Bubble, Tower 28 And Crown Affair Founders Give Us The Lowdown On Launching At Retail Down Under

Several American beauty brands have expanded internationally to Australian brick-and-mortar retail this year. Among them are Crown Affair, Act+Acre, Fig.1, Polite Society and Glossier, which have all landed at specialty beauty chain Mecca. Meanwhile, Bubble has partnered with Priceline Pharmacy to make its accessibly priced skincare available to teens and tweens in stores down under.

Along with the United Kingdom and Canada, Australia is a popular early international stop as English-speaking beauty brand founders in the United States plot their businesses’ global strategy. Expected to hit $7.32 billion this year, according to Statista, the country’s beauty and personal care market is a fraction of the market in the U.S., which the insights resource predicts will reach $100 billion this year. For U.S. brands, that means a misstep in Australia isn’t catastrophic.

Also, for venture capital-backed brands, which the American brands traveling to Australia tend to be, strong sales in the country can demonstrate to a potential future acquirer or investor that its products translate abroad. And due to the relatively small size of the country—it has almost 27 million people, making its population less than the populations of Texas and California—it still leaves plenty of runway for a subsequent owner to realize a ton more international growth.

To learn about what it’s like to enter Australia, we touched base with three founders—Amy Liu of Tower 28, Shai Eisenman of Bubble Skincare and Dianna Cohen of Crown Affair—whose brands recently launched there. Below, they tell us about what prompted their brands to go to Australia, the products taking off in the country and the process of setting their brands up for Aussie success.

Amy Liu, founder of Tower 28 

Mecca Launch on Aug. 28

“We had been shipping to Australia through Revolve, but Revolve doesn’t really give us a sense of where they’re shipping to. Looking at our Instagram following, we could see that a significant part of the audience was coming from Australia, but the real linchpin was about a year and a half ago when the Mecca team came to us and pitched us.

They said that, to date, we were the No. 1 most highly organic searched brand they’ve ever had on their website. They had more than 35,000 organic searches, so people actually typing, “Tower 28,” into their website. In general, as a founder, you go where the customer is. That made it a pretty easy decision.

Mecca is not a typical wholesale model. It’s somewhere between a wholesaler and distributor model. They take a deeper margin, but, as part of that, they really take care of everything. We had a press event, we had an influencer event, we had trainings where they flew in hundreds of staffers to learn about Tower 28. Mecca is an incredible organization that invests 4% of their revenue back into education.

The toughest hurdle was the sunscreen regulatory process. It is costly, time-consuming and a lot of paperwork, so you have to be ready for that. Thankfully, when you work with a partner like Mecca, they’re really used to doing this with brands, so they help you through it quite a bit.

We went into Mecca with a dedicated end-cap. We sold almost 9,000 units in the first 48 hours and were Mecca’s most successful Insider Access launch, their version of an app preview, to date. Since then, we have tripled Mecca’s original projection, and the Mecca business now makes up around 9% of overall sales.

Tower 28’s sales in Australia are very much reflective of the mix of business we have here in the States. SOS Daily Rescue Facial Spray is our No. 1-selling product here and in Australia. But there are a few minor deviations. For instance, Sunny Days, our tinted sunscreen foundation, over-penetrates there compared to what we do in the States.

I think it’s because sun safety is so much more understood and emphasized there. They have signs everywhere. You have to wear sunscreen to school. Here in the States, I still find that sunscreen seems to be a seasonal conversation.

The other SKU that has really popped over there is our BeachPlease cream blush. It’s a good product for us here, too, but it was very exciting for [the Mecca customer] because they don’t have Patrick Ta or Rare Beauty.

The Mecca team just came out two weeks ago, and we walked them through our plans for 2025. Like any other [retail] partnership, it’s a real conversation round what [the future] looks like and how we can support each other.

As an indie brand, a lot of it is about leveraging what we’re already doing like our PR mailers. A lot of the effort is in the design of the box, and the execution of sourcing and producing the items that go into the box. In that situation, we’re able to ask them, ‘Hey, do you want 200 of these,’ and we’ll just make 200 extra. Another thing is being thoughtful about the design and artwork for things we’re already doing, whether it’s content or graphics, and just making sure they can also use it.”

Shai Eisenman, founder of Bubble Skincare 

Priceline Pharmacy Launch On Oct. 10

“Australia was the No. 1-requested region our consumers had been asking for. Some Australian customers have already been ordering Bubble online despite the shipping costs.

After we spent time researching and speaking to our community, we felt like Priceline Pharmacy was the perfect retail partner. They have more than 400 doors and are accessible all throughout Australia, not just a few major metropolitan areas.

