Case 51 — Fenty Beauty · Rihanna · 2017

Foundation is the riskiest product you could lead with, and every shade you add costs inventory in sixteen hundred doors. How wide do you launch?

It is 2016 and you are in development with Kendo, LVMH's incubator, on a beauty brand you will own half of. Foundation is the hardest product in cosmetics: it must match skin, it is returned when it does not, and every shade is a separate stock-keeping unit in every door. The prestige norm is fifteen to twenty-five shades, thinning out sharply at the dark end, and the retail data says the deep shades sell slowest per unit — because, as far as anyone at Kendo can tell, nobody has ever stocked them properly. Sephora will give you roughly 1,600 doors in seventeen countries on day one, exclusively. Every extra shade multiplies the launch inventory across all of them. You know, from your own life, that the dark end of the chart has been an afterthought for as long as you have worn makeup.

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