As beauty and wellness become increasingly crowded, investors are looking beyond the latest trend to identify brands with the potential to become enduring businesses. In this Q&A, Simran Suri, principal on the investment team at Maveron, shares what makes a beauty brand truly investable, the qualities she looks for in founders, and the consumer shifts she believes will shape the category’s future.
Based in New York City, Suri focuses on health and wellness, commerce and consumer social at Maveron, the early-stage consumer venture capital firm founded by Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan. (The firm's current portfolio includes Madison Reed, Necessaire and Snif.) She believes the strongest brands start with genuine customer love and a deep understanding of the consumer, while also having the vision, execution and flexibility to evolve.
She challenges the idea of the “Gen Z brand,” sees opportunity at the intersection of hair and fragrance, and anticipates continued convergence between beauty, wellness and technology.
What separates a promising beauty brand from a truly investable one?
Suri: Customer love. With enough time, that shows up in revenue growth and retention but for early-stage brands, I look for it in the way customers behave: how they discuss products online and the features they gravitate toward. The founders themselves are also the biggest indicator – who they are and why they’re starting this brand. Founders with a clear vision and early ability to execute for their customers can mean the difference between a flash in the pan and a generational brand.
What are investors seeing today that founders may be missing?
Suri: That price isn’t the only lever for accessibility, and leaning too hard on it can actually cap your market. The bigger unlock is making value feel tangible: does a customer feel the benefit whether that be in the product experience itself, the design, the language. Wellness brands are a great example; while they often sell aspiration (e.g., “optimize your biological age,”) the massive middle of the market cares most about the practicality behind the offering. Pie in the sky rhetoric may feel compelling to a small group of power users, but value-oriented language has a higher likelihood of driving real, meaningful adoption.
Which trends are overhyped and which are underestimated?
Suri: Overhyped: “Gen Z brands.” There’s no such thing as a Gen Z brand anymore. As the same social media apps have proliferated across all ages, the same marketing campaigns are reaching all audiences; 15 year-old teens are seeing the same ads as 35 year-old women. All of a sudden, they both want Patrick Ta blush and Glow Recipe serums. It’s not to say there’s no place for Gen Z brands in the market—in fact, Snif in our portfolio is absolutely killing it with these traits, but not just with Gen Z. Their recent expansion of the Notewrks collection into Ulta and (my personal favorite) limited edition collaboration with Rob Rausch of Love Island infamy show how they’re balancing the youthful, fun, gourmand scents they’re known for with an expanding consumer base. It’s time to move on from the Gen Z tropes that abounded during Covid.
Underestimated: I’m seeing the most exciting innovation in hair and fragrance, and even some at the intersection of both as fragrance increasingly represents a form of identity in the way hair has for decades. In the hair category, I have my eye on Goddess Hair, started by ex-K18 and Olaplex execs. On fragrance, I’m seeing more neolabs start to pop up, all focused on helping brands and fragrance houses develop custom molecules. The neolab component makes this R&D faster and cheaper, but more importantly, I think it creates a better consumer experience by creating richer fragrances. Examples are Vacanza, Lore and Snif.
What are the qualities that consistently stand out in successful founders?
Suri: Grit and persistence. The journey of building a business has so many ups and downs, especially in CPG. Markets change, competitors and fast followers scale, consumer preferences are dynamic. Having the stamina, intellectual honesty and speed to navigate these hurdles is critical to success.
And having a deep understanding of your customer, who they are, how to reach them and how they may evolve is also critical. This ties to my point below on what immediately turns me off about a company. Part of finding success over time and building a generational business requires meeting your customer at every step of their journey, not just when you first acquire them (or when they most mirror you and your own story).
What’s the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when raising capital?
Suri: Discounting the competitive landscape when they talk about their market positioning. Most investors already have their own POV on the competitive landscape and have met with other companies building in the category. It’s better to proactively own your competitors, even if they are direct, than say you have none. Even if you have no competitors today, you will certainly have some once you start to gain traction.
Having direct competitors isn’t immediately a dealbreaker! There are so many opportunities to differentiate within categories or customer demos (and notably, on more than just price). If you have a unique POV on your product and a unique insight on how to reach your customer, you may just have the ability to unseat your competitors. Gruns is one of my favorite examples here—not only did they find great success in the same category as AG1, but where everyone viewed them as competitors initially, they were able to prove there is room for multiple winners in the market.
Where do you see the greatest opportunities over the next five years?
Suri: At the intersection of hair and fragrance. I’m seeing interesting consumer behavior with Gen Z and Gen Alpha teens trialing and layering to build a fragrance that uniquely represents them. I think we’ll also see more at the intersection of fragrance and hair. Susan Yara’s post-Naturium act two that starts with a fragrance-depositing hair gloss is my favorite in the space so far.
What does the next generation of beauty innovation look like.
Suri: Personalized molecules and compounds that help establish more trust around claims and efficacy. Pacagen in our portfolio is a great example—the brand just launched a new hair growth serum called RE:YOU with a proprietary molecule clinically proven to outperform minoxidil.
I also think we’ll see more devices that blur the lines of beauty and wellness. We’re already seeing a ton of innovation when it comes to sleep, managing GLP-1 side effects and broader hormonal health, all directly related to skin health and personal care. I think we’ll also see the beginnings of a shift from at-home devices to 4-wall physical experiences focused on beauty maintenance and longevity—think red-light workout classes or spas, bathhouses with treatments focused on skin care, and med spas as holistic retreats. Some early examples on my radar are Sofwave, the Altar, and Kimba.
What immediately turns you off about a company?
Suri: When a founder doesn’t zoom out of their own personal experience. Personal experience in consumer can be a strong starting point, but ultimately, founders need to appeal to more consumers than just themselves. As a founder, you have to balance your own personal pain points with those across other demos in order to build a truly generational brand.
What are some tips for creating a stronger investor deck?
Suri: Beyond the standard slides (market size, competition, financials, team, product) a deck becomes more compelling when it storytells a fully realized consumer world. The magic is in how every part of the experience works together: packaging, creative, scent, texture, price, positioning, even the specific font or shade of blue. Those details are not superficial; they drive trust, retention, and emotional connection.
The strongest decks make that link explicit. They show how the brand earns consumer trust, and then connect that trust directly to stronger retention, better unit economics, higher LTV, more efficient launches, and greater room to innovate. In a great deck, and broadly a great pitch, the creative, brand, and qualitative story shouldn’t sit separate from the quantitative story. They should prove it.
What makes you pay attention during an elevator pitch?
Suri: The “why.” The “who” and “what” are important, but make those the first line and give me the “why” in the second. That’s the easiest area to show differentiation and, as a result, the best way to pique my interest.
Ultimately, Suri sees the future of beauty belonging to brands that combine genuine customer love with a clear point of view, strong execution and the ability to evolve. For founders, the opportunity is not simply to follow the next trend, but to build a differentiated brand that understands its customer, delivers tangible value and can translate creative vision into lasting business growth.
Nancy Trent (nancy@trentandcompany) is a writer and speaker, a lifelong wellness activist, a globe-trotting trend watcher, and the founder and president of Trent & Company, a leading wellness PR firm. Trent & Company, which launched many health and beauty brands, grew out of Nancy's personal and passionate commitment to helping people live longer and healthier lives. A former journalist for New York magazine, Nancy has written seven books on healthy lifestyles, serves on the editorial boards of several magazines and travels around the world speaking at conferences and trade shows on trends in the marketplace. She is a recognized expert in PR with more than 30 years of experience creating and managing highly successful campaigns.