We reached out to Priceline’s team on Linkedin and found out that they actually love Bubble and have been following us for a very long time. Right from the beginning, it felt like the absolute perfect match. To support the launch, we brought in a country manager, who has extensive experience in the beauty industry working for multiple Australian brands.

We don’t really work with distributors. We want every launch to be thoughtful, intentional and feel like the brand. The only way, in our opinion, to do this is to do it directly. We knew we needed to have a team on the ground. We have a team on the ground in Nottingham, London as well working with Boots.

We have built a team internally that is based in Australia and can go to stores and work and develop the relationship with the associates and with Priceline and really ensure that we’re coming to life the right way. A great example is the fact that they have opposite seasons, so you don’t want to make a holiday gift set that is cold weather-themed for Australia because it’s summer there.

I went out to Australia for three days [to support the launch]. We had an education tour, Beauty Prescription Live, which was a beautiful event our team planned with Priceline, and we also held an event to launch the brand in Australia with media and influencers. In the first two weeks since launch, we’ve become the No. 2 beauty brand in Priceline. Since day one, we’ve sold one unit of our hit moisturizer Slam Dunk every 15 seconds.

It’s been a whirlwind of a year. We launched in the U.K. with Boots in January and Australia with Priceline in October. The majority of our business is still in the U.S. We’re a New York-based brand sold in more than 13,000 stores across the country. We’re also a profitable brand and did not need to fundraise in order to support this growth.

In the future, we would love to have a mix close to where a lot of the large brands are at in terms of international sales, which I would say is at the 40% to 50% mark. There’s so much more opportunity.

Right now, we’re still in the three- to six-month regulatory process to get our sunscreen approved in Australia. It does not require any reformulation, but there is a lot of testing you need to get through. We’re planning to bring this sunscreen to the region as soon as possible.”

Dianna Cohen, founder of Crown Affair 

Mecca Launch on April 2

“There was a lot of organic demand for us to enter Australia on social, via email and requests people would submit in our checkout. Mecca was the clear partner to take us into this market. As you know, Mecca takes on the inventory as a distributor versus a traditional wholesaler, so they really take a lot of ownership in terms of getting the word out there, marketing the brand and handling all of the operations and logistics.

As an indie beauty brand, we’re still not ready to do all of this on our own right now. Unlike Sephora domestic, where you own your end-cap and your own visual merchandising, Mecca owns all of the visual merchandising, which means they also own that expense. They’re really good at what they do and know how to talk to their customers. So, we’ve really been able to lean on and trust them in terms of consistent marketing/messaging. They also include us in emails, homepage features and influencer gifting.

We started talking to Mecca at the end of 2022 and launched with them in 32 doors this spring. That’s really just how long it takes. You want to give yourself about a year in terms of regulatory updates (Crown Affair’s Cleansing Scrub required a packaging change before hitting Australian shelves), inventory marketing, preparing marketing with them.

We were very lucky timing-wise to have our head of sales, Elise [Valentine], be able to join us in January for the spring launch in Mecca. From a founder perspective, it is really helpful to have someone on your team who has a depth of retail experience and really understands the retail life cycles. I came from the direct-to-consumer world, so this is all an education for me. It is really helpful if you have someone on your team who knows how to have those types of conversations.

We have already achieved the sales goals Mecca set for the brand in the first year. Australia will make up less than 5% of our total business in 2024, which is in line with our goals given our current brand awareness in that market.

I feel like the Australian girl is looking for the things the U.S. customer is looking for. The Dry Shampoo is our No. 1 SKU in both regions. It’s definitely the hero product. The next top-performing SKU is The Leave-In Conditioner, which is reflective of our SKU assortment here. And The Brush No. 001 does really, really well in Australia, followed by The Towel. For us, tools and accessories slightly over-index in the Australian market.

Right now, our wholesale includes Sephora, Mecca, Goop and Violet Grey, We’ve hit our projections with Mecca every single quarter, which is only since April. So, it’s all pretty new, and it’s really nice to have it right. It pays for itself. It’s not this massive revenue driver, but it’s a very important thing that is 100% worth engaging and doing.

In the near future, we’ll plan a trip to Australia and support our presence there with a bit of a press strategy, a bit of TV and podcast strategy on my own channels and on Instagram. We have a really nice humming community base in Australia, so as the whole business continues to grow, we’ll figure out ways to continue to activate there on our own as well. We’re still very much growing, and I think we’re growing as haircare grows, too, and becomes a bigger category.”