What’s the important thing to success in beauty?

For Thirteen Lune, the inclusive beauty platform, it’s been specializing in scalability since Day One.

It’s been “a core guiding true north principle for us,” said cofounder Patrick Herning at WWD’s inaugural Los Angeles beauty conference.

Herning and partner Nyakio Grieco launched the web retailer — which is opening its first stand-alone store in L.A. in coming weeks — in December 2020. Also found shop-in-shop at 600 JCPenney stores, their aim has been to supply shelf space for BIPOC founders. The retailer also carries brands that align with its mission of inclusivity. (Ninety percent of brands are created by people of color, while 10 percent are dedicated to fostering allyship.)

“So, the way you achieve profitability in our opinion and to great success, has been through three levers,” Herning continued, ticking off Thirteen Lune’s omnichannel approach via its direct-to-consumer channel, the JCPenney partnership and the soon-to-open brick-and-mortar store on Larchmont Avenue in L.A. “These three levers are what have ensured our profitable scale.”

Constructing organic traffic to their site has been driven by press, added Herning. The duo has raised $12.5 million in total funds up to now, growing 2,000 percent year-on-year, in line with the brand.

For its first round of funding, they reached out to about 25 family and friends. Twenty-two invested by January 2021, raising $1 million from the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Sean Combs, Naomi Watts, Gregg Renfrew of Beautycounter, Tracey Cunningham of Mèche salon, former U.S. Ambassador Nicole Avant, enterprise capitalist Patrick Finnegan and Sydney Holland of The Urban + The Mystic.

“We also saw this huge opportunity to debunk the parable that Black and brown people only make products for ourselves — and, you already know, industrywide a lot of the ingredients that we use are cultivated from marginalized parts of the world,” Grieco said. “And so, after all you should use ingredients on all skin tones, but what we did really need to give attention to was serving a consumer who had been underserved for a lot too long.”

For each Herning and Grieco Thirteen Lune has been a second endeavor; Herning is the creator of plus-size fashion e-retailer 11 Honoré, acquired by Dia & Co. last 12 months, and Grieco is behind Nyakio Beauty, sold to Unilever in 2017. Grieco has since returned to brand constructing with Relevant, launched in 2022 and focused on ingredient safety for melanin skin. She plans to take it internationally.

“As a first-generation American, I’ve never sold product overseas, and we’re out now in the method and having conversations to take this brand globally,” she said.

It was her personal experience as a founder that allowed her to attach with other BIPOC creators. Brands now found at Thirteen Lune had little or no distribution and few followers when Grieco first connected with them, she explained. In addition they had a tough time getting funding and into factories: “We might share stories about my experience of starting as an indie brand in boutiques and going to national retail and what that looked like as a Black female founder and formed these amazing relationships.”

Success stories include Cece Meadows of Prados Beauty who was doing about $17,000 in sales before Thirteen Lune, said Grieco, and is now at $1.5 million. “After we connected online in 2020, she had began her makeup brand out of her baby’s nursery, 4 kids, former military.”

Grieco added, “We imagine that beauty is universal and after we all come together, that’s how we’re in a position to create more generational wealth through the lens of beauty.”