Haus Labs
Lady Gaga's clean makeup brand. Launched on Amazon in 2019, failed, relaunched through Sephora in 2022 with 400% revenue growth.
Most celebrity beauty brands launch once, ride the hype, and fade. Lady Gaga’s launched, flopped on Amazon, scrapped every product, reformulated the entire line from scratch, switched retailers, and came back with 400% revenue growth in a single year. Haus Labs is the most successful brand pivot in the celebrity beauty space, and it happened because the founder treated the first version as a failure worth learning from instead of a reputation worth protecting.
The brand now generates an estimated $75 to $100 million in annual revenue, sells through every Sephora location in North America and 12 European countries, and is expanding into Southeast Asia and Oceania in 2025. Gaga’s total net worth sits around $300 million across music, film, and beauty, and Haus Labs is the business she built from the ground up rather than licensed out.
At a glance:
| Founded | 2019 (as Haus Laboratories); relaunched June 2022 as Haus Labs by Lady Gaga |
| Founder | Lady Gaga (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) |
| CEO | Ben Jones (co-founder; previously CDO at The Honest Company) |
| Artistry Director | Sarah Tanno (Gaga’s personal makeup artist) |
| Investors | Lightspeed Venture Partners (lead), Gaingels, Riverside Ventures, Sozo Ventures |
| Total funding | $10.4 million |
| Revenue (2022) | ~$80–100M (400% growth over 2021) |
| Revenue (2023) | ~$75–100M (estimated) |
| Available at | Sephora (North America, U.K., 12 EU countries), Sephora at Kohl’s, hauslabs.com |
| Price range | $16–$49 |
The Story
A pop star who never felt beautiful
Lady Gaga did not start a beauty brand because she saw a market opportunity. She started one because makeup changed her life before music did. Growing up, she was mercilessly bullied, and by her own account, she never felt beautiful. When she discovered makeup, she realized she could create any version of herself she wanted. She watched her mother transform with a few products before going out, and it clicked for her that beauty was not about looking a certain way. It was about deciding who you wanted to be and building that person with your own hands.
That perspective shaped everything about how the brand was eventually built. Haus Labs was never designed to sell “natural beauty” or “your skin but better.” It was designed for people who use makeup as self-expression, transformation, and creative control. Roughly 25% of the brand’s customers are men, a figure that is unusual in celebrity beauty and makes complete sense when you consider who Lady Gaga’s audience actually is.
The Amazon experiment
In September 2019, Haus Laboratories became the first prestige beauty brand to launch exclusively on Amazon. On paper, the logic was compelling: Amazon had hundreds of millions of active customers, and Gaga’s fame would drive initial sales. The brand hit #1 in the Makeup category on Prime Day 2019, with nine of the top 100 best-selling makeup products belonging to Haus Laboratories.
Then reality set in. Amazon is where people buy things they already know they want. Shoppers searching “eyeliner” or “liquid eyeshadow” were not finding Haus Laboratories in the results. The brand only appeared when someone searched the brand name directly, which meant it could not attract new customers organically. Amazon does not let brands tell their story, communicate their values, or create the kind of environment that makes someone feel something about a product before they buy it. On Amazon, a $24 lip gloss from Lady Gaga sits next to a $7 lip gloss from a brand nobody has heard of, and the platform treats them identically.
The deeper problem was that Amazon is a restocking platform for beauty, not a discovery platform. People go there to reorder their Aquaphor or their go-to mascara. They do not go there to fall in love with a new brand. After the first year, Amazon’s internal support dried up, and the brand was left managing the channel on its own in an environment fundamentally hostile to prestige beauty.
Burning it down and starting over
In 2022, Gaga and CEO Ben Jones made the decision that most founders would never make: they scrapped every single product and started from zero. Every formula was reformulated, every product was rebuilt, and the brand relaunched on June 9, 2022 as Haus Labs by Lady Gaga, exclusively through Sephora and the brand’s own website.
The team removed roughly 2,700 ingredients from the formulations and replaced them with skincare-grade alternatives like hyaluronic acid and vegan collagen. They developed a patent-pending ingredient called Fermented Arnica, which the brand claims is 860% more potent than conventional arnica for reducing redness and irritation. The result was a line of about 90 SKUs that could credibly call itself clean beauty without sacrificing the high-pigment, long-wear performance that Gaga’s artistic identity demanded.
