Ami Colé
A clean beauty brand built for melanin-rich skin that won 80+ awards, landed in 600 Sephora stores, and shut down four years after launch with only $3 million in funding.
Ami Colé won more than 80 beauty awards, landed on Oprah’s Favorite Things, earned four Allure Best of Beauty wins, expanded to 600 Sephora doors in under two years, and had celebrity fans including Kelly Rowland, Mindy Kaling, and Hailey Bieber. The brand shut down in September 2025, four years after launch, having raised roughly $3 million in venture capital to compete in a category where $5 million is considered the bare minimum to survive at retail.
Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye built Ami Colé for the women she grew up with in her mother’s braiding salon on 125th Street in Harlem. She named the brand after her mother, Aminata “Ami” Colé, who had opened one of the first African braiding salons in the country in 1988. The products worked, the press loved them, the customers were loyal. The capital was never enough.
At a glance:
| Founded | 2021 by Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye |
| Founder background | L’Oréal, Glossier, VIBE Magazine |
| Peak revenue | ~$3.5M annually (2024 est.), 75% YoY growth |
| Total funding | ~$3.15M VC + undisclosed L’Oréal BOLD investment |
| Key investors | Imaginary Ventures, Greycroft, Debut Capital, G9 Ventures, L’Oréal BOLD |
| Retail | 600 Sephora doors (US + Canada) + DTC |
| Awards | 80+ total, 4 Allure Best of Beauty, Oprah’s Favorite Things |
| Closed | September 2025 |
| Why it closed | Undercapitalized for retail scale, post-2020 funding retreat |
The Story
From her mother’s salon to Glossier’s office
Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye grew up in Harlem, the daughter of Senegalese immigrants. Her mother’s braiding salon on 125th Street was the backdrop to her childhood, a place where she absorbed lessons about community, womanhood, and beauty from the women who sat in the chairs. She studied at Syracuse University, then built a career in the beauty industry that included social media roles at L’Oréal Paris, VIBE Magazine, and Rebecca Minkoff.
In 2018, Emily Weiss recruited her to join Glossier’s product development team. The experience didn’t match the promise. “The job that I was offered as an inroad to help with development and marketing turned into a situation in which I lacked mentorship and support,” she later wrote.
She left in 2019, took a solo trip to Thailand for clarity, and came back with the idea for Ami Colé: a clean beauty line designed specifically for melanin-rich skin, built around the belief that darker complexions deserved formulas engineered for them from the start rather than adapted as an afterthought.
150 pitches and a pink suit
She surveyed over 400 women about their beauty routines and the products that didn’t exist for them. Then she pitched roughly 150 investors. Nearly all said no. One dismissed her inclusive shade vision as “nondescript” and called her target audience “niche.”
Less than 1% of venture capital went to Black founders at the time, and Diarrha had no celebrity co-sign, no famous last name, and no family money to fall back on.
Then George Floyd was murdered. Within weeks, investors who had ignored her started reaching out. “I received an influx of requests to bring my ‘deserving brand’ to life,” she wrote. The same investor who had dismissed her followed up on the same email thread.
She became one of roughly 30 Black women in the country to raise over $1 million for a startup.
Launch day
Ami Colé launched in May 2021 with three products: a Skin Enhancing Tint, a Lip Treatment Oil, and a highlighter, each formulated with desert date oil and baobab seed oil as a nod to her Senegalese heritage. The first run of skin tints and lip oils sold out within a month.
One customer wrote, “I am buying every single thing, because this brand is ME.” Another commented, “I could almost cry. I’m so excited to try this out. May Allah make this the best of the best for you.”
What Worked
The product was genuinely good
Ami Colé wasn’t a celebrity cash grab or a marketing-first brand. The formulas were developed specifically for darker skin tones, not extended from a universal range, and the reviews reflected it.
Four Allure Best of Beauty wins, a spot on Oprah’s Favorite Things in 2023 for the Desert Date Cream Multistick, and more than 80 awards total across the brand’s four-year life. Vogue, Allure, and Marie Claire all recommended the products. Customers with melanin-rich skin said the brand made their complexions look like their own skin, only better, which is exactly what Diarrha had set out to build.
