Beauty Independent reported on 9 September 2026, updated 10 September, that Anisa Beauty is winding down after seven years. Source: https://www.beautyindependent.com/makeup-brush-brand-anisa-beauty-wind-down-after-seven-years/.
The reported detail matters. The parent company, Anisa International, was founded in 1992 and launched the brand in 2019. It employs around 400 people globally and holds 180 brand partnerships. Estimated 2024 brand sales were $25m to $50m, against $100m in total brush category sales for the parent. Sales continue through the end of 2026, and the stated reason for closing is to refocus on core manufacturing and research and development.
A brand doing somewhere between $25m and $50m is not a failure by any normal definition. Most founders reading this would take that outcome happily. So the interesting question is why you close one.
The conflict is structural, not managerial
Anisa International makes brushes for other brands. A great many of them, given 180 partnerships. Then it launched a brush brand of its own.
From the moment that brand launched, every client of the manufacturing business had a reasonable question. Is my supplier also my competitor. Does my development work inform their range. When capacity is tight in the run-up to Christmas, whose order gets filled first. If I share a concept at the briefing stage, where does it end up.
Those questions do not require anyone to behave badly for the damage to occur. The suspicion alone is enough, because a client who is unsure will simply place the next order somewhere else rather than raise it.
And crucially, the problem intensifies with success. A small in-house brand is a curiosity. A brand doing tens of millions in the same category your clients compete in is a genuine rival with privileged access to the factory floor. The better the brand does, the more the manufacturing business pays for it.
That is a structural conflict. No amount of internal separation, firewalls or good intentions resolves it, because the client's perception is the thing that matters and the client cannot see your firewalls.
Why this is relevant well below $25m
Most people reading this do not run a factory. The pattern still applies, and it shows up in beauty constantly in smaller forms.
A brand that also offers white-label manufacturing to other brands. A founder who runs a brand and a consultancy serving competitors in the same category. A business selling both its own range and a wholesale ingredient or component line. A salon group with a retail product line competing with the brands it stocks. A creator-founder with a brand who also takes paid partnerships with rival brands.
In each case there are two revenue streams and one of them is structurally in tension with the other. And in each case the tension is invisible while both are small, and becomes decisive at exactly the point where one of them starts to matter.
The reason founders walk into this is that both revenue streams are real, and at the start they genuinely do support each other. The service business funds the brand. The brand proves the capability that sells the service. It feels like a hedge rather than a conflict.
The question to answer before it is answered for you
Which of these is the business.
Not which is bigger today, and not which you enjoy more. Which one gets the capacity when both need it, the capital when only one can have it, and the founder's attention in the week that matters.
Most people in this position have never explicitly answered that, and the absence of an answer is itself a decision. The default is that the one with the urgent deadline wins, which over a couple of years means the service business wins, because service businesses have clients and clients have deadlines.
If you cannot answer it in a sentence, look at three things that reveal the real answer regardless of what you would say. Where capacity goes when both need it at once. Which one gets price protection when input costs move. Whose launch calendar bends when there is a clash.
Whichever consistently wins those three is the business you have actually chosen.
What the alternatives look like
If the answer is the service business, then the brand needs to be small enough to be uninteresting to your clients, or in an adjacent category where you do not compete with them, or sold.
If the answer is the brand, then the service business becomes a funding mechanism with an end date, and you should know roughly what that date is rather than discovering it when a client walks.
And if you genuinely want both at scale, they need to be separately owned and separately operated to the point where the separation is credible to a sceptical client. That is expensive, it is slower, and it is sometimes correct. What is never correct is running both and hoping nobody draws the obvious conclusion.
The plain version
A company with 180 brand partnerships decided those relationships were worth more than a brand doing $25m to $50m, and acted on it.
That is a clear-eyed decision rather than a defeat, and it is a useful one to borrow from. The question is not whether two revenue streams can coexist for a while. It is which one you will protect when they stop being able to, and whether you would rather decide that now or have a client decide it for you.