Professional Surfer Alana Blanchard Partners With Gloss Ventures To Launch Sun And Skincare Brand Pursuit

Professional surfer Alana Blanchard’s newest pursuit is sun and skincare brand Pursuit Beauty.

Its assortment spans seven products—Clean Wave Daily Face Cleanser, Double-Up SPF 50 Face Sunscreen Serum, Hang 40 SPF 40 Face Sunscreen Gel, Body Surf SPF 40 Daily Body Sunscreen, Golden Hour Hydrating Glow Serum Stick, Coldrush Cooling & Neutralizing Serum Stick and Locked-In Overnight Moisturizer—priced from $18 to $20 and packaged in vibrant tubes with gradient blue, orange and yellow hues. Created in partnership with Gloss Ventures, an incubator and acquirer specializing in omnichannel distribution, it will start selling today on its own website in advance of launching on Amazon in a few weeks and later branching into retail.

“I’ve wanted to work on a sun and skincare product for a long time,” says Blanchard. “Myself and everyone I know spend our lives in the sun and in the water. Over the years, I’ve gotten a really good sense of what skin and sun products work the best, and I’ve always found that everything that’s high quality is super expensive, so I wanted to create a line of products that was super high quality, but not overpriced. I met the team at Gloss Ventures who wanted to do the same thing, so it was a great fit.”

Pursuit was designed with masstige positioning in mind. More expensive than mass-market brands such as Neutrogena, which generally prices its sunscreens around $10 or under, but cheaper than prestige brands such as Supergoop, which has products exceeding $40, it hopes to attract mass-market consumers willing to pay a slight premium for clean, vegan, cruelty-free products with textures Carlin Rode, marketing manager for skincare at Gloss Ventures, describes as “luxury.” She says, “We worked really hard to get the best ingredients and formulas we could and make them as affordable as we possibly could.”

Blanchard isn’t stepping into vegan beauty without bona fides. The 32-year-old who learned how to surf at 4 years old has been vegan most of her life. “I just love animals, and I can’t imagine hurting them,” she says. “I also just feel so healthy and happy with a plant-based diet, and I can’t imagine living any other way. I don’t judge people who might think differently, but, for me, it’s what makes the most sense.”

“I wanted to create a line of products that was super high quality, but not overpriced.”

Specifically on Pursuit as a vegan sun and skincare brand, she adds, “There are tons of incredible vegan ingredients that are beneficial for your skin, so there’s really no need to use any ingredients that come from animals. The vegan, clean, cruelty-free formulas we created turned out perfectly, and we didn’t have to sacrifice on any front.”

Prognosticating about Pursuit’s possible bestsellers, Rode points to Double-Up SPF 50 Face Sunscreen Serum and Hang 40 SPF 40 Face Sunscreen Gel. “We are really making SPF a hero product that’s accessible for everyone in a really cool and fun way,” she says. Blanchard’s favorite product is Double-Up 50 Face Sunscreen Serum. “All of the sunscreen products are super effective, but this one is just ridiculously good,” she says. “You can wear it all day and night for that matter with or without makeup on, and your skin just feels great wearing it.”

Pursuit is beginning with chemical sunscreens. Mineral sunscreens are down the line as the brand fills out what it calls The Daily Pursuit or its customers’ daily sun and skincare routines. Blanchard says, “We want The Daily Pursuit to nourish your skin and beyond, so we’re working on some exciting holistic products coming soon. Besides continuing to create incredible clean, vegan products, I hope that Pursuit is more than just a sun and skincare brand, but also a community of awesome people who are all on their own ‘pursuit.’”

Rode details Gloss Ventures has sketched out four avatars characterizing Pursuit’s core consumers aged 20 to 35 years old: athletes and Blanchard buffs, busy moms, plant-based lifestyle enthusiasts and adventure seekers. The brand is connecting with influencers that suit each avatar to grow its audience, and it will leverage Blanchard’s audience, of course. She has 4 million-plus followers across various digital platforms.

“I hope that Pursuit is more than just a sun and skincare brand, but also a community of awesome people who are all on their own ‘pursuit.’”

Pursuit isn’t the only brand tied to a recognized personality in Gloss Ventures’ portfolio. Influencer Sarah Cheung’s brand Sacheu Beauty with Gloss Ventures debuted in 2020. The firm’s other brands are Vitamin Bounty, Active Wow and Zoë Ayla. In a 2021 interview, co-founder and CEO Quinn Roukema disclosed that Gloss Ventures’ sales were poised to increase 60%, and it achieved 20% EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) for its entire portfolio. It previously secured almost $10 million in senior debt and is expected to draw further funding.

The beauty industry has been inundated by celebrity and influencer brands, and the sun care segment is no exception. In it, there’s Winnie Harlow’s Cay Skin, Naomi Osaka’s Kinlo and Venus Williams’ EleVen. Roukema emphasized in the earlier interview that Gloss Ventures takes a different approach to celebrity brands than most companies that develop them. “We think a lot of the celebrity brands are being built the wrong way,” he said. “It should be all about the brand first, and then identifying people that really match the brand and embody it to really make it tangible for the consumer.”

Blanchard takes a different approach to brand partnerships as well, at least in the wake of her nearly 15-year partnership with Rip Curl ending in 2020. Along with Rip Curl, Blanchard has been affiliated with OSEA Malibu, Reef, Hurley, SPY Optic, GoPro and Rockstar. In a YouTube video posted last year, she shared her relationship with Rip Curl soured after she became a mom. She recounts that the brand informed her “the family image isn’t their image,” and she was too old to be pictured with 18-year-old models. Blanchard has two sons—1-year-old Koda Riley and 4-year-old Banks Harvey—with fellow professional surfer Jack Freestone.

“I really do think brands have a huge impact on women and young girls, and how we perceive our bodies and how we think we should look,” she said in the video. “Yeah, I just feel I wish I stood up for myself more because…since I didn’t stand up for myself, I wasn’t standing up for every girl behind me, and yeah I guess this is me standing up for myself and asking companies to, you know, change. I feel like we all deserve a change. It shouldn’t be just this one size fits all teeny tiny 18-year-old model.”

Blanchard tells Beauty Independent, “I used to think that it was important for me to be who people I was working with in the industry wanted me to be. I went through a lot of tough times in my career trying to do that. Over the last few years, though, I realized that really just focusing on being myself in all aspects of what I was doing was the most important thing to building something meaningful in the next stages of my career and long term. The beauty industry seems to be embracing that type of thing more and more, too, which is refreshing, but I still think there’s more work to be done there to embrace and encourage people being true to themselves and not trying to fit something that is dictated by others.”