A-Frame Brands, the beauty incubator behind celebrity beauty and personal care brands from John Legend, Naomi Osaka, Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade, is shifting its focus from building brands with famous faces to private label for retailers.

Private label gives A-Frame a more capital-efficient way to deploy its product development, sourcing, branding and marketing capabilities without shouldering the costs associated with owning and scaling brands through retail. The company moved in that direction after the president of a multibillion-dollar retailer approached co-founder and CEO Ari Bloom about developing brands on its behalf.

A-Frame already had experience bringing brands to large-scale retail. From 2022 to 2023, it launched Loved01 into CVS and Walmart, Kinlò into Walmart and Proudly in Target.

“I’d say we were a victim of our own success in a way. We just had so many opportunities because it was timed right, but we were essentially on the hook for every possible cost of doing business in a retailer,” says Bloom. “Now if they want to get into the business, they don’t have to hire a team. We can be their team.” He adds, “Our story is an innovation story about how to take the entire infrastructure that we built around the celebrity brand incubator and make it relevant for today and tomorrow’s market.”

Already, A-Frame has worked with Bath & Body Works to develop pet brand Purrfect Paws and skincare brand Daily Essentials as limited-edition offerings. It has a number of other private-label projects in the works, including a gen alpha-focused brand with a major beauty retailer. Bloom says A-Frame is working with three retailers he describes as among the largest in the United States despite doing little marketing for its private-label business.

A-Frame’s shift comes as private-label sales are growing faster than national brands, rising 3.3% to a record $282.8 billion in 2025 versus 1.2% growth for national brands, according to Circana data from the Private Label Manufacturers Association. However, it won’t be alone in creating private-label beauty for retailers, as companies like Maesa, Klar & Co. and AX Beauty Brands have extensive track records doing it.

A-Frame’s private-label strategy reflects a transformation in Bloom’s thinking about the role of celebrity in beauty brand creation. Pre-pandemic, celebrity beauty was a considerably less crowded arena, but Bloom argues the subsequent flood of actors, musicians, athletes and influencers into the space has made a famous name less of a differentiator on its own. A-Frame will still incorporate celebrities and influencers at a retailer’s request, but they’re no longer essential brand headliners.

“Celebrity brands in the traditional model might not work, and especially this incubator model, there’s something different that needs to be done,” says Bloom. “We’re agnostic on it now. It really just depends on the situation. In the case of private label, that brand is already the star.”

A-Frame continues to operate its suite of celebrity beauty and personal care brands, even as the brands’ retail footprints have changed. Loved01 is currently sold through Amazon, QVC and direct-to-consumer. Kinlò is now pursuing licensing partnerships. After wrapping up a partnership with J.C. Penney, Proudly is available through Amazon and DTC. Bloom says the brand could return to brick-and-mortar.

“In the case of private label, that brand is already the star.”

Launched in 2019 with a mission to serve underserved consumers, A-Frame operated as a traditional incubator by forming individual companies around its celebrity-led brands and splitting ownership with them. It raised $11.2 million in a funding round led by Forerunner Ventures and Initialized Capital in March 2022. A-Frame still helps retailers identify demographic white spaces, and Bloom points out its lens has widened to encompass age as well as race and ethnicity.

He estimates roughly 80% of A-Frame’s conversations involve retailers branching into product categories they haven’t developed themselves and identifies fragrance in particular as a category retailers are zeroing in on. Body sprays, mists, hair mists and solid formats are drawing significant attention. Lip care is another category mentioned frequently, as are products like deodorant, dry shampoo, wipes and whole-body deodorant for active lifestyles. Bloom says hand wash and hand lotion can also be attractive because they’re functional, giftable and lend themselves to brand storytelling.

Discussing retailers’ priorities, Bloom says, “They want high margins. Their challenges are just thinking about, how do they grow their brand? How do they get in new categories? How do they do it in a way that’s going to be authentic and not feel off-brand and not brand dilutive?”

As A-Frame shifts what it builds, it’s also shifting how it builds it. The company hired CTO Ryan Morris last year and introduced an internal system dubbed “Mission Control” to connect information that had lived across emails, spreadsheets, Slack conversations and meetings. The system organizes research, product development information, approvals and partner communications, and provides Bloom with a daily rundown of priorities and relevant conversations.

According to the publication Inc., the system has cut the time it takes A-Frame to convert prospective clients into paying customers from about a year to one month. A-Frame is opening “Mission Control” to its retail partners, but no decision has been made on whether it could eventually be a standalone software product.