The Anti-Trend Philosophy That Turned Nearly 30-Year-Old OSEA Malibu Into An Overnight Success

OSEA Malibu turns 30 years old next year, but its business rooted in seaweed-powered skincare, sustainability and expert-led entrepreneurship has never been more current. 

Launched by spa director-turned-founder Jenefer Palmer and scaled for the past decade by Jenefer’s daughter and OSEA CEO Melissa Palmer, the brand proudly hasn’t updated its logo or sparse packaging since its launch and resists the urge to constantly churn out product releases. 

The ascetic approach hasn’t hindered OSEA’s growth. The brand is expanding into new territories across the globe and boasts over $100 million in revenue. It entered Australia and New Zealand with Mecca last year, and it’s traveling to Mexico with Ulta Beauty in the fall. In the United States, along with Ulta, it’s available at Bluemercury, Nordstrom, Credo and select spas. 

Jenefer and Melissa spoke to Beauty Independent about why clean beauty isn’t dead, being early on vagus nerve products, the Shiseido sale rumors from last year and more. 

Is there any aspect of OSEA’s origin story that you feel hasn’t been shared?

Jenefer: My dad was an executive for a glass bottle company. He did pioneer the bottle bill on the East Coast where you get 5 cents back. My grandmother was one of the first women chiropractors. I came from this healing tradition. After my father died when I was 38 years old, I saw a therapist, and she said to me, “When someone dies, they take a piece of you with them. They also give you a legacy, but you have to be listening for that legacy.”

I was in the shower, and I picked up this little jar of cleanser I’d been developing—for years I wanted to create natural beauty that was safe and clean—and my whole body just started vibrating. I realized at that moment, this is my father’s legacy. It was such a profound moment and gave me the courage to continue to move forward and fight an incredibly uphill battle because, when I started, the word “clean beauty” didn’t exist. The idea of glass bottles, minimal packaging and naturally-derived ingredients was, at the very best, just considered junk products for health food stores. 

Melissa: We’re turning 30 next year, and OSEA is fundamentally the same brand. Our mission, vision, logo, foundation has been unwavering. In beauty, there’s so much following trends. We have a thriving and healthy business that continues to grow every year. We’ve been making products that are naturally-derived, free of synthetic fragrance for decades. We didn’t even use the word “clean.” We also didn’t use the word “beauty.” We’ve always seen ourselves much more as a wellness company. 

I keep hearing this conversation about, “Is clean beauty dead?” It’s actually the exact opposite. Consumers are waking up more. We’re all getting so empowered in this heavy information age about how to take better care of ourselves. If anything’s dead, it’s the idea of marketing to a consumer. You can’t just label something clean beauty. 

Jenefer: We’ve always believed in the intelligence of the consumer from the very beginning. Instead of spending all the money on expensive packaging, we use the same stock packaging that we started buying in the mid-90s. Packaging was never the focus. People know the difference when they’re using a product that’s made with great ingredients. It became part of my selling pitch. I would say, “You can tell we put all the money into ingredients, not the packaging.” 

Tell us about the brand’s growth trajectory over the decades.

Melissa: When we launched in 1996, we spent the first 20 years business focused on our distribution in the hotel/luxury/destination spa market. It was really aligned with our focus on seaweed wellness. The concept arose when my mom was running a spa and wellness center in the ’80s. It was connected to our heritage.

I left the business for a couple years and came back in 2015, when we started to shift our strategy. Up until 2015, we were sold 99% in spas. I built a website and social media. 

Up until 2015, we had one employee. We were in our family’s garage. We’d never done over $1 million in sales. We grew 10% a year from nothing, slow and steady, sometimes 20% just plotting the course. It’s funny this has to be said, but of course we were profitable. It was a small business that supported our family, and we were fully self-funded. 

When I stepped in, I became the CEO. We started retail in 2017, 2018 with clean beauty retailers. Then, we started a test with Bluemercury. We launched at Ulta in the end of 2020. We started in half the stores on a little shelf, then moved to all stores, and we’re now rolling out in three-foot bays. We also went into Nordstrom in 2021.

Retail was a big shift for the brand. We started out in facial skincare. In 2010, we launched Undaria Algae Body Oil, which is our No. 1 bestseller across all products. It took off around 2018. We sell one every 30 seconds.

Now, we are pretty evenly split between face and body, just slightly over 50% of our revenue is driven by body. Ulta is our largest retailer.

What is OSEA’s sales split between retail and direct-to-consumer?

Melissa: It’s roughly 50/50, slightly more DTC. 

How do you approach new product development?

Melissa: Newness didn’t drive our first round of growth. We really didn’t start launching products until 2021. We have a unique position in that one of our top three SKUs launched in 1996. Our No. 1 SKU launched in 2010. The rest of the top five launched in the past couple of years.

We’ve really focused on marketing our core products and have been really thoughtful and mindful on newness. We have really resisted the mentality of newness at all costs. 

Sustainability is something that’s been inherent in the brand since the beginning. I was lucky to have a mom that talked about that since day one. We originally packaged the products in glass because it’s a much more sustainable resource. Things like PCR were not something that was available to us. 

Jenefer: We didn’t even have secondary packaging for the whole line. We hand-wrapped some in newspaper. We felt like, if they were going to sit on a store shelf, then why should they be in a box that you would throw away? The retailers were like, “We can’t do this.” In 2017, we did go into recycled cardboard boxes. 