Sephora came fast
In December 2022, Ami Colé entered Sephora through the “Next Big Thing” displays at 270 doors. Within 16 months the brand expanded to 600 locations across the United States and Canada.
L’Oréal’s BOLD venture fund invested in September 2024, the first time the fund had made an early-stage investment in a brand with a Black founder and a Black core customer. At that point revenue was approaching $3.5 million annually with 75% year-over-year growth.
The Numbers
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2020 | Pre-seed round: ~$1M from Imaginary Ventures, Greycroft, Debut Capital, Henry Davis (former Glossier president), Lindsay Peoples Wagner, Katherine Power, Hannah Bronfman |
| May 2021 | Launch. Three products. First run sells out within a month. |
| Sept 2022 | Seed round: $2.15M from G9 Ventures, XFactor Ventures, others |
| Dec 2022 | Enters Sephora at 270 doors |
| 2023 | Oprah’s Favorite Things. Allure Best of Beauty. Expansion continues. |
| Mid-2024 | 600 Sephora doors. Revenue approaching $3.5M/year, 75% YoY growth. |
| Sept 2024 | L’Oréal BOLD invests (undisclosed amount) |
| July 2025 | Diarrha publishes open letter in The Cut announcing closure |
| Sept 2025 | Ami Colé officially shuts down |
Total VC raised: approximately $3.15 million, plus the undisclosed L’Oréal investment. For context, Makeup by Mario raised $40 million. One/Size, Patrick Starrr’s brand, launched with $10 million from Luxury Brand Partners. Ami Colé was trying to hold 600 Sephora doors on a fraction of what competitors spent just getting started.
The Turning Point
600 doors on a $3 million budget
The expansion from 270 to 600 Sephora doors looks like a success story on paper. In practice, it was the moment the math stopped working. Sephora is a pay-to-play environment: co-op marketing costs, sampling programs, field team support, fixtures, and returns management all come out of the brand’s pocket. Industry experts estimate that a real retail run at a major retailer requires $5 to $7 million minimum, and that’s before a single ad dollar is spent on driving traffic to the shelf.
Ami Colé had raised roughly $3 million total. Diarrha was transparent about the bind: “I invested heavily in marketing and prayed. But I couldn’t compete with the deep pockets of corporate brands. At retail stores, prime shelf space comes at a price, and we couldn’t afford it.”
What Went Wrong
The capital was never close to enough
Manica Blain of Top Knot Ventures put it plainly: “When a founder enters color cosmetics, with the pressure of inclusion, a rollout into 600 Sephora doors, and only $3M raised, it’s not just hard, it’s structurally stacked against them.”
Divya Gugnani, an investor and beauty entrepreneur, said $1.5 to $3 million is the minimum just to get started at Sephora, not to sustain a multi-year presence. Ami Colé was operating at the absolute floor of what the channel demands, with no room for the inventory swings, marketing spend, or operational hiccups that inevitably come with scaling a physical product business.
The 2020 money came with strings that frayed
The funding surge after George Floyd’s murder opened doors that had been locked shut. But the enthusiasm was shallow.
“Instead of focusing on the healthy, sustainable future of the company and meeting the needs of our loyal fan base, I rode a temperamental wave of appraising investors, some of whom seemed to have an attitude toward equity and ‘betting big on inclusivity’ that changed its tune a lot, to my ears, from what it sounded like in 2020,” Diarrha wrote.
The numbers confirm the retreat: Black-founded beauty brands raised $73 million in 2022 but only $16 million in 2024, a 78% drop in two years. Total VC funding to Black founders fell below 0.5% of all venture dollars by 2024.
Inventory whiplash at retail scale
“One week we’d be completely sold out because an influencer mentioned us. The next, we’d be stuck with inventory we couldn’t move,” Diarrha wrote. The brand made production decisions based on potential demand without knowing how the market would respond, which is the kind of bet that larger brands can absorb and smaller brands cannot. At $3.5 million in annual revenue spread across 600 doors, the unit economics left almost no margin for error.
The money wasn’t coming back fast enough
Venture capital works on a cycle: investors put money into brands, those brands eventually get acquired or go public, and the returns from those exits give investors the confidence (and the capital) to fund the next round of brands. By 2025, that cycle had stalled in beauty.
