Before it became a go-to playbook in beauty, Ogee began building its business through direct-to-consumer distribution and Amazon, establishing demand ahead of hitting the accelerator on prestige retail.
That strategy is now paying off with an entrance into Sephora, where Ogee launched online in June with an assortment spanning skincare and makeup, followed by an in-store rollout planned for October. Its bestselling Crystal Contour Collection is joining the chain-wide assortment for the holiday season, and top shades of its Sculpted Lip Oil are launching in the Beauty on the Fly register section at more than 250 stores. The move comes a year after the clean beauty brand entered Nordstrom, where it’s exceeded its forecasts.
The Sephora expansion marks another chapter for a business that surpassed nine figures in revenue through digital channels. Ogee reports that it achieved a compound annual growth rate of approximately 65% over three years through 2025 as it evolved into an omnichannel business. Over the next three years, it expects wholesale to account for 40% of its sales, up from 20% last year, when DTC drove 80% of its business.
Launched online in 2016 by CEO Mark Rice, who previously co-owned and managed the John Galliano fashion label before it was acquired by LVMH Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, chief product officer Abbott Stark, who spent nine years in business development at beauty manufacturer Autumn Harp, and his brother and CMO Alex Stark, who has a background in operations and logistics, Ogee has carved out a niche at the intersection of organic skincare, makeup and luxury. Its Sculpted Face Sticks and Tinted Lip Oils have helped establish the brand as, well, an OG of clean beauty.
Ogee raised roughly $7 million in a series A round that closed in 2021, led by Birchview Capital with participation from existing investors FreshTracks Capital and Coastal Ventures, bringing its total equity raised at the time to $12.57 million. It added another $2.5 million in equity financing in 2023, according to a United States Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
Below, we chat with Rice and Abbott Stark about Ogee’s Sephora expansion, its omnichannel approach and future goals.

Why is Sephora a good fit for Ogee?

Stark: We really loved the luxury positioning of Sephora. Easy to use makeup is so important, but we also believe in effectiveness, organic and luxury. On the luxury end, that often means rarefied packaging and beautiful formulations that really perform. We also love the commitment Sephora makes to independent brands and to building brands. We felt like with that value alignment and with where we’re at in our growth, it just seems like such a natural fit.

Rice: We started the company on those pillars and we haven’t changed anything. We have this NSF organic certification in our products that no one else in prestige beauty does. I think that’s really unique in the clean beauty landscape. We’re doing that at the highest standard that one can do. And when we talk about prestige luxury, it’s the packaging, it’s the look and the feel, but it’s also the incredible ingredients that are going into a product.

You’ve changed Ogee’s tagline from “Beyond Clean Beauty” to “A Higher Standard for Beauty.” What prompted the change?

Stark: When we talked about “Beyond Clean” before, it meant so much to us because clean is why we got into this space in the first place. Why not think about beauty ingredients the same way that we do about food? For us, the organic certification, it’s very important, and yet it’s also a bit technical. We wanted to be able to articulate that value proposition simply.

We found that “Beyond Clean” was not connecting. They didn’t really understand what it meant. We wanted something that was more ownable by our customers.

Rice: The idea behind “Beyond Clean Beauty,” we thought it was great. It’s a pretty way to say it, but we just don’t know if it was really showing the real difference with Ogee, which is the really high standards we have on every level. Not just being beyond clean, but also beyond performance, beyond that look and feel, beyond the ingredients.

Ogee co-founder and chief product officer Abbott Stark launched the brand with his brother, Alex Stark, and Mark Rice in 2016 around a vision of combining organic skincare with luxury beauty. Ryan Bent Photography ryan@ryanbent

Why is now the right time to enter Sephora?

Stark: We’ve launched an edited set that we think speaks most to our No. 1 hero ingredient, which is organic cold-pressed jojoba seed oil. Our Jojoba Glow face oil, our sunscreen and then our crystal contour collection, our face sticks, which are our blushing sticks, our bronzing sticks and our sculpted foundation sticks are there as well. It’s a very purposeful assortment meant to introduce the Sephora customer to what’s really our claim-to-fame products.

We’re going at the market a little bit backwards to how many brands do it because a lot of brands, especially independent brands, they start out in a format like a trade show, get retail traction and then grow in retail as they’re scaling on direct-to-consumer, whereas Ogee, we joke, “it’s like an overnight success in 10 years.” It feels so fast, and we’ve come so far. We’re off the map of any projections that we originally thought we could get to.

Rice: We grew really quickly in the last few years with our DTC, and part of our strategy was to really go develop this DTC muscle. We wanted to strategically move from a DTC brand into a full omnichannel brand by rolling out piece by piece as we do this in a way that really makes sense. Part of it was, once we go into retail, we’re coming in to a retailer already having this vibrant community from our DTC that we’ve built for all these years. The brand has had a level of discovery before we’re launching there.

What we’ve found with all of our retailers we’ve launched into, the second we launched there, it’s almost like people were waiting for it and excited that it’s arrived because the demand is out there for the retail customer that may not buy online or prefers to discover it through a retail channel.

You’re going to be in stores in October. What’s the strategy there?

Rice: We must reflect the level of education, relationship building and community that we bring to our digital spaces into our real-world retail spaces. So for us that means utilizing what we call our field sales team. These are the folks who work with Ogee and actually go into the stores. We’ve been building this model out into our existing retailers. We’ve started with Bluemercury and Nordstrom on the East Coast, and now we’re expanding into our West Coast stores.

That’s the model that we’re now working to build out across the country and to be ready when we’re in those Sephora doors to go in and engage directly with the users and the cast of the Sephora stores. It’s so important that they understand the points of differentiation for Ogee—the organic certification, the efficacy, the ease—and are able to extol those virtues to the Sephora user.

Ogee CEO and co-founder Mark Rice. After building a nine-figure business largely through DTC, Ogee is accelerating its shift to omnichannel distribution with Sephora.

What role does Amazon play in your strategy today?

Rice: When we launched, we thought it was great to have a strategy on Amazon rather than not having a strategy on Amazon. It’s really paid off over the years. There were certain companies and brands that would have said a long time ago, “Oh, we wouldn’t be on Amazon.” They’re all there now.

We have this prestige customer, yet we do really well on Amazon with our price point. A couple of our products are top-ranked. We see it as another operating channel, and we find both managing it now and investing in it for the future is really smart.

What trends are you seeing? 

Rice: One is obviously skincare meets makeup. We started as a skincare company and then added on makeup. Much of what is inside of our makeup products are the same products that are in skincare. Our tinted serum is 90% skincare ingredients and 10% makeup ingredients. We find skincare and makeup to be connected and not separate.

Stark: A big trend is the ever-more-educated consumer. That education is through social media, but now also from AI and apps that are helping people screen products. Whenever we do a new store training, we ask, “Do you still have customers who are coming in and asking for clean beauty?” There’s a resounding yes from the people who are working in the stores. It’s a very warm opening for Ogee.

There are the apps where people scan the barcode of the product and then it gives it a score. Because of our organic certification and the true clean values that we bring to selecting our ingredients and formulating the products, we tend to score amongst the highest of any product or brand in the store.

What are short- and long-term goals for Ogee? 

Rice: Developing this healthy omnichannel each step at a time in a way that’s really smart for the next three years to really deliver those future revenues, but also a much higher profitability for the company. We really see this next step as the move towards that.

We’ve always seen the potential for global expansion. Eight percent to 10% of our DTC customers are international already, and that’s without a large amount of support for it, so it just shows the potential of an international customer for our product.