Ben Jones had come from The Honest Company, where he served as Chief Digital Officer. He understood DTC and digital customer acquisition. Nicole Quinn, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners who had previously backed Goop, led the investment and joined the board. Sarah Tanno, Gaga’s personal makeup artist of many years, served as Global Artistry Director and co-created every product with the development team, translating Gaga’s artistic vision into consumer-ready formulas.
Gaga herself showed up at the Sephora store in Westfield Century City, Los Angeles on June 16, 2022 to meet the beauty advisor team and present the collection. The brand started in 25 high-traffic Sephora doors and expanded to over 500 locations by fall 2022.
The Strategy
Amazon taught a $20 million lesson
Haus Laboratories generated roughly $20 million in revenue in 2021, its last full year on Amazon. That is not a terrible number for a beauty brand, but it is a terrible number for a brand backed by one of the most famous women on the planet. The Amazon-exclusive strategy proved that distribution is not just about where people can buy your product. It is about where people can experience it. Prestige beauty requires environment, curation, and context, all of which Amazon actively strips away.
The pivot to Sephora was not just a channel switch. It was a complete rethinking of what kind of brand Haus Labs needed to be. Sephora gives brands their own display space, beauty advisors who can explain the products, and a customer base that shows up specifically to discover new things. The difference was immediate: after the Sephora relaunch in June 2022, the brand reported 400% revenue growth year over year.
Clean beauty that actually performs
The “supercharged clean artistry” positioning solved a problem that most clean beauty brands ignore. Clean brands typically sacrifice performance for ingredient purity, ending up with products that are safe to put on your face but do not actually do much once they are there. Traditional prestige brands deliver performance but use ingredient lists that would not pass Sephora’s Clean certification standards.
Haus Labs decided to do both. Every product is Sephora Clean certified, cruelty-free, and vegan, while delivering the kind of pigment and wear time that a professional makeup artist (or a pop star performing under stage lights for three hours) would demand. The Triclone Skin Tech Foundation launched with 51 shades across six shade families, each with warm, cool, and neutral undertones, infused with over 20 skincare ingredients including the brand’s proprietary Fermented Arnica.
This was not a marketing angle. It was a product development commitment that required reformulating every single product from scratch when they abandoned the original Amazon line.
Sephora as the growth engine
The Sephora partnership expanded in deliberate stages rather than flooding every market at once:
- June 2022: U.S. and Canada (25 doors, expanding to 500+ by fall)
- June 2023: U.K.
- March 2024: 12 European countries including France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, and Denmark
- August 2024: Sephora at Kohl’s (nationwide U.S.)
- May 2025: Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Hong Kong
Each expansion added a new geography only after the previous one had proven demand. The Sephora at Kohl’s launch was particularly strategic because it put the brand in front of a completely different customer, one who shops at a department store rather than a beauty specialty retailer, without diluting the brand’s prestige positioning.
The Marketing
The concert as a product test
Every celebrity beauty founder posts about their products on Instagram. Gaga wears a full face of Haus Labs through hours-long arena concerts under extreme heat, sweat, and movement, and the products have to hold up because the entire world is watching in HD. CEO Ben Jones has called this “the ultimate benchmark” for product performance, and it is an authenticity play that no other celebrity beauty brand can replicate in quite the same way.
Gaga is not the face of the brand in the traditional sense, where a celebrity shows up for a photo shoot and collects a check. She is the creative mind behind the products, the walking product demonstration at every concert, and the person who decided to burn down version one and rebuild from scratch when it was not good enough. Executives describe her as “the mind of the brand, who happens to also be a face of the brand.” That distinction matters because it is the difference between a licensing deal and a founder.
9.4 billion views on one TikTok challenge
In September 2022, shortly after the Sephora relaunch, Haus Labs launched a TikTok challenge featuring the Triclone Skin Tech Foundation. The challenge generated 9.4 billion views, a number so large it would be hard to believe if it were not verified by multiple sources. For context, Fenty Beauty’s entire first month of earned media was valued at $72 million. A single Haus Labs TikTok challenge reached an audience the size of the planet.
The foundation went viral among sensitive-skinned creators who praised its ability to deliver coverage without irritation, which reinforced the “clean artistry” positioning in the most authentic way possible: real people with real skin problems saying the product actually worked.
