The Outset
Scarlett Johansson turned down Shiseido and Estée Lauder, chose independent backing instead, and built a clean skincare brand estimated at $153M in revenue by year two.
Scarlett Johansson is the highest-grossing female actor of all time, with a global box office total exceeding $14 billion. She has no personal Instagram account. She walked away from deals with two of the largest beauty conglomerates on the planet because neither one offered her enough ownership. And she launched a skincare brand two months before her 38th birthday that generated an estimated $153 million in revenue by its second year on the market.
The Outset is not what most people picture when they think celebrity beauty brand. It is not a single hero product with the founder’s face on it. It is not a licensing deal dressed up as a personal brand. It is a 5-product skincare line with a proprietary ingredient, a clean formulation standard that bans more than 2,700 ingredients, and distribution across Sephora, Target, Nordstrom, Amazon, QVC, Cult Beauty UK, and Bluemercury. Fast Company described it as “an indie brand with a superpower, as opposed to a celebrity brand,” which is the most precise thing anyone has written about it.
At a glance:
| Founded | March 1, 2022 |
| Founders | Scarlett Johansson + Kate Foster Lengyel |
| CEO | Kate Foster Lengyel (departed April 2025; no successor named as of publication) |
| Funding | The Najafi Companies |
| Revenue (2023 est.) | ~$153M (Particl/Retailboss; other 2024 sources estimate $25–89M) |
| Launch products | 5 SKUs, all under $55 |
| Key ingredient | Hylauroset (plant-based hyaluronic acid alternative from cassia flower seeds) |
| Banned ingredients | 2,700+ (approximately twice the industry standard) |
| Retailers | Sephora (all US doors), Target, Nordstrom, Amazon, QVC, Bluemercury, Cult Beauty UK |
| International community | 50%+ from outside the US |
The Story
The lawsuit that changed her business philosophy
In April 2021, Johansson sued Disney for releasing Black Widow simultaneously on Disney+ and in theaters, arguing that the move breached her contract and cost her tens of millions in box office-tied compensation. Disney settled the suit in September 2021 for an undisclosed amount. The settlement paid her something Disney had not intended to give her: clarity.
The entertainment industry had restructured itself around streaming in ways that transferred enormous value from talent to studios, and Johansson had experienced firsthand what happens when your financial outcome depends entirely on decisions made by a corporation with different incentives than yours. The answer was to own something outright, in a category where she controlled the terms.
Shiseido approached her. Estée Lauder approached her. She turned both down. The reason, she told interviewers, was that she did not want her name on something she did not meaningfully own and operate. She wanted equity, real input, and a co-founder who could build the operational side. She found that in Kate Foster Lengyel.
Who actually built it
Foster Lengyel had founded SwearBy, a product recommendation platform, and sold it to Meredith Corporation in January 2020. She came to The Outset with experience running a company from inception through acquisition and with a clear set of opinions about what the clean beauty market was missing.
The two founders spent time on product development before launching anything, which is a pattern that shows up in the celebrity brands that sustain real revenue. Rare Beauty took two years. Rhode took nearly three. The brands that fail tend to move faster because they are built by licensors who want to get products to market before the celebrity’s cultural moment passes. The brands that last move at the speed of the product, not the fame.
The Outset launched on March 1, 2022, with 5 products: a Gentle Micellar Cleanser, Brightening Vitamin C Serum, Nourishing Squalane Prep Serum, Lightweight Whipped Moisturizer, and an SPF moisturizer. Every product was priced under $55, fragrance-free, vegan, and cruelty-free. The formulations banned 2,700+ ingredients, roughly twice what most clean beauty brands require. And every product used a proprietary ingredient the brand developed specifically for the launch.
The ingredient no one else has
Hylauroset is a plant-based alternative to hyaluronic acid, derived from cassia flower seeds. The Outset developed it themselves, which means no competitor can buy the same thing from a supplier and replicate their formulation story. This is a structural advantage that most celebrity beauty brands never bother creating, because it requires real product development investment and time, and most celebrity beauty brands are not built around real product development.
Hyaluronic acid is the ingredient everyone knows: it holds moisture in the skin and has become one of the most recognized skincare terms among consumers who follow beauty content. Hylauroset performs the same function but comes entirely from plants and is exclusive to The Outset. The brand built its formulation identity around this ingredient, and it gave the marketing something factual to say that no competitor could legitimately repeat.
