Black-Owned Clean Makeup Brand Bootstraps to $10 Million Success.

5 hours ago7 min read3 comments

In an industry where the chasm between intention and profitability often swallows promising ventures whole, Tisha Thompson’s trajectory with LYS Beauty reads less like a corporate playbook and more like a quiet, deliberate revolution. The narrative surrounding Black-owned beauty brands has, in recent years, been painted with a broad brush of struggle and closure—a trend starkly illustrated by the shuttering of popular brands like Ami Colé, Ceylon, and Koils by Nature, each a casualty of a funding ecosystem that offered initial fanfare but failed to provide the sustained capital necessary for long-term survival.Against this backdrop of systemic neglect, Thompson’s achievement—bootstrapping her clean cosmetics line to over $10 million in sales with a mere $500,000 in startup capital and an immediate launch into Sephora—is not merely a business success; it is a profound political statement on resilience, strategic foresight, and the reclamation of narrative power. Her journey began not in a boardroom, but in a personal reckoning.A plus-size Black woman who spent 15 years within the beauty industry's trenches—from MAC to Pür Cosmetics to Astral Brands—Thompson intimately understood the dual exclusions faced by women of color: they were largely ignored by the marketing engines of mainstream beauty and later sidelined by the burgeoning clean beauty movement, which predominantly catered to an affluent, older, white demographic with premium price points. The 2019 death of her father catalyzed a shift from observation to action, pushing her to leverage a small inheritance and a single angel investment to build LYS (Love Yourself) as a brand that would center the very consumers the industry had overlooked.What distinguishes Thompson’s approach is a radical financial conservatism born of her insider knowledge. While peers rushed to secure capital during the heightened awareness following George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement—a period she describes as a surge of investor interest she deliberately declined—Thompson recognized that such funds often came with strings attached: aggressive growth targets and significant equity dilution that could jeopardize both profitability and autonomy.Instead, she operated the company as a solo employee for two years, pouring every profit back into the business, and eschewing expensive marketing campaigns for a grassroots strategy that leveraged her industry relationships. Her now-legendary 'drunk-text' to a Sephora merchant on LinkedIn, sent with a glass of wine for courage, unlocked a partnership that validated her thesis: there was a hungry market for inclusive, clean beauty.The launch day saw four months of inventory vanish in 24 hours, driven by 300 influencers who championed her mission without payment, creating a groundswell of organic demand that white-owned counterparts often spend millions to manufacture. This calculated restraint allowed LYS to remain cash-positive without external debt or dilution, a stark contrast to brands that expanded rapidly on venture capital only to collapse when political winds shifted and DEI commitments waned under the current administration.Thompson’s recent decision to accept eight-figure funding from Encore Consumer Capital—after reaching eight-figure revenues—was not an admission of need but a strategic choice to access global markets, a move that reflects her nuanced understanding of when to bootstrap and when to partner. Her story, therefore, transcends the typical founder arc; it is a critical intervention in the discourse on Black entrepreneurship, challenging the pervasive, damaging narrative of inherent failure and replacing it with a blueprint for sustainable, self-determined success. As she prepares LYS for international expansion, Thompson’s legacy is crystallizing: a testament to the power of saying 'no' to conditional solidarity and 'yes' to building institutions that endure, proving that profitability and principle need not be mutually exclusive.

#Black-owned business

#entrepreneurship

#beauty industry

#bootstrapping

#Sephora

#featured

#business strategy

#startup funding