 

The goal at scale for any company is predictable growth. This sounds both so obvious and so boring that it’s easy to ignore. But the decision to prioritize this metric affects everything downstream. And not in a way that benefits you.

Even your favorite indie brand starts to think and behave differently when they hit the scale needed for the sale of their dreams. There are fewer than ten companies who do the majority of indie beauty acquisitions. One of these ten companies buys most of them out. The compromises start right around the time they hit peak popularity and those companies come calling. Suddenly it’s not about serving a customer community anymore. It becomes about cleaning up the P&L and optimizing the customer base, which translates to sell them as much as you can, as fast as you can. The product is no longer the point and the brand reorganizes itself around goals that improve the bottom line and make your experience worse.

Formulation changes, discontinuing popular products. Less surprise and delight, more heavily incentivized ‘sales events’. Customer service dwindles and accountability seems a thing of the past. All in the name of a payout. Everything becomes about caution instead of excellence. Minimize risk and increase margin. 

We call our philosophy Human Care. It’s the collection of ethics and morals which guide every decision we make, rooted in regenerative thinking. It’s important to us that you know about Human Care because it’s what enables the conditions for a new paradigm in consumer goods. One where scale and production are limited to the bounds of what we can accomplish while maintaining net-positive impact. Compared to sustainability’s broad goal of net-zero impact, it’s our goal to transmute the broken mechanics of extractive capitalism into our own expression of regenerative economics. 

The goal over time is to become a community-owned company instead. A place where the products stay incredible and we pour profits back into a shareholder base that represents our user base. We’re building MILO as a vehicle for social momentum. We all need products to help us care for our bodies. The beauty industry has exploited this baseline need and built a machine around your overconsumption of whatever they feel like selling you.  

These are our non-negotiables:

• We don’t expand our product catalogue indefinitely. 

• We don’t reduce product quality or efficacy to improve margin.

• Revenue cycles back into the community who supports us via MILO Cares and MILO Creates

• We don’t sow or exploit insecurities to sell product

• Our Steward Ownership model means that we’re mission-locked forever

• We work with independent suppliers who support their local communities 

What we're building is something most beauty executives and investors wouldn’t greenlight. That’s why haven't taken outside money and why we’re choosing to grow steadily with our community. We reject timelines that would require compromises to our values. Our model doesn’t fit the incentive structures of the beauty world and that’s something we’re extremely proud of. 

If a brand was designed to sell you more, it will. Everything from R&D to marketing and customer service. That conflict doesn’t exist in our world. We see our customers as a community and our model is designed to enrich that community through localized impact and public arts initiatives. We’re co-creating a better world, financed by your support of MILO. When you choose to buy the MILO Trio instead of something you can find at Sephora, you’re voting with your dollar for a world that embodies Human Care values.