While brands like Rare Beauty, Fenty Beauty, and Haus Labs have become darlings of the celebrity brand category in prestige, another company has a lock on the celeb brands in the mass set.

Maesa, founded in Paris in 1997, refers to itself as the “world’s No. 1 beauty incubator in mass.” Its roots are in developing private label lines for retailers, but in 2013, it debuted its first brand, Drew Barrymore’s beauty line Flower Beauty. It’s since expanded to several celebrity-backed lines like Kristin Ess, a haircare brand founded by the eponymous celebrity hairstylist in 2017, and Ashley Tisdale’s homecare line Being Frenshe, which debuted in 2022. This branded side now accounts for the largest percentage of its business, CEO Piyush Jain, a 20+ year Unilever vet who took the reins at Maesa in 2022, told Retail Brew.

• Maesa continues to produce private labels for beauty retailers like Sally Beauty along with retailer-exclusive lines like the TikTok viral Fine’ry, a fragrance line launched at Target last year. The company also introduced the Mesa Magic Incubator last year to support entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities.

While there’s been a proliferation of beauty brands—celebrity and otherwise—that have come and gone over the last few years, Maesa said it has managed to double its revenue from 2020 to 2023, and produce its own brands that have captured shelf space at major retailers for over a decade.

Keep reading here.—EC

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Welcome back, everyone. Happy Presidents’ Day to all who celebrate. For the occasion, we have a fun fact about America’s 33rd president.

After World War I, Harry Truman teamed up with his war buddy to open a men’s clothing and accessories shop in Kansas City, Missouri, but it went bankrupt and had to close in 1922. The moral of the story? We’re not sure, but treat retail workers nicely because they could end up becoming president.

Let’s fast-forward roughly a century and dig into what’s going on in retail this week.

In new products: This year doesn’t only mark Beyoncé’s foray into country music, but also hair care. On Tuesday, the superstar’s new brand, Cécred, will be available after months of speculation.

Coca-Cola's first new permanent soda flavor in three years drops today in the United States and Canada. The release of Coca-Cola Spiced and Coca-Cola Spiced Zero Sugar are the company’s latest attempts to draw in younger consumers.

Keep reading here.—KM

It was innocent enough. You bought two sizes of the same shirt online, hoping to find your perfect size. One fit, and the other didn’t, so back to the retailer it went.

For you, it was about getting a flattering shirt, but for a retail CFO, you just caused a major headache.

“Regardless of how you classify it, at the end of the day, there’s margin erosion to the retailer,” Pedro Ramos, chief revenue officer at loss prevention retail tech firm Appriss Retail, told CFO Brew.

Unlike the much-hyped topic of retail theft, accidentally costly returns often have much more innocent origins, but that doesn’t lessen the financial burden to retailers. In 2023, the retail return rate was 14.5%, amounting to $743 billion in total merchandise returns, according to a joint National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail report. For every $1 billion in sales, on average, retailers simultaneously rack up $145 million in returns.

A costly, widespread problem that’s often proliferating by sheer oversight? Now there’s an issue for CFOs to solve if we ever saw one.

Keep reading here on CFO Brew.—NP

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