Maesa’s meteoric rise to success seems like a recent phenomenon, but the company’s roots date back to 1997 when Julien Saada and Gregory Mager founded it, in Paris, as a developer of private label personal care. In 2007, a U.S. subsidiary opened in New York City, and the transition into a global incubator for some of the biggest brands in mass retail was under way.

Today, Maesa’s portfolio includes brands in hair care, fragrance, skin care, and personal care. Over the years, some brands have been launched in partnership with celebrities/influencers; others have been organic, stand-alone efforts that fill a white space in the market. All of Maesa’s brands are available in mass retailers such as Target, Walmart, and Dollar General, among others, as well as Ulta Beauty.

The company made its beauty mark in 2013 with the launch of Flower Beauty by Drew Barrymore. Emboldened by the success of Flower (which is still going strong), Maesa’s roster of celebrity and influencer brands now include Ashley Tisdale’s Being Frenshe, Kristin Ess, Hairitage by Mindy McKnight, and TPH by Taraji Henson. Brands not celebrity related include Fine’ry and Mix:bar, as well as Koze Place, a home fragrance brand available at Dollar General.

In 2019, Bain Capital Private Equity acquired a majority interest in Maesa to usher in the next phase of growth. Piyush Jain joined Maesa as CEO in 2022, the second CEO in the company’s history, bringing more than 23 years of experience from his career at Unilever.

Even at a time when product failures are as high as 70% by some industry estimates, Jain has piloted the incubation of some of the buzziest brands in beauty while extending those franchises into new categories. Simultaneously, he has created an incredible and diverse leadership team that is leveraging Maesa’s entrepreneurial roots and complementing it with best-in-class beauty industry experience and expertise.

Retailers say Maesa’s winning formula is its ability to identify unmet consumer needs and address them through creativity in new and unique ways. With the agility of an incubator and a robust brand portfolio, the company is lauded for delivering new and different products through its deep trend scouting and consumer understanding, best-in-class design, formulation, and marketing capabilities.

Here, Maesa CEO Piyush Jain reveals what’s in the works for 2025, and how the company thrives by delivering luxury-quality products at value prices.

Beauty News: You have a lot of newness planned for 2025. What’s the secret to ensuring they hit the mark with consumers, especially at a time when some shoppers are pulling back?

Photo of Maesa CEO Piyush Jain
Maesa CEO Piyush Jain

Piyush Jain: Maesa has always been a leader in innovation — it is the lifeblood of our company. We have a blue-sky team focused on macro and micro trends to understand where the consumer is going and ensure we address unmet needs. We are privileged to have an incredibly powerful portfolio of brands, and we are constantly looking at how to keep them fresh and deliver innovation that the consumer needs and wants.

BN: How has Maesa successfully brought luxury quality to the mass market?

PJ: We broadly define our portfolio as masstige — somewhere between prestige and mass. We constantly look at all the prestige trends and prestige offerings and then democratize them at accessible price points and in accessible channels. We have the ability, the technology, and the innovation teams to create products for mass and that is the niche we’ve chosen. If you have the right brand, the right technology, and the right price point, that is where the magic happens and that’s where most of our portfolio fits. Masstige continues to be the fastest-growing segment, and as we look into the future, this space will continue to accelerate.

BN: Maesa launches with many well-known names, whether influencers or celebrities. How do you mitigate the risk of teaming up with famous faces?

PJ: The trick is to link up with a founder partner who is genuinely authentic in the space, believes in the products and the brand proposition, and drives it along with us. If on the other hand, you just slap the name of a celebrity or an influencer onto a product, it doesn’t really work out.

Photo of Being Frenshe Haircare Product Line
Being Frenshe Hair Care

BN: Being Frenshe is such a huge hit — is that an example of a founder partner with authenticity and what’s ahead for the brand?

PJ: The idea behind the brand was that, particularly during the pandemic, everyone needed daily wellness rituals to enhance their mood — to feel a little better in a world which was more complicated. Wellness was very important to Ashley, and she was a natural partner for the brand. What we do in the brand is born out of Ashley’s personal wellness journey and we provide these solutions to our consumer.

The brand has seen tremendous success, in bath and body where we launched. We also expanded some of the fragrances in candles. In discussions with Ashley, we looked for where else it made sense to take the brand. Hair was a natural extension. We looked for the white space in hair; where does the brand have a right to be? Hair wellness was the space we decided was the next territory for us. While the hair category is developing rapidly and there is a lot of innovation, hair and scalp health is often overlooked. Ashley has been open about suffering from alopecia, so it was natural to focus on hair and scalp health.

