Exponent Beauty, which hit the market in April 2022, is working with creators in its own way — by bringing them in as investors. Sara and Erin Foster have been investors since the brand launched, preceding even the official launch of their early-stage fund, Oversubscribed Ventures. Now, Exponent Beauty is announcing longtime fashion influencer Rocky Barnes as its latest investor, Glossy can exclusively confirm. Barnes has 3.4 million followers on Instagram. The amounts of the investments have not been disclosed.
Exponent Beauty differentiates itself from other skin care with a focus on ingredient freshness. Active ingredients in powder form, such as retinol or vitamin C, are mixed by the end user into a hyaluronic acid base and blended together. At launch, founder Liz Whitman called it “self-activated skin care.”
Of the decision to invest, Barnes said, “In my industry, I’m constantly being connected to new brands and introduced to things. …… When I [learned about] Exponent, [I thought] it was shocking that no one has done this sooner. It’s a genius idea. Everyone is investing so much money in beauty products, [while] everything is losing [its efficacy] or degrading consistently after it’s exposed to oxygen and sun. People don’t realize their products [hold] a fraction of their potency after a while,” she said.
Barnes and her husband are active investors — they made investments in “around 12” companies last year, she said, which spanned categories including real estate, tech, and alcohol. Of growing an investment portfolio, Barnes said, “I’ve been doing social media, influencing for close to 15 years. At a certain point, after having a family and having done this for so long, you want to see yourself grow outside of your own image.”
Whitman began raising capital for Exponent before it launched. “The first phase was validating that [existing, competing] clinical skin-care brands actually degrade, working on a prototype for a product that could solve for this, and then doing clinical testing on our formulations,” she said, noting that all of the brand’s packaging had to be designed from scratch. “The [investment] round was constructed very specifically to have the lion’s share taken up by venture funds, but always with this allocation room left over for strategic angels,” said Whitman. At the time, that was where the Foster sisters came in — they’d met Whitman through Founders Fund, one of Exponent’s investors. They joined in early, advising Whitman on the brand’s color scheme and serving as early product testers, for example. If the brand sells, they will make a profit, as will Barnes.
This is, of course, a mutually beneficial arrangement. Exponent, which has 20,000 Instagram followers, benefits from these creators’ talking about its products and helping raise brand awareness. Sara Foster has 773,000 Instagram followers and Erin Foster has 661,000. The sisters also featured…
Read More: Rocky Barnes joins Erin & Sara Foster in investing in Exponent Beauty
