Most skincare brands launch with a full product line and hope for traction. Topicals built a 13,000-person waitlist and sold out in 48 hours before becoming Sephora's fastest-growing skincare brand, hitting $35M in revenue by 2024. Founder Olamide Olowe didn't guess at the opportunity; she quantified it: 1 in 4 Americans have chronic skin conditions, ethnic skin conditions occur 6x more frequently in people of color, and 50% of dermatologists admitted inadequate knowledge treating skin of color.
Here's what made their validation strategy bulletproof:
- 13,000-person waitlist validated demand before inventory investment, creating launch urgency
- Launched with just two hero products (Faded Serum and Like Butter) instead of a full line and sold out in 48 hours
- Used 9-month DTC phase to collect data (demand, engagement, repeat purchase rates) that de-risked the Sephora pitch
- Secured Sephora partnership in 9 months by walking in with metrics, not vision, hitting one product sold every minute by 2022
- Revenue scaled 3,000% over four years (2020: $1M to 2024: $35M) through phased distribution, not guessing
Topicals understood that product-market fit isn't about launching more products; it's about building proof before you scale. While competitors spread resources across ten mediocre SKUs, they perfected two products, controlled the narrative through DTC, and built defensible metrics that made retail partnerships inevitable. Their co-founder pairing of Olamide's industry experience from a $500M Unilever acquisition and Claudia Teng's six published dermatology papers gave them domain expertise and scientific credibility to move faster than first-time founders.
If you're building a consumer brand, this is your blueprint: quantify the gap, build a waitlist before launch, perfect your hero products, and use DTC metrics as ammunition for retail partnerships, not as the endgame.