“All About Smart Growth”: How Belle Brands Is Carefully Plotting The Future Of Former Amyris Brands JVN Hair And Pipette

Teresa Lo had a wild ride at Amyris Inc., the biotechnology company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year and emerged from it earlier this year after shedding its beauty brands.

She was formative in bringing Biossance, which launched in 2016 and went on to generate around $300 million in global sales, to prominence. Encouraged by the brand’s success, Lo shepherded the birth of JVN Hair, the brand linked to the “Queer Eye” star and hairstylist Jonathan Van Ness. According to the publication The Business of Fashion, JVN generated between $20 million and $30 million in annual sales before Amyris’s implosion.

Lo, who held roles at Macy’s, Sephora and Ipsy prior to Amyris, witnessed that implosion and drunk in the lessons from it to guide her current gig as global president at Belle Brands, a holding company formed by Windsong Global, the private equity firm that acquired JVN Hair for $1.25 million and baby brand Pipette for $1.75 million from Amyris out of bankruptcy. She says, “If there’s anything to be learned from Amyris, it is that focus is always better than not being focused.”

Today, Lo believes JVN and Pipette have bountiful opportunities for expansion, but she’s intent on seizing upon them judiciously. “Anyone can spend a $100 million to make $50 million. How do you spend $5 million to make $50 million? That’s the challenge,” she says. “That’s the way that we’re thinking about the business. We want to make sure that we are growing sustainably with the right partners, the right foundation and launching newness. Unfortunately, at Amyris, it was about growth at any cost, just grow, grow, grow.”

Below, Lo delves into her time at Amyris, the future of Biossance and JVN, her relationship with Van Ness and the “Rolling Stone” article that alleges he’s been difficult to work with on the set of “Queer Eye,” what it takes to make it at retail and whether Belle Brands could enlarge its portfolio.

What’s your history with JVN at Amyris?

I joined Amyris when Biossance just started. They were looking for someone who had Sephora experience to build and launch this new clean skincare brand in Sephora. I think I was full-time employee No. 3. The success of Biossance led Amyris to realize, “Oh, this might be a viable business opportunity, so let’s build and launch more brands in a similar clean and sustainable capacity.” Pipette was the second brand that Amyris launched. I also oversee it today, but at the time I wasn’t on the brand.

Jonathan Van Ness was our first brand ambassador on Biossance. I’ve known him now for over five years, and we’ve worked together more from a client-partner relationship to start. Right before COVID, his team reached out to me and said, “We’re potentially looking for haircare partners, would you guys be interested?” Little did they know, we were exploring some extensions into haircare as well. It felt like a very natural fit.

We took a break from the conversations during COVID because we didn’t know what was going to happen, but ultimately launched JVN fully remotely during a global pandemic. From when the ink was dry on the contract with Jonathan to when the first bottle was on a physical shelf in Sephora, we did that in nine months, which is insanity. I don’t think I slept that year.

We already had buy-in from Sephora before the brand was fully viable. We had pitched the idea to them. They were in the kitchen with us from day one helping us with the branding, the positioning, the pricing strategy. That’s also what made the brand so successful at launch because Sephora was a key partner in the development process. So, I’ve been running JVN from the beginning and led the sale process once Amyris filed for bankruptcy. Now that we’re on the other side, Jonathan and I continue to work very closely together.

As an insider, what’s your take on what happened at Amyris?

If the work we had done had not been so successful for Biossance, none of the rest would’ve happened. We proved that it could be done in a cost-effective way and that there was brand love. It’s all about brand building. You can’t just have good ingredients. You also have to have a brand that people understand and believe in. What I can say is I think there was a lot of good intention at the start at Amyris.

Pipette as a baby brand using squalane makes a lot of sense, completely different customer than Biossance, but a very engaged, viable customer. JVN and silicone-free haircare using ingredients that Amyris had produced also made a lot of sense, and it got incredible engagement from our community.

Where things started shifting is when Amyris stopped focusing on the few brands that they had. If it had stopped with JVN, we would’ve just had Biossance, Rose Inc, JVN and Pipette. That would’ve been a wonderful portfolio. That was, to me, was enough, but then there were acquisitions that happened after that. That’s when things started turning. It was less about those core brands, it was about everything else that Amyris was spending funds on.

Amyris realized that to build, purchase and run this many brands, there needs to be much more efficiency that they didn’t have the expertise to coordinate. It made more sense to sell those brands off to organizations that could do it better, and they could go back to focusing on what they know best, which is science and ingredients.

How did you make the jump from Amyris to Windsong and Belle Brands?

