Why Does Beauty Become ‘Niche’ When It’s Black-Founded?
The Word That Does a Lot of Work
“Niche” sounds neutral. It sounds like a compliment, even a brand with a specific audience, a dedicated following, a point of view. But in the beauty industry, “niche” has a way of attaching itself to certain brands and not others, and the pattern is hard to ignore once you see it.
When a brand is founded by a Black woman and marketed specifically to Black consumers, it gets called niche. When a brand founded by a white celebrity launches with the same tight product lineup and a clearly defined audience of, say, fans of minimalist skincare, it gets called “curated” or “intentional.” Same shelf space. Same price point. Wildly different framing.
Language in business is never just language. When investors, retailers, and media repeatedly describe Black-founded beauty brands as niche, they are making a market-size argument whether they intend to or not. They are saying: this is for a limited audience. And once that argument gets made, it shapes funding decisions, shelf placement, press coverage, and ultimately whether a brand scales or stalls.
Who Gets to Be Universal
There is a foundational assumption embedded in how the beauty industry assigns mainstream versus niche status, and it goes mostly unexamined: that white consumers are the default audience, and everyone else is a subset.
This assumption is not just ideological. It has been operationally baked into the industry for decades. Shades in foundation lines historically bottomed out at medium beige. Hair careaisles in major drugstores were built around straight hair as the norm. Brands designed for Black women were literally shelved in a separate, often smaller section physically apart from the “main” aisle. The segregation was real and spatial.
Fenty Beauty’s2017 launch cracked this wide open. Forty shades at launch, eventually growing to fifty. The industry called it a disruption. What it actually was, was an acknowledgment that the so-called “niche” audience Black women, deep-complexion women of all backgrounds had been there the entire time, shopping, spending, and being ignored. Fenty reached $100 million in sales within forty days. Niche, apparently, was the wrong word all along.
But here is what’s worth sitting with: it took Rihanna a global superstar with an existing audience of hundreds of millions to make the industry take that market seriously. A Black woman without that platform would have been told her brand addressed a niche need.
The Funding Gap Is Not Coincidental
Behind the language problem is a capital problem, and they feed each other.
According to Project Diane, a study tracking funding for Black women founders in the U.S., Black women receive a fraction of venture capital compared to their white counterparts less than 1% of VC funding in most years tracked. In the beauty space specifically, this means Black-founded brands are more often self-funded, built on tighter margins, and forced to grow through channels that don’t require institutional buy-in. That resilience is real and worth respecting. But it also means these brands rarely get the kind of launch budgets that would let them blanket Sephora end-caps, run national campaigns, and get written about as the next big thing before they’ve had a chance to prove their numbers.
The cycle is almost elegant in how it sustains itself. A brand can’t get funding because investors see it as niche. It can’t achieve scale without funding. Without scale, it remains niche. And the label sticks.
Sharon Chuter, founder of UOMA Beauty, has talked openly about the exhaustion of having to argue for her brand’s mainstream potential in investor meetings having to essentially make the case that Black women are a real market, not a charitable consideration. That conversation doesn’t happen in the same room when the founder is white. Nobody asks a founder selling anti-aging moisturizer whether older consumers are actually a viable market.
What Retailers Choose to See
Retail is where the niche label does its most concrete damage.
A brand’s placement in a store determines how many people encounter it. Placement depends on what a buyer at a major retailer decides to stock, where they put it, and how much real estate it gets. Those decisions are made by people people with their own assumptions about who the average shopper is and what she’s looking for.
For years, Black-founded brands were kept in “ethnic” beauty sections, a retail designation that was simultaneously an acknowledgment of these customers and a way of keeping their products out of the main beauty aisle where impulse discovery actually happens. You don’t stumble across something that’s been moved to the edge of the store.
This has started to shift, partly because brands like Pat McGrath Labs and Briogeo forced the conversation, and partly because the racial justice reckoning of2020 pushed retailers into making real commitments some more substantive than others. Sephora’s 15Percent Pledge, founded by Aurora James of Brother Vellies, asked major retailers to commit 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned brands, proportional to the percentage of Black Americans in the U.S. population. It was a simple, logical ask. Target, Macy’s, Rent the Runway, and others signed on. What followed was complicated commitments made, products stocked, and then the slow question of whether the infrastructure around those products (placement, promotion, reorder depth) would actually support them or let them quietly fail.
The Consumer Who Gets Erased
There’s another layer to this that doesn’t get talked about enough: what it costs Black consumers to have their preferences labeled as niche.
When the products made for you live at the margins of the market, you pay more. You work harder to find what you need. You deal with products that are reformulated or discontinued the moment sales dip below a certain threshold, because the brand never truly believed in the category. The “niche” designation isn’t just a marketing inconvenience it signals that your needs are considered optional.
Black women are by nearly every measure the most influential consumers in beauty. They spend significantly more on beauty products per capita than any other demographic group. They drive trends that eventually go mainstream from bold lip colors to protective styling to glass-skin routines that have roots in Black and brown beauty culture long before they were spotlit in a Vogue feature. The market follows Black women and then forgets to credit them for it.
A brand that serves Black women is not serving a niche. It is serving the most engaged, most loyal, most style-forward segment in the category. The fact that it gets called niche anyway tells you something about what the word actually means and who gets to decide it.
When’Niche’ Becomes a Ceiling
None of this means Black-founded beauty brands are without power. Some of the most aesthetically compelling, technically sophisticated, community-rooted brands in the industry right now are Black-founded. Danessa Myricks Beauty has a following that borders on devotional. Topicals is rewriting how skin concerns get discussed publicly. Ami Colé built a whole brand philosophy out of the idea that melanin-rich skin deserves products designed for it, not adapted to it.
These brands are doing extraordinary work. They are also doing it while managing the weight of a label that limits how they are seen.
The question worth asking the uncomfortable one that the industry keeps not quite getting around to is whether “niche” is a market description at all, or whether it’s a gate. A way of saying: we have decided, in advance, how large your ambition is allowed to be.
Because the history is clear. The consumer data is clear. The cultural influence is clear. What’s not clear is why an industry that claims to celebrate beauty in all its forms keeps treating the founders who built for those forms as an afterthought that occasionally surprises everyone by succeeding.
