I really admire ColourPop (/Seed Beauty) as a company. They scour social media to see what products people are talking about and asking for, and they manufacture their products in the US very quickly to meet demand as fast as possible. Since most of the product is sold online, they can do small batches - no need to take the risk of shipping thousands of products to Ulta and Sephora that might not sell and play shelf space games with those retailers. If the product does well, make more next week, and everyone wants it even more, because it already sold out once. They can take more risks on weird products. A lot of the product and packaging is really similar, like just printed cardboard with a picture, so they don't need to come up with new molds and formulas for everything.
Their advertising goes at the speed of social media. No need to plan ahead for print magazine spreads next quarter, just slap up some Facebook and Instagram posts and ship it out to a few influencers who will churn out video ads within a week. Take the comments from social media and go back to the drawing board for next week's product.
It all sounds easy, but it's not that easy. I guess my big question is how they manufacture in the US and still be so cheap, but I suppose makeup is already super high margin, maybe they just have a 40% margin instead of like 80%+