Meet Bianca Ingrosso, Co-Founder at D2C Beauty Brand: CAIA Cosmetics

Bianca Ingrosso

CAIA Cosmetics, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is a global beauty brand creating high-quality makeup and skincare products. Our mission is to make beauty more empowering and engaging for people everywhere in the world.

CAIA products cover makeup, brushes, and tools, through to perfume and skincare. All of our formulas are carefully selected for maximum performance while being gentle on the skin, and our skincare range has been developed in close collaboration with dermatologists, toxicologists, and biologists. All our skincare products and most makeup products are 100% vegan. Foundations and concealers are available in up to 19 shades, and our palettes and lip products are designed for a range of skin tones.

To date, we’ve sold more than 3.5 million of our products, in over 30 countries. In only three years, CAIA Cosmetics has become Northern Europe’s fastest-growing D2C beauty brand. CAIA is the alter ego for everyone. She supports us to be the best version of ourselves.
 
 
CAIA Cosmetics | Verdane Portfolio Company
 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
CAIA really was born out of a long-held passion I’ve had for beauty. It’s a passion I developed from a young age, from when I started going on tour with my parents. My mother is an actress and singer in Sweden, and my father is a composer but he was primarily a professional dancer in those days. I spent a lot of time behind the scenes of productions in makeup lounges and around really talented makeup artists.

As I grew older, I started appearing in musical productions and television shows myself, which gave me even more exposure to the professional beauty industry. And it was around that time that I started to realise there was a gap in the market for top-quality beauty products at accessible prices.

CAIA was founded in 2018, when I was 24. I met with my manager Vanessa Lindblad, and beauty industry veterans Jesper Matsch and Mikael Snabb, and we started working hard to envision the beauty brand we felt people globally wanted and was really suited to the social media age – and this became CAIA Cosmetics.

Although we founded it in Sweden, we have always envisioned CAIA as a global brand, and from the beginning CAIA has been built with a worldwide audience in mind.
 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
We’ve been fortunate that our business model – which is built on D2C ecommerce and working closely with our wonderful online community to offer the quality, affordable products that people really want – has meant we’ve not been negatively impacted by the pandemic.

We’re very proud to have a dedicated and amazing fanbase, who are passionate about our products. We’ve always been very close with our consumer community, and we love to communicate with them through our content and online interaction. And we’ve always collaborated closely with the makeup artists and dermatologists who help us to create our great products, and that hasn’t changed either.

So, really, we’ve just kept on doing what we do best. We’ve kept asking our community what they would like to see from us next, and then done it the very best we can. We’ve sold 200,000 skincare products since we launched the skincare range in November 2021, and our Bb-sticks sell out in hours every time we restock them, which makes me extremely proud.
 

What can we hope to see from CAIA in the future?

 
Well, the global beauty market is growing so fast. Last year, it was already valued at $511 billion – it’s predicted to exceed $716 billion by 2025, which is pretty amazing. There are lots of great, young beauty brands out there, including us, that I believe are a big part of the future of the beauty market.

Our own growth has been very promising. In 2021, we recorded €32 million in revenue, and following our successes in Sweden and wider Scandinavia over the last few years, we’re now really focusing on Germany and the UK as well.

It’s just the start for us. With our amazing community and our brilliant team, our aim is to bring empowering beauty products to people everywhere in the world.