OSEA has had success on TikTok. How did you approach it?

Melissa: I love emerging marketing platforms. So much of our growth was driven by digital innovation. What catalyzed our growth in 2015 was this accessibility that didn’t exist. When we got orders in the ’90s, it was sent to us on a fax machine. If we wanted to advertise, that was taking out a full page ad in a magazine. When things like influencer marketing, Instagram, Facebook came along, it opened us up to the world. 

2015 was a turning point because we started sending products to people on social media. Some of our earliest supporters have now become huge bloggers. It gave us so much visibility and allowed us to speak to a whole demographic that we never were able to. Our original marketing, we never even attempted to market through beauty channels. We focused on nutritionists, yoga teachers that aligned with our brand values. 

I look at TikTok as an opportunity to affirm who we are and stay completely true to our brand pillars through new ways of speaking. One of the advantages platforms like TikTok have is they’re real. They have a high authenticity filter. Gen Z is really into what’s real. Our integrity reads well. 

A lot of what drove our original growth, too, was celebrities. Our body oil was originally made very popular by Victoria Beckham, a celebrity we would’ve never imagined could speak so well to our demographic. That success was driven by her authentic passion about the product.

Did you gift the product to her?

No. We’re lucky to be an LA brand and have aspects of the brand that celebrities can speak to authentically. That, to me, is what makes a platform like TikTok successful. We have to be true to who we are, and it’s not for everyone. People can tell a mile away when it’s a paid celebrity versus when it authentically comes from the celebrity—as if we could have ever afforded Victoria Beckham in the first place.

More people are talking about the vagus nerve, but OSEA was one of the first brands to launch vagus nerve products.

Jenefer: The Vagus Nerve Oil launched in 2019. We have had it in professional use since 2014. The vagus nerve is one of the most exciting breakthroughs in medicine. It comes from the Latin word that means wandering, and it goes from the cranium all the way down to the gut. What is so profound about the vagus nerve is that neural impulses, 70% of them go from the gut to the brain. When you have a gut feeling, that’s your vagus nerve talking to you, and it regulates the parasympathetic nervous system. 

Because I did cranial work, I had to learn all the cranial nerves, and I wanted to give the world greater awareness about the vagus nerve. I recognized that 20 years ago. I’m obviously not a doctor, not a researcher, but I knew it would be a breakthrough, so I wanted to put it out there. People use our Vagus Nerve Oil, Vagus Pillow Mist, and they experience profound levels of relaxation.

There’s awareness growing. Our early education was focused on explaining what the vagus nerve is, and now we’ve really focused on the aromatherapeutic benefits of the products, which people have become a lot more aware of. 

When we first started, people asked, “Why doesn’t it smell like perfume? Can’t you make it pink?” When I create scent, I use essential oils and track the sensation in my body and how it is affecting me. For years, I went to spas, and I was met with a lot of skepticism, but you know what? When you’re right, you’re right. You just have to keep saying it and culture will catch up.

OSEA took on a minority investment in 2021. How did you know it was the right time and investor?

Melissa: We constantly had and have suitors. We were totally self-funded until 2021. During COVID, we felt it would be a good opportunity to get more resources into the business. It was driven by finding a partner that deeply aligned with our values. We raised money from Cavu, a fund focused on products that are better for people and the planet, our core mission. They were aligned with our belief system, and it was a natural fit.

It was reported by Women’s Wear Daily last year that Shiseido was going to acquire OSEA. Later, the deal was off. Are you considering taking on more investment or selling?

Melissa: We’re not actively looking for investment or to sell the brand. We’re focused on continuing to grow the brand. One of our exciting aspects right now is our international expansion with Australia and New Zealand, Singapore and Mexico—and lots more in the future. 

What we’re thinking about is what the next 30 years of the business looks like. It feels like a real milestone to be hitting 30 years. We’re looking at ways to continue to engage with our consumer in our quickly changing world and new mechanisms by which people will be shopping through AI. I’m focused on GEO (generative engine optimization). Any leader right now has to be heavily involved with AI because it’s all happening so quickly, and there are so many new technologies emerging.

Do you have employees dedicated to working with you on emerging technologies? 

Melissa: We’ve always focused on an in-house model. We don’t use agencies. It’s helped us to maintain a level of control and authenticity around our messaging and ads. We create all of our own ads, content. We also do our own engineering. We have an engineer who was previously focused on coding, and now she’s moved on because she’s able to use AI for most of that. It’s mind blowing how quick the technology is moving.

Jenefer: She personally built our first website. She learned how to code.

It wasn’t plug and play back then.

Melissa: Not at all. The biggest changes in beauty now—in business period—is you can make a Shopify site in an hour.

How big is your team?

Melissa: The team is around 60 people.

Jenefer: It’s really a privilege to be able to see and be with your child in the world, not just when they come home for Thanksgiving, and who better to take this journey with than someone that you truly love? 

Melissa: It makes everything I do is so fun because I get to continue to share my mom’s mission and vision. We have a primarily female team, and we’ve really worked to build a new model for female leadership that’s focused on kindness and being successful at the same time. We can remain true to our values and build a thriving, sustainable, profitable, healthy business.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.