Sleek Scandinavian Skincare Brand Mantle Plans US Retail Launch Next Year

What Acne Studios and Matilda Djerf have done in fashion and social media, Stockholm-based Mantle aims to do with clean and clinical skincare: melding minimalism with functionalism and building a loyal community, Scandi style.

Established in 2020, Mantle is setting the stage to partner with American retailers next year. As it eyes international expansion, the brand is benefiting from a boost of capital, experience in the startup world and placements in high-end department stores and specialty beauty retailers across Europe, including Le Bon Marché, Selfridges, H&M Beauty, Lyko and Niche Beauty. The move to retail in the United States is being guided by Molly Rådberg, an American and Mantle’s head of new markets and relations.

“In other markets, as we grow, so much of the positive feedback is coming from the textures and the formulations and the absorption,” Rådberg tells Beauty Independent. Mantle co-founder and CEO Josefin Landgård says, “This climate is so harsh in Sweden, and everyone’s dehydrated and gets sort of imbalanced skin. We want to make highly efficacious products.”

Landgård, previously COO and co-founder at Kry, a telehealth company that’s raised more than $700 million and was valued at $2 billion in 2022, started Mantle with Stina Lönnkvist, an influencer and founder of former social media influencer monetization marketplace Color Cone. With 23 people on staff, the brand has secured almost 8 million euros or roughly $8.4 million at the current exchange rate in funding from investors such as H&M Group Ventures, the investment arm of H&M that has Goop in its portfolio, and Venrex, an early backer of Charlotte Tilbury and Apothékary.

Over breakfast at the Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., during a weeklong trip to the U.S. last month, Landgård describes Mantle as “a pandemic baby.” Declining to disclose financials, she says the brand is “very close to being profitable.” Its sales are under $50 million.

While Mantle is extending at retail—the brand tested its own brick-and-mortar store for two months with a pop-up shop in Stockholm, and a shop located within the department store KaDeWe in Berlin opened in November—it pulls the largest proportion of its sales from its website. It’s initiated e-commerce in the U.S. and a few orders are trickling in from the American site.

“As we grow, so much of the positive feedback is coming from the textures and the formulations.”

“We’re not actively doing things in the market until we have chosen [retail] partners,” says Landgård, who had a prior foray into the beauty industry with a stint at European subscription service Glossybox. She notes that Mantle’s sales strategy for the U.S. won’t necessarily mirror its European strategy. She says, “We will use a tailored approach in the U.S. focused on succeeding with strong partners.”

Mantle uses a bevy of active ingredients, azelaic acid, niacinamide, glycolic acid, B-Circadin, lactobionic acid and bisabolol among them. The brand has pivoted away from highlighting CBD, but continues to incorporate cannabis sativa leaf extract sourced from Switzerland in products like The Glow Serum, a calming and brightening oil product that’s one of its bestsellers. Cheaper than Augustinus Bader and Dr. Sturm, Mantle’s prices mostly sit at under $100, with the exception of The Retinol Serum. At $120 for a 30-ml. size, its formula has encapsulated retinol, bakuchiol, isoflavones and chlorophyll.

Its latest product, The Hydra Serum, was released in September, and it contains jellyfish mucin, a marine ingredient Mantle touts on its site for “its ability to bind water in the skin 3X more effectively than hyaluronic acid.” Recalling The Hydra Serum’s origin story, Landgård explains, “There were still some girls in the office who were using the snail mucin serum, and so I was like, ‘We’ve got to make something that makes them not use it.’”

Mantle has around 40 items in its assortment and adds about 10 products a year. It taps a laboratory and factory in Sweden for its products and adheres to Sephora’s clean beauty standards. Daily peeling pads and an innovative sphere formula to enhance the epidermal growth factor, a protein involved in wound healing and tissue regeneration, are on deck for 2025. To help customers select what’s best for their skin, Mantle offers virtual consultations with product managers.

“We will use a tailored approach in the U.S. focused on succeeding with strong partners.”

Mantle plans to launch its U.S. retail network with 10 stockkeeping units. It’s waiting to see what future retail partners prefer, but it expects the lineup to be powered by The Hydra Serum, The Glow Serum and The Barrier Cream, a facial moisturizer packed with biomimetic ingredients and prebiotics.

The spotlight on skin barrier repair is getting brighter. The skin barrier is the topmost layer of the skin. According to Glimpse’s search data from October gathered across sites like Google, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon, interest in the topic grew 35% in the past year, generating 12,000 searches per month. Glimpse reports that shoppers tend to search for ingredients rather than brands. In the past year, searches grew 25% for azelaic acid, 21% for bakuchiol and 18% for niacinamide.

Pursuing other avenues to reach consumers, Mantle developed a hair, body and bath range for high-end hotel rooms at Gleneagles in Scotland and Estelle Manor in Oxfordshire, England. A hotel collaboration with Ett Hem in Sweden will go live next year. Via Ruuby, a digital beauty concierge in London, Mantle products form the basis for a trio of facials conducted by about 30 therapists at homes, offices or hotels.

Landgård says Mantle’s biggest asset is the word-of-mouth recommendations its “tight community of women who really relate to the brand” give to their peers. Those recommendations were a boon for a recent casting call for “skin with experience,” which resulted in the brand screening 800-plus applicants from Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Paris for four spots in a retouch-free advertising campaign.

Landgård and Rådberg’s trip to the U.S. featured a breakfast at Marissa Hermer’s home in Santa Monica, where the restaurateur and former “Ladies of London” TV personality welcomed over 50 of her friends to sample Mantle’s skincare. “It’s like the Tupperware model, but we’re not selling,” says Rådberg. “It’s just we’re getting a cool group of women together.” Hours after the event, though, an attendee ordered a thousand dollars’ worth of Mantle products.