In late August, The Detox Market’s customers received an email that was undoubtedly a welcome surprise for many. The subject proclaimed, “HOTTEST COMEBACK: Cult-fave May Lindstrom Skin is BACK.”
The luxury clean skincare brand has reentered retail after withdrawing from stores amid the pandemic four years ago to focus on direct-to-consumer distribution, which enables it to execute its intentional model of in-house manufacturing and sourcing ingredients directly from farms globally with greater control.
When Beauty Independent spoke to Lindstrom in 2018, the brand was in close to 100 retail doors, including Cult Beauty, Barneys New York, Nordstrom, Net-a-Porter, Neiman Marcus, Goop, Violet Grey, The Detox Market, Citrine and Space NK. Today, along with The Detox Market, May Lindstrom Skin has returned to Citrine and Space NK, where it will be in select stores in January next year.
“Sometimes the best thing is to have somebody be able to walk in off the street and go, ‘I’ve never seen this before,’ and I’m going to give them that opportunity more,” says May Lindstrom, a former model who founded her namesake skincare brand in 2011. “I’m excited about the ability to be more visible, to be a little bit less scared of perfection.”
Corresponding with an industry-wide post-COVID omnichannel distribution push, May Lindstrom Skin’s retail comeback follows the bootstrapped brand’s bank not renewing its line of credit without incoming retail purchase orders, an unforeseen consequence of its DTC focus, according to Lindstrom. May Lindstrom Skin has since switched banks.
“We grew in 2020. We grew in 2021. Our numbers went up, and we became unbankable at the same time,” she says. “If we had investors, I suppose you could maybe go ask your investors for more money, but they could look at it the same way.”
It also follows Melissa Lenberg, founder of Citrine, messaging Lindstrom late last year to inform her that Citrine would be ecstatic to carry May Lindstrom Skin again, should the opportunity arise. In its past tenure at Citrine, a clean beauty retailer with a single location in Scottsdale, Ariz., May Lindstrom Skin moved more units than it did at any other individual retailer, even Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Goop.
“She crushed them,” says Lindstrom of Lenberg, adding, “She really took her hiring seriously, always had fantastic women on the floor that knew their stuff. I would do an event there, and it really did feel like coming into a community.”
Lenberg isn’t alone in keeping tabs on May Lindstrom Skin’s whereabouts. Lindstrom and her brand have assumed positions of influence in the beauty startup space, and their steps are tracked by entrepreneurs in and out of it.
“They’re watching me and going, what is she going to do? I get letters every day from other brand founders, not just in the skincare business, but all across so many industries,” she says. “I swear half our newsletter list is people that have no interest in buying our skincare. It’s people who are watching how we ran our business in 2020 when we decided we’re not going to fulfill those wholesale orders.”
May Lindstrom Skin currently offers seven facial skincare products priced from $75 for exfoliator The Clean Dirt to $220 for the bestselling balm The Blue Cocoon, one of the first skincare products to incorporate blue tansy as an ingredient. It also offers two limited-edition body oils, The Good Stuff and The Happy Galaxy, both $160.
“I’m excited about the ability to be more visible, to be a little bit less scared of perfection.”
May Lindstrom Skin doesn’t expect retail sales to ever eclipse DTC sales. The brand previously set exacting standards for its retail partnerships, but it’s toned them down as it reemerges at stores in recognition of the tough realities of the beauty retail business. Formerly, to make sure its products were fresh upon application, the brand mandated they be opened within six months of the date of manufacture printed on boxes and be used within 12 months of opening. To facilitate adherence to the guidelines, the brand would check on inventory at its stockists to verify it wasn’t sitting on shelves. Many retailers couldn’t or wouldn’t comply.
Inventory management remains a major factor determining May Lindstrom Skin’s retail relationships, and the brand still suggests its retail partners not allow the products to sit on their shelves on a prolonged basis. “Retailers ask us if we have order minimums, and we’re far more likely to have maximums,” says Lindstrom. “We don’t encourage over-buying. We want to send everything fresh. We want them to rotate products. We’d love if they all took first-in first-out rotation as seriously as a grocery store, but…they don’t need to stress it with us.”
Part of the green beauty vanguard that counts OSEA, Odacité, Josh Rosebrook and Rahua among its members, May Lindstrom Skin premiered in retail in 2012 at Spirit Beauty Lounge, a pioneering clean beauty e-tailer that’s since shuttered. In 2015 to 2016, the brand took off, and retailers the likes of Nordstrom and Barneys New York were hungry to sell it. Lindstrom remembers, “I didn’t have a single person on my team doing outreach, not one.”
When Lindstrom made the difficult decision in 2020 for her brand to exit retail, she recalls, “I looked at how many orders that we have in wholesale, what that takes to fulfill. I look at how many orders we have through our website. Maylindstom.com crushes the rest of the world put together, so the most important thing for me to do as a business leader is keep Maylindstom.com operating. The only way that we could do that is if we had enough inventory to fulfill those orders.”
By going direct only, May Lindstrom Skin could optimize its DTC operations because it didn’t have to manage the day-to-day work of retail partnerships like fielding inquiries and traveling for staff trainings and customer events. Lindstrom’s less taxing schedule was a boon for the brand. She says, “That’s actually how we got to where we are now, where for the first time in the history of the company, we have excess bandwidth.”
Reflecting on May Lindstrom Skin’s earlier experiences at retailers, though, Lindstrom acknowledges they were integral in introducing new people to the brand—and those shoppers becoming loyal customers.
“Most of those people would buy from our retail partners, they’d go research us, and then they’d figure out that buying online at May Lindstrom ships fresh from the kitchen lab…They’d come shop from us,” she says. “I was giving very little credit to these retailers that were kind of a fishing operation. They were helping us. We were helping them, too. We brought up their sales, but they were such a direct link back to us.”
