Social media has moved many conversations previously held in private, often in hushed tones, into the public. These days, as entrepreneurs chronicle everything from sellouts to selling their companies online, that includes struggling brands searching for buyers.

The latest example is Melissa Butler, founder and CEO of makeup brands The Lip Bar and Thread Beauty, who took to Instagram on Aug. 10 to tell her 93,000-plus followers that she’s searching for a business partner to save Thread Beauty. Her appeal follows similar public calls from the founders of perimenopause wellness brand Valerie, hormonal skincare brand Faace and clean beauty retailer Pretty Well Beauty.

As entrepreneurs build their brands in public, the vulnerability these founders have exhibited as they seek a buyer is part of a broader shift toward candor about the challenges of running a business. In June, Topicals founder Olamide Olowe took to TikTok to acknowledge that a new product from Bread Beauty Supply, the haircare brand she acquired in 2025, had generated “almost no sales” and that she had spent nearly her life savings trying to revive the business. Rather than simply announcing a new strategy, Olowe asked her community for help figuring out what wasn’t working. The video generated nearly 640,000 views in less than a day.

Social media has made it easier for founders to share their struggles publicly as they see other entrepreneurs doing the same and potentially being rewarded for it, if not with a deal, then with support from their communities. The growing willingness to expose business issues publicly is colliding with a funding environment that remains highly selective, particularly for flagging emerging brands.

Andrew Ross, senior advisor and venture partner at XRC Ventures, says the public appeals are a symptom of a broader “valley of death” in beauty, where undercapitalized brands have gained enough traction to require meaningful investment but haven’t reached the scale needed to attract institutional capital or acquirers. With many of those brands running out of cash and choices, he understands why founders turn to their digital communities as a last resort. However, he cautions that doing so can introduce a new set of risks.

“I really would not recommend this unless you are truly out of any other options,” says Ross. “It may be a potential tactic if you have truly reached the end of the road, but it essentially broadcasts that to the world, leaving you with no leverage.” He adds, “This approach is likely to result in pretty low quality buyers with a high proportion of predatory time wasters and because you’ve given up any leverage by publicly announcing you’re desperate, you’re going to be a price taker.”

For Tina Bou-Saba, founder of CXT Investments, expanding the pool of prospective buyers through social media outreach doesn’t solve the underlying problems that made a brand unsustainable. “If this doesn’t work for the founder, why do you think it would work for you?” she says. “The amount of money that these businesses need to raise is real, and if a founder couldn’t do it, why would someone else be able to do it?”

The pressure of building and scaling in a fiercely competitive beauty market has contributed to a brand shakeout over the last several years. In 2025, emerging brands including Ami Colé and Youthforia shuttered, alongside more established names like Ren and Drew Barrymore’s Flower Beauty. The dynamics have persisted this year, with makeup brands Flyte.70 and Auric recently shuttering and beauty holding company AS Beauty closing Cover FX and Mally Beauty in January.

Calling On Community

Butler launched Thread Beauty at Target in 2022 as an affordable, gen Z-oriented counterpart to The Lip Bar. Four years later, she said on Instagram that the brand has failed to gain traction, which she attributes in part to its lack of a public-facing founder. She’s looking for a partner who can take a larger role in guiding it as she concentrates on The Lip Bar and a forthcoming venture.

“It’s not working,” said Butler in the video, which has been viewed more than 100,000 times. “I underestimated that it really needed a face, it really needed that human connection. If you have been thinking about wanting a beauty brand, I’m literally taking applications for not only a business partner but a face of the brand.”

Pretty Well Beauty founder Jazmin Alvarez is similarly hoping that being open with her community can unearth a potential partner. Launched online in 2019 before opening a New York City boutique in 2022, Pretty Well Beauty has seen its sales tumble over the last three years amid inflation, tariffs, fierce competition and economic uncertainty. Alvarez has run it without outside investment and plans to close it if she can’t secure a buyer before leaving the United States for Barcelona next month. Her Instagram video outlining the situation has been viewed more than 10,000 times.

