Customer acquisition on the channels that built the direct-to-consumer beauty boom has gotten dramatically more expensive. Ad costs per customer acquired on Meta have climbed past $50 for many beauty brands, and the formula that fueled years of growth, spend on ads, offer a discount, scale, is not producing the same returns it used to. Some of the sharpest brands in the category are responding by looking beyond the marketplace entirely. Beetles Gel Polish, for instance, used its appearance at Cosmoprof North America this month to introduce a professional product line and a color collaboration with Pantone, a signal of where it sees its next chapter of growth.
That pressure is pushing beauty brands to rethink where their next wave of growth will come from. Industry analysts now point to hybrid distribution, blending direct-to-consumer with retail and other channels, as one of the defining shifts shaping the category this year. Owned e-commerce is increasingly treated as a brand's home base rather than its primary source of new customers, with specialty retail and professional distribution positioned as the natural next step for brands that have already proven demand online.
The line between consumer and professional products is also blurring from the other side, and the brands moving early are the ones benefiting most. Formulation standards once reserved for salons, such as HEMA-free formulas, are now something everyday shoppers ask about before buying gel polish at all. Salons, in turn, are courting the same shoppers directly. Haircare label Unite Hair recently launched on Sephora.com, following Sephora's earlier addition of another professional brand, Kenra Professional, both moves that let the brands meet a more informed customer wherever that customer happens to be shopping. The two audiences that used to sit in separate aisles are increasingly shopping from the same shelf.
Beetles Gel Polish's presence at Cosmoprof North America this month sits squarely inside that shift, and it is worth unpacking in more detail. The brand built its name on Amazon and TikTok Shop, growing a community of more than 18 million users since its 2017 launch, largely by winning on price, speed, and social reach. Its collaboration with Pantone marks a different kind of move. Rather than another product drop, it is a bid for standing with an audience that has never bought from Beetles based on a bestseller ranking. Color authority is not something a brand can buy with an ad budget. It has to be earned through partnership with an institution the industry already trusts, and pairing that with a professional nail system built for technicians gives Beetles two ways into a conversation it was previously locked out of, the language of color expertise and the tools of the trade itself. For a brand that built its business on being fast and everywhere, spending real effort to be credible and specific is a notable and smart pivot.
That pivot does not replace the marketplace growth that built brands like Beetles in the first place, but it gives them a second engine at a moment when the first one is getting more expensive to run. Professional distribution is slower to build and harder to scale than a viral TikTok moment, yet it offers something Meta ad spend increasingly cannot: durable trust with a customer who was never going to be won on price alone. As customer acquisition costs keep climbing across the category, brands willing to make that longer-term investment now may be the ones best positioned once the marketplace playbook stops working as well as it once did.
Copyright © 2026 California Business Journal. All Rights Reserved.
For California Business Journal Disclaimers, go to /terms-conditions/.
