We are excited to share the news about the post-seed investment TEN13 made in Atelier approximately 12 months prior to the company’s recently announced $10m Series A round led by Macquarie Capital’s venture capital division.
Market Opportunity
Atelier is revolutionising the way brands and influencers develop, manufacture and scale their own skincare and beauty products by building the operating system for physical products - a zero-to-one value-creating innovation that has the potential to transform the way the [US$570bn](https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/beauty-personal-care/worldwide#:~:text=Revenue in the Beauty %26 Personal,US%24253.30bn in 2023.) beauty and wellness manufacturing market operates.
Atelier controls the flow of supply, demand, and capital between brands and contract manufacturers. Their world leading technology platform helps brands to rapidly design, prototype, iterate, manufacture, and globally scale their beauty and skincare products.
Problem
It currently takes a brand anywhere up to 18 months to launch a bespoke beauty product from idea to product-in-market and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These factors converge to create significant barriers for incumbent brands to innovate and stop new entrants from being able to effectively develop and launch new products at the rate and scale that their global consumers demand.
The Solution
The Atelier platform streamlines the entire process of designing new products from scratch, empowering a new generation of brand builders to launch products and focus on customer experience, marketing, and brand - leaving the manufacturing and supply chain complexity to Atelier.
Atelier’s technology platform seamlessly integrates with a global network of suppliers including biochemists, formulating chemists, blend and fill manufacturers, packaging manufacturers, logistic providers, designers, engineers, quality controllers, and much more.
Through Atelier, global customers like beauty giant Sephora and many more can innovate and bring new products to market up to 15x faster than their competitors.
Why we invested
- The Team to Win: We believe the co-founding team has the right mix of skills, experiences, and tenacity to globally disrupt the global beauty industry, which has to date, been very slow to adopt new and innovative technologies.
Nick Benson - Co-Founder and CEO. Nick has spent 15 years in Physical Products, Brand, and Creative. He was the former Head of Creative at Yates and Partners before eventually starting his own skincare brand over the years called the Gentleman’s Brand Co where he experienced the challenge of launching and managing a skincare brand firsthand.
Nick Hudson - Co-Founder and CRO. Former APAC Director at Yieldify (E-commerce Revenue Optimisation Platform) where he managed the P&L and was responsible for driving growth. He was formerly at Google. Nick has worked at the intersection of e-commerce brands, performance marketing, and revenue growth and intimately understands their pain points and customer psychology.
- Vision: At TEN13, we are excited by companies that aim to become the foundational infrastructure or operating system for their respective industries. Atelier is well positioned to capture this opportunity by becoming the global aggregator of contract manufacturers, centralising supply and making it easy for brands to create high-quality products via their technology platform; improving the supply chain, product creation, and sourcing process. We believe this represents a transformative shift in e-commerce, enabling brands and creators who were previously hindered by high entry costs and minimum order requirements.
- 10x value proposition and category creation potential: Atelier allows customers to create and scale physical products with the same ease as setting up a Shopify store, transforming the opaque contract manufacturing process into an affordable, transparent, and accessible digital experience. We believe Atelier will help drive meaningful innovation and growth in the beauty industry given its ease of use and depth of manufacturing and adjacent capabilities, creating enormous value for the company as customers return and continually re-order sold out inventory.
- International validation and a global market opportunity: Launching businesses from Australia to the world can be very difficult. Often we see companies that gain traction in Australia before having to adapt their sales teams, playbooks, and messaging as they expand into the US or other international markets. Atelier has already achieved international traction validating the global problem and opportunity set. This is a multi billion-dollar opportunity on a global scale, and Atelier is still only in the early stages of addressing its initial addressable market of beauty and wellness.
We are delighted to partner with this seasoned team of operators early in their journey. The global beauty industry has not yet been meaningfully disrupted by technology, creating a major opportunity for this world-class team to create a hugely successful company in this category.
If you’re a brand interested in learning more about how Atelier could help you develop, build and launch your beauty product, reach out to the team - you’ll be impressed!
Jump onboard!
An and the TEN13 Team