Ben Bennett's West Hollywood accelerator spots gaps on the shelf, hands them to founders with real equity, and points each new brand toward an exit - Naturium sold to e.l.f. Beauty for $355 million.
Most beauty brands begin with a person: a founder, a face, a story worth telling. The Center begins somewhere less romantic - with an empty spot on a shelf. Inside its West Hollywood office, founder Ben Bennett studies where the market is thin, decides what a winning product would look like, and only then goes looking for the human to lead it. The order is deliberate, and it is most of the reason the company exists at all.
Bennett spent years in the machinery of consumer beauty, including a stretch as co-founder and creative officer at HatchBeauty Brands. When he started The Center in 2019, he did not set out to build one more label. He set out to build a way of making them - a small, repeatable house that could design a brand, scale it, and hand it off. The company describes itself as an accelerator rather than an incubator, a distinction Bennett insists on because the founders who run these brands own real equity in what they build.
The location is not incidental either. West Hollywood puts The Center inside the gravitational field of Los Angeles beauty - the creators, the studios, the manufacturers and the retail buyers who make or break a launch. It is a city where an audience can be assembled on a phone and a product can be on a shelf within a year, and The Center is built to compress exactly that distance. The team is deliberately small for the output it generates, with staff estimates in the range of several dozen people supporting the whole portfolio at once.
The method is almost procedural. Bennett identifies whitespace - a price point no one owns, a category consumers are searching for and not finding - and builds a commercial answer to fill it. Then he attaches a founder, frequently a creator or influencer with an audience that fits the brand. Those founders join as business partners with equity, typically without a salary, rather than as paid celebrity faces. It is a difference that shows up in the work: the founder is invested in the outcome, not renting out a name.
The house also shares its plumbing. Testing, manufacturing, forecasting and distribution are pooled across the portfolio, so a new brand launches with infrastructure a standalone startup could not afford on day one. That shared back office is the unglamorous engine underneath the glamorous names - it lets a small team move faster than the size of any single brand would suggest.
The founder relationships have their own internal shorthand. Bennett has referred to his group of founder-partners as the "sister wives" - a knowing joke about a house of women building distinct brands under one roof, from Susan Yara to Carrie Barber, Chriselle Lim, Iskra Lawrence and Claudia Sulewski. Beneath the joke is a real structural choice: these are owners with skin in the game, not spokespeople on a contract. The brands also draw on seasoned operators; Michael Kremer, who has worked across beauty at companies including Pacifica and L'Oreal, has served as a chief marketing officer within the group, helping translate a creator's audience into a durable retail business.
"I know that being a founder is not my role; my role is somebody who identifies whitespace and creates a highly commercial answer to fill that opportunity." Ben Bennett, Founder & CEO
The Center keeps roughly four to five brands live at any moment, spanning skincare, color cosmetics, fragrance and bodycare. The names have changed over time because change is the point. Naturium, the masstige skincare brand built with creator Susan Yara, became the breakout - and in 2023 it was acquired by e.l.f. Beauty for $355 million, the largest acquisition in e.l.f.'s history. MAKE Beauty, a color line, was acquired and relaunched. Phlur, a fragrance brand relaunched with Chriselle Lim, later sold to TSG Consumer Partners. Saltair, built with model and entrepreneur Iskra Lawrence, pushed the house deeper into accessible personal care. In March 2024, bodycare brand CYKLAR, created with Claudia Sulewski, joined the lineup.
Naturium is the clearest illustration of the whole thesis. It grew up around a creator's audience - Susan Yara had built a following talking about skincare long before she was selling it - and The Center turned that trust into a masstige range priced to sit between the drugstore and the department store. The brand reached scale quickly, landed in mass and specialty retail, and became attractive to a strategic buyer looking to move into skincare. When e.l.f. Beauty paid $355 million for it in 2023, the deal was reported as the largest acquisition in e.l.f.'s history, and it turned The Center from an interesting experiment into a proof of concept.
Bennett is unsentimental about ownership. He calls himself "the birth parent, not the forever parent," and he means it structurally: brands are built to be scaled and, when the moment is right, sold to a larger strategic buyer. The exit is not a happy accident. It is the intended endpoint, priced into the plan from the start. Phlur, the fragrance brand the house relaunched, followed a version of the same arc when it was sold to TSG Consumer Partners - a second data point that the model was not a one-time stroke of luck.
Spot a gap in price, category or need that no incumbent owns.
Pair the concept with an owner-partner who holds equity, often a creator.
Plug into pooled manufacturing, forecasting and distribution to scale fast.
Grow the brand toward a sale to a larger strategic acquirer.
The word that keeps coming up around The Center is masstige - the blend of "mass" and "prestige" that describes products engineered to feel premium while pricing for a wide audience. It is a demanding place to build. Go too cheap and the brand reads as disposable; go too expensive and it loses the volume that makes a mass retailer care. The Center's competence is landing repeatedly in that narrow band, then giving each brand a distinct point of view - clinical and ingredient-led for Naturium, accessible and body-first for Saltair, scent-as-storytelling for Phlur - so the portfolio does not compete with itself.
The Center effectively serves two very different customers. The first is the shopper - the person buying Saltair at a mass retailer or Naturium at Ulta, drawn to masstige products that feel prestige but price like the mass market. The second is the acquirer - the e.l.f.s and TSGs of the world, strategic buyers shopping for a scaled, de-risked brand to fold into a larger portfolio. Everything in between, from formulation to founder to forecasting, is built to move a brand from the first customer to the second.
"When we travel, I make everybody, including these women, fly economy." Ben Bennett, on the culture
That line says more than it seems to. The Center's culture is lean and operator-led, and its cost discipline is a feature, not a quirk. In a corner of the industry that runs on spectacle, a house that flies its founders economy and still lands nine-figure exits is making a quiet argument: in consumer, discipline scales better than hype.
The Center sits in a competitive lane of beauty brand incubators, accelerators and roll-ups - names like Maesa, Beach House Group, A-Frame Brands and Waldencast - alongside the traditional CPG conglomerates that build or buy brands in-house. What sets it apart is less any single brand than the founder-equity model and the deliberate small batch: four or five brands, real ownership for the people running them, and a clear-eyed plan to sell. In 2021, Prelude Growth Partners backed that thesis with a $15 million growth investment. Two years later, one brand from the house sold for $355 million. The math, so far, has held.
The timing helped. Beauty has been one of the most acquisitive corners of consumer over the past several years, with large strategics hunting for growth they can buy rather than build. That appetite is precisely what a house like The Center is designed to feed: it manufactures the kind of scaled, culturally fluent, founder-led brand that acquirers want and that would take them years to grow from scratch. The risk, of course, runs the other way - a colder M&A market or a stumble in a single brand would test a model that treats the exit as the plan. So far, the additions have kept coming; CYKLAR's arrival in 2024 signaled that the pipeline was still filling even after the headline sale.
There is a version of the beauty business built on the myth of the singular founder, the overnight brand, the face that launches a thousand carts. The Center is running the opposite experiment - treating brand-building as a craft you can repeat, staffing it with owners rather than employees, and measuring success by what happens when a brand is ready to leave home. It is a less cinematic story. It has also, so far, been a more bankable one.