Millie Bobbie Brown’s make-up line is the most in-demand British celebrity-owned beauty brand at the moment.
Why? What separates Mille Bobbie Brown from the scores (and scores and scores) of celebrities trying to emulate the success of Selena Gomez and Rihanna in the beauty space?
@florencebymills, Brown’s makeup line, has 3.6m followers on Tiktok, and 66.6m likes overall. You’d be hard-pressed to find a video with less than 30,000 views – and the ones which include the eponymous Brown are guaranteed to reach 100,000 or into the millions.
There is also Florence By Mills coffee, with over 200,000 followers, and Florence By Mills fashion (newer, with only 20,000 followers).
Millie Bobbie Brown promotes body positivity, confidence, and self-care—noble goals that are not dissimilar to others in the same space.
The key to Millie Bobbie Brown’s success
According to Rachel Manning and Sarah Culpan at research company Savanta, the key to her- and others’ success is authenticity and audience connection. It probably also didn’t hurt to have an in-built viewership in the millions from her work on Stranger Things and Enola Holmes.
“When she launched… it made sense for her because she shared her skin care journey,” Rachel Manning, director in Savanta’s wealth team, said. “She was sharing the skin care concerns of the age cohort that followed her as well. So, to have a product that worked clearly on her skin really resonated with the audience.”
There’s a sense that “if it works for her, then it will work for me… it’s like the ultimate endorsement,” Manning said.
Millie Bobbie Brown is “leveraging the audience that she’s going after,” senior director at Savanta Sarah Culpan said. “We’ve seen a rise in these more playful skin care and beauty brands… Florence by Mills is really capturing that.”
“It’s setting itself apart from competitors [because] it has a unique selling point,” she continued. Celebrity brands which find success like Brown’s are those that “make intuitive sense… when they launch, it feels like it makes complete sense that [the celebrity] would do that”.
A good example is Rihanna and her brand Fenty, which specifically provides an “unmatched” offering of foundation shades. Rihanna said she developed her makeup “with promise of inclusion for all women”.
Manning explains that before launching the brand, she regularly discussed her own experience with makeup and the difficulty she had finding the right foundation shade.
“When she launched her own line and it tapped into those same things, it made sense and it felt authentic,” Manning said. “That’s a massive shift from the 90s, when we saw celebrities putting their name to anything… Now it has to connect with their audiences.”
Fenty Beauty was the most successful celebrity beauty brand worldwide last year, with revenue of £577.3m.
Kylie Jenner provides more realistic evidence of the pros and cons of tying your image to a consumer product. Her lip kit, launched in 2015, famously sold out within ten minutes and helped make her the world’s youngest “self-made” billionaire by 2019.
“When she launched her lip kit, everyone was talking about her lips – it made sense to launch [the product]… it sold out everywhere,” Manning said. “Now a few years down the line, it’s much less relevant. You see the sales dropping off because what she’s launching doesn’t correlate to what she’s sharing about her life, what she’s sharing about who she is as a person.”
Her new alcohol line has not been particularly successful, partly because it doesn’t match up to the image she has attached to it, Manning added.
There’s a huge amount of money to be made for those who do beauty right: the US market grew 15 per cent in the first half of last year to $14bn (£11.3bn), according to Circana.
Celebrity beauty brands amassed over $1bn (£800m) in sales alone in 2023, and sales for the top 10 brands surged by nearly 58 per cent in 2023, according to Upbeat Agency. The overall growth rate of the beauty industry is projected to grow by around three per cent annually.
Are we reaching carrying capacity?
Having been shown the green-backed light, everyone is now trying to get a slice of the beauty pie.
Luxury brands have also moved into the beauty space, trying to capitalise on their in-built heritage audiences in much the same way as celebrities do.
“Historically, those types of brands would have tried to get a celebrity to be the face of their brand,” Manning said. “They used to be more of a partnership and now there’s that direct competition.”
Both celebrities and luxury brands have an in-built audience, Manning said, adding that “regardless of whether it’s a celebrity brand or a luxury brand, I think how well-tuned they are to the way the market is going will determine who’s more successful”.
The space is now so populated, though, that newcomers “have to be doing something really good or something that’s not been seen before”, Culpan said.
Hayley Bieber provides a good example. Her £35 silicone phone case with an inbuilt lip-treatment holder was “absolutely genius”, Caplan said. The case went viral on social media and quickly sold out.
“[It’s] not something that we’ve seen from a brand… [it] helped her celebrity beauty brand to stand out and capture market share from people that don’t necessarily just like Hailey Bieber, but they also want this unique product that’s not been seen before,” Coplan said.
Beauty industry trends
Another way to win market share is to jump on trends (early and authentically). One such trend in the industry at the moment is “ingredient-led” products (yes, yes, all products have ingredients, but do they have the right ones?).
Consumers are increasingly looking for skin-boosters like retinoids, hyaluronic acids and vitamin C over simple face washes or cleansers.
“As the knowledge of ingredients grows and it becomes more mainstream, consumers are seeking out those ingredient-led products,” Coplan said. “That can be across skin care, but it’s filtering down into beauty [too].”
“Even the quantity, or per cent, of the ingredient [in the product] is a shortcut that consumers are using more and more to decipher what products and brands to purchase,” she added.
The most important thing, however, remains the celebrities’ connection to the brand. People are “really looking” for brands that feel authentic – across all age groups, Culpan said.
“It’s connected to every facet of who they are – how they perform, who they are as a performer, how they communicate… [as well as] engagement with social media,” Manning said.
“It shouldn’t come across as kind of too try hard or false, otherwise it doesn’t connect,” she said.
It’s just the ultimate wallet-voting popularity contest, then.