Julius Young — Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Vantage
Coty is returning Kylie Cosmetics for $400 million. The deal that looked like a $600M exit is a case study in what happens when a celebrity brand outlasts its corporate owner — and what the comparison to SKIMS actually tells us about how to sell.
Coty announced this week it will return Kylie Cosmetics to Kylie Jenner, receiving approximately $400 million and continuing to operate the brand until mid-2027 before transferring full control. The deal that began in November 2019 as a $600 million acquisition of a 51 percent majority stake is ending with the brand returning to the person whose name is on every product — and whose face, presence, and audience were the only things that ever made the product worth buying.
When Coty chairman Peter Harf called Kylie "a modern-day icon with an incredible sense of the beauty consumer," he was describing a business with trailing twelve-month revenues of approximately $177 million — not the $300 million or more the Jenner team had publicly suggested. Forbes later reported the revenue figures had been significantly inflated for years. Coty paid $600 million on the assumption it could apply its global manufacturing and retail infrastructure to scale a brand that had generated EBITDA margins above 25 percent with virtually no employees and no advertising. What Coty missed was the mechanism: Kylie Cosmetics did not sell because of its products. It sold because of the person who announced them, the intimacy of the platform, and the sense that buying a lip kit was participation in something personal. That mechanism is not transferable to a corporate owner. By 2022, Coty had recorded $31.4 million in impairment charges on Kylie Cosmetics — an accounting statement that the asset was worth less than what they paid. By August 2023, Kylie was actively exploring buying back Coty's stake over frustration with brand management.
The comparison to Kim Kardashian's SKIMS is the sharpest illustration of what the difference in strategy produces. SKIMS was founded in 2019 with Jens Grede as co-founder and CEO. Kardashian retained majority equity, maintained creative control, and did not sell a majority stake until SKIMS was valued at $4 billion. By 2026, the brand is valued at approximately $5 billion. Kim's net worth is estimated at $1.9 billion — nearly three times Kylie's estimated $670 million. The gap exists almost entirely because of when and to whom each woman sold. Kylie sold early, sold majority control, and sold to the wrong structural partner. Kim played the longer game. Kylie Jenner is thirty years old. She built a $1.2 billion brand from a lip kit she sold out of her bedroom at eighteen. She is about to have full control of it again, with seven years of hard education in what not to do with it. The next chapter will be more interesting than the Coty chapter. Related: The New Celebrity Economy