Recently, the American brand JUNOCO announced that it has received US$6.3 million in Series A financing, led by China’s Vision Plus Capital and followed by FreeS Fund. In the past, JUNOCO has obtained tens of millions of RMB angel round financing from FreeS Fund. Since the company’s establishment, it has focused on makeup sponges. Its makeup sponge became a hit 9 months after its launch in the United States, with sales exceeding 1 million within a year.
Recently, the American brand JUNOCO announced that it has received US$6.3 million in Series A financing, led by China’s Vision Plus Capital and followed by FreeS Fund. It is reported that this round of financing will be used to expand SKUs, upgrade refillable packaging and product research and development.
It is worth mentioning that this investment is not the first investment of FreeS Fund. As early as 2018, JUNOCO obtained tens of millions of RMB angel round financing from FreeS Fund.
JUNOCO is a DTC beauty brand founded in the United States. In the first year of the company’s establishment, JUNOCO only focused on selling one product, cutting from makeup sponge. With this makeup sponge, JUNOCO became the most viewed beauty brand on YouTube in the second half of 2018. Moreover, the makeup sponge became a hit 9 months after its launch in the United States, with sales exceeding 1 million within a year.
As we all know, beauty consumers are highly dependent on KOLs on social media, and short video platforms and social media with great influence all over the world have also brought opportunities for emerging beauty brands to quickly go global.
When JUNOCO’s makeup sponge became popular on Youtube, the news of this Internet celebrity product also quickly spread to the Chinese market, and many Chinese beauty bloggers also introduced this product to fans on Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Tik Tok China and other platforms.
The strong purchasing power of the Chinese market gave JUNOCO the idea of entering the Chinese market. In addition, the founder of the brand, Kyle, is a Chinese American, and he has been silently paying attention to the changing trends of the Chinese beauty market.
In June 2019, JUNOCO established an office in Guangzhou, China. Its first step in China is to support some Chinese overseas shopping distribution stores so that these stores “take the lead”; then, JUNOCO began to promote its brand on mainstream Chinese social media such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo; in August 2019, JUNOCO entered China’s mainstream e-commerce platform Tmall and also opened a flagship store, which means that JUNOCO has officially entered the Chinese market.
In the JUNOCO Tmall flagship store, there are a total of 20 SKUs, including makeup sponge, eyeshadow, highlighting powder, primer, etc. The price range is 5-35 US dollars. Among them, the product with the highest monthly sales is “SpongeBob”, with monthly sales of 600+ and a price of about $7.
At present, the online channels of China’s beauty tools are still dominated by Taobao and Tmall. By calculating the online makeup sales of Tmall and JD.com and the share of beauty tools, the market size of China’s online beauty tools in 2020 is 907 million US dollars ( The data does not consider product returns), and the year-on-year growth rate is as high as 52.4%, which shows that the market demand is huge.
In this rapidly growing market, CHAILEEDO has discovered many Chinese brands that have entered the cosmetics market with the category of beauty tools, such as Marchare, Amortals, Yaozhi…
Marchare was established in 2018. In April 2019, Marchare opened a flagship store on Tmall. On the day of entering Tmall, the sales of the store exceeded 150,000 US dollars. At present, the number of followers of Marchare Tmall flagship store exceeds 398,000, and there are a total of 30 SKUs in the store. The types of beauty tools include makeup sponge, makeup brushes, and powder puffs. “Rose Sponge” is the single product with the highest monthly sales in the store, and it is also a popular product created by Marchare. The monthly sales volume is 20,000+, and the price is 15 US dollars / 4 pieces.
Why do so many innovative brands in China take makeup sponges as the entry point for the cosmetics market? This is because makeup sponges are mostly sponges, and the research and development costs and processing costs are not high; the beauty tool market has not been innovative for a long time, and user loyalty is high.
At present, in the Chinese market, beauty tools are only used as a supplementary category, and most of them are sold jointly with makeup products, and there are few innovations in the current beauty tool categories. For emerging brands, deep cultivation of beauty tools will be a good way. way out. Although a makeup sponge only occupies a small part of the beauty tool, there are as many as ten kinds of products, such as drop makeup sponge, mini makeup sponge, velvet makeup sponge and so on.
In the future Chinese beauty tool industry, the market demand for makeup sponges is bound to be gradually enlarged.