Manica Blain pointed out that marquee indie brands like Rare Beauty, Makeup by Mario, Kosas, Saie, Westman Atelier, and Merit were all still privately held. Investors had poured hundreds of millions into indie beauty over the previous five years, and none of those bets had produced a return yet.
The brands weren’t failing, but VCs couldn’t show their own investors that the beauty thesis actually pays off. When the proof isn’t there, new checks stop being written, and the brands that get cut first are the ones that still need more capital to reach profitability. Ami Colé was growing 75% year-over-year and still couldn’t raise what it needed.
What You Can Learn
Retail expansion is a capital problem, not a traction problem. Getting into Sephora is not the finish line. Staying in Sephora requires marketing spend, inventory management, and operational infrastructure that costs multiples of what most indie brands raise in their first few rounds. If the funding isn’t there to support the doors, the doors become a liability.
Post-crisis capital is not the same as committed capital. The money that flows after a cultural moment often comes with fragile conviction. If investors funded you because of a headline rather than a thesis, their support may not survive the first difficult quarter. Founders who raise in a momentum window should pressure-test whether their investors will show up for a bridge round when things get hard.
Growing 75% year-over-year can still put you out of business. Revenue growth without adequate capitalization creates a trap: the faster you grow, the more inventory, marketing, and infrastructure you need, and if the capital isn’t keeping pace, growth becomes the thing that bleeds you out.
The question isn’t whether revenue is going up. It’s whether the cash in the bank can sustain the rate at which you’re scaling.
The system is real, and knowing it helps. Black-founded beauty brands received 5.36% of total industry venture funding in 2024. That’s not a personal failure; it’s a structural one.
Founders operating inside that constraint need to plan for it: bootstrap longer, stay DTC longer, prove unit economics before scaling into retail, or find strategic partners early who bring capital and distribution together. Knowing the playing field is tilted doesn’t level it, but it changes which bets are worth taking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Ami Colé shut down?
The brand was undercapitalized for the scale of its retail presence. With roughly $3 million in total VC funding and 600 Sephora doors to support, the math never worked. Rising tariffs, post-2020 investor retreat from DEI-focused brands, and a frozen exit market in beauty made additional fundraising impossible.
How much funding did Ami Colé raise?
Approximately $3.15 million in venture capital across a pre-seed and seed round, plus an undisclosed investment from L’Oréal’s BOLD fund in September 2024. For comparison, competing indie brands in Sephora have raised $10 to $40 million.
What happened to Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye after Ami Colé?
In November 2025, she was hired as Executive Vice President of Beauty and Fragrance at Skims, Kim Kardashian’s brand valued at $4 billion. She oversees product development, innovation, and brand strategy for the company’s beauty expansion.
Was Ami Colé profitable?
The brand does not appear to have reached profitability. Revenue was approximately $3.5 million annually by 2024, growing 75% year-over-year, but the costs of maintaining 600 Sephora doors, including co-op marketing, sampling, field support, and inventory management, consumed most of that revenue.
Sources
- The Cut, “Why I Am Closing Ami Colé, My Beauty Brand,” July 2025. Diarrha’s own letter. Founding story, investor experiences, reasons for closure, key quotes.
- TechCrunch, “After raising over $3M, popular VC-backed beauty brand Ami Colé is shuttering,” July 2025. Funding totals, timeline, closure announcement.
- Beauty Independent, “Ami Colé’s Closure And The High Price Of Trying To Compete At Sephora,” July 2025. Industry expert quotes on capital requirements, Sephora economics.
- WWD, “Ami Colé Lands L’Oréal Investment, Expands Sephora Presence,” September 2024. Revenue figures, growth rate, L’Oréal BOLD investment, Sephora expansion details.
- Business of Fashion, “Ami Colé Is a Sign of a Broken System for Black Beauty Founders,” July 2025. Systemic funding disparities, VC data on Black founders.
- 19th News, “Ami Colé is closing. The brand’s story has implications for the Black beauty industry,” August 2025. Broader industry context, funding statistics.
- Essence, “Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye Opens Up About Closing Down Ami Colé,” July 2025. Post-closure interview, personal reflections.
- TheGrio, “Ami Colé Founder Diarrha N’Diaye Joins Skims Beauty,” November 2025. Skims hire, post-Ami Colé career.