“Activewear For Your Face”: Sweat Cosmetics Rebrands As Hustle Beauty To Double Down On Athleisure Positioning

When Courtney Jones Louks, Taryn Colborne, Leslie Osborne Lewis and Lindsay Tarpley Snow, former players for Boston Breakers, a now-defunct team in the National Women’s Soccer League, launched Sweat Cosmetics in 2015, they were all professional athletes or had just ended their professional soccer careers.

“The idea was to create cosmetics for women who are sweaty. Sweat was a really empowering part of our lives, and we wanted something that catered to us,” recalls Jones Louks. “We were waking up at 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. for training and having to go to team dinners at night. There wasn’t a lot of downtime for us to prepare for after practice. It was bouncing from one thing to the next, and we always thought, ‘Why isn’t there anything that lasts long and is natural looking?’”

Promoted by women soccer stars in their circles, Sweat Cosmetics notched early successes. It landed at the retailers Sephora, Anthropologie and Soft Surroundings, and raised $1.5 million in funding through several sources, including crowdfunding and friends and family investors. During Sweat Cosmetics’ tenure, it closed in on $3 million in revenues, with yearly sales highs of $500,000 to $700,000.

But today the brand’s co-founders are in much a different place—together, the retired athletes have nine children—and the beauty landscape is, too. To resonate with contemporary consumers, they’ve rebranded Sweat Cosmetics as Hustle Beauty to double down on athleisure positioning. The renovated brand specializes in cosmetics comfortable for daily wear by women squeezing fitness into packed schedules.

“We are not the intense professional athletes we once were, even though that was a lifestyle we lived, know and loved, but we are more on the athleisure side today. We need to bring fun and sportiness into our brand for the majority of females who have an interest in fitness and wellness,” says Jones Louks, adding, “I’m up at 6 a.m. with my kids before I get on Zoom calls and then hit the gym. There are so many aspects of your life you’re trying to organize. Every single female is hustling. We felt that we could really relate to our customer through our product and us as people and how we have grown.”

Sweat Cosmetics transformed into Hustle Beauty with guidance from the agencies Darkroom and Paper Laundry. Jones Louks admits she and her co-founders made plenty of mistakes at Sweat Cosmetics, and they’re pumped to rectify them at Hustle Beauty. “We love constructive criticism,” she says. “We have always had coaches tell us what we do wrong, and we go back to the field and change it. That is part of our lives, that’s what we are used to. You go back out there and fix it.”

“We need to bring fun and sportiness into our brand for the majority of females who have an interest in fitness and wellness.”

A mistake at Sweat Cosmetics was its name, and that’s been fixed. Although the co-founders (there were five at the start, but co-founder Emily Hines departed the brand in 2020) adored reimagining sweat, often considered icky, particularly in association with women, as uplifting with the brand, it was confusing to consumers. “We wanted to change our name to something that could be relatable to a lot of people,” says Jones Louks. “We settled on Hustle because it was still sporty, but it was more of a mindset. We like to play with the word ‘hustle.’ We are very work hard, play hard. There’s a life balance thing to our brand and who we are as people.”

The pricing was another mistake. Sweat Cosmetics was originally pegged as a mid-tier to high-end brand with products priced primarily from $40 to $50. Everything at Hustle Beauty will be $30 and under. “We were almost aiming to be a luxury brand. We learned pretty quickly that there are some people willing to pay $40 to $50 for a cosmetic, but our customer base is a very high energy, but low maintenance type of beauty girl. She’s always on the go. She needs something that’s quick and easy, and she’s not willing to take a lot of time or spend a lot of money.”

To lower prices, Hustle Beauty dove into the costs of its packaging and was able to slash them by over half. For example, it removed foil and coating that had been on Sweat Cosmetics’ boxes to reduce their cost from around $2 to 60 cents each. “It was really important to our team that we weren’t going to cut costs on the formula, we are going to cut costs in the packaging,” says Jones Louks.

While perhaps not a mistake, Sweat Cosmetics’ design has been modified to stand out on retail shelves. Rather than Sweat Cosmetics’ color palette of black, white and pink, Hustle Beauty’s is white and vivid light blue. Light blue is the brand’s signature color. Jones Louks compares it to Drybar’s signature yellow. She says, “I wanted something that, when someone sees that color, they think of Hustle.”

“Our customer base is a very high energy, but low maintenance type of beauty girl. She’s always on the go. She needs something that’s quick and easy.”

Currently, Hustle Beauty has one product available, $10 Hydrating Cleansing Cloths, but it has formulated a total of 10 products. The brand expects to introduce three to five products later this year. Among the products in its pipeline are foundation, primer, tinted moisturizer, sunscreen and under-eye balm. Jones Louks describes Hustle Beauty’s products as “activewear for your face.” She says, “I want to make such a strong name for ourselves that, when someone is going on a hike or to the gym or playing tennis, in their bag is a collection of our products that does it all. It takes them from the time they get ready in the morning to the end of their day.”

In 2022, the brand participated in the Target Takeoff accelerator program, and Target is at the top of its dream list of retailers. Jones Louks applauds the chain for what it’s done in activewear with the brand All in Motion and points out Hustle Beauty could be a corollary to it in beauty. Eventually, her hope is for Hustle Beauty’s sales to be evenly split between retail and direct-to-consumer distribution. “You have to be more omnichannel these days,” says Jones Louks. “Our customer wants things to be very accessible, not only in terms of the products being functional and easy to use, but in terms of going down the street to grab them.”

Hustle Beauty has learned a lot of lessons about retail from the mistakes Sweat Cosmetics made at Sephora, where it was previously sold online shortly after its launch. “We would do whatever they wanted us to do, and that was a big mistake. Smaller brands have to know they have to have traction and say no when they are little,” says Jones Louks. “If you are not ready for it inventory wise and especially on the marketing side, it’s going to be more of a pain than it is helpful.”

Hustle Beauty is in the middle of a fundraising process in which its objective is to secure $1 million to support marketing, merchandise and retail. It’s already drawn about $400,000 in the round, and a portion of the funding has been spent on packaging to roll out forthcoming products. This year, Hustle Beauty’s goal is to reach $1 million in sales. Next year, its goal is to reach $2.5 million.

“We have never paid ourselves. Literally everything that has come into our company has gone back into reordering products and a small marketing budget,” says Jones Louks. “It’s truly something we are passionate about, and we feel it needs to be on the market. We’ve definitely had revenue to prove the concept and that there was demand in the market. We have a cap table on the line, and we are hoping to make that cap table really proud with the launch of Hustle.”