Highstock, a business-to-business marketplace that sells surplus beauty inventory to vetted trade buyers, has raised a $30m series A led by a16z, WWD reported on 10 September 2026. Source: https://wwd.com/beauty-industry-news/beauty-features/highstock-b2b-marketplace-surplus-inventory-raises-30m-a16z-1239204407/.
a16z partner Olivia Moore joins the board. The company says it has more than $1bn of inventory listed and works with more than 100 major brands, with roughly 60% of transaction volume coming from brands and conglomerates doing more than $500m in annual revenue. Laura Geller, Bliss and Versed are among the beauty brands it has worked with.
The raise will fund an expansion into apparel. The part worth a founder's attention is a single sentence from Camille van Horne, Highstock's founder, about why beauty has a surplus problem at all.
Beauty's surplus is a clock, not a mistake
Van Horne told WWD that apparel builds waste in through seasonal drops, while beauty has a different problem: "shelf life, so we often work with brands that have products with less than 18 months of shelf life, which is the point at which traditional retailers won't accept the goods."
That changes how you think about excess stock.
Most founders treat surplus as a forecasting error. You ordered too much, it did not sell, you have a problem. That does happen. But van Horne's point is that beauty stock can become unsellable to your main accounts while it is still perfectly good, simply because too much of its life has passed. Nothing went wrong with the product or the demand. It ran out of time.
It is also worth noticing where the volume comes from. If companies with more than $500m in revenue, with their planning teams and forecasting systems, generate enough surplus to support a venture-backed marketplace, a £2m brand is not going to plan its way to zero. The realistic goal is to see it coming.
The threshold is not one number
In an April 2025 interview with Beauty Independent, van Horne said most major retailers will not accept product with anything less than a year of shelf life remaining. This month she described the point as 18 months.
Both can be true, because the requirement varies by retailer, category and agreement. That is the practical lesson: the figure that matters is not an industry average, it is the one in your own terms of trade. Many founders do not know it for each account until a delivery is refused.
How the selling window actually works
Every batch has three dates that matter.
The fill date, when the clock starts. The end of its shelf life. And the point, somewhere in between, where the remaining life drops below what your retailers will accept.
The gap between the fill date and that third point is your real selling window into retail. Everything that happens after filling eats into it: time at the filler waiting for components, freight, customs, time in your warehouse, time in the retailer's distribution centre.
This is where minimum order quantities cause most of the damage. A manufacturer offers a better unit price at a larger run, you take it, and you now hold eighteen months of stock for a product whose retail window may be much shorter than eighteen months. The saving on the unit cost is real. So is the risk that a slice of that run ends up sold at a steep discount, or not sold at all.
What surplus is worth when you have to move it
In the same 2025 interview, van Horne said surplus wholesale pricing sits at around 50% off SRP for some buyers, and that 90% off SRP is a very common figure. She also described the company's fee at the time as 10% of the accepted offer value for buyers the brand does not already know.
Do the arithmetic on your own range. As an illustration, if a batch you paid full cost for clears at 10% of SRP, the recovery may barely cover the freight. A 20,000 unit run that saves 15p a unit on filling saves £3,000. If the last 3,000 units of that run clear at a fraction of cost, the saving has gone and you have spent the working capital for a year to get there.
That is not an argument against surplus marketplaces. They are a far better outcome than destruction, which is what van Horne told WWD first drew her to the problem, when she saw sellable goods at a manufacturer's warehouse on their way to being destroyed. It is an argument for treating the exit route as part of the buying decision rather than a rescue.
Why discreet matters
Highstock's model sells through international buyers, which make up 40% of its business, and live commerce sellers on Whatnot and TikTok Live, helping brands shift product out of their core markets discreetly.
Discreet is the key word. The reason brands destroy good stock is usually not that nobody would buy it. It is that selling it cheaply in the brand's own market undermines the price the retailer is charging, the retailer notices, and the relationship takes the hit.
So before you ever need it, decide the rules: which markets surplus can go to, which channels are off limits, and whether any clearance route could put your product next to your retailer's shelf price at a fraction of it. Put those rules in writing, and check them against your retail agreements.
What to do this week
Build a simple table for every SKU. Fill date of the stock on hand. Total shelf life. Minimum remaining shelf life each retail account accepts. Units on hand and on order.
Subtract to get the selling window for each batch, and compare it to your current rate of sale. Any batch that will not sell through before its window closes is your surplus, whether or not it feels like surplus today.
Then change the next production decision, not just this one. Order to the window, not the MOQ discount, and agree your exit route before the stock is filled, while you still have time to choose it.
The plain version
A $30m raise for a surplus marketplace tells you something the industry rarely says out loud: overproduction is routine, even at the largest companies, and much of it happens because beauty stock runs out of time before it runs out of customers.
Your version of that problem starts on the fill date. Know each batch's window, buy to it, and have a quiet exit ready before you need one.