Why most beauty brands get worse as they grow

Hint: It's not because the founders wanted it that way

Have you ever found the perfect product for your needs? That one thing that somehow checks all the boxes. The right texture, a scent you like, and outcomes you love. You spent a long time searching and when you found it, you told everyone so they could experience what you are. You repurchase and even auto-subscribe so you never run out. And then one day you crack open a new one and instantly, something feels off. The texture is a little different, there’s a new scent. This is not your tried and true product. And back to Sephora you go, to find something else you’ll get attached to and ultimately have to leave behind. 

Every indie brand starts the same way. Founders with a vision for something better. A genuine point of view on an unsolved problem and how to fix it. It can take three to five years of grinding it out while following little glimmers of external validation that keep them. If they manage to get through this point, it might just become an indie cult brand. AKA: The Dream. By the time a brand gets there they’ve got a path of hard bets and big promises behind them, and it’s time to make good. With more attention from the consumer market, investors start calling. A big check that will keep you going, finally pay you something so you can just…breathe. That’s the validation every self-funded entrepreneur plans for. And it comes with a cost. 

As soon as the check is cashed, the brand is essentially locked into agreement with their investor(s) that the new goal is a liquidity event. This changes everything. Suddenly, it’s about positioning the brand as profitable and promising to M&A executives over the span of a few years. The idea of brand love becomes distorted—it’s no longer about genuine community feedback or building 1:1 customer relationships. It becomes an endless loop of chasing the same social media metrics through expensive influencer campaigns that incentivize overconsumption. Massive PR packages and influencer trips are seen as the norm but they introduce bias to product reviews. This is doubly true when they’re further incentivized with affiliate marketing deals. They build an advertising engine that works the same as printing money—the more you add, the more it multiplies. And it’s all at the expense of the end consumer.

Even that moniker is problematic—Consumer. Like that’s all you do, and all you’re for. To consume. It's the nature of an economy built on extractive capitalism to enforce a growth at all costs approach to business. From a Systems perspective, this implies that your experience will continue to get worse. The loops will get tighter until suddenly, you don’t even feel like you have the illusion of choice anymore. This is what we’re fighting against. 

And it all starts with our Governance model. We structured ourselves so that those who support the Human Care Mission stay in control. In our setup, it’s not possible for customer or community interests to be subsumed by endless greed. Instead, we operate within regenerative economic principles.

Our governance structure looks like this: 

Class A Shares: Human Care Governance Board (12 seats). Only one seat represents our Investor base. 10 seats are to be allocated across founders, advisors, a customer representative, as well as reps for MILOCreates, and MILOCares. The 12th seat is held by a third party and serves as a mission-locked tie breaker. They are bound to vote in the interests of the Human Care Mission as defined in our constitution. This vote serves to eliminate all the reasons brands get worse. Each seat holds one vote. Unallocated board seats (votes) are split amongst founders until the board is filled, but the mission lock remains intact. 

Class B Shares: Financial Shares which yield dividends over time and come with no voting rights. Class A Shareholders may hold Class B shares, but there is no way for their financial interests to be represented beyond the value of their singular vote of 12 on the board. Our dividend model allows investors to receive returns over time from profits, eliminating the need for a liquidity event that would undermine our mission.

This may seem needlessly complex for a small brand like ours but these are the structural differences that enable structural change. Without these differences, we have no mechanisms to protect us from what happens to successful brands who don’t safeguard themselves against practices that will erode their autonomy and ultimately, their brands.  

Drunk Elephant is the most instructive case study the beauty industry has produced in years. Their trajectory from mission-driven cult favorite to epitome of Big Beauty is one of the most well documented. OIaplex is another good example of what happens when investors put a brand under immense pressure to perform against a landmark M&A deal. But in the long run, it doesn’t even matter. The System doesn’t need any particular brand to survive and accepts that not every acquisition will survive long term. In fact, parent companies acquire many of them only to extract enough profit to justify the deal, then sunset the brands to eliminate competition against their legacy portfolio.

Unfortunately for the end user, these dynamics are too far upstream from the product to make informed decisions. More than that,we feel strongly that it’s not the customer’s job to know these things. The onus sits with companies who run on consumer-generated revenue to operate in alignment with consumer well-being. We see this as non-negotiable and expect that as consumers start to join us in this thinking that other brands will join us. Human Care is a philosophy that can belong to everyone who wants to put in the work. Friends don’t gatekeep better economic policy. 

MILO started just like every other brand. Two founders and a vision. The difference is the structure we built around the vision. Steward Ownership is not a values statement or brand positioning. It's our way to lock out destructive economic interests while allowing us to take on growth capital in a community oriented way.

We are creating what will become a community-owned company whose products stay excellent because there’s no incentive structure that rewards making them worse. Your loyalty deserves that. The founders of the brands you loved before they changed deserved it too.