1,700 creators, zero gatekeeping
The brand collaborated with over 1,700 creators in a single year, generating more than 6,400 Instagram posts. The influencer strategy was deliberately broad, ranging from everyday beauty enthusiasts to celebrity makeup artists. This approach mirrors what worked for Fenty Beauty: when you send products to people who actually look like your customers instead of only the biggest names, the resulting content feels real because it is.
The Numbers
| Year | Revenue | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 (Sep–Dec) | Not disclosed | Amazon launch |
| 2020 | Not disclosed | Amazon exclusive |
| 2021 | ~$20M | Last full year on Amazon |
| 2022 | ~$80–100M | Sephora relaunch, 400% YoY growth |
| 2023 | ~$75–100M | Estimated |
These are estimates based on industry reporting, not confirmed financials. The 400% year-over-year growth from 2021 to 2022 is the most widely cited figure and has been referenced by multiple beauty industry outlets.
Funding: Haus Labs raised $10.4 million total, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Gaingels, Riverside Ventures, and Sozo Ventures. Nicole Quinn, the Lightspeed partner who led the deal, also backed Goop and has a track record in the beauty-meets-lifestyle space.
Profitability: Not publicly disclosed.
Valuation: Not publicly disclosed. With $10.4 million in total funding and estimated revenue approaching $100 million, the brand appears to be operating at a scale that far exceeds its initial investment, though the exact valuation remains private.
Controversies
The Amazon launch everyone saw coming
Beauty industry analysts and press questioned the Amazon-exclusive strategy from the moment it was announced. Amazon had never been a successful channel for prestige color cosmetics, and the criticism proved prescient. The brand essentially acknowledged the failure by abandoning Amazon entirely and relaunching through Sephora in 2022. To their credit, they did not try to spin the pivot as anything other than what it was: a course correction after learning that the original distribution strategy was wrong.
Product complaints after the relaunch
Some customers have reported that the Triclone foundation oxidizes to an orangey tone on certain skin types, and there have been complaints about the brand’s color match tool on its website not working properly. These are standard product feedback issues rather than scandals. The brand’s Trustpilot reviews also flag occasional international shipping delays and confusion around a discovery kit that charges $19.21 if the customer does not purchase a full-size product after the trial.
What You Can Learn
The best time to pivot is when you are wrong, not when you are failing. Haus Laboratories was not dying on Amazon. It was making $20 million a year. Many founders would have called that good enough and kept going. Gaga and her team recognized that “not dying” is different from “succeeding” and made the harder choice: scrapping everything and starting over. If you are building something and the results are mediocre, ask yourself whether the problem is execution or strategy. If it is strategy, no amount of better execution will fix it.
Distribution is not just logistics. It is brand identity. Selling through Amazon told one story about Haus Laboratories: it is a commodity, interchangeable with everything else on the platform, discoverable only if someone already knows your name. Selling through Sephora told a completely different story: it is prestige, it is curated, and it belongs next to the best brands in the world. The product inside the packaging was different too, but the channel switch alone changed how people perceived the brand. Where you sell is a statement about what you are.
Clean does not have to mean boring. The clean beauty market has a reputation problem: customers assume clean products sacrifice performance. Haus Labs proved that clean certifications and high-pigment, long-wear formulas are not mutually exclusive. If you are building in any market where the existing options force customers to choose between two things they want, the brand that figures out how to deliver both has an enormous advantage.
Celebrity fame is not a substitute for product quality. Gaga is one of the most famous people alive. Her fame alone was enough to generate a #1 Amazon ranking on launch day. It was not enough to build a sustainable beauty brand on a platform that does not support brand storytelling. The celebrity brands that last, Fenty Beauty, Rare Beauty, Haus Labs, are the ones where the founder is genuinely involved in product development and treats the brand as a business rather than a revenue stream.
Your first version does not have to be your final version. The Haus Labs story is ultimately about permission. Permission to be wrong, permission to start over, and permission to treat a public failure as a learning opportunity instead of a permanent mark. Most founders are terrified of admitting their first idea did not work. Gaga did it with a $20 million business on the line and came back with one five times its size.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who owns Haus Labs?
Lady Gaga co-founded the brand with CEO Ben Jones. The exact ownership breakdown is not publicly disclosed. Lightspeed Venture Partners is the lead investor, with a total of $10.4 million raised from Lightspeed, Gaingels, Riverside Ventures, and Sozo Ventures.
