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Forbes
3 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
What Went Wrong With Drunk Elephant
Once an iconic brand, Drunk Elephant is now facing an identity crisis with sales plummeting Drunk Elephant's sales dropped 65% in the past year, urging parent company Shiseido to call for a complete brand revamp. Once a cult brand and disruptor in the world of skincare, Drunk Elephant is an interesting case for what happens when a brand loses its voice and core audience and becomes untangled with short-lived viral exposure. Founded by Tiffany Masterson, Drunk Elephant was among the first brands to lead the clean skincare movement, offering products free of harsh or toxic components, while at the same time focusing on dermatologist-approved ingredients. Masterson formulated products containing active ingredients like AHAs, BHAs and Vitamin C, promising gentle and effective skincare. Through this positioning, the brand attracted both natural beauty fans and clinical skincare users, and quickly gained traction. Its colorful yet minimalist packaging stood out from competitors, helping the brand became very popular on social media and entering Sephora stores in 2015. By 2019, Drunk Elephant amassed $120 million in net sales and was ranked most popular skincare brand across all its retailers. It was acquired that same year by Shiseido for $845 million, making it one of the biggest skincare and beauty acquisitions of the decade. Under its new ownership, the brand expanded into body and haircare, entered new markets and grew its customer base, which mainly comprised women aged 25-40 with a budget to spend on premium skincare. Drunk Elephant sits in the prestige category, with products ranging between $20 and $100, making it a premium yet relatively mass-market brand unlike higher-end luxury skincare brands. As the trend grew bigger, safety concerns arose among parents, dermatologists as well as regulators, concerned about the effects of such adult and mature skincare products on kids. This 'Sephora kids' trend backfired and negatively impacted the brand's equity, creating a disconnect between the brand's core audience and its recent buzzworthy consumers. Tweens likely pushed away the brand's older customers, and bringing them back might be challenging. Sales plunged 65% in the past year, with the brand's main market - Americas - being the most affected in this sharp decline. Now, Shiseido is focused on 'rebuilding brand engagement' with a goal to 'leverage new messaging to drive awareness on clinical and high-performance skincare and drive offline consumer engagement by educating beauty advisors at retail touchpoints', as shared in the company's 2025 Q1 presentation. Will a brand revamp work? Given the intense competition in the skincare space, and the fact that now dozens of new clean and effective skincare brands have seen light of day since Drunk Elephant was born, the task might prove challenging. Drunk Elephant's current struggles are an unfortunate reminder of the risks of short-lived viral trends fueled by social media. The brand's detour into a much younger consumer group cost it both credibility and connection with its original audience, something that may take significant efforts to rebuild. As Shiseido attempts a reset, the challenge will not just to win back customers but to re-establish its brand voice and clear identity in a very crowded market. The clean and clinical skincare space Drunk Elephant helped define ten years ago is now highly competitive, making it even more essential for the brand to reclaim the unique, differentiated brand identity that helped it thrive.
Business of Fashion
14-05-2025
- Business
- Business of Fashion
Drunk Elephant Was Never for Kids
Drunk Elephant has learned the hard way not to play with tweens. On Monday, Japanese beauty conglomerate Shiseido released its first quarter 2025 earnings and revealed that sales at the pastel-hued clean beauty brand it acquired had declined by a staggering 65 percent. It was a major reversal of fortunes for Drunk Elephant, which Shiseido acquired for $845 million in 2019 and rose to fame for spearheading trends in accessibility to high-quality formulations, playful marketing and of course, liquid bronzer. For those who have been closely observing, however, the news is simply confirmation of suspected stumbles. Since it was purchased six years ago, Drunk Elephant grew slowly, then explosively, then shrunk, as it has struggled to hold on to consumers old and new while simultaneously balancing its playful sense of whimsy with its core promise of results-driven skincare. Unforeseen headwinds also set Drunk Elephant back, like overexposure to the weakening Chinese and travel retail segments, or production issues related to its best-selling Bronzing Drops. But the main source of Drunk Elephant's woes is ever-fickle teenagers, who embraced it wholeheartedly during the height of the 'Sephora tween' phase last year before quickly moving on, exposing a gaping wound in its brand identity. Prior to their arrival, the brand was a Sephora darling, quickly becoming its number one skincare brand after its in-store debut in 2015. By 2023, when the teens arrived, clamouring for Drunk Elephant's technicolor packaging, they brought a tailwind with them, helping the brand access a new and skin-curious audience. But turning towards this new customer meant turning away from the brand's core: Millennials and young Gen-Xers, who were drawn to Drunk Elephant for its clean ethos and efficacious skincare. Now, they've come to see the brand as too young for their tastes. 