Glossier’s former president and chief operating officer Henry Davis turned customers into partners with new personal care startup, Arfa
$185 million from blue-chip investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins when it pitched a similar crowd-sourcing model that solicited ideas from everyday people and rapidly spun out consumer products that landed on the shelves of Target, Walmart and Bed Bath & Beyond.
“So much of the lack of profitability has come from overspending on marketing to get customers that weren’t natural customers,” says Davis. He joined Glossier in 2014 before it had launched any products and helped take the company from a 10-person operation to a cult beauty company with millions of customers in seven countries. Davis, who is originally from London, previously worked in corporate finance at Citi and as a venture capitalist at Index Ventures.
Arfa has three other cofounders. Bryan Mahoney, who was previously Glossier’s chief technology officer, has taken that same role at Arfa. Shabdha Chigurupati, who used to be Davis’s chief of staff at Glossier, is now vice president of business development and finance. Ariel Wengroff, who was formerly the publisher of Vice’s women’s issues channel Broadly, is chief content officer.
The New York-based company plans to launch multiple brands as a holding company, leveraging shared overhead costs like finance, product development and supply chain. It joins a growing number of such direct-to-consumer holding companies, like Win Brands Group, which is working to acquire as many as 25 brands with revenue between $5 million and $50 million in the next five years. Another L.A.
Arfa, which has about 20 employees, has raised money from Index Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, Imaginary Ventures, Thrive Capital, White Star Capital and others, according to Davis, who declined to specify the amount of funding. The
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