The Sao Paulo brand born on the internet turned skincare shoppers into co-creators - and a beauty blogger's audience into a company that raised roughly R$170 million.
In most beauty companies, the customer shows up at the very end - after the chemists, the marketers and the retail buyers have already decided what a face needs. Sallve ran that sequence backwards. Before its first product went on sale, the Sao Paulo startup talked to more than 10,000 people, rewrote the formula 11 times, and only shipped once the community said yes. The result is a skincare brand where the comment section functions a lot like a research department.
Sallve (the "all" tucked inside the name is on purpose) is a digitally-native Brazilian dermocosmetics brand. It was founded in 2018 and launched to the public in 2019 by chief executive Daniel Wjuniski together with Marcia Netto, Juliana Shor, and Julia Petit - the last a well-known beauty communicator whose earlier project, the Petiscos portal, was one of the largest beauty sites in Brazil. When that chapter closed, its audience did not disappear. It became the starting material for a company.
The founding thesis was simple to say and hard to execute: build the country's first digitally-native vertical skincare brand, and let the people who buy it help design it. Netto and Wjuniski came from digital and investing backgrounds; Shor had managed products at O Boticario and L'Oreal; Petit brought two decades of credibility talking to Brazilians about beauty. What they shared was impatience with an industry that, in Petit's framing, sells an unreachable dream.
The mix of skills matters, because a community-first brand can fail in two opposite directions. Listen too little and you are just another cosmetics company with a nice Instagram. Listen too much and you ship whatever is loudest rather than what actually works on skin. Sallve's structure is designed to hold that tension: a formulation and product function (Shor's territory) that can say no to the crowd, a digital operation (Netto and Wjuniski) that keeps the conversation flowing, and a communicator (Petit) who has spent years learning what Brazilians will and will not believe about their own faces.
Nobody can stand a brand that makes you dream of an unattainable world.Julia Petit, Co-founder
That posture - honesty over aspiration - is not just tone. It is the operating model. Sallve treats buyers as co-creators rather than an audience to be persuaded. Products are tested with the community and pass through customer approval before they reach the store. It is a small change in sequence with a large change in outcome: the brand ships fewer surprises, and the people it sells to feel like they were in the room.
Walk into Sallve online and the first thing it asks is not to buy - it is to answer. The Skin Quiz recommends a routine based on skin type and concerns, and it has now collected more than 600,000 responses. For the shopper it is guidance. For the company it is a live, aggregated map of what Brazilian skin is actually worried about: oiliness, dark spots, sun damage, fine lines. Most companies would file that as a marketing funnel. Sallve reads it as a product roadmap.
The catalogue that grows out of that listening is deliberately unfussy: vegan, cruelty-free formulas at prices meant for the local market. The Antioxidante Hidratante serum-gel stacks niacinamide, vitamin C, vitamin E and hyaluronic acid. The sun-care line runs from a dry-touch facial sunscreen to stick formats. There are moisturizers built around several forms of hyaluronic acid, an enzymatic exfoliant, an under-eye serum and pro-collagen treatments. The through-line is function first, fantasy never.
Transparency runs through the catalogue as much as the formulas do. Product pages spell out active ingredients and their concentrations - a pure vitamin C stick, niacinamide for oil control, hyaluronic acid in several molecular weights - so the shopper can compare rather than just trust. It is a quietly technical approach dressed in friendly, colorful packaging, and it fits a customer who has learned skincare on the internet and arrives already fluent in ingredients.
Sallve is a DNVB - a digitally-native vertical brand - which is a precise way of saying it owns its own demand. Instead of fighting for shelf space and splitting margin with retailers, it sells directly to consumers on Shopify Plus and reinvests what it saves into formulation, content and the relationships that keep people coming back. Marketing leans on community and influencers rather than billboards. There is some selective presence in Brazilian beauty retailers and marketplaces, but the center of gravity is the brand's own store.
Everything at Sallve begins in the community. We see consumers as co-creators.Julia Petit, Co-founder
That structure paid off quickly. Revenue grew roughly fourfold in 2020 as digital-first shopping accelerated, and the growth attracted capital. Sallve raised a first tranche of around R$60 million, then a Series B of roughly R$110 million in May 2021, bringing the total to about R$170 million (on the order of US$31 million). Backers include the Latin American venture firm Kaszek and the beauty-platform company Waldencast, which the following year combined with Obagi Skincare and Milk Makeup.
Brazil is one of the world's largest beauty markets, and Sallve is not the biggest name in it. It shares the field with Natura and O Boticario, with L'Oreal-owned dermocosmetic lines such as La Roche-Posay, CeraVe and Vichy, and with a wave of newer digital brands. Sallve's answer to that scale is not to outspend anyone. It is to be closer - to design in public, ship direct, and keep the feedback loop short enough that a customer complaint can become a product change.
There is a risk baked into that model, and it is worth naming: listening-as-strategy is easy at ten people and hard at two million. Whether co-creation survives the jump from startup to scale-up is the open question hanging over every DNVB. Sallve, now around 230 employees, is running that experiment in real time.
Who actually buys it says something about where the brand fits. Sallve's customer skews younger and digital-first - people comfortable buying skincare without touching it, who read ingredient lists the way an earlier generation read magazine reviews. For that shopper, the appeal is not a celebrity face on a poster. It is the sense that the brand is a peer: it answers questions, admits what a product cannot do, and treats a routine as something to be simplified rather than expanded into a ten-step ritual. In a category that has long run on insecurity, positioning the product as a plain tool - not a promise - is itself the differentiator.
You spend a fortune on cosmetics. Sallve's pitch is that you probably do not need to.On the brand's simplify-the-routine thesis
The expertise underneath is less visible than the packaging but does more of the work. Sallve invests in formulation and research to build products for Brazilian conditions - strong sun, a hot climate, a wide range of skin tones - rather than importing formulas designed elsewhere. Its stack is modern and unglamorous: Shopify Plus for the storefront, email and messaging tools for retention, analytics feeding back into the same community loop that started the whole thing. None of it is the headline. The headline is the sequence, and the sequence is the moat.
Wjuniski and Netto set out to build a digitally-native beauty brand in Brazil and recruit industry and community expertise.
The first product ships after 11 versions and 10,000+ conversations, alongside the Skin Quiz.
The line expands and sales grow roughly fourfold as online shopping accelerates.
A round of about R$110 million lands, with backers including Waldencast.
Waldencast completes its combination with Obagi Skincare and Milk Makeup.
The takeaway Sallve's most copyable idea is not a serum. It is a sequence: ask first, build second, sell third. Put the customer at the start of the process instead of the end, and the product tends to arrive already wanted.