
Sephora Expands Body Care Offering With Soft Services Launch
Responding to consumer demand, Sephora is amplifying its body care presence by bringing on Soft Services.
The brand launches online today and will roll out to 300 doors on Feb. 16. Its bestselling $28 Buffing Bar, $30 Smoothing Solution and $28 Speed Soak along with an exclusive $32 Discovery Set featuring Smoothing Solution, Speed Soak and Buffing Bar will be available in physical locations, and Sephora’s website will additionally offer $44 Software Update Performance Retinol Serum, $40 Carea Cream and $32 Comfort Cleanse.
“We are thrilled to partner with Soft Services as we continue to grow this exciting, emerging category of prestige body care,” says Brooke Banwart, SVP of skincare merchandising at Sephora, in a statement. “With an education-first approach, Soft Services offers high-quality formulas that provide individualized solutions to some of our clients’ most common body skincare concerns. We look forward to introducing this brand to our Sephora community and know that their innovative products will be a great addition to our assortment.”
Soft Services founder Rebecca Zhou grew up in Novi, Mich., going to the Sephora store at Twelve Oaks Mall, where her brand will be carried. She says, “Part of the origin story of Soft Services is that I’ve had body acne my whole life as a dancer, and when I think about young me who felt there must be something wrong with me because nobody’s talking about this and there weren’t any products out there, the idea that now in my same hometown, I could walk into a Sephora and see products that specifically address those issues, that feels really incredible.”

Marking Soft Services’ retail debut, its Sephora partnership is being financed with an injection of capital from existing investors for an undisclosed amount. Its prior investors include Michael Dearing, founder of Harrison Metal, and Craig Shapiro, founder of Collaborative Fund, among others. Soft Services raised $300,000 from friends and family along with a $3 million seed round in advance of its 2021 launch. The brand is expecting its sales to multiple 4X to 5X this year.
Soft Services’ talks with Sephora date back to its launch, but Zhou explains it didn’t want to see the deal with the retailer until it had a strong footing “in understanding how our products are resonating with customers, what type of education customers need to use the product successfully, and then on the operation side, making sure we would be able to scale and keep up pace with Sephora by the time we entered.”
It helps that the conversation around premium body care is becoming more mainstream. The success of brands like Nécessaire and Sol de Janeiro at Sephora are illustrative of the mainstreaming of the category. “When we initially launched, the idea of what we were doing was much more novel,” says Zhou. “We’ve seen such an increase in interest for body care to really transform I feel like into body skincare, and that’s not only from the customer, but definitely the industry at large. I think at Soft Services we can take credit for a part of that accelerated interest.”
Soft Services plans to hire a team member to spearhead its partnership with Sephora and another experienced with work in the retail field. It currently has six full-time employees. Education is essential to get consumers very familiar with facial skincare up to speed about products designed for the skin below their faces, according to Zhou.
At Sephora, she says, “Their customers need guidance in figuring out, well, what does it mean to use retinol on my body? Or how should I be thinking about exfoliation when it comes to my body skin, which is both sensitive and super tough?”

Soft Services co-founder and chief creative officer Annie Kreighbaum left the company in July 2023. “Myself and the entire Soft Services team are grateful for the enormous contributions Annie has made to the company and are excited for what she does next,” says Zhou. “I am beyond proud of all we’ve accomplished at Soft Services.”
Last year, Soft Services took its overnight hand cream Theraplush off the market due to mold complaints. After a six-month investigation, it found the cases had to do with refill systems and the assembly process in customers’ homes. The product relaunched in January.
“Even though we learned that the contamination wasn’t coming from within our system or supply chain or anything that we sent to customers, we decided to take this moment to really relook at Theraplush,” says Zhou. “We looked at everything from the formula to the packaging system to the design of the case and how easy and fast it could be assembled in someone’s home and made a bunch of adjustments to really minimize the possibility that, through the assembly process, a customer could end up seeing contamination again.”
In a way, with its arrival at Sephora, the entire Soft Services line is “relaunching” to an entirely new audience and “way more eyeballs,” points out Zhou. She says, “We feel really grateful that our customers have put so much trust in us over the past couple of years, diving into a whole new realm of their beauty routines that they never had before, and we’re super excited to continue doing that work with a much larger audience.”
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