'Drunk Elephant became so strongly associated with Sephora tweens that it lost credibility with older consumers,' explained Casey Lewis, who writes the teen trend newsletter After School. 'Tweens are notoriously fickle consumers. They're not brand loyal. They simply seek out what's new and trending, and when the market is as saturated as this one, consumers will literally never run out of other brands and products to try.' A worsening economic climate has teens — and their parents — trading down from their beloved Protini peptide moisturisers ($69). Even the brand's creator may be moving on: Puck News recently reported that Tiffany Masterson, who founded the brand in 2013, is stepping down from her day-to-day duties as chief creative officer amid Drunk Elephant's sloppiest year yet. Shiseido declined to comment on speculation. The Curse of the Sephora Tweens When the brand launched direct-to-consumer in 2013, it was positioned as clean, highly efficacious skincare with a winking sense of humour. Early hits, like its C-Firma Day Serum ($79), were seen as smart, better-priced alternatives to products like Skinceuticals CE Ferulic ($182). At a time when doctor-led labels were only slowly emerging, and the clean beauty movement was beginning to bloom, Masterson's brand resonated with a group of people who seemed to be waiting for it. By 2019, Drunk Elephant was doing about $120 million in annuals sales. The next year, Shiseido touted its new acquisition as a key to increasing its profitability in the Americas, and went all-in on ramping up Drunk Elephant's distribution — in North American travel retail, in Sephora doors across China and in every Ulta Beauty in the US. As a result, sales nearly doubled, but they've since come back down: 2024 net sales hit just over $135 million, according to Shiseido. The brand's influence in the greater industry has also waned significantly. Social chatter about Drunk Elephant cooled dramatically in the past year, down 72 percent, according to insights firm Spate. The brand peaked in January 2023 on the strength of its hyperviral Bronzing Drops, with interest dropping off at the beginning of last year. Even with a hit product, Drunk Elephant was unable to keep up with demand, which resulted in long sellout periods that allowed dozens of dupes (from Sephora neighbours like Saie, Glow Recipe and Westman Atelier) to fill the void. Since then, consumer interest in liquid bronzer has melted, with searches down 10 percent year on year, noted Addison Cain, Spate's senior insights and marketing lead. Drunk Elephant's strengths remain in its serums and moisturisers, which once defined accessible and effective skincare but have since ceded that authority to competitively priced offerings from the Innbeauty Project or Isla Beauty, and even more affordable offerings from more Gen-Z-focussed brands like Byoma and Bubble. Parents, for their part, are also souring on Drunk. 'I was super turned off that Drunk Elephant was marketing to my tween via TikTok influencers,' said Dora, a woman in her 40s, in The Business of Beauty's Instagram comments section. 'Not only did I refuse to buy her the 70$ [sic] moisturizer her 12 year skin did not need but I wasn't about to buy it for myself just so she could steal it.' Drunk Elephant has never marketed directly to Gen-Z or -Alpha — executives have said so repeatedly — and its products have never been appropriate for young skin. (Its top selling Baby Facial, for instance, contains a cocktail of exfoliating acids that no dermatologist would recommend to a user under 18.) 'We're not going to start to try to get into a dialogue with children about acids and retinol,' founder Masterson told The Business of Beauty in 2024. In her mind, they're like alcoholic offerings on a restaurant menu: 'Parents decide whether or not that's appropriate for their kid.' Still, in casting a too-wide net in reaching its target customer, the message that Drunk Elephant is fun for the whole family rose to the top. Looking ahead, in Shiseido's integrated report for 2024, Barbara Calcagni, president of Nars and Drunk Elephant, stated the conglomerate's intent 'on regaining global momentum by increasing our loyal community and recruiting new customers.' For its own sake, it could aim higher. 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