Skincity shut down after 14 years — the owner stopped investing after the Kicks merger

Skincity was a Swedish online beauty retailer founded in 2011 by Mikael Kjellman as a family company. It grew into one of the country's best-known e-commerce skincare destinations, reaching just under 600 million SEK in annual sales, and turned profitable during the pandemic years.

Axel Johnson took a majority stake in 2017 and full ownership in 2021. In October 2022 the group merged Skincity with its beauty chain Kicks into Kicks Group, billed as the Nordic region's leading beauty player — Kicks alone had 3.6 billion SEK in turnover and 230 stores across Sweden, Norway and Finland. The plan was synergies in logistics, customer experience and technology, with the two brands kept separate toward customers.

After the merger, Skincity.com was left to wither. Kicks CEO Carola Lundell later admitted the platform had not been actively worked on for months: no campaigns, no newsletters, no offers, no relaunches — and sales on the platform dropped. In February 2025 she revealed the next step was to close Skincity.com and fold professional skincare into Kicks as 'ProSkin by Skincity'. The site shut on 30 March 2025 with a farewell page reading 'Tack för oss', ending 14 years of operations. Some loyal Skincity customers were lost in the transition, the CEO acknowledged.

Axel Johnson merged Skincity into Kicks and stopped campaigns and offers, so sales fell and the 600M SEK business closed in 2025.

After the 2022 merger, Kicks Group stopped investing in Skincity.com — no campaigns, newsletters, offers or relaunches — and sales on the platform fell.

Skincity's business depended on its own e-commerce platform and customer base, which the new owner chose not to maintain once the brands were folded together.

The acquisition thesis was synergy, but the execution was absorption: the smaller brand's channel was quietly run down instead of developed, then closed.

An acquirer that stops investing in the brand it bought is killing it slowly. Synergies are not automatic — a platform with no campaigns loses customers, and the smaller brand pays the price.