The Strategy
Choosing the right money
The Najafi Companies is a private equity firm that also backed BÉIS (Shay Mitchell’s travel brand) and Pattern Beauty (Tracee Ellis Ross’s haircare line). The firm’s portfolio strategy centers on founder-driven consumer brands where the celebrity holds real equity rather than a licensing fee, and its infrastructure supports the back-end operations that founders without corporate experience typically lack.
Johansson’s choice to take Najafi’s backing over the conglomerate deals matters for a specific reason: when a brand is backed by Shiseido or Estée Lauder, the distribution, marketing, and operational decisions are made by the conglomerate. The brand’s direction follows the acquirer’s priorities. Najafi’s model keeps the founder in control, which is the same reason Johansson walked away from the Hollywood streaming deal that cost her the Black Widow upside. The structure of ownership determines who benefits from the brand’s success.
Clean beauty at a functional price point
The clean beauty market had a segmentation problem when The Outset launched in 2022. The credible end was expensive: Drunk Elephant built its following by refusing to formulate with what it called the “Suspicious 6,” but its products regularly cost $60 to $90. The affordable end was crowded with brands making clean claims that did not survive scrutiny. The Outset positioned itself in the middle: a 2,700-ingredient banned list at a price cap of $55 per product.
That price discipline was deliberate. Johansson has said she wanted a woman to be able to buy everything The Outset sells without spending more than most people spend on a single luxury moisturizer. A full 5-product routine at The Outset’s prices costs less than one jar of La Mer. That is not an accident in the formulation or a consequence of cutting corners. It is a founding principle that shaped every product decision from the beginning.
Minimalism as a product architecture
The Outset launched with 5 SKUs while most celebrity beauty launches aim for range and breadth. The brand was built on the idea that most women own too many skincare products and that a small number of well-formulated essentials could replace the overcomplicated routine the beauty industry had been selling for years. Five products was the whole routine, and that constraint was the point.
The brand has since expanded beyond the original 5 products, but the core philosophy of fewer products and better formulations has stayed intact. It is the same logic that took Drunk Elephant from a small clean beauty brand to an $845 million acquisition by Shiseido, and it requires confidence in the product that most celebrity founders do not build into their business model from day one.
The Marketing
Johansson does not have a personal Instagram account in any ongoing sense. She created one in February 2022 specifically to support the launch, posted a series of images around the debut, and stepped back. She has no TikTok, no active Twitter, and no public social presence that generates daily discovery for the brand. For context, Hailey Bieber built Rhode on her own 49 million Instagram followers, and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty runs through 400 million followers across platforms. The Outset built its earned media foundation through press coverage and retail credibility instead.
Allure named the Prep Serum a Best of Beauty 2022 winner in the launch year. Allure Readers voted The Outset Best New Brand in 2023. Both are among the most cited endorsements in the beauty industry, and neither required Johansson to post a tutorial. Fast Company reported her description of the brand’s marketing approach in two phases: the first chapter was about telling her origin story and capturing the news cycle, and the second chapter was about the products themselves. That deliberate pivot is exactly what separates the celebrity brands that last from the ones that don’t.
The QVC debut on January 9, 2024 is the clearest window into the brand’s retail marketing strategy. Both Johansson and Foster Lengyel appeared live on the channel, which reaches approximately 100 million US households. QVC’s core audience is women 35 to 65 who make purchasing decisions based on product demonstration rather than social media trends. That is not Hailey Bieber’s audience or Selena Gomez’s audience. It is exactly the audience a fragrance-free, under-$55 skincare line should be talking to, and the founders showed up in person to make the case.
The international composition of The Outset’s community tells a parallel story. More than 50% of its social following comes from outside the United States. For a brand without a personally active celebrity social account driving daily discovery, building that kind of international reach requires product quality and press credibility doing the work that follower counts do for other brands. The clean formulation story travels across markets in ways that a trend-driven beauty launch cannot, because the formulation standard is the same everywhere.
Influencer marketing plays a role, but the brand’s public-facing strategy leans toward press validation and retail placement as its primary authority signals. Being in all Sephora US doors, Nordstrom, Target, Bluemercury, and Cult Beauty UK simultaneously tells a consumer something different than a sponsored post. It says the brand cleared the gatekeepers.