Taking their searches for a buyers public gives founders access to a network extending well beyond the people they could approach privately. Bou-Saba understands the impulse. “I want to acknowledge that that takes courage because no one wants to admit that they couldn’t make the business a success,” she says. “They just believe that what they’ve built is an asset that someone might pay for, but unfortunately this is typically not the case.”

Expanding the pool of prospective buyers isn’t always a great idea. Thomas Winarick, founder and CEO of Kindred Brands, a holding company acquiring distressed and undervalued beauty assets, explains an open call to buy a brand is likely to generate significant interest from parties that aren’t qualified to complete a transaction. He argues that vetting those leads can be intense and time-consuming with no guarantee of ultimately finding a suitable partner.

Winarick points out that more interesting prospects could be strategic buyers with a specific reason for wanting the asset. For a brand like Thread, that could include a smaller, cash-rich company interested in gaining access to Target or a portfolio company like Kindred searching for an undervalued asset. Winarick says, “For us, it would have to either fit within our current core distribution or perhaps open the door to a new retailer.”

From Leads To Buyers

Co-founders Wizz Selvey and Olly Johnson put Valerie up for sale last month after failing to secure funding to continue scaling it. Giving the brand until Aug. 3 to find a buyer or cease trading, Johnson wrote on LinkedIn on July 28, “After months of relentless fundraising, and despite follow-on backing from new and existing investors, we did not raise the capital needed for our next stage of growth…So I’m asking my network for help.”

Johnson tells Beauty Independent that the post produced a vast amount of inbound inquiries from founders, operators and investors with credible interest in the brand and that the sale process remained underway. “The seriousness and calibre of the conversations we’ve had has genuinely exceeded what we hoped for,” he says. “Choosing to be transparent about a difficult moment publicly felt like a real risk, but it’s ended up being one the best decisions we’ve made. Getting a sense of control back over our own destiny…has honestly been a game changer.”

Launched in 2024, Valerie secured 514,000 pounds, or roughly $730,000, in pre-seed funding last year and is stocked at British retailers Liberty and Holland & Barrett. Johnson discloses that the brand has agreed on commercial terms with two more national retailers and has a nearly 80% gross margin and a 70-pound, or about $95, average order value.

For Faace, turning to its digital community produced the outcome it was looking for. In 2024, founder Jasmine Wicks-Stephens posted a video on Instagram detailing her burnout and asking the brand’s audience for assistance in finding the right buyer. The video came after Faace had secured backing from three investors on “Dragons’ Den,” the British equivalent of “Shark Tank.”

Although Wicks-Stephens’ social media outreach connected her with a prospective buyer for Faace, the path to a deal wasn’t straightforward. An initial agreement ultimately fell through, causing Wicks-Stephens to announce in 2025 that the brand would close. That closure announcement generated another wave of interest, eventually leading her to a different buyer and enabling the brand to avoid closing. It’s aiming to relaunch under new ownership later this year with the founder staying on as the face of the brand but handing over day-to-day operations.

“If it does go ahead then it will be bigger and better than before,” said Wicks-Stephens in an Instagram video posted Nov. 30. “We’re going to revisit the lineup, we’re going to make changes to formula, pack sizes, bringing new products and hopefully reignite the love that there is for the brand whilst making it kind of a more commercially stable business.”

Pinning down a buyer, though, isn’t sufficient for a struggling brand to regain its footing. Bou-Saba emphasizes that distressed brands frequently require fresh inventory, marketing spending and operating capital after founders have cut expenses to conserve cash. Even an inexpensive acquisition can necessitate substantially more investment after the deal closes.

“The barriers to entry in beauty are very low, so if a brand has not grown meaningfully and demonstrated profitability or a clear path to it, it is generally worth little if anything in the market,” says Bou-Saba. “This is brutal, I agree, especially given the time and treasure that founders invest in their businesses, but it’s the reality of this market.”

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