If you keep an eye on direct selling, clean beauty, or women’s business brands, you’ve likely heard the news: Beautycounter, once a leading name in “clean” cosmetics, suddenly stopped operations in April 2024. The company, which built its reputation around safer ingredient standards and a large network of independent consultants, abruptly shuttered its doors. Employees, consultants, and even loyal customers were caught off guard.
This article answers a key question: **Is Beautycounter going out of business?** We’ll cut through the noise and deliver practical insights, key reasons for its downfall, what happened during bankruptcy, and what to expect from its new incarnation, Counter.
Details of the Shutdown
The closure of Beautycounter was not a gradual fade. On a single day in April 2024, the business halted all operations, locked employees out of systems, stopped processing orders, and fired nearly all staff consultants included. This sudden move left thousands scrambling. Lost commissions, unpaid wages, and outstanding orders created confusion among consultants, customer service, and end buyers alike.
Tip: If you’re ever facing a business closure, communicate clearly and early with everyone affected. Surprises damage more than money they erode trust, which is hard to rebuild.
For Beautycounter, the end came with almost no warning. Consultants not employees, but independent sellers woke up to discover their accounts were gone and income streams cut off. In retail, keeping your frontline sellers informed is critical. Lesson: If you use a distributed sales model (like direct sales or network marketing), the news needs to reach everyone fast, not just headquarters.
Impact on Employees, Consultants, and Customers
The fallout was wide-reaching. Beautycounter once boasted thousands of active consultants, many of whom relied on the business for supplemental income. Suddenly, every consultant no matter how large or small their “team” lost their business at the same time. Employees, from product development to IT to logistics, were given notice by email or in some cases, couldn’t even log in to check their status.
Customers experienced cancelled orders, unresponsive service channels, and a website that stopped working. If you’re running a business dependent on subscription or recurring revenue, designing a graceful shutdown path is just as important as a launch plan. Focus on the customers you already have before chasing new ones.
Key takeaway: Sudden shutdowns burn through goodwill with everyone staff, salesforce, and loyal buyers.
Factors Leading to Bankruptcy
It’s tempting to blame a single issue when a brand implodes, but Beautycounter’s bankruptcy stemmed from several interrelated challenges.
First, mismanagement played a role. After the private equity firm Carlyle Group acquired a majority stake, the business model began to shift. Growth at all costs became the new mantra, sometimes at the expense of operational discipline and responsiveness.
Sales began to stall in late 2023, with heavy investment in consultants, events, and digital tools failing to lift the top line. The business relied on a multilevel-marketing (MLM) structure where consultants recruited other sellers, who then built their own downlines. For a time, this helped expand reach quickly, but as public attitudes shifted against MLMs, recruiting slowed and churn increased.
Did you know? Many MLMs face regulatory pushback or negative press when too much focus is placed on recruiting rather than direct product sales. Beautycounter hit this problem head-on while grappling with operational costs.
As cash reserves dwindled, debts mounted. Carlyle’s oversight brought high expectations and strict performance targets, but slower sales and failed pivots eroded margins. By early 2024, the company was unable to keep up with its obligations, forcing a dramatic stop and the need for bankruptcy protection.
Bankruptcy Proceedings and Asset Acquisition
Filing for bankruptcy is a formal process that allows a failing business to sell assets and pay creditors in an organized way. For Beautycounter, this meant halting all commercial activities, entering court proceedings, and offering up the company’s core assets brand, formulas, technology, and inventories for sale.
Key takeaway: In bankruptcy, businesses can often preserve valuable intellectual property or market goodwill for a future buyer, even if the original operation ends.
Here’s where founder Gregg Renfrew reenters the story. Having sold controlling interest years earlier, she stepped back in during the bankruptcy process. Through a foreclosure auction, she reacquired Beautycounter’s core assets. It’s unusual, but not unheard of, for founders to buy back what they started under new terms. For example, Steve Jobs famously returned to Apple after being ousted, and his return saw a pivotal turnaround.
Renfrew’s move wasn’t about reviving Beautycounter in its old form. Instead, she aimed to reset, rebuild, and avoid the pitfalls that brought down the first iteration.
