When Indie Lee launched her eponymous beauty brand in 2010, all-natural beauty was yet to hit the mainstream. But after experiencing the rise and fall of the ‘clean’ beauty movement in the 2010s, Lee is hoping for a second coming for her label. On February 24, she’s launching an affordable line, Indie Lee Botanicals, aimed at a mass-market consumer, available at Whole Foods Market.
The Indie Lee Botanicals range is priced below $25 with four products: the Morning Dew Gel Cleanser ($19.99), Hydra Petal Facial Toner ($19.99), Vital Bloom Serum ($24.99) and Bloom Balance Moisturizer ($24.99). All of the products use a minimum of four ingredients that can be grown and extracted at home, like safflower, blackberry and lemon, while only the serum uses hyaluronic acid, derived from microbial fermentation of plants. It’s a far more accessible version than her original brand, which ranges between $20 to $135 and is sold through retailers like Credo.
The decision to strip back the ingredients is a nod to how Lee started her business. One of the founding figures of the clean beauty movement, she entered the beauty industry in unusual circumstances. After giving birth to her second child in 2003, Lee left her accountant role at HBO, and became interested in the farm-to-table movement. She built a 750-square-foot greenhouse in her backyard, growing 12 varieties of plants. Later that year, Lee began to lose her vision, and was told by doctors that she had a brain tumor.
She went into surgery on Earth Day — April 22, 2009 — and emerged eight hours later with a full vision for a clean beauty brand, with all-natural ingredients. As Lee recovered, the experience made her question what ingredients she would put on her skin. The brand launched in 2010. “I put HBO businesses all over the world, so it wasn’t difficult to understand how businesses scale,” she says.
In the early years, Lee was selling to her local community, friends, and family with “eco chic” packaging that had a homegrown feel. But the brand underwent redesign in 2014, incorporating clean and minimal designs that put the product front and center. Department store Henri Bendel began stocking the line shortly after, followed by Bluemercury, Credo Beauty, and Nordstrom that same year.
Around that time, clean beauty entered its boom era. Brands like Indie Lee, Tata Harper, Drunk Elephant, Flying Wild, and Goop were capturing serious market share, as consumers became conscious of the negative effects of artificial ingredients in skincare. After three years of growth, in 2017, Indie Lee was acquired by beauty investment business Ancora, founded by beauty executives Nicky Kinnaird and Lori Perella Krebs, who had partnered with private equity firm Winona Capital. The investment was to help Lee expand the brand’s categories and international exposure. “[With] all the things that were necessary in retail at that time, I needed capital,” she says.
