- Harry Styles is the latest celebrity to launch a wellness and personal care business.
- Styles aims to sell minimalist beauty products, and later plans to offer ideas and insights.
- Gwyneth Paltrow and Rihanna have grown cult-like followings for their health and beauty companies.
Harry Styles is the latest celebrity to voyage into the $1.5 trillion wellness industry.
The former One Direction singer told Dazed he's launching Pleasing, a beauty brand that Styles hopes to expand into a
"platform" to share ideas.
The line will start with a small product offering of nail polish and lip oil — as well as an eye serum infused with a peculiar combination of okra, marshmallow, and lingonberry.
Styles told Dazed he is keeping Pleasing open-ended and planning to experiment with different products and concepts in time.
"Do I have any idea where Pleasing will be in five years? No," Styles said. "Obviously I have an idea of what I would like us to be aiming at, but honestly, I don't know. That's what makes it exciting to me."
Styles' Pleasing — a wellness brand that packages a concept in addition to products — is similar to actress Gwyneth Paltrow's $430 million Goop brand.
Goop began as a Paltrow's nutritional newsletter for sharing recipes in 2008, and grew into a popular — albeit controversial — advice column and retailer for skincare and wellness products and supplements.
Trendy, celebrity-backed beauty and health businesses have found mainstream success. After generating more than $300 million in revenue in 2020, Jessica Alba's cosmetic and baby product line Honest Company went public earlier this year. Rihanna's success with her Fenty Beauty makeup line, as well as her Savage X Fenty lingerie brand, helped catapult the star to billionaire status.
Styles' products aren't meant to be noticeable, rather they're meant to highlight an individual's natural beauty, similar to the $1.8 billion cosmetic line (and Gen Z darling) Glossier.
Pleasing's products are marketed to be gender-neutral, but Styles follows a recent trend of men entering the beauty and wellness space.
Perhaps most notably, baseball star turned "Shark Tank" investor Alex Rodriguez recently launched a men's concealer line. Analysts at Allied Market Research predict the men's personal care industry will hit $166 billion in 2022, CNBC reported. Sales in male's skincare increased 4.5% in 2021, partly driven by the "Zoom boom," or increase in beauty and plastic surgery sales as more people spend time looking at themselves during team meetings.
The CEO of Frederick Benjamin, a company that specializes in grooming products for men, previously told Insider's Bethany Biron that "the beauty industry didn't see the opportunity with men for a long time, partly because men were basically fine with soap and water. But men are more in tune with their appearance now, and the indie brands see the opportunity."