Amid Sales Boom, Bubble Plots Expansion
Bubble has big expansion plans on the horizon.
The brand, founded in 2020 by Shai Eisenman, is debuting Cloud Surf, a not-quite-cream, not-quite-gel moisturizer with lilac extract, hibiscus extract and celery seed extract, on Wednesday. It will debut at Ulta Beauty, where the brand is expanding into all doors, and retails for $16.
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The company is profitable and has grown almost threefold, according to industry sources, who expect sales to reach $85 million in 2023.
Eisenman didn’t comment on the estimates, but did acknowledge that business was booming.
“We have seen over 1,000 percent growth in the last few months, and we just can’t keep up with the demand,” Eisenman said. “We are in a state of not even knowing what the demand is because everything we bring goes out of stock. We’re facing a lot of stock challenges, but it’s been incredible.”
Her strategy for launching new products — finding white space via data, then testing the products with a community of brand enthusiasts — seems to be working. “We always say that we launch products with an immediate product market fit because we’ve been testing them on our community for two to three years before we launch,” she said. “Our community has been testing Cloud Surf for close to two years now. We test on at least 50 members with every product, and we don’t launch anything until 90 percent of them say they would buy it.”
Eisenman also pointed out that the waitlist to join that community now tops 41,000. Brand awareness in the U.S., she said, has reached 48 percent of consumers aged 25 and under. That was the impetus for her expansion with Ulta Beauty.
“Accessibility is very important to us. We want to be truly accessible,” she said. “Ulta has been such an unbelievable partner and is such a place for exploration and discovery, especially for our target demographic.”
Ulta will have Cloud Surf exclusively for four weeks before it heads across Bubble’s distribution, which now includes more than 10,000 doors across Ulta, Walmart and CVS.
Part of the rationale behind a new moisturizer was the success of past ones. One of the brand’s hero products, Slam Dunk, a moisturizer with aloe leaf juice and vitamin E, sells one unit every 15 seconds. “We launched right from the beginning with two moisturizers because when I sat with a focus group of over 200 people, people either like gel moisturizers or rich cream moisturizers, and you can’t convince people to switch,” she said.
“It’s not even by skin type, it’s about texture preference. But we saw a shift of people looking for lighter hydration in the summer — something that’s lighter texture, more airy, more fluffy. We felt there was real room there for a creamy, light moisturizer that’s going to be a little bit mattifying.”
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