Global Brand President Shay Bennaim’s Blueprint For Turning Tata Harper Into A $100M Business

Shay Bennaim, global brand president of Amorepacific-owned Tata Harper, has clear self-imposed marching orders. “Our near term ambition is to become an over $100 million brand in the next few years,” he says.

To realize that ambition, Bennaim, who joined Tata Harper last year after stops at Estée Lauder-owned Le Labo as GM for North America and Coty as VP of sales and go-to-market strategy and the brand’s namesake founder stepping down as president, aims to amplify awareness, deepen the customer experience for longtime devotees and streamline global operations.

New York is the epicenter of Tata Harper’s latest awareness efforts. Timed with the release of Brightening Eye Gel, the brand is running its first-ever out-of-home campaign. For four weeks, 50 LinkNYC 5G towers in Manhattan near Sephora and Bluemercury stores will feature videos of the product’s ingredients and it on a model, animations conveying product benefits and key messages, and prompts directing people to where they can purchase it.

In another first for the brand, Brightening Eye Gel, priced at $74, launched exclusively on Sephora’s app on Tuesday for 24 hours before landing on Tata Harper’s website Wednesday and subsequently rolling out to Sephora and Bluemercury stores. Containing rose gold pigments, the brand describes Brightening Eye Gel as a hybrid skincare-meets-makeup product. It has 27 natural ingredients such as vitamin C from Kakadu plums, polyphenols from avocados, ceramides from oat and macro hyaluronic acid.

Tata Harper is carried in 55 of Sephora’s over 500 North American doors. The specialty beauty retailer sells about 25 of its products online and 15 in stores, including bestsellers Regenerating Cleanser, $88, and Resurfacing Mask, $68.

A central component of Bennaim’s plans for Tata Harper is fortifying its partnerships with major retailers like Sephora and Bluemecury in leading markets, namely the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and France. The U.S. is by far the brand’s biggest market, followed by France. Tata Harper’s sales in Canada and the U.K. are roughly equivalent.

“The most challenging part is the resources,” he says. “We’re still very much a lean team. My commercial team is only a handful of people. You would think that we had an army of salespeople. One of my biggest beliefs is focus, focus, focus, focus. Get one thing absolutely right, and then let’s scale it.”

“Our near term ambition is to become an over $100 million brand in the next few years.”

Bennaim’s emphasis on focusing Tata Harper’s business meant severing ties with a few hundred retailers worldwide. The brand culled the countries it’s sold in from 63 to its four leading markets. Werte Freunde in Hamburg took to social media to lament receiving the news that the brand was moving away from it. The eco-conscious beauty, apparel and lifestyle boutique had a dedicated Tata Harper facial treatment room.

“It was probably one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever had to make, and I’ve ever had to make,” says Bennaim. “We knew people were going to be disappointed, which was really hard.”

In the U.S., Tata Harper pulled out of Cos Bar and Beautyspace at Bloomingdale’s, while staying at Sephora, Bluemercury, Nordstrom and Credo. “We just couldn’t support all of them within the U.S.,” says Bennaim. “Maybe in the future there’ll be an opportunity for us to go back, but we wanted to stick with those handful of customers that we can really build our business together with.”

Tata Harper has partnerships with over 50 luxury spas like Mexico’s Rosewood Mayakoba, The Standard Miami and Anassa Spa in Cyprus. Select spas provide dedicated Tata Harper treatments, and Bennaim anticipates beefing up the brand’s backbar selection in the near future. Tata Harper has a team of aestheticians and spa manager that manage its spa business separately, according to Bennaim.

“We want to make sure we retain everything that Tata has developed.”

In 2010, Tata Harper founded the luxury clean skincare brand with her husband Henry from her farm in Vermont at a moment when the clean  beauty movement was gaining traction. In 2015, it received a minority investment from Alliance Consumer Growth. Two years later, it was reportedly generating between $60 million and $65 million in sales. When Sephora introduced the Clean at Sephora initiative in 2018, Tata Harper was in the inaugural cohort with Drunk Elephant, Tatcha, RMS Beauty, Supergoop and Boscia.

In 2022, South Korean beauty conglomerate Amorepacific created a roughly $125 million special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to acquire Tata Harper, marking its first acquisition of an American brand. Tata Harper declined to disclose current sales.

In recent years, Tata Harper’s clean positioning has been less of a distinguishing feature as clean beauty has become increasingly mainstream. When asked about centering Tata Harper’s clean beauty bonafides going forward, Bennaim says that’s “pretty much what I’m getting paid for.” He adds, “Even though clean is the space that we exist in, we never try to align or fit into the clean space. Our objective was always to continue to offer the best high-quality ingredients in high-performance products.”

The brand is vertically integrated as it’s been since its inception, although that doesn’t mean that every ingredient in its products is grown on the farm in Vermont, but its products are assembled there. Harper remains integral in guiding day-to-day operations. “I talk to Tata every day almost,” says Bennaim. “She is helping with formula development, working with the marketing team and the R&D team, filming content.”

He fully embraces his close collaboration with Harper. “We want to make sure we retain everything that Tata has developed and created in everything we’re trying to bring over the next few years,” stresses Bennaim. “It’s one of our top priorities to maintain that ethos.”