Kevin Gould and Ann McFerran launched Glamnetic as a magnetic lash brand in 2019. Within a year, COVID tailwinds and cheap customer acquisition costs catapulted them from $1 million to $50 million in revenue—the kind of growth most founders fantasize about. Then it all pulled back. The lash category deflated, customer acquisition costs spiked, and Glamnetic sat on months of excess inventory with no outside capital to cushion the fall. Kevin made a bet: Pivot the entire business into press-on nails, a category that was just getting started. Five years later than he originally projected, Glamnetic crossed $100 million in revenue. Here, Kevin breaks down how the pivot happened, what hypergrowth actually cost, and why the slower road to $100 million was the one that worked.
On going from $1 million to $50 million in a single year:
We launched in July 2019, and for the back half of that year we did $1 million. Then, in 2020, we went to $50 million. It was this perfect storm: great, innovative product, strong growth marketing and community building, and then all these tailwinds working in our favor.
COVID pushed everything into DIY beauty. Acquisition got really cheap because bigger brands dropped out of advertising. And specific to lashes, everyone was wearing masks—lipstick sales went down because no one was showing their lips—but you could still show your eyes. So there was this huge pull forward in the lash market.
It was probably 10 different factors that contributed to that growth. But usually anything that goes up like that doesn’t go up like that forever.
On the moment the growth engine stalled:
The assumption was: If we went from $1 million to $50 million, we can probably go to $100 million the next year. So what do you do? You buy a lot of inventory against that.
Then in 2021, the iOS updates hit on Meta, and all of a sudden acquisition got super expensive. That was the macro thing that happened to everyone. But specific to lashes, the category had been growing a steady 3% to 4% a year pre-2019, and during COVID it went straight up. In a normal, non-COVID scenario, that never should have happened. So there was a huge pullback to where it should have been.
We had a flat year in 2021—stayed around that $50 million mark when we thought we were going to a hundred. Then in 2022, revenue dipped 25%. That was by far the hardest year we had.
On the inventory trap that comes with buying into your own growth:
When we started seeing headwinds, we were already sitting on all this inventory we’d bought against $100 million expectations. Instead of four to six months of stock, that timeline just kept extending and extending.
We never raised outside capital; we were fully self-funded and still are. So there was extreme cash flow management that had to come into play. When we went into nails, we had to make difficult choices about how much we ordered and when, purely because we didn’t have enough cash. We had to be way more conservative than we were with lashes.
But honestly, getting stuck with all that lash inventory was a great learning lesson. It forced us to be a lot more strategic about picking the spots where we saw real opportunity and running lean everywhere else.
On pivoting despite the unknowns:
The hard thing was there were so many unknowns. We had a lash business in serious decline with insanely high customer acquisition costs. We had this nail business that was super promising but still a small part of the business. And we had to make a decision.
The worst thing you can do as a founder is be indecisive. But the hardest thing is making a decision when there’s so much you don’t know. I remember writing a letter to the team, being open and honest, and saying: I don’t have full answers for the future, but I know what we’re doing now is not working. We’re going to make a strategic two-year pivot into what we think is a more sustainable category—nails.
And then we just had to stick with that decision.
On the retail signal that confirmed the pivot was right:
We’d launched our first nail collection at the end of 2020, direct to consumer (DTC), and then in 2021 we also launched nails in Ulta. We very quickly realized this is an incredible category.
One thing that made it click was how the retailers were allocating space. With nails, we have full end caps at Ulta—more than 60 SKUs. With lashes, retailers just don’t allocate as much space. We had six or seven SKUs. That told us a lot about where the total addressable market (TAM) was heading. The retailers could see the demand signal before we fully could.
The key difference between lash and nail was the trajectory. Lashes had this big pull forward during COVID and then a reversion. Nail was just starting. We were in the infancy of what was happening with the press-on category.
On managing 600 SKUs with a balance of evergreen and trend:
Nail is a SKU-intensive business; we have over 600 SKUs on the site now. You have to pick and choose where you’re going to lean in and where you’re going to run lean.
The way we think about it: You need an evergreen core of nail styles that are always on and last forever. Then you infuse newness into the mix: seasonal collections, collaborations, and limited-edition drops. That newness supports the long tail of all the core SKUs that sell over and over again. There’s this element of stability through the core collection infused with a fashion-like element of trend, and you have to nail both.
On why press-on nails are positioned to keep growing:
Salon prices have risen 50% over the last four years. That’s a real cost issue for a lot of consumers, and it’s one of many reasons people are moving into press-ons.
Nail is an incredible category for consumability. When someone gets their nails done at a salon, they’re going every three, maybe four weeks. Press-ons last up to two weeks. And if you look around, nine out of 10 women do something to their nails—polish, press-ons, something. They want to switch designs, switch colors, and that’s happening once or twice a month.
Subscription isn’t big for us because it’s not like skin care, where you buy the same serum over and over. Consumers love to switch up their designs. What we see more success with is bundling: solids collections, French tip collections, different drops. The repeat purchase is built into the nature of the product.
On why he’d never want to scale that fast again:
I don’t think I ever want to scale that fast. It honestly sounds amazing; there’s nothing wrong with growth that goes up and to the right, but in a healthy way. It’s a lot more sustainable when you go from one to five to 12 to 18. That still sounds like amazing growth, but it gives you time to build the infrastructure, the predictability, the team.
It took us five more years to get to $100 million than we thought. We thought we were going to a hundred in 2022. But you always end up directionally where you want to be; you just never know exactly when it’s going to happen.
Hear more from Kevin on מאסטרס, including the mental health toll of steering a business through decline, why he checks a brand’s tagged photos instead of their feed to gauge real customer love, and the “just because gifts” tactic Glamnetic has run every month for seven years.
