In three years, Nakery Beauty has become the No. 1 beauty brand on HSN and pulled in around $100 million in sales for products warding off the body’s discomforts like pain, exhaustion, vaginal odor and hot flashes and making women look better by plumping lips, wrinkles, hair and more.
Now, it’s diversifying its retail reach with a launch in Ulta Beauty, starting online today before rolling out to the beauty specialty chain’s 305 top wellness doors in October in the selection called The Wellness Shop. The brand will sell eight body care products priced under $40 at Ulta, including new products exclusive to the retailer: SkinRecovery Energize & Repair Body Cream, SkinRecovery Cool & Energize Body Cream and SkinRecovery Tension Relief Roll-On.
Founder and CEO Liz Folce pitched Ulta, where millennials and gen Zers are the core consumers, about a year ago on carrying Nakery because she heard from the brand’s customers, primarily women in the gen X and baby boom generations, that they feel it’s an unintimidating beauty retail environment to shop in. Nakery generally holds focus groups quarterly and has also gleaned from them that half its customers purchase beauty products online, and they aren’t big drugstore or Target beauty shoppers.
“In talking to Ulta and learning about who their customer is, it was a perfect fit,” says Folce, 56. “Nakery really filled the gap of not only who our customer is, but also the wellness aspect of it as well because we create not only skincare for women over 50, but we also create wellness products.”
Prior to establishing Nakery in 2022 with six products targeting sagging skin, stretch marks, boob sweat and other concerns of older women, Folce spent 15 years at Estée Lauder, the last four as regional sales director for Bobbi Brown, and 14 years at Korres as a VP and on-air personality. Her husband, Robert DeBaker, serves as the COO of the brand. He was formerly group president of Luxury Brand Partners, global president of Korres and president and CEO of Becca.
In its first year on the market, Nakery crossed $10 million in sales. This year, sales are growing at a 25% clip, according to Folce, who divulges that its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) margin is roughly 20%. Nakery hasn’t taken on outside investment, and Folce suggests she’s enjoyed “doing it myself” to control the brand’s destiny in its early stages. Along with Ulta and HSN, Nakery is available on Amazon.
“The mission of this brand since day one has been every product that we create is from listening to the customer.”
The brand typically appears every month on HSN, where Folce is the brand’s chief spokesperson. “A lot of people have said, why don’t you have someone else do it? But then you lose that connection with the customer,” she says. “There’s something about having that one-on-one connection. I was talking to a customer—her name was Pam—and she said, ‘Liz, when you look at me through my TV, I just love it so much, and I love what you’ve taught me with my skin, and it’s looking so much better.’ How do you walk away from that?”
In the fall, Nakery is expanding to QVC UK. In October, timed with its in-store Ulta debut, the brand will announce a celebrity deal. Currently, it has partnerships with 15 influencers. Among them are Lissette Diggs, who has 22,200 Instagram and 10,800 TikTok followers, Bonnie Joan McAdams, who has 28,400 Instagram followers, and Rachael Beverly, who has 69.3 million TikTok and nearly 2,500 Instagram followers.
Although Nakery has had success on HSN, the shopping network’s parent company QVC Group Inc. has been under severe strain as people have turned their attention away from linear television, and 2020 was the last year it registered a revenue increase. In the second quarter this year, its revenue from beauty declined 13%. In January, it closed HSN’s St. Petersburg, Fla., studio and consolidated its operations with QVC in Westchester, Penn.
Nakery’s eight-product collection at Ulta is a small portion of its full assortment of about 40 products. The brand releases six to 12 products a year, although some are seasonal in-and-out offerings. Teasing a seasonal offering set for January, Folce says it’s for people who are stuffy and sniffling. Nakery’s bestsellers are SkinRecovery Pain Cream and SkinRecovery Relax + Repair Body Balm. Its products incorporate trending ingredients such as magnesium and NAD, and they’re all validated by clinical testing.
Rather than leaning into TikTok, where the largest demographic is in the 18- to 34-year-old age range, Facebook is a stronger draw for the brand. Folce’s Facebook page for Nakery has almost 8,000 followers. She says the brand doles out lab samples to customers requesting them to solicit feedback and build buzz. At Ulta, sampling will be an important part of the awareness strategy, and Folce mentions the Relax + Repair Body Balm will be one of the focuses of the sampling.
Contrary to beauty brand founders who identify their personal problems and develop products to address them, Folce is adamant that Nakery’s products respond directly to its customers’ problems. “I was meeting once with a group of beauty editors, and they said to me, ‘Now come on, you have to have something you want for you,’” she says. “And I said, ‘No, the mission of this brand since day one has been every product that we create is from listening to the customer, building that community.’”
