Lady Gaga Burned Down Her Own Makeup Brand - Then It Grew 400%

In 2019, Lady Gaga did something no prestige beauty brand had done before: she launched her cosmetics line, Haus Laboratories, exclusively on Amazon. It shipped in nine countries on day one. It had a famous founder, professional artistry behind it, and a marketing engine most startups would trade a warehouse for. By 2021 it was doing roughly $20 million a year - and going nowhere fast.

Then, in 2022, Gaga and her co-founder and chief executive, Ben Jones, made a call that most brands with a nine-figure celebrity attached would never make. They threw the whole thing out. Every product. Every formula. The name itself. What came back was Haus Labs by Lady Gaga, rebuilt for Sephora, and within a year it was growing about 400% year over year. This is the story of a beauty company that fixed itself by deleting itself.

01 / The ResetWhy scrap a working brand?

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The uncomfortable truth of the Amazon era was that Haus Laboratories sold, but it did not resonate. Amazon is where people buy things they already know. It is a checkout counter, not a stage - and a new prestige brand lives or dies on discovery and story. Shoppers were not stumbling onto Gaga's makeup and falling for it; they were finding it only if they already knew to look.

So the 2022 relaunch was not a refresh. The team reformulated from zero, stripping out roughly 2,700 ingredients they classed as "dirty" and rebuilding each product to meet Sephora's Clean standard while keeping professional-grade payoff. They swapped their exclusive retail partner from Amazon to Sephora and the brand's own site, and renamed the company from "Haus Laboratories" to "Haus Labs by Lady Gaga." Same founder, new everything else.

02 / The NumbersWhat the pivot actually did

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The channel switch worked almost immediately. Post-relaunch revenue grew roughly 400% year over year, and the brand went from a couple dozen doors to more than 500 retail locations within months. Industry estimates put annual revenue somewhere between $75 million and $100 million by 2023 - several times the Amazon-era peak.

03 / The ProductA foundation that thinks it is skincare

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If there is one object that carries the whole comeback, it is the Triclone Skin Tech Foundation with Fermented Arnica. The pitch is unusual: it is a medium, buildable-coverage foundation with more than 20 skincare ingredients packed inside, including a patent-pending fermented arnica meant to reduce redness and even skin tone. Hyaluronic acid, squalane and a bio-ferment complex do the work you would expect from a serum; the pigment does the work you expect from makeup.

It ships in 51 shades across six families, which is table stakes for inclusivity now but still a real manufacturing commitment. The concealer sibling uses the same complex, and both sit at the top of the brand's bestseller list. The through-line - clean formulation without giving up performance - is the argument the entire company is built to win.

Six shade families, 51 total - a sample of the range.

The catalog spreads out from there without losing the thesis. The PhD Hybrid Lip Glaze blends balm, oil, plumper and gloss into one non-sticky formula that plumps without the sting most glosses rely on. The newer Atomic Shake Lip Lacquer arrived in nine high-shine shades, and the color range runs through high-pigment eyeshadow palettes, gel eyeliners, blushes, bronzers and highlighters - all vegan, all built to the same clean standard. In early 2026 the brand pushed a direct-to-consumer lip liner launch, using its owned site to test and lead with new drops before they hit the Sephora shelf.

04 / The OperatorBen Jones runs it like a product company

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The quiet reason the reset held is the CEO. Ben Jones came to Haus Labs from The Honest Company, where he was Chief Digital Officer - a background in clean-label consumer goods and direct-to-consumer commerce, not celebrity licensing. That shows in how the brand treats formulation as its core intellectual property rather than an afterthought to the name on the box.

The company is headquartered in El Segundo, California, with a team of around 160 people. It raised $10.4 million in 2018, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Gaingels, Riverside Ventures and Sozo Ventures joining. That is a lean capital base for a brand now selling across two continents - a sign the growth has been more product-led than spend-led.

05 / The ModelCommerce with a line item for kindness

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Haus Labs sells full-price prestige cosmetics through its own Shopify storefront and, at retail, exclusively through Sephora - in every North American location, across 12-plus European countries, in Sephora at Kohl's, and pushing into Southeast Asia and Oceania. It is a clean two-lane model: owned DTC for story and margin, Sephora for reach and hand-selling.

The part that is easy to dismiss as marketing is wired in deeper than that. Haus Labs donates $1 from every transaction to the Born This Way Foundation, the youth mental-health nonprofit Lady Gaga started with her mother, Cynthia Germanotta. During Pride, that runs through campaigns like "We Belong to Something Beautiful," funneling money to the foundation's Kindness in Community Fund. The "kindness" in the brand's three-word brief is not a slogan; it is a per-order cost.

06 / The CustomerWho is actually buying it

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The buyer skews the way most of Sephora skews now: Gen Z and millennial shoppers who read ingredient lists, want their base makeup to double as skin care, and expect a shade that matches without a compromise. Lady Gaga's fanbase gives the brand a warm-start audience, but the repeat purchase is driven by the foundation and concealer, not the poster. A shopper who tries the discovery set, finds their tone in one of the 51 options, and comes back for the full size is worth far more than a one-time celebrity-curiosity sale - and that is the loop the reformulation was designed to close.

Scale follows from where the products sit. Selling through every Sephora in North America and a dozen European markets, plus Sephora at Kohl's, puts Haus Labs in front of a mainstream-prestige audience measured in the millions, not a niche clean-beauty crowd. The estimated $75-100 million in annual revenue is the aggregate of a lot of $40-ish foundation and concealer purchases, spread across owned DTC and wholesale shelves.

07 / The FieldWhere it sits in a crowded aisle

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Haus Labs competes in the most crowded corner of beauty: celebrity-founded, clean-leaning prestige makeup at Sephora. That means shelf-neighbors like Rare Beauty, Fenty Beauty, ILIA, Kosas, Merit and Saie. Its wedge is the overlap - founder-led and Sephora Clean and built on a genuinely differentiated hero ingredient, rather than picking one of those and hoping.

There is history here worth noting. Gaga first used the "Haus Laboratories" name back in 2012-2014 for the fragrances Fame and Eau de Gaga with Coty. The 2019 makeup line was the second act; the 2022 relaunch was the third. Few beauty brands get three swings. Fewer still use one of them to delete their entire catalog on purpose.

The lesson founders can actually steal is not "be famous." It is narrower and more useful: a distribution channel is not neutral plumbing, it is part of your brand's meaning, and picking the wrong one can hide a good product completely. Haus Labs did not need a better foundation to get unstuck. It needed a place where the foundation could be discovered - and the nerve to admit the first place was wrong.

Where would this not work? If the product underneath were ordinary, the channel switch buys nothing - Sephora hand-sells things worth hand-selling. And the $1-per-order kindness model only reads as sincere because it predates the marketing, tied to a foundation Gaga has run for over a decade. Copy the tactic without the substance and shoppers notice fast.

At a glance: Haus Labs by Lady Gaga · Founded 2019, relaunched 2022 · HQ El Segundo, California · Co-founders Lady Gaga & Ben Jones (CEO) · ~160 employees · Vegan, cruelty-free, Sephora Clean certified.