Patrick Ta Beauty
Celebrity makeup artist turned brand founder. Bootstrapped to $30M+ before taking outside money, Sephora-exclusive, built on a signature blush technique that became a product.
In May 2025, Patrick Ta Beauty held its first pop-up event on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. Fans camped overnight for up to 17 hours, the line stretched more than 1.5 miles, and organizers had to cap entry 90 minutes before the doors opened. The event sold nothing. No product, no merch, no exclusive drops. It was a 2,400-square-foot brand experience that cost approximately $500,000 to produce, and the day it opened, Sephora sales for Patrick Ta Beauty jumped 28% while the brand’s own website saw a 49% spike in traffic.
Patrick Ta dropped out of high school at 16, opened a nail salon at 18, went bankrupt at 21, started working a MAC counter at 22, and was doing Gigi Hadid’s makeup by his mid-twenties. He co-founded the brand in 2019 with Rima and Avo Minasyan, bootstrapped it to an estimated $30 million in annual revenue before taking a single dollar of outside investment in 2022, and as of 2025 the company is valued at over $70 million with its blush collection holding the number one position in its category at Sephora stores across the United States.
At a glance:
| Founded | April 2019 |
| Founders | Patrick Ta, Rima Minasyan, Avo Minasyan |
| CEO | Kimberly Villatoro (appointed March 2023, formerly of Estée Lauder Companies) |
| COO | Paul Parikh (former senior L’Oréal executive) |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped 2019–2022. Stride Consumer Partners took minority stake October 2022. Founders retain majority. |
| Estimated annual revenue | $30–50M (2023 est.) |
| Estimated valuation | $70M+ (2025) |
| Retailers | Sephora (all ~460 U.S. doors), Sephora Mexico, Sephora Middle East (34 doors), Cult Beauty (UK), patrickta.com |
| Product categories | Blush, eyeshadow, lip, brow, complexion, body, tools |
| Certifications | Vegan, cruelty-free |
The Story
A nail salon, a bankruptcy, and a MAC counter
Patrick Ta grew up in San Diego in a Vietnamese American household where his mother owned several salons. He was bullied in a predominantly white high school for his weight and creativity, came out as gay while still a teenager, and dropped out of school at 16. At 18, his parents helped him open a nail and tanning salon in Scottsdale, Arizona. The salon did well at first and then collapsed. By 21, he was bankrupt.
His roommate in Arizona happened to be a MAC makeup artist, and through her, Ta started working a MAC counter around 2012. He worked there for about a year and discovered that he was genuinely good at it. In 2013 he moved to Los Angeles to freelance, with no formal training, no industry connections, and a bankrupt nail salon in the rearview.
Instagram finds the right face
What happened next is something that was only possible because of Instagram’s rise as a discovery platform. Ta started posting his work, and two people found him. Shay Mitchell, the actress, followed and DM’d him, becoming his first celebrity client. Then Gigi Hadid booked him for an awards show after finding him on the same platform, and as Hadid’s career exploded through the mid-2010s, Ta’s reputation grew with it. Within a few years his client list included Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian, Bella Hadid, Sydney Sweeney, Halle Berry, and Eva Longoria.
The trajectory from MAC counter to Gigi Hadid’s personal makeup artist took roughly four years. From bankruptcy to celebrity makeup artist for some of the most photographed women in the world took about the same amount of time. Six years after that, he launched a brand.
Three co-founders, three skill sets
Ta did not build the brand alone. Rima Minasyan brought deep product development expertise in beauty formulation, and her brother Avo Minasyan brought the operational muscle. Avo’s background was not in beauty at all: he had co-built TNH Pharmacy into what was described as the fastest-growing privately held specialty pharmacy in the country. The trio launched Patrick Ta Beauty on April 4, 2019, debuting on patrickta.com and in 32 Sephora doors with a “Major Glow” collection of nine products, including a body oil at $52, a highlighting mist at $32, and a lip shine at $22. By September 2019, the brand was in all 460 Sephora stores with 70 dedicated endcap displays.
The Strategy
Bootstrapped to $30 million before taking a dollar
Patrick Ta Beauty launched in 2019 and did not take outside investment until October 2022, when Stride Consumer Partners, a growth-equity firm that had previously backed First Aid Beauty and Skinfix, acquired a minority stake. By that point the brand was already generating approximately $30 million in annual revenue. The founders had bootstrapped the entire operation for three and a half years, which meant they could negotiate from a position of strength rather than need and retain majority ownership.