The Numbers
Revenue estimates for The Outset vary significantly depending on the source and the time period. Particl and Retailboss data estimated roughly $153 million in 2023, while other 2024 sources put annual revenue between $25 million and $89 million. All figures are estimates because The Outset is a private company with no obligation to disclose financials.
The wide range across sources reflects a genuine challenge in estimating DTC brand revenue from third-party data. Panel-based measurement services like Particl extrapolate from observed transaction data, and accuracy varies depending on how a brand is distributed across channels. For a brand available across Sephora, Target, Nordstrom, QVC, Amazon, and its own site simultaneously, reconciliation is complicated.
| Year | Notes |
|---|---|
| 2022 (Mar launch) | Sephora US, theoutset.com; 5 SKUs under $55; Allure Best of Beauty (Prep Serum) |
| 2023 | Allure Readers’ Choice Best New Brand; expanded retail footprint |
| 2024 (Jan) | QVC debut with both founders live on air; Target, Nordstrom, Bluemercury added |
| 2025 (Apr) | Foster Lengyel departs; no successor named |
Controversies
The SodaStream years
In 2014, Johansson became a brand ambassador for SodaStream, the Israeli carbonation company. Oxfam, which she had supported as a Global Ambassador since 2007, raised concerns because SodaStream operated a factory in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. Johansson chose SodaStream and resigned from her Oxfam role. The controversy generated significant press coverage at the time, and it surfaces periodically in discussions of The Outset’s brand positioning, particularly in markets where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a consumer consideration.
The Outset itself has not been the subject of a dedicated boycott campaign linked to this history, but the SodaStream story is part of Johansson’s public record and relevant to any analysis of the brand’s reputation risk.
What You Can Learn
Ownership structure is the strategy. Johansson turned down Shiseido and Estée Lauder because the deals on offer did not give her meaningful equity. The conglomerate model is fast, well-resourced, and reduces founder risk, and it is also the model that gives the brand’s upside to someone else. The decision to take independent backing from The Najafi Companies meant slower scaling and more operational complexity, and it also meant she owns the outcome. That decision mirrors the lesson from the Disney lawsuit: the structure of ownership determines who benefits when the work succeeds.
A proprietary ingredient is worth the development cost. Most beauty brands launch with commodity ingredients sourced from the same suppliers as every other brand on the Sephora shelf. The Outset developed Hylauroset specifically for the brand, which gives them a formulation story no competitor can copy without creating their own version from scratch. For a brand without a celebrity social media presence driving daily discovery, a defensible product story is one of the few things that earns sustained attention from press and retail buyers.
You do not need a personal social media account to build an audience. The Outset built an international community that is more than 50% non-US, won two major industry awards in its first two years, and landed in every major US beauty retailer, all without Johansson posting a single ongoing tutorial or behind-the-scenes clip. Earned media and retail placement do not scale as fast as a viral post from a founder with 400 million followers, but they build a different kind of credibility, and they do not require trading the product’s story for the founder’s attention span.
Price discipline is a product decision, not a marketing one. The choice to keep every product under $55 while maintaining a 2,700-ingredient banned list required formulating around the price point rather than pricing to what the market would bear. Brands that set their price ceiling first and build to it rather than building first and pricing later create more defensible products, because the constraint forces real decisions about what the product actually needs to contain.
The operational co-founder matters as much as the famous one. Foster Lengyel had built and sold a company before partnering with Johansson, which meant the operational side of the brand was not being improvised while the founder learned how businesses work. The same pattern appears across the celebrity brands that have sustained real revenue: Rare Beauty hired Scott Friedman, who had built NYX from scratch and sold it to L’Oréal for $500 million. Rhode was co-founded with Lauren Ratner, who had worked in beauty investment. The famous name gets the doors open. The operator decides what happens inside them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who co-founded The Outset with Scarlett Johansson?
Kate Foster Lengyel co-founded The Outset with Johansson and served as CEO from launch until April 2025. Foster previously founded SwearBy, a product recommendation platform she sold to Meredith Corporation in January 2020. As of publication, no successor CEO has been named.
What is Hylauroset?
Hylauroset is a proprietary ingredient developed by The Outset as a plant-based alternative to hyaluronic acid. It is derived from cassia flower seeds and functions as a skin hydration agent in the brand’s formulations. Because it is proprietary to The Outset, no other brand can source or use it.
