Why Are So Many Black and African Beauty Brands Closing Down?

Something painful is happening in the beauty world right now — and it deserves an honest conversation.

Over the past year, some of the most beloved Black and African-founded beauty brands have closed their doors. Brands that had community, press, awards, loyal customers, and in some cases millions in funding. Gone. And it is not a coincidence.

We want to talk about it — the individual stories, the bigger picture, and what we think it means.

First, the beauty industry is struggling across the board

It would be wrong to talk about Black brand closures without acknowledging what is happening more broadly. Even established UK names have not survived this period.

REN Clean Skincare, a British clean-beauty pioneer founded in 2000, was shut down by its parent company, Unilever, in July 2025 after 25 years. Mallows Beauty went into voluntary liquidation in December 2025. Malin + Goetz closed all seven of its London stores in January 2026 and filed for UK administration. These are not small brands. They had decades of heritage, loyal customers, and serious backing.

The market is brutal right now — rising costs, cautious consumer spending, an oversaturated landscape, and shrinking margins. Nobody is immune. But for Black and African founders, these pressures land on top of a set of structural disadvantages that make survival even harder.

The brands we have lost

Let us talk about them by name because they deserve more than a statistic.

Ami Colé. Founded by Diarrha N'Diaye-Mbaye, daughter of Senegalese immigrants, former L'Oréal and Glossier employee, Ami Colé was built for melanin-rich skin at a time when clean beauty largely ignored it. It launched in Sephora, expanded to 600 locations, won 80+ awards, raised over $3 million in VC funding, and was loved by Kelly Rowland and Mindy Kaling. It closed in September 2025. In her open letter, N'Diaye-Mbaye was clear: investor appetite for 'betting big on inclusivity' had quietly disappeared since 2020, and without sustained backing, the retail costs could not be covered.

Adwoa Beauty. Julian Addo started this textured haircare brand in 2017 with $80,000 of her own savings. She got it into Sephora. She raised $4 million. Her Baomint range became a cult product. Then a lender dispute changed everything — a financing arrangement that redirected retailer payments away from Adwoa and eventually froze the brand's entire inventory and revenue through a lawsuit. Addo did not pay herself for most of 2025 and turned to community fundraising to survive. On 1 May 2026, a court ordered Chapter 7 liquidation. A brand built from $80,000 to Sephora, gone.

Plantmade. Ama Amo-Agyei started this UK brand in 2020 with £100 after losing her job in lockdown. She formulated vegan hair growth oils drawing on her Ghanaian heritage, built 340,000 social media followers through raw, honest storytelling, and grew the brand to a projected £11 million in revenue. In June 2025 it entered administration owing £1.8 million, largely due to pressure from short-term lenders. Its assets sold for £30,000. Ama and her family are no longer involved. A brand built from £100 and community love is now trading under new ownership without its founder.

Amila Naturals (Nigeria). Founded by Hadrat Abolade to serve melanin-rich skin using ingredients sourced from Nigerian farms, Amila Naturals has announced it is closing operations. Community tributes have flooded in. The brand's story also reflects the specific challenge facing African-based founders — regulatory costs like Nigeria's NAFDAC product registration, which some founders cite at $10,000 per product SKU, make scaling simply unaffordable for small brands.

Stabana Cultural Products, Leicester. This one is different — it is a retirement, not a collapse. But it matters just as much. Randy and Jenny Stabana opened their shop in 1996 because their African-Caribbean community had nowhere local to buy the hair and beauty products they needed. They served that community for nearly 30 years. They closed in December 2025. Randy said it best: 'People have said many times the shop belongs to you. I've told them, no — it belongs to the customer.' When community institutions like this close, they rarely get rebuilt.

“They had the products. They had the customers. They had the press. It still was not enough.”

So why does this keep happening?

A few things are working against Black and African founders specifically — and they compound each other.

The 2020 DEI wave dried up. After George Floyd's murder, corporations and investors pledged billions to support Black businesses. Brands scaled, entered retail partnerships, and hired teams on the assumption that support would continue. It didn't. By 2024, only 0.4% of all venture capital went to Black founders — down over two-thirds from 2021. Brands built on post-2020 momentum were left with infrastructure they could no longer afford.

Retail partnerships cost more than they return — for founders without capital safety nets. Getting into Sephora sounds like the dream. The reality is that sustaining a Sephora presence can require upwards of $10 million in ongoing funding to cover inventory, marketing, chargebacks, and new product expectations. A single failed product launch can cost six figures. Without deep pockets to absorb shocks, one bad season can be the end.

Predatory lending fills the gap left by traditional finance. Because Black founders disproportionately lack access to standard bank lending, they turn to alternative lenders — sometimes with terms that hand those lenders enormous power when disputes arise. Both Adwoa Beauty and Plantmade were brought down, at least in part, by financing arrangements that froze their operations during disputes. This is not bad luck. It is a gap in the financial system being exploited.

None of this is about individual failure. It is about a system that was never designed to support these founders fairly.

But it is not all over

The African beauty space is still alive and growing. The A-Beauty movement is genuinely gaining global momentum. Across Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and diaspora communities in the UK and US, founders are building brands that combine African botanical heritage with clinical formulation and community-driven growth models.

The brands surviving this period share a few things: they have not chased aggressive retail expansion, they have built direct-to-consumer communities that are genuinely loyal, and they have stayed rooted in cultural authenticity that cannot be copied by a white-label competitor overnight.

The demand for products that truly serve Black and Brown skin has never been stronger. These closures leave real gaps. Those gaps will be filled by the next generation of founders who are watching, learning, and building right now.

What you can do — right now

The most powerful thing any of us can do is spend our money with intention. Not just during Black History Month. Not just when there is a viral moment or a news story. Every month, consistently.

• Buy from Black and African-founded beauty brands — including small ones you find on Instagram
• Leave reviews. It costs nothing, and it matters enormously to small brands
• Share products with people who would not otherwise find them
• Ask your favourite retailers why they do not stock more African-founded brands

The community's purchasing power is one of the few things that genuinely moves retailers and investors when nothing else does. Use it.

“The demand is there. The talent is there. The community is there. What is missing is fair access to capital — and our consistent support.”

At Zawadi Naturals, we are watching all of this closely. We recognise the pressures. We have tried to build differently — sustainably, without overextending, staying rooted in the community that got us here. But we are clear-eyed about the fact that the landscape is not fair, and that the founders who built Ami Colé, Adwoa Beauty, Plantmade, and Amila Naturals deserved far better than they got.

Their work mattered. Their brands mattered. And the conversation about why this keeps happening needs to get louder, not quieter.

Tell us in the comments — which Black or African-founded beauty brands have meant something to you? Let us celebrate and support what is still here.