Jonathan and I are joined at the hip. A lot of people think of him as a celebrity founder, but I think of him as a professional hairstylist. He was doing hair for almost 20 years before he really was well known on “Queer Eye.” This is our business. Yes, the brand name is JVN. He’s the creative brains behind it, but I am the business behind it. I know what this brand can do. I know what I can do, I know what he can do.

When it came down to it, we wanted to see the brand succeed. We wanted to make sure that JVN found a better home that could actually help us grow. When people see a brand, it’s usually all the glossy marketing and social. The unsexy part of running a brand is the operations, the logistics, the sourcing, the pricing. All of that is even more critical, and Amyris unfortunately just didn’t get that right.

We talked with a lot of different prospective buyers, and we immediately knew Windsong was right place for us to be. They are operational experts, and they’ve got a track record of turning other brands around through bankruptcy. Their team is incredibly entrepreneurial, too.

We wanted to make sure wherever we ended up, they would value the brand values and allow us to continue working in a way that was most authentic to us. How many people can say that they have the first non-binary, queer, HIV-positive founder in Sephora? We wanted to make sure that we could find a partner that honored our truth and would celebrate the inclusivity our team represents.

For me personally, the decision to stay was a very easy one. This is my baby just like it’s Jonathan’s baby. Jonathan and I did not have equity in JVN at Amyris. I was just an employee there. For Jonathan, it was just a royalty agreement where he got a percent of sales. The Windsong team immediately said, “That’s crazy, let’s change that.” So, Jonathan and I have a stake in the ownership of the business now. Windsong also acquired Pipette, so it made sense once they met me to put the two brands together.

Did any JVN or Pipette employees come over to Belle Brands from Amyris?

We were able to save a majority of the team, which is what I’m most proud of is. I would say somewhere between 10 to 20 employees came over after the sale to Windsong. The people who work for JVN believe in this brand. We have a very loyal, passionate and resilient team.

Considering what happened at Amyris, what’s your philosophy on growing JVN? Where is the brand distributed now?

We have exclusivity with Sephora. We are in conversation with them now on what comes next. We have additional global distribution through Sephora in Canada, Australia and the U.K. and are in talks with some other regions to continue growth within Sephora. Within the U.K., we’ve got Space NK, where we had exclusivity for about a year, Cult Beauty and a couple others that we’re looking to further grow with.

My perspective on growth is all about, let’s do the right thing at the right time because timing has a lot to do with your success. Going broad with more distribution isn’t always the best because all of that requires. If you haven’t built a solid foundation first and you just keep layering stuff on top, it’s going to crash as we clearly saw from the bankruptcy.

My philosophy with JVN is on building a really tight and solid foundation. Sephora is our core partner, and they’re incredible. We know what numbers we need to be hitting in order for us to be successful in that environment. They are genuine brand builders. We’re already planning our pipeline through 2027 with them.

How many Sephora doors is JVN in now?

We’re not in all stores in the U.S. and that goes back to the thoughtful approach of how we grow. Going into all stores, not just in Sephora, but in any retailer, is not always the most fiscally responsible decision because they make you pay for the visual merchandising. That capital expenditure adds up quite quickly.

If you want to be in all stores with a three- or four-shelf end-cap, that can cost you upwards of $2 million to $3 million in capital expenditure. That’s cash that’s immediately gone, that you can’t invest back into marketing. Additionally, Sephora requires that you support doors with field staff. So, the more doors you have, the more people you have to hire.

It’s all about smart growth. Not all doors are created equal. Not all regions are created equal. We want to make sure we’re leaning into markets that are the right markets for us, even within the U.S., and that we are spending our money in the most cost-effective way.

But we have barely scratched the surface. JVN is only a little over 2 years old now. People forget how young and small of a brand we still actually are. There is opportunity to continue growing in Sephora, and if one day we decide that we’re no longer in an exclusive partnership, there’s Ulta, there’s Target, there’s a lot of other retailers within the U.S. and internationally.

What does success at Sephora look like, and how do you execute it?

With any major retailer, there’s a few things you have to do. Sustainable growth is ultimately the goal, so you need a very strong foundation. The faster you rise, the harder you fall. You don’t want to be a fad. You want to make sure you’ve got a really good core business.

What defines a good core business? It’s two things. You want to make sure you’ve got a great hero product strategy. Do you have one or two products that are driving the majority of the awareness and the new customer growth, repeat purchase, etc.? You need something that’s anchoring the product strategy, and you need a strong customer base. You also need to have loyalty and strong repeat purchase. That’s what all retailers are looking for.

The rest of it is about investing in the right marketing channels. It’s steady growth in retail, if you’re in store. For online, they care about traffic and conversion, but in store they care about productivity. Is your product leaving the shelf? Are people buying it off the shelf or do you see strong repeat sales in store? That’s the recipe. Everything else is in the details of how you execute that in your marketing and content strategy.

