Elevated Hand Care Brand Paume Enters 700 Ulta Beauty Stores, Reaches Profitability

Solidifying itself as a major player in the hand care space four years after its launch, Paume has rolled out to 700 Ulta Beauty stores and hit its first month surpassing roughly $713,000 in sales.

Although Paume has completely different aesthetics and core consumers from Touchland, both brands are proving that hand sanitizer businesses can outlast the pandemic with status symbol merchandise. Touchland, the buzzy gen Z brand, was recently acquired by Church & Dwight for up to $880 million. Fueled by millennial shoppers, Paume is becoming a broader elevated hand care specialist by building distribution and moving beyond sanitizer with hand cleanser, probiotic hand balm, all-in-one cuticle and nail cream and more.

At the height of the pandemic, Amy Welsman, a seasoned entrepreneur and ex-national sales manager at Knix, developed Paume out of personal need as a new mother when hand sanitizers and hand cleanliness became priorities in her home. She wasn’t a fan of options that were harsh on the skin, smelled unpleasant and were packaged wastefully, so she came up with the idea of creating an elevated hand hygiene solution for new moms like her.

Paume made its debut with the Paume Pump, a uniquely shaped hand sanitizer with a short spout and cylindrical body in muted shades suitable for an elegantly appointed bathroom. Eschewing alcohol, the formula features a unisex botanical scent and uses a plant-based emollient derived from safflower oil for long-lasting hydration. Paume has plastic-neutral certification through Repurpose Global, houses its smaller dispensers in packaging with at least 65% post-consumer recycled (PCR) material and sells refill pouches for its hand sanitizer and cleanser. Prices range from $12 at the low end up to about $98 for premium bundles.

With stores anxious to stock up on hand sanitizer at the start, Paume gained retail traction out of the gate, but Welsman has been careful with its retail steps. In Canada, where the brand is based in Toronto, Paume entered Indigo. In the United States, it entered Nordstrom, The Detox Market, Grove Collaborative, Loft and SLFMKR prior to Ulta. This year, its wholesale sales have multiplied 2.5X.

“It was important to establish the brand with the right retail partners that would give us the legitimacy we needed.”

“I felt it was important to establish the brand with the right retail partners that would give us the legitimacy we needed and deserved,” says Welsman. “We wanted those flagship partners on the retail side.” She adds, “I never wanted it to grow too fast, so I’ve focused on being intentional and really deciding what direction to take the brand that’s best for it.”

However, direct-to-consumer distribution has been Paume’s biggest channel, and it’s accounted for 60% of its sales for the past two years. DTC excludes Amazon,  which the brand launched last year. Its growth on Amazon has spiked 3.5X, and the brand is slated to reach over $1 million in sales by the end of 2025 on the platform alone.

Welsman says, “We’ve always been an omnichannel-focused company, and, in the early days, I saw the value in the direct-to-consumer side of the business.” She elaborates, “We’re spending most of our marketing dollars, which is an average of around $150,000 per month, on Meta advertising, which then feeds into Amazon. Meta drives all our channels in one way or another, so when I look at overall profitability, I always ask if what we are spending is an appropriate amount to achieve that end profitability for where we are at the stage of business.”

Out of the gate, Paume raised a friends and family round of roughly 250,000 Canadian dollars or around $178,000. During the initial year and a half, Welsman ran the business herself, using the raised funds for bottle pump tooling, product development and overhead costs. In 2021, she completed a larger friends and family and angel round, raising approximately 1.2 million Canadian dollars or about $855,000. The brand has been bootstrapped since.

“We’re sticking with hand care.”

Paume crossed into profitability this year. Welsman expects to consider fundraising again for the brand in the future, especially to support retail growth. However, she has no plans to spread Paume to a ton of retail doors within the next two years. Instead, she’s concentrating on proving it can perform in existing retailers before supercharging retail.

Deliberate product expansion has been key to Paume’s success. Welsman is steadfast about positioning the brand exclusively as the only luxury hand care brand with a dedicated daily ritual that ties luxurious accessories and efficacious formulas to a moment of indulgent self-care.

Often compared to haircare brand Crown Affair for that positioning, Welsman admits it’s been tempting to push the brand into categories such as body care, but she’s committed to keeping it in the hand arena. Paume has just extended its assortment with a hand and foot mask, and next up for the brand is a new foot product and a product within the sanitizer category.

“At the time, no one was thinking about hand care beyond typical fragrance houses, and no one was thinking about efficacy, the ingredient story, hand neglect and all the specificities around hands as a category,” says Welsman. “So, we did, and it’s worked to our advantage,”

Welsman underscores the brand is “owning hand care in a unique and focused way” in an incredibly crowded beauty market. “I love being really focused on what we’re doing and that we are true to our roots,” she says. “We’re sticking with hand care.”