How a Vietnamese beauty startup landed a $38m exit

Long before Hannah Nguyen built skincare startup Skinetiq, she was experimenting with and creating natural makeup products on a coffee farm in rural Vietnam.

As a child, Nguyen would crush berries from the garden into makeshift lipstick and blush, while she used coffee branches as hair curlers. “I was into beauty since I was five or six,” she says in a recent interview with Tech in Asia.

Skinetiq co-founder Hannah Nguyen / Photo credit: Skinetiq

Years later, that early fascination turned into a business and, eventually, a multimillion-dollar exit. Skinetiq, which Nguyen co-founded in 2020 with Vietnamese entrepreneur Bui Ngoc Anh, was valued at around US$38 million after the team agreed to sell a 75% equity stake to India’s consumer goods giant Marico last month.

Nguyen, a cosmetologist trained in the US, built a career in Vietnam managing global beauty brands such as Burberry, Hugo Boss, and Make Up For Ever. At the time, she realized that Vietnamese consumers were “so basic with skincare.”

In 2016, she started a Facebook blog to share skincare advice. The page quickly gained traction. Today, it has about 1.5 million followers.

By 2018, Nguyen began organizing promotional campaigns with international beauty brands for her followers. The first three-day campaign generated about US$100,000 in sales. “That shocked me,” she says.

Skinetiq grew out of that success. But few beauty influencers in the country have managed to turn online followings into companies with meaningful exits, especially in a market where counterfeit products remain widespread.

So what did Nguyen do differently?

Building a beauty ecosystem

Nguyen built Skinetiq into a beauty ecosystem, where content, product recommendations, and sales reinforce one another. Followers who trust her reviews often go on to buy the products she highlights.

Her team now runs more than 10 campaigns each month for beauty brands across social media platforms. Skinetiq also moved early to build its own products rather than remain just a distributor.

Candid skincare product launch event in Vietnam / Photo credit: Skinetiq

In 2023, the company launched Candid, a skincare line centered around retinoid, which helps reduce inflammation, unclog pores, minimize wrinkles, and regulate skin cell turnover. Nguyen worked with cosmetics manufacturer Kolmar Korea to develop a formula using encapsulated retinoid, a technology designed to stabilize the ingredient and reduce irritation.

Why Marico made the cut

Post M&A plan