The encyclopedia · Marketing & Brand · Marketing decision · 2018–2024
HEDONE went from Tmall's breakout makeup brand to closure in six years
Sequoia-backed, ¥10M months within half a year of launch — and no funding after 2019. When cheap white-label makeup arrived, the traffic model died.
HEDONE · 2024-11-09
What happened
HEDONE began under Shanghai Henai as a nail sticker business, and in 2018 pivoted into color cosmetics, led by founder Qu Xinzhe, previously of L'Oréal's Biotherm in London. The timing was perfect: three funding rounds between 2017 and 2019 from Pengpai Capital, Sequoia Capital and Chenhai Capital, and a Tmall launch that passed ¥10 million in monthly sales within six months, putting it among the platform's top dozen emerging beauty brands.
The model was traffic, and traffic stopped compounding. After the November 2019 Series B, no new funding was disclosed. New product releases stopped at 2022. The affordable makeup segment HEDONE competed in had no entry barrier, and better-and-cheaper products from white-label sellers kept arriving; a brand built on marketing spend found itself paying more for attention every year while the products it bought it for looked more interchangeable.
In October 2024 HEDONE announced it would close, with the official shutdown on 9 November — six years after launch. The following year its investors cleared out their holdings entirely. It is the cleanest example of the new-consumption pattern: capital can build a brand's distribution in eighteen months, but it cannot build the repeat purchase that survives the moment the capital stops.
Why it happened
- Growth was bought traffic, not earned retention — when funding stopped, the customer acquisition cost stayed and the budget did not.
- In a no-barrier category, 'affordable and stylish' is a position anyone can copy; the white-label sellers did, at half the price.
- A funding cadence substituted for a profit model — the Series B was treated as validation when it was actually the last input.
The lesson
If the business plan needs the next round to work, the business does not work — unit economics that only close with fresh capital describe the capital, not the customer.
Sources
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