Emergence of Counter: A New Chapter
By June 2025, Gregg Renfrew brought a new business to life: Counter. Lessons from the past prompted a streamlined approach.
What’s different about Counter? For starters, the name, branding, and product lineup all changed. The range was simplified. Rather than dozens of SKUs and limited-edition “flash” launches, the new business focuses on core bestsellers and straightforward routines.
Whereas legacy Beautycounter’s strength and risk was its consultant network, Counter chose a new operational model (more on that below). Consultants are gone. No more MLM, no recruiting downlines, no complex commission statements.
Tip: When relaunching a failed business, cut the complexity that led to costly overhead. Streamline your line-up and processes. Overly elaborate sales structures rarely help when resources are tight and market trust needs repair.
Operational Shift from Previous Model
One of the most dramatic changes in Counter’s relaunch was ditching the MLM consultant structure. Beautycounter’s entire commercial machinery recruiting, onboarding, ranking was gone.
Instead, Counter took a retail-focused approach. That means selling directly to consumers through ecommerce, select wholesale partners, or potentially exclusive pop-ups. For business leaders, this is a reminder: review regularly how your products reach the end user. As you scale, adapting your distribution can create more direct relationships and higher control over margins.
Consultants who had built large teams were understandably frustrated. But the shift solves several big problems:
- It creates transparent pricing for every customer.
- It lets the brand own the customer relationship, rather than outsourcing it to independent sellers.
- It cuts recurring commissions and incentive costs, freeing up cash for product quality and digital marketing.
Key takeaway: Multilevel-marketing worked during the first “growth at all costs” phase. But public skepticism, growing competition, and the cost of maintaining a large distributed network made the model unsustainable at scale.
Target Audience and Strategy
Another way that Counter differs from its predecessor is in targeting. The relaunched brand is highly focused: Counter is for women over 35 those seeking science-backed, clean, results-driven skincare without the hype.
This focus is not random. Women in this demographic make more repeat purchases, spend more per order, and are less likely to chase “trend” launches that fade quickly. For business owners, there’s a powerful lesson here: focus on the customers you already have before chasing new ones.
Renfrew and the Counter team also leaned hard into fresh branding. Gone are the old names and consultant-style “parties.” The visuals are cleaner, the messaging more direct, and every product aims to explain real skin benefits in plain English.
Tip: When repositioning a business after crisis, start with customer pain points. Busy shoppers over 35 want ease, clarity, and honesty not lengthy pitch decks or endless up-sell.
Summary of Beautycounter’s Transition
Beautycounter as it was known from 2013 to 2024 is no longer in business. The combined weight of mismanagement, declining sales, and the challenges of an expiring MLM model shuttered the doors in April 2024. The legacy consultant network has been fully dissolved. Existing products are either gone or reformulated under new branding.
However, the brand’s DNA didn’t disappear. Gregg Renfrew’s reacquisition of the company’s assets allowed her to rebuild from the ground up without the institutional baggage or costly network structure of the Carlyle years. Counter is now operating with a fresh product line, clearer customer focus, and a direct-to-consumer strategy.
Key takeaway: The fall of Beautycounter shows that even fast-growing “unicorns” are vulnerable when market fit changes and operating costs balloon. Recovery often demands a clean slate, trimmed expenses, and sharply defined customer focus.
If you’re a business owner, founder, or operational leader, study what happened at Beautycounter as both a warning and a roadmap. Review your sales channels for complexity that adds risk. Balance short-term growth targets with healthy, realistic customer relationships. And if things go wrong, don’t be afraid to reset sometimes starting over with a tighter focus is smarter than doubling down on what’s broken.
For more stories and deep operational insights into business pivots and practical leadership, check out Mega Business Journal.
The story of Beautycounter’s closure and the birth of Counter stands as a reminder that transparency, strong fundamentals, and customer clarity are what endure. Brands may fall, but clear-eyed founders with the courage to adapt can write new chapters. Focus on what works, learn quickly from mistakes, and build with resilience. That’s how you last.
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