Fragrance and cosmetic company Coty Inc. announced that it will purchase a 51% stake in Kylie Jenner’s beauty business – which includes Kylie Cosmetics and Kylie Skin – for $600 million.
The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2020. Jenner will keep a 49% stake in Kylie Cosmetics and remain the creative lead on both product development and marketing initiatives, particularly on social media, where she has 270 million followers across platforms.
Coty, the parent company of Covergirl and Sally Hansen, is looking to appeal to a younger demographic with the purchase.
Jenner, who became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in March, founded her cosmetics company in 2015, at age 18, with money she earned from modeling. Thanks to her social media following, her line of $29 “lip kits” – a lip liner and lipstick – quickly took off. With minuscule overhead (as of last year, she had only seven full-time employees) and almost no marketing costs (nearly all of the marketing is done on her own social media pages), the business was likely profitable from the start.
