Skylar Is Poised to Disrupt the Fragrance Industry With A Natural Personal Care Platform
For millions of women around the world, a splash of fragrance is a key part of their morning ritual before they head out the door. Scent is considered to be the most powerful of the five senses, connecting us to emotional memories, warning us of danger and even helping to identify love.
For Cat Chen, it’s also the foundation of her latest ecommerce undertaking. Upfront is thrilled to be leading Skylar’s Seed Round.
As an entrepreneur and former vice president of The Honest Company, Cat realized that while her beauty routine was largely devoid of synthetic chemicals, her perfume and scented products were not. She searched high and low for a natural fragrance that also smelled sophisticated, and when she couldn’t find one, she set out to make one. Eight months ago, she launched Skylar Body, a Los Angeles–based direct-to-consumer brand specializing in natural perfumes. Cat bootstrapped all the way to her first 10,000 customers.
The Type of Founders We Look For
At Upfront, we’re all about investing in exceptional people. We look for founders with an unfair advantage in their industry. In other words, the kind of visionaries poised not just to take share from an existing market — but to actually expand that market and help it evolve into something entirely new for the next generation of customers.
If anyone fits that description, it’s Cat Chen.
It was only a year ago that Cat was heading up operations at The Honest Company. As one of the first key hires at Honest, Cat wore many hats; she built a 500-person operations team from scratch, and at various times, oversaw the brand’s audience building, customer lifetime value analysis, inventory planning, and eventually, all of its operations. She left The Honest Company with a set of skills that made her uniquely equipped to dominate in the eCommerce beauty sphere — expertise in the realm of supply chain and strategic finance, as well as a lifelong passion for natural products.
The Recipe for Success: Brand-Driven + Tech-Forward + Big Market
It’s rare to find a direct-to-consumer brand led by a founder who deeply understands each of the three pieces that are fundamental to success in ecommerce: building a brand that deeply connects with customers, building a repeat online audience and developing a technology-forward approach to address a huge market opportunity.
When it comes to brand-building, Cat’s passion for the product is palpable. The products speak for themselves. Made of real flowers, fruits, and botanicals sustainably sourced from all over the world, each small-batch Skylar perfume begins with a base made from organic sugar cane alcohol hailing from a sustainable distillery in Oregon. The scents are also hypoallergenic and totally devoid of phthalates, parabens, and other harmful chemicals.
Every bottle is handcrafted in traditional small batches by a team of artisans with a professional perfumer at the helm, and poured right here in L.A. The attention to detail extends all the way to the packaging designed by a local watercolor artist. And then there’s the direct-to-consumer sampling and pricing model, which cuts out the costs of retail markup and traditional marketing, giving customers access to high-quality products at a fair price.
In addition to Cat’s unfair advantages building this company, she also brings to the table her connections to some of the best talent across all of the key direct-to-consumer functional areas.
For all of this to come together in one founder, and one brand, is rare. Then Cat came along. We’d followed her work at The Honest Company, and have had the pleasure of getting to know her well over the past year in both casual and formal settings. This is one of the reasons we love being here in Southern California, where the emerging big startups launch our future entrepreneurs. It has been clear to us for months that Cat was one of the special ones to grow up in our ecosystem.
Finally, Beauty is a massive industry — last year, Forbes reported its worth at $445 billion in sales. The global fragrance market alone is ~$40B, with ~$8B in the United States. Fragrance is one of the most interesting product lines to anchor a broader personal care brand as it has margins akin to software, strong replenishment rates and has a favorable (small) footprint to value ratio.
Upfront Ventures’ investment in Skylar represents confidence in what L.A. has to offer as a hub for innovative, eco-friendly companies pushing the envelope in ecommerce.
As consumer demand for natural beauty products continues to explode, we believe Skylar will lead the charge with its line of natural, sustainably sourced, premium perfumes. We’re incredibly excited to welcome Cat and the team at Skylar to the Upfront family, and to work with them as they disrupt the traditional fragrance market.