The contrast with other celebrity beauty brands is sharp. Haus Labs raised venture capital before its first product shipped. Kylie Cosmetics partnered with Seed Beauty’s manufacturing infrastructure from day one. Patrick Ta Beauty proved it could build a multimillion-dollar brand with three co-founders, a retail partnership, and zero outside capital.
One retailer, maximum depth
In the U.S., Patrick Ta Beauty sells through Sephora and its own website. That is it. No Ulta, no department stores, no Amazon. Sephora accounts for 70 to 80% of the brand’s revenue, making it one of the most concentrated retail distribution strategies among prestige beauty brands of its size.
The upside of that concentration is partnership depth. Sephora gave the brand 70 endcap displays within five months of launch, expanded it from 32 doors to 460 in the same timeframe, and continues to give it priority placement as a Sephora-exclusive. Other brands spread across Sephora, Ulta, Nordstrom, and Amazon to maximize reach, but Patrick Ta chose maximum investment from one partner over thin presence across many, and the data suggests it worked: the brand has outpaced overall makeup category growth at Sephora every year since launch.
The blush duo that productized a technique
Most beauty brands expand by adding more shades in the same format. Patrick Ta’s breakthrough was productizing a specific technique. As a celebrity makeup artist, his signature was layering cream blush under powder blush to create a particular kind of dimension and longevity that neither formula could achieve alone. The Major Headlines Double-Take Creme & Powder Blush Duo put both formulas in a single compact at $38, and the product became the foundation of what Glossy called “a blush empire.”
The blush collection now holds the top position in its category at Sephora in the U.S. In 2024, the brand created a TikTok AR filter that let users virtually try all blush shades, and within one week it ranked in the top 1% of all TikTok filters. Seven shades sold out on Sephora.com. Within two weeks, approximately 9,000 people had made videos using the filter, with total posts eventually exceeding 13,000.
Operators from Estée Lauder and L’Oréal at the helm
After the Stride investment, the brand hired experienced operators to build infrastructure for the next phase of growth. Kimberly Villatoro became CEO in March 2023, bringing two decades of experience including VP and General Manager of Smashbox and Glamglow at Estée Lauder Companies and a prior stint running marketing for Barbie at Mattel. Paul Parikh joined as COO from a senior role at L’Oréal. The pattern mirrors what other successful founder-led beauty brands have done: recognize the point where the founder’s creative vision needs professional operators behind it, and hire people who have already scaled beauty companies.
The Marketing
The makeup artist is the marketing
Patrick Ta’s primary marketing asset is Patrick Ta. He has roughly 4 million Instagram followers and posts daily at 12 PM EST with product-driven content: tutorials, celebrity behind-the-scenes footage, and technique demonstrations. The brand account has over 1 million followers and more than 1,100 posts, but the real reach comes from Ta’s personal platforms and the earned media his celebrity clientele generates without paid spend.
He described the challenge in a Glossy interview: “It was easier for Kylie Jenner,” referencing the difference between launching with a Kardashian-Jenner audience and building one as a makeup artist. But that constraint also created something most celebrity brands cannot replicate: every post demonstrates genuine skill rather than pure fame. When Patrick Ta applies blush on Gigi Hadid, the content works because the technique is visibly expert, and that credibility transfers to the product in a way that a celebrity holding up a bottle cannot match.
A $500,000 pop-up that sold nothing
The May 2025 “House of Glow” pop-up on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood was 2,400 square feet of brand experience, created by agency Kado, with zero product for sale. Fans waited up to 17 hours overnight, the line exceeded 1.5 miles, and organizers had to cap entry at 8:30 AM. The event cost approximately $500,000, and the return was not measured in transactions but in attention: a 28% increase in Sephora sales and a 49% increase in DTC site visits on the first day alone.
The math on that is worth sitting with. Five hundred thousand dollars, no revenue at the event itself, and a measurable sales lift at a retailer that the brand does not control. The pop-up did not sell products because selling products was not the point. Creating a physical manifestation of the brand’s identity that fans would document, post, and talk about was the point, and the sales lift proved that the strategy translated into real purchases through existing channels.
Email as a growth engine, not an afterthought
According to a Klaviyo case study, Patrick Ta Beauty’s email program drove 30% of its ecommerce revenue in 2024, three times larger than in 2023. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024, the brand achieved 8x year-over-year growth in Klaviyo-attributed revenue, 4x growth in SMS revenue, and 175% year-over-year growth in ecommerce revenue. They increased email send volume by 6x while unsubscribe rates actually dropped 37%, which means they were sending more messages to an audience that wanted to hear from them more, not less.