How does The Outset’s clean standard compare to other clean beauty brands?
The Outset bans more than 2,700 ingredients from its formulations, approximately twice the number banned by most clean beauty brands. All products are fragrance-free, vegan, and cruelty-free. For comparison, Drunk Elephant built its reputation on avoiding what it calls the “Suspicious 6,” while The Outset’s standard covers a far broader list.
Why doesn’t Scarlett Johansson have a personal Instagram?
Johansson has said publicly that she values privacy and prefers to keep her personal life separate from her public work. She created an Instagram account in February 2022 to support The Outset’s launch, posted during the launch period, and has not maintained an active ongoing presence. The brand markets without a celebrity social media presence, which is unusual for a celebrity beauty brand at this scale.
How does The Outset compare to Rhode?
Both brands are celebrity-founded clean skincare lines launched in the same period, priced accessibly, and distributed through major retailers including Sephora. The primary structural difference is in marketing: Rhode was built extensively through Hailey Bieber’s personal social presence and products designed to be visually compelling in short-form video. The Outset built its credibility through press awards, retail placement, and a proprietary ingredient story. Rhode reached an estimated $230 million in 2024; The Outset’s revenue estimates range between $25 million and $153 million depending on the source and year.
Is The Outset backed by a major beauty conglomerate?
No. The Outset is backed by The Najafi Companies, a private equity firm that also backed BÉIS and Pattern Beauty. Johansson turned down acquisition deals with Shiseido and Estée Lauder before choosing independent backing that allowed her to retain meaningful ownership and operational control.
Where can you buy The Outset?
The Outset is available at Sephora (all US doors), Target, Nordstrom, Bluemercury, QVC, Amazon, Cult Beauty (UK), and the brand’s own site at theoutset.com.
Who founded The Outset?
Scarlett Johansson founded The Outset with co-founder Kate Foster Lengyel in 2022. Johansson developed the brand concept and clean formulation philosophy after turning down deals with Shiseido and Estée Lauder, while Foster Lengyel brought operational experience from selling SwearBy to Meredith Corporation.
Who owns The Outset?
The Outset is privately held by Johansson, Foster Lengyel, and The Najafi Companies, the private equity firm that also backed BÉIS and Pattern Beauty. Johansson chose Najafi over conglomerate offers specifically to retain meaningful equity and operational control.
When was The Outset founded?
The Outset launched on March 1, 2022 at Sephora and theoutset.com with five products priced under $55. Johansson and Foster Lengyel had spent time on product development before launch, including formulating the brand’s proprietary Hylauroset ingredient.
What is Scarlett Johansson’s net worth?
Johansson’s net worth is widely estimated at $165 million, derived primarily from her acting career as the highest-grossing female actor of all time with global box office exceeding $14 billion. Her equity stake in The Outset is private and not factored into most public estimates.
Sources
- Forbes, “Scarlett Johansson Opens Up About Life As An Entrepreneur And The Future Of Her ‘The Outset’ Skincare Line,” July 2022. Founding story, “indie brand with a superpower” quote, two-chapter marketing strategy.
- WWD, “Scarlett Johansson Launches Skin Care Brand The Outset,” March 2022. Launch details, product lineup, pricing, Sephora distribution.
- Glossy, “The Outset’s Scarlett Johansson and Kate Foster Lengyel are done ‘representing someone else’s beauty ideal,’” 2022. Foster Lengyel background, SwearBy history, co-founding dynamic.
- Allure, “Best of Beauty 2022”. Prep Serum award.
- PR Newswire, “The Outset Launches at QVC,” January 2024 — cites 2023 Allure Readers’ Choice Award, Best New Brand. Best New Brand recognition.
- Retailboss / Particl, revenue estimates, 2023. $153M revenue estimate, methodology notes.
- People, “Scarlett Johansson Launches The Outset on QVC,” January 2024. QVC debut details, live appearance with Foster Lengyel, household reach.
- WWD, “Kate Foster Lengyel, Cofounder of The Outset, Leaves Brand,” April 2025. CEO departure, Foster’s statement.
- The Guardian, “Scarlett Johansson Quits Oxfam Over SodaStream Row,” January 2014. SodaStream controversy, Oxfam resignation.
- The Hollywood Reporter, “Scarlett Johansson Settles Black Widow Lawsuit With Disney,” September 2021. Lawsuit background, settlement, business philosophy context.