How much revenue does Haus Labs generate?
Estimated $75 to $100 million annually as of 2023. The brand reported 400% revenue growth year over year after relaunching through Sephora in 2022, up from roughly $20 million in 2021 when it was sold exclusively on Amazon.
Is Haus Labs cruelty-free?
Yes. Haus Labs is cruelty-free and vegan. All products are Sephora Clean certified and free from approximately 2,700 ingredients on the brand’s exclusion list.
What happened to Haus Laboratories on Amazon?
The brand launched exclusively on Amazon in September 2019, becoming the first prestige beauty brand to use Amazon as its primary retail partner. After discovering that Amazon’s platform was hostile to brand-building in prestige beauty, the brand scrapped its entire product line, reformulated everything, and relaunched as Haus Labs by Lady Gaga through Sephora in June 2022.
How many foundation shades does Haus Labs have?
The Triclone Skin Tech Foundation comes in 51 shades across six shade families (Fair, Light, Light Medium, Medium, Medium Deep, Deep), each with warm, cool, and neutral undertones.
Where can you buy Haus Labs?
Sephora stores across North America, the U.K., and 12 European countries, plus Sephora at Kohl’s locations nationwide in the U.S. and hauslabs.com. The brand is expanding to Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Hong Kong through Sephora in 2025.
How is Haus Labs different from other celebrity beauty brands?
Three things separate it. First, Gaga is deeply involved in product development rather than just lending her name. Second, the entire line is clean-certified while maintaining professional-grade performance. Third, the brand publicly failed, publicly pivoted, and publicly rebuilt itself, which is the opposite of how most celebrity brands operate.
Who founded Haus Labs?
Lady Gaga (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) founded the brand alongside CEO Ben Jones, formerly Chief Digital Officer at The Honest Company. Sarah Tanno, Gaga’s longtime personal makeup artist, serves as Global Artistry Director and co-creates every product with the development team.
When was Haus Labs founded?
The brand originally launched in September 2019 as Haus Laboratories, exclusively on Amazon. After scrapping every product and reformulating the entire line, it relaunched on June 9, 2022 as Haus Labs by Lady Gaga, exclusively through Sephora and hauslabs.com.
What is Lady Gaga’s net worth?
Lady Gaga’s total net worth is estimated at approximately $300 million across her music, film, and beauty businesses. Haus Labs is the company she built from the ground up rather than licensing her name to, and Gaga retains founder equity, though the exact ownership split has not been publicly disclosed.
What is Haus Labs’ valuation?
Haus Labs’ valuation has not been publicly disclosed. The company has raised $10.4 million in total funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Gaingels, Riverside Ventures, and Sozo Ventures, against estimated annual revenue of $75 to $100 million.
Sources
- PR Newswire, “Launching Today: Lady Gaga Debuts All-New Makeup Brand Haus Labs by Lady Gaga,” June 2022. Relaunch details, product count, clean certification, ingredient strategy.
- PR Newswire, “Haus Labs by Lady Gaga Launches Triclone Skin Tech Foundation,” September 2022. Foundation shade count, skincare ingredients, Fermented Arnica details.
- Marketplace Pulse, “Lady Gaga’s Beauty Brand Gives Up on Amazon,” 2022. Amazon strategy analysis, why prestige beauty fails on Amazon.
- Marketplace Pulse, “Amazon Launched a Brand with Lady Gaga to Show Off,” 2019. Original Amazon launch details, Prime Day performance.
- Beauty Independent, “Haus Labs Shifts to Sephora Distribution,” 2022. Distribution pivot analysis.
- Storyclash, “Haus Labs Marketing Strategy,” 2023. TikTok challenge views, creator collaboration numbers, male customer percentage.
- Business of Fashion, “How Haus Labs Mastered the Comeback,” 2023. Ben Jones quotes, concert product testing, brand positioning.
- PR Newswire, “Haus Labs Launches in Europe,” March 2024. European expansion details.
- PR Newswire, “Haus Labs to Launch in Sephora at Kohl’s,” August 2024. Kohl’s expansion details.
- PitchBook, “Haus Labs Company Profile”. Total funding, investor details.
- The Ethos, “Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs Clean Beauty,” 2022. Ingredient removal count.
- PAPER Magazine, “Sarah Tanno on Creating Haus Labs”. Sarah Tanno’s role and creative process.