The Numbers
| Year | Estimated Revenue | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 (Apr–Dec) | Not disclosed | Launch year, started in 32 Sephora doors |
| 2022 | ~$30M | Estimated at time of Stride investment |
| 2023 | $30–50M | BeautyMatter FUTURE50 range |
All revenue figures are estimates because Patrick Ta Beauty is a private company. The most credible figures come from BeautyMatter, which profiled the brand in its FUTURE50 list in May 2023, and from industry sources cited at the time of the Stride Consumer Partners investment in October 2022. The brand has described its growth trajectory as “double- or triple-digit” each year since launch.
Funding: One known round. Stride Consumer Partners acquired a minority stake in October 2022. The investment amount and valuation were not disclosed. Lincoln International advised Patrick Ta Beauty on the transaction, and Stride used Ropes & Gray as legal counsel. As of 2025, the brand is estimated to be valued at over $70 million.
International expansion: After staying U.S.-focused from 2019 to 2025, the brand launched at Sephora Mexico in August 2025 and Sephora Middle East (34 doors across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar) in 2026. The Middle East already accounts for 35% of international revenue, with plans to expand to approximately 45 doors within the first 12 months. Patrick Ta won WWD’s International Beauty Innovator of the Year award, presented in Riyadh.
Controversies
Avonna Sunshine and the unpaid creator
On December 7, 2024, beauty influencer Avonna Sunshine, who has over 418,000 TikTok followers, posted a video breaking Patrick Ta Beauty products and accusing the brand of failing to pay her for work she had completed in Spring 2024. She stated: “I’m sick of seeing companies profit off of the Black dollar, and they’re not paying Black creators.” The video received 8 million views and 14,000 comments.
Patrick Ta posted a tearful TikTok apology the following day, saying: “I want to get you compensated as soon as possible, today if you are willing to answer me.” He attributed the missed payment to staff turnover on the influencer and finance teams, including employees who had quit, been let go, or gone on maternity leave, leaving the payment untracked. He took down his initial apology video and reposted a more emotional version, which drew additional backlash from viewers who called the tears performative.
Sunshine responded by framing the issue beyond a single missed payment: “This is the systemic undervaluing of creators, especially Black creators,” and noted that creators of color are “often overlooked, underpaid, and dismissed despite the value and impact we bring to the table.” The incident highlighted a recurring problem in influencer marketing where brands outsource creator relationships to teams that lack the infrastructure to track payments reliably, and the founder’s personal reputation absorbs the damage.
The $42 eyeshadow pricing debate
In October 2024, beauty influencer Mikayla Nogueira called the $42 price of the new Major Dimension Eye Illusion Eyeshadow Duos “insane.” Patrick Ta responded on TikTok explaining that the duos use a specialized “slurry” formula made in Italy, baked rather than pressed, composed of “100% pearl” with no filler pigments. He compared the price to MAC Dazzle Shadow Extreme and Too Faced Disco Crush Glitter, each $30 for a single shade. Jeffree Star called the formula “pure pigment, pure diamonds” but conceded the price could be “chopped down a few dollars.” The debate generated significant attention and did not appear to hurt sales.
What You Can Learn
Productize what makes you different. Patrick Ta did not launch a generic beauty line. He turned his signature professional technique, layering cream under powder blush, into a physical product that customers could use to replicate a result that previously required a celebrity makeup artist. If you have a skill, method, or approach that people pay you for as a service, the question is whether that expertise can become a product that delivers the same result without you in the room.
Prove the business before you take the money. Three and a half years of bootstrapping to $30 million in revenue meant the founders could negotiate investment terms from a position of strength rather than desperation. Every dollar of venture capital comes with expectations, and the later you take it, the fewer concessions you make. Patrick Ta Beauty gave up a minority stake to a growth-equity partner after proving the business model worked, which is a fundamentally different negotiation than asking someone to bet on a concept.
Depth with one partner beats breadth across many. Seventy endcap displays in Sephora within five months of launch is what happens when a brand commits to a single retail partner instead of splitting attention across Sephora, Ulta, Nordstrom, and Amazon. The trade-off is concentration risk, since 70 to 80% of revenue coming from one retailer is a vulnerable position. But for a brand at this stage, the depth of that partnership, the endcaps, the priority placement, the exclusive positioning, generates more growth than wider but thinner presence would.
Attention that you do not sell converts anyway. A pop-up that costs $500,000 and sells nothing sounds like a failed retail experiment. But the 28% same-day lift in Sephora sales and the 49% spike in DTC traffic prove that attention and commerce do not have to happen in the same place. The hardest thing for most brands to accept is that the event generating the excitement does not need to be the same channel capturing the revenue.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Patrick Ta Beauty?
