As Mora Cosmetics Closes, Its Co-Founders Discuss The Perils Of A Small Brand At A Big Retailer

Minara El-Rahman launched halal-certified Mora Cosmetics in 2020 as a love letter to her Muslim community. Even though the bootstrapped makeup brand announced via email on Monday that its business is ending on Jan. 31, preternaturally optimistic El-Rahman isn’t dire about the future of either halal or indie beauty.

“We really didn’t see many brands taking the effort to become halal-certified when we created Mora,” she says. “Now, people are becoming aware of certain ingredients that are not necessarily halal compliant or that people don’t want to use on their bodies.” Mora Cosmetics defines its halal makeup as not containing alcohols to “allow Muslims to pray with the makeup on.”

At launch, El-Rahman and Jasmine Dayal, her friend, former colleague and co-founder at Mora Cosmetics, dreamt of placing Mora Cosmetics in a large beauty specialty chain like Sephora or Ulta Beauty. The brand didn’t realize that dream and pivoted at the outset to pitching to smaller retailers that weren’t as expensive to play in, but El-Rahman’s faith in the possibility of small brand success at large beauty specialty chains hasn’t been shaken.

“I truly believe there are market gaps, and if you create a brand that speaks to that consumer and gets into Sephora, you really can win,” she says. “We see it with Danessa Myricks and Ami Colé. They’re amazing.” However, she laments, “I feel like those stories are becoming rarer and rarer.”

El-Rahman’s persistent faith is surprising because Mora Cosmetics’ story underscores the perils of a small brand endeavoring to compete at larger retail. Decisions it made to move units at J.C. Penney such as release a new product turned out to be unfruitful. A bigger brand could push through the misfires that Mora Cosmetics couldn’t.

El-Rahman spent about $45,000 from her personal savings to start the brand and held on to a job outside of it until 2023. Once she left the job and didn’t have outside income to support it, El-Rahman ultimately concluded she couldn’t float Mora Cosmetics any longer.

“It got to a point where we were definitely in a hole and couldn’t make new products. Once I couldn’t fill it because I couldn’t pay the lab, it was time for us to call it,” she says. “I did this for the community. I wanted the community to feel seen, and I wanted to keep it going for them, but I had to make the call because it was starting to affect my family and finances.”

Today, as Mora Cosmetics winds down, El-Rahman has a clear view on its mistakes. Below, she and Dayal delve into them so other beauty entrepreneurs can learn from them.

Understand MOQs Can Change

Before she developed Mora Cosmetics, El-Rahman admits she didn’t know what minimum order quantities (MOQs) were and absolutely didn’t know they would eventually be a hurdle her brand couldn’t jump.

It was able to get underway by ordering 10,000 units from a contract manufacturer across three debut stockkeeping units—The Satin Sheen Multistick in shades Minxy, Hyped and Jessie’s Girl—but El-Rahman explains the MOQs quickly changed, and the contract manufacturer required the brand to produce 10,000 units per SKU. She figures it was attempting to recoup pandemic-related losses.

“We couldn’t necessarily afford to sustain the inventory,” says El-Rahman. “We couldn’t say, ‘Hey, we are out of Jessie’s Girl, can you do 5,000 instead of 10,000?’”

Try To Read Retailers

El-Rahman says Mora Cosmetics was hit hard by J.C. Penney, which the brand entered through Thirteen Lune, the retailer curating an assortment with brands from Black and brown founders, severing ties with the brand last year. Mora Cosmetics arrived at J.C. Penney in 2021 shortly after its launch and proceeded as if the relationship would continue indefinitely.

Referring to the higher MOQs from the manufacturer, El-Rahman says, “To be honest, we were OK with it because we had J.C. Penney as a retailer. Truly what shuttered the brand was the relationship with J.C. Penney. They gave us these exciting purchase orders, and with the purchase orders coming in, we wanted to make sure we could scale, so we preemptively ordered packaging, and that really did us in. If we held back a little, we would be telling a different story.”

Get Buy-In Before Product Launches

Mora Cosmetics was told repeatedly by beauty industry insiders that its limited product assortment—it only had three SKUs of a single product at first—was holding it back, and it determined J.C. Penney had an underwhelming color cosmetics assortment that could be helped by expanded merchandise.

In October 2023, Mora Cosmetics extended its selection by launching The Beach Glass Highlighter in two shades, Pink Sands and Rio. The launch meant the brand had to invest in formulation and new tubes and secondary packaging. Mora Cosmetics thought J.C. Penney would pick up the highlighters, but it never did.

El-Rahman says, “If we could have seen the writing on the wall that they weren’t interested in the highlighters, we shouldn’t have invested in more packaging.”

Paid Influencers May Not Pan Out

Out of the gate, Mora Cosmetics paid $3,000 to Brown Girl Magazine to work with three influencers. While El-Rahman and Dayal deem the price reasonable (they mention influencers quoted them as much as $10,000 for a lone Instagram Stories post), they discovered paid influencer marketing wasn’t a cost-effective strategy for their brand. Instead, organically seeding its products to makeup artists was a better strategy. The makeup artists Matin Maulawizada, Sir John and Katie Jane Hughes highlighted the brand, which netted bumps in its online traffic.

Based on Mora Cosmetics’ experience, Dayal tells beauty brands, “Don’t feel obligated to pay for an agency to find influencers to try your products because you want people who are going to be organic fans, and if you have to pay an influencer, it’s not necessarily going to work in terms of a good relationship. We had influencers who posted that were great, but they weren’t using the product regularly in their Get Ready With Mes.”

Invest In PR Even Without Clear ROI

Mora Cosmetics tapped The Avana House, a now-defunct public relations firm, to handle its PR for a year. Although El-Rahman confesses that, during the brand’s run with The Avana House, it wasn’t achieving the return on investment in terms of sales she initially expected, she concludes it was a worthwhile expenditure.

“You have to constantly pay them even if there are no PR mentions. We were getting PR mentions every few months, but there were months when we didn’t see anything,” says El-Rahman, adding, “PR is effective, but it depends on who you partner with and what their connections look like. If their connections are not deep and effective or if you work with a PR agency that doesn’t get why your brand is different, you are not going to get that authentic storytelling that can come with PR.”

Tell A Collective Story

In a beauty industry niche, it’s easy to be overlooked by the press. “Within the beauty space, this is something that, as a Muslim person, I feel deeply. There really isn’t a big community to help you tell a collective brand story,” says El-Rahman. “You have all these small Black-owned brands that are able to come together and tell a Black-owned beauty story or Latinx brands that can tell a Latinx beauty story, but there really isn’t a lot of Muslim-owned brands where you can say, ‘Hey, we are here.’”

She elaborates, “Once you get into roundups, and you get critical mass, you get more awareness from that, then you get the in-depth story telling what’s happening, and you get the brand stories and then perhaps ‘Good Morning America.’ Our brand didn’t even get the roundups. We weren’t really even included in a lot of the ‘diversity in beauty’ stories.”

Pursue Amazon Early On

Once Mora Cosmetics was dealing with retail, it was hard for it to focus on building its Amazon business. Dayal believes the brand should’ve focused on it early as possible. She says, “There was negative feedback from other people that were like, ‘Don’t put your brand on Amazon,’ and that slowed us down, just from the appearance of it.”

El-Rahman says, “There was not only this stigma, but the idea that people don’t necessarily buy color cosmetics on Amazon that I don’t agree with because I buy stuff on Amazon all the time. I wish we ignored the advice we were getting from people in the industry.”