From a business standpoint, success in one retailer doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll achieve it in another. Every retailer has different customer base, so a big part of the brand’s responsibility is understanding who the customers are in different retail channels and the different markets and how their behaviors are different. Then, how do you tweak and customize your marketing strategy to fit each one of those? That takes a team to do.

As a business leader, my job is to also balance, when are we ready for that next move? Do we want to move into Ulta one day? Great. But is that today? No. Everything is a matter of timing and assessing when we are ready.

What’s your philosophy on launching new JVN products?

My personal philosophy is, if you don’t feel that this product launch is going to be an A-plus launch, then why are you launching it? We’re not here to launch newness for the sake of newness. There needs to be something genuinely unique and different for the customer and for Sephora for us to deem it worthy to launch, and Sephora gives us a lot of very critical feedback.

It’s not like we’re the first or last shampoo ever to be created, but what makes our shampoos different? We need to make sure that the innovation and the technology that we put behind it is differentiated. We had a lot of innovation already in the pipeline before the bankruptcy that did get paused, but we’re ready to hit the ground running. Our Nurture Hydrating Mask launched last August in store. We have some exciting newness happening later this year in Q4.

Pipette was available in big mass-market and drugstore retailers like Walmart, Target and Walgreens when it was under Amyris. What’s the retail approach today? 

The Amyris approach was to go as broad as possible with the Pipette business, but if you peel back the layers, that doesn’t mean every door is productive. You can be in 15,000 doors, but if each of those doors only does $7 in sales a week, that’s not doing anything for your business. I would rather be in 100 doors and each of those doors be doing thousands of dollars a week.

During the transition, we did make some strategic decisions to tighten up the distribution. The anchor retailer for Pipette is Target. In the last three months, that business has been on fire because we’ve been able to focus on it, service it well and continue to grow.

The philosophy that we have with Sephora is actually no different than for Target. You want to give them as much exclusivity as you can. You want to make sure you’re also launching newness with them and that you’re growing smart. The Pipette sunscreen collection launched officially in all doors at Target this year. The brand has been in Target since 2021, so it took three years to get into all doors, and it’s not yet all Pipette SKUs.

Like Sephora, there is so much growth opportunity within Target, but there’s some foundational things that we still need to fix. Unfortunately, the biggest challenge within Amyris was the complexity with so many brands, so many vendor partners and so many SKUs. Everything ultimately was more complex than it needed to be. So, in the last three months, I’ve been more focused on streamlining and making sure the way that we work is smarter.

Did Pipette exit its other retail partnerships then?

We are not a 100% exclusive to Target. We are on Amazon, with some doors at Ulta and Walmart, but we are pulling back significantly.

What will be the biggest challenges in steering these brands forward?

With any business, regardless of bankruptcy, there’s always challenges. It’s a lot of creative problem solving. What I’ve been pleasantly surprised by is the core devotion that we’ve seen from our customers. Even through the transition, we had a very high retention rate, higher than the industry average.

The reality is a lot of people genuinely don’t know that Amyris went through bankruptcy and that Pipette and JVN were owned by Amyris. We have a very solid foundation for both brands in terms of brand loyalty. We just need to build more brand awareness in the U.S. and internationally.

With retail partners, relationships are built on trust. I think Amyris broke a lot of trust with a lot of partners in general, but, with our team and with Jonathan, our word is our bond. Part of why both brands have been able to continue to thrive and succeed despite the bankruptcy is because of the relationships that we’ve built, the trust and transparency we share.

Earlier this year, “Rolling Stone” published an article in which several crew members accused Van Ness of being emotionally “abusive” and having “rage issues” on the set of “Queer Eye.” Did that affect JVN or your working relationship with Van Ness?

I’m not on “Queer Eye,” and I genuinely don’t know any of the other cast members. What I can say is what I know of Jonathan. I know he is someone who cares very deeply and very genuinely. The No. 1 thing he cared about the most through the Amyris bankruptcy process was me and the team. When things were not getting paid or if we weren’t sure if we were getting bonuses, he volunteered to pay that out of his own pocket. He is a genuine, good person.

I would not have stayed nor would the majority of the team have chosen to stay if he was what the “Rolling Stone” article claims him to be. I knew the “Rolling Stone” article was coming out because he’s very transparent, too. He has nothing to hide. He’s direct, and I see that as a good thing. My working relationship with him hasn’t changed since the article came out. He is still who he is with me. He is still who he is with the team.

Will Belle Brands acquire more assets? 

The focus right now is on JVN and Pipette. However, we are a holding company. So, yes, there is potential for further growth in the future. Again, is that today? No. But is that potentially in the future? Yes.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.