Patrick Ta co-founded the brand with Rima Minasyan, a beauty product development specialist, and Avo Minasyan, an entrepreneur who had previously built TNH Pharmacy into one of the fastest-growing specialty pharmacies in the country. The brand launched in April 2019.
How much revenue does Patrick Ta Beauty generate?
Industry estimates place the brand at approximately $30 million in 2022 and $30 to $50 million in 2023, though the company does not disclose official figures. The brand has described its growth trajectory as “double- or triple-digit” every year since launch.
Where can you buy Patrick Ta Beauty?
In the U.S., the brand sells through Sephora (all approximately 460 doors) and its own website patrickta.com. Internationally, it is available at Sephora Mexico, Sephora Middle East (34 doors across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar), and Cult Beauty in the UK.
Is Patrick Ta Beauty independently owned?
The founders retain majority ownership. Stride Consumer Partners, a growth-equity firm, acquired a minority stake in October 2022 after the brand had been bootstrapped for three and a half years. The investment amount was not disclosed.
What is the brand’s best-selling product?
The Major Headlines Double-Take Creme & Powder Blush Duo, priced at $38, is the brand’s hero product and holds the number one blush collection position at Sephora in the United States. The duo format, which puts cream and powder blush in one compact, was based on Patrick Ta’s signature professional technique.
Is Patrick Ta Beauty cruelty-free?
All Patrick Ta Beauty products are vegan and cruelty-free.
How did Patrick Ta become a celebrity makeup artist?
Patrick Ta dropped out of high school at 16, went bankrupt running a nail salon at 21, started working a MAC counter at 22, and moved to Los Angeles to freelance in 2013. Shay Mitchell and Gigi Hadid both discovered him on Instagram, and as Hadid’s career exploded through the mid-2010s, his client list grew to include Ariana Grande, Kim Kardashian, Sydney Sweeney, Halle Berry, and others.
When was Patrick Ta Beauty founded?
Patrick Ta Beauty launched on April 4, 2019, debuting on patrickta.com and in 32 Sephora doors with a “Major Glow” collection of nine products. By September 2019, the brand was in all 460 Sephora stores nationwide.
What is Patrick Ta Beauty’s valuation?
Industry sources estimate the brand at over $70 million as of 2025. The figure follows Stride Consumer Partners’ minority investment in October 2022, when the brand was already generating roughly $30 million in annual revenue after three and a half years of bootstrapping. Founders Patrick Ta, Rima Minasyan, and Avo Minasyan retain majority ownership.
Sources
- Glossy, “Inside the Patrick Ta Beauty pop-up that inspired overnight camping and a mile-long entry line,” May 2025. Pop-up details, costs, sales lift metrics.
- BeautyMatter, “Patrick Ta Beauty: FUTURE50 2023,” May 2023. Revenue estimates, growth trajectory, Sephora relationship.
- BeautyMatter, “Patrick Ta Beauty Lands Minority Investment,” October 2022. Stride Consumer Partners investment, 2022 revenue estimate.
- PR Newswire, “Stride Consumer Partners Invests in Patrick Ta Beauty,” October 2022. Investment structure, advisors.
- PR Newswire, “Patrick Ta Beauty Accelerates Growth with New CEO,” March 2023. Kimberly Villatoro appointment, background.
- PR Newswire, “Former Senior L’Oréal Exec Joins Patrick Ta Beauty,” 2022. Paul Parikh COO appointment.
- Glossy, “Patrick Ta is also quietly building a blush empire,” 2024. TikTok filter results, blush duo performance.
- Glossy, “Makeup artist Patrick Ta talks about his brand’s Sephora launch,” 2019. Launch details, Sephora expansion timeline, “easier for Kylie Jenner” quote.
- WWD, “Patrick Ta Beauty’s Middle East Expansion,” 2026. International expansion, Middle East revenue share.
- CEO Today Magazine, “Patrick Ta’s $70M Brand Goes Global in 2025,” October 2025. Valuation estimate.
- Klaviyo, “Patrick Ta Beauty Case Study,” 2024. Email and SMS revenue metrics, BFCM 2024 performance.
- Her Campus, “Patrick Ta and Avonna Sunshine TikTok Drama,” December 2024. Avonna Sunshine controversy, quotes, timeline.
- Cosmetics Business, “Patrick Ta defends $42 eyeshadow pricing,” October 2024. Pricing controversy, formula details.
- Stride Consumer Partners, “Patrick Ta Beauty”. Co-founder backgrounds, brand positioning.
- Very Good Light, “Patrick Ta on AAPI Identity,” May 2021. Personal background, family, coming out.