Gen Z-Led Rosen Skincare Launches Acne Products At Gen Z’s Favorite Beauty Retailer Ulta Beauty

When Rosen Skincare founder Jamika Martin secured a partnership with Ulta Beauty earlier this year, she knew she wanted a fun display to show off her brand’s acne-focused products. “As far as younger consumers, there’s so much discovery going on in an Ulta and a Target, and a display just captivates so much more space, and it’s so much easier to catch the eye,” she says.

The theme of the display—a mock arcade game—leans into an Eighties aesthetic as does the Rosen Skincare’s packaging, even though the brand’s target gen Z and younger millennial audience wasn’t alive for the decade. Martin enlisted the help of illustrator Jess Loya to create it with a character donning a gravity-defying afro. “I wanted to make sure that I represented Black women on shelves,” she says. “It’s not super often that you get to see something like that come to life in a creative way that represents somebody that looks like you.”

Rosen Skincare has launched the products Super Smoothie Cleanser ($18), Tropics Toner ($18), Bright Citrus Serum ($18), Tropics Moisturizer ($20) and spot treatment Breakout ($18) into almost 700 Ulta doors as well as online at the beauty specialty chain. The lineup spotlights the brand’s bestselling routine. “One thing that we’ve noticed in our journey with Rosen is that most folks deal with breakouts that aren’t as severe and so that routine suits them a lot better,” she says. “Our goal when we come on the shelf is to take the customer through this journey of the brand.”

Martin began emailing with an Ulta buyer she identified on LinkedIn in 2020. Rosen Skincare had a year-long exclusive partnership with Target at the time, so she put conversations with Ulta on hold and picked them back up in 2021. The brand is in 315 Target stores and six Urban Outfitters doors. CVS and Walmart are other players it’s eyeing. “We want to make sure that we’re in places that are really amazing at building brands before we start tackling the mass acne space and maybe some of the more true mass drug players,” says Martin. “We want to make sure the brand has been built, and we have that support from those retailers before we start trailing off into other things.”

Rosen Skincare launched in 2017 “in an anti-climatic way,” says Martin. “I was making products in my college dorm and, once I graduated from undergrad, I was like, ‘I’m going do this full-time.” Well, she couldn’t exactly afford to do it full-time at first and babysat on the side to fund her entrepreneurial endeavor. Her personal struggles with acne inspired the brand. “I’ve dealt with pretty severe breakouts since sixth grade and scarring for most of my life,” says Martin. “I did a lot of treatments, had a lot of aesthetician visits, dermatologists visits and became super familiar with the over-the-counter space.”

After a second failed experience with Accutane, she was scouring the aisles of Target. While there, she realized, “Wow, these are literally the exact same products that I was using in sixth grade. Nothing’s changed.” Clean beauty was growing in popularity, and she remembers pondering, “There’s stuff to be done here, but I could be wrong.” She went down an ingredient and scientific study rabbit, and started developing formulas in her kitchen.

Martin aims to modernize what she calls “breakout care.” She says, “Some of the more traditional players tend to think about acne in a fairly siloed way of large breakouts and then super oily skin, but there are a lot of people who deal with texture and dark spots, and I don’t think that gets addressed super well with some of those legacy players.”

The brand came to market with three products, and now has a 14-piece collection. Martin plans to release more products this year. “We definitely want to be a brand that doesn’t have a ton of cannibalization when it comes to like two cleansers that feel fairly similar, but different formulas,” she says. “We aim to keep it pretty tight on the product list, that is one thing I think I admire with those mass acne players. It’s pretty simple, pretty straightforward, you know what you’re getting.”

Currently, Rosen Skincare’s core customers are younger millennials. Martin is working on capturing 16-year-old to 24-year-old gen Z consumers who are in high school and concerned about breakouts. From a content perspective, Rosen Skincare’s 10-person deep team is primarily focused on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Martin, 24, has a keen sense of the content that will work for her brand’s demographic. “We want authenticity, we want representation,” she says. “We get marketed to a lot, so brands need to cut through the gimmicks.”