COMPANY

Name: Skylar

Legal Name: Skylar Body, Inc.

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Founded: April 2017

Founder: Cat Chen

Website: https://www.skylar.com/

Social Media Following: 23.1k Likes on Facebook, 947 Followers on Twitter, 41.2k Followers on Instagram

Reviews: 4.4 stars on Facebook, 92 recommendations/reviews; 7468 5-star reviews on website

INDUSTRY – Organic Food/Nutritional Supplements

Size: $52.7B (2018)

Projection: $72.3B by 2024, CAGR of 5.5% (2019-2024) (Source: Mordor Intelligence);

Introduction

Skylar offers perfumes and fragrances which are hypoallergenic, cruelty-free, and vegan. The Los Angeles, CA-based company’s products are all manufactured in the USA, and it offers free at-home sampling and an online scent quiz to help customers discover a more personal way to shop for fragrances.

The Product

The company’s core philosophy, in addition to eschewing chemical ingredients and being cruelty-free, focuses on clean, modern scents and aims to elevate the user’s ‘natural beauty’. Skylar undertakes to provide a ‘clean, conscious, and innovative’ approach to finding the right fragrance which avoids ‘dirty ingredients’ such as parabens, suflates, and phthalates. The company sells products directly off its website. The company sources the natural ingredients from Cosmo Fragrances and relies on Sarah Horowitz to act as a perfumer and advisor.

To overcome the digital gap, the brand uses a scent quiz to generate leads, asking for how users want to feel while wearing the scent. The company also bundles different sets, and offers a sample palette for $20 to make their products accessible to reluctant first-time customers.

 A full-sized bottle of one of the 6 fragrances in the line costs $78, while a set of 6 costs $300. The company has also moved into making candles in 4 scents, each being priced at $38.

Origin and Founding Team

Cat Chen was the Vice President of Operations of The Honest Company, a clean baby and household products brand founded by Jessica Alba. She was inspired to found Skylar when she couldn’t find a fragrance with clean ingredients to swap into her routine. She surveyed 100+ women to find that nearly 1/3rd of them found the scents too strong or were allergic to them. When she realized that her daughter was allergic to the scents she had in her collection, her resolve was bolstered and she started Skylar in September 2016.

Performance and Trends

According to Cat, Skylar has grown 1000% year-on-year and is backed by Upfront Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Amplify LA, and Gingerbread Capital. The company got its pre-seed funding in November 2017 from Amplify LA. It raised a Seed Round of $3M which gained it some attention. The company also gained some goodwill by partnering with Step Up, donating a portion of their proceeds to the non-profit organization that provides mentorship for underprivileged high school girls across the country. The company has also been featured in The New York Times as a part of Serena Williams’ beauty routine. The tennis champion also claims to be an investor.