The lineup features the brand’s signature MoodScience Scent Technology, including existing Lavender Cloud and Cashmere Vanilla scents that deliver holistic hair wellness and enhance well-being through an affordable yet luxurious sensorial experience. We have so much more potential and consumer license to innovate further and to take the brand into new categories.

Photo of The Kristin Ess+ Peptide Protect line
The Kristin Ess+ Peptide Protect line

Beauty News: Maesa has enjoyed success in hair care. One brand that comes to mind is Kristin Ess. The range launched in 2017 and continues to expand in the competitive and fragmented hair care category. What will keep the momentum going?

PJ: Kristin Ess is one of our biggest brands and it is much-loved by consumers. We’re taking Kristin Ess into a space where salon meets science with the stylist created and salon inspired brand now bringing in advanced science and technology to provide the best-in-class solutions to our consumers. We call the range Kristin Ess+ because it features advanced peptide-infused formulas that address consumers’ needs. There is one range called Peptide Restore to restore the quality of hair; another is Peptide Protect. Kristin Ess+ is launching exclusively at Target.

BN: What is planned for Hairitage by Mindy McKnight?

PJ: We realized there are opportunities within our current brand portfolio. In some instances, consumers were asking for their favorite shampoos to have a conditioner pairing, so we are launching these. We are also continuing to expand on our highly successful styling range by launching new sku’s to meet unmet hair styling needs.

Beauty News: Shifting gears to fragrance. The prestige fragrance category is skyrocketing with sales up 14%, while mass increases were held to 2%. How has Maesa cracked the mass market fragrance code?

PJ: The idea of fragrance as a pick-me-up accelerated during the pandemic and along with Target, we identified this as a growth opportunity. We launched Mix:Bar with Target to fill this gap and followed up with Fine’ry. Fine’ry was born with a mission to democratize fragrance. We feel the best fragrances in the world shouldn’t be reserved for only those who can pay hundreds of dollars to buy a fragrance. That’s why we felt Fine’ry had a right to be. We are very excited with how many consumers have accepted the brand in the two years it has existed.

Fine’ry went viral on TikTok. Consumers talk about how fantastic our fragrances are, and we’ve been getting more demand to expand into men’s categories. We launched a series of fragrances that are more men-forward in addition to the range we already have. A large part of the fragrance success is the consumer experience in store. We launched all fragrances with testers so consumers can experience scents before they buy them. Consumers and influencers tell us fragrances are as good as prestige and many buy multiple scents. That’s been at the heart of our success.

Newness in fragrances is critical, and we continue to launch new scents like Pistachio Please, and we moved into the rose territory with Rosa Lina. At Dollar General, we launched a home fragrance brand called Koze Place. The candles on that brand have been absolutely phenomenal.

BN: Building off of distribution on channels like dollar stores, provide an update on the distribution of the brands. You often launch with one retailer and then roll them out.

PJ: Kristin Ess is now broadly available and sold in Target, Walmart, Costco, Amazon, Ulta, CVS and some other grocery retailers. However, the new Kristin Ess+ innovation is launching exclusively at Target. Hairitage is sold at retailers including Walmart, Kroger and CVS, but the innovations will be exclusive for now at Walmart. Fine’ry remains a Target exclusively, as well as Being Frenshe. Mix:Bar has been extended beyond Target to CVS and Walgreens.

BN: What can we expect from Maesa this year?

PJ: It will be a big year of innovation for us. We are in a very, very healthy portfolio position and you’ll see more #maesamagic launching soon. Consumers are at the heart of what we do, and we’re continuously expanding our offerings to meet their diverse needs to ensure that everyone has access to luxury-quality experiences. Fingers crossed that 2025 will be an incredibly successful year.

BN: It was announced this week that global beauty and manufacturing company kdc/one has acquired Maesa’s European and Middle East operations. What does this mean for your brands that are made and sold in the region?

PJ: This strategic divestment of Maesa’s European and Middle East operations simplifies our portfolio and adds further fuel for the rapid growth and expansion of our portfolio of brands both in the U.S. and globally. It also allows Maesa to lean in further into its strength as an incubator of new brands and we are excited to bring in a lot more innovation in the market in the near future.