Is Ben Bennett The Godfather Of Female Founded Beauty And Wellness Brands?
Inside The Quiet Operator Behind Naturium, Phlur, And Saltair, And Why He Keeps Betting On Women.
Ben Bennett has quietly built and sold some of the most talked-about beauty brands of the last five years, Naturium to E.l.f. Beauty for $355 million, Phlur to TSG Consumer Partners for a reported $400 million, and this past July, a majority stake in Saltair to that same firm. Which raises the real question behind the buzz. If Bennett is the one building the machine, why does nearly every brand he touches end up fronted by a woman?
The Operator Behind The Curtain
Bennett's path to beauty started sideways. Early in his career at Limited Brands, he worked across fourteen different apparel businesses before landing on the team that helped conceive Bath & Body Works, the project that got him hooked on fragrance and personal care. From there came Bennett Kreative, his own branding studio, then Hatchbeauty in 2010, an incubator he co-founded that eventually built a portfolio generating $150 to $200 million in annual retail sales, with clients including Dollar Shave Club and Unilever. He sold his stake to Lion Capital and, in 2020, started over with The Center.
"I know that I'm better at that stage, and my team is built to be better at that, than we are at the long-term growth of the business," Bennett has said of his role. He describes his sweet spot bluntly: zero to fifty million dollars in revenue. Past that point, he says, it takes a different mindset than his to keep scaling, so he sells. He was self-funded for years before taking his first outside capital, a $15 million investment from Prelude Growth Partners, in 2021. Before that, he says, it was the old way: maxed-out credit cards, borrowed money, turning ten thousand dollars into twenty.
Image via Puck News
The Women Building Alongside Him
The Center's actual roster tells its own story. Naturium was quietly seeded by Bennett in 2019, then handed its public face and DTC launch by co-founder Susan Yara. Phlur, originally a small clean fragrance label out of Austin, was purchased by Bennett in 2021 and rebuilt around Chriselle Lim, who turned her own divorce and heartbreak into the brand's best-selling scent, Missing Person. Saltair launched in 2022 in partnership with model Iskra Lawrence, who is staying on as chief community advocate through the TSG sale. Make Beauty was revived under Carrie Barber, a former Violet Grey art director stepping into her first role as a named founder. And Cyklar, founded independently by creator Claudia Sulewski in 2023, joined The Center's portfolio the following year and is now the brand insiders expect to be Bennett's next big exit.
Image via @ben_bennett
“I’m drawn to female founders because I think that female founders have not been given the same platform that male founders have.”
That's Bennett, in his own words, on a 2021 episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. It's worth sitting with, coming from a man who by his own account avoids press and interviews almost entirely.
So, Is He The Godfather
Call him the godfather and you're not entirely wrong. Six brands, nearly all of them fronted by women, three exits worth a combined fortune, and a stated, repeated preference for backing the founders the industry has historically underlooked. But godfather implies the women around him are working in his shadow, and the actual pattern reads differently. Yara, Lim, Sulewski, and Barber are not incubated ideas wearing a founder's name for marketing purposes. They are the reason these brands work at all, the taste, the audience, the story. Bennett is the operator who knows exactly when to build the infrastructure and exactly when to get out of the way.
Maybe the better title isn't godfather. Maybe it's matchmaker, the guy who has figured out, again and again, that the smartest thing he can do with his experience is hand the microphone to a woman who's earned it.
Image via Beauty Independent
