Brands on the Rise is a regular Ad Age feature spotlighting the marketing and business tactics of successful challenger brands. Read other installments here.

There’s a new drugstore skincare brand threatening CeraVe’s pandemic-era glow up. 

Bubble, 14 years CeraVe’s junior, has CeraVe—which became an unlikely TikTok darling—beat on the platform. As of this writing, Bubble has roughly 1.33 million TikTok followers, surpassing CeraVe’s roughly 1.27 million.

Started in 2020, Bubble—an affordably-positioned direct-to-consumer skincare brand with many products in the $20 and below price range—has grown 900% in sales from 2022 to 2023, according to a company spokesperson. Plus, its founder says it’s profitable.

Experts say demand is growing for skincare brands, with Insider Intelligence predicting total U.S. retail sales for skincare to be $21.59 billion this year, with almost a third (32.9%) of those sales taking place online.

Bubble’s growth seems to reflect the brand’s fun font on its packaging that shows the letters in “Bubble” bubbling to the top of the package. Its rise is partly thanks to roughly 14 new social media employees in the past year, a popular brand ambassador program and some timely early influencer partnerships. There’s even a 40,000-person waitlist for its ambassador program, according to the brand’s founders. Although it started out only selling direct-to-consumer, Bubble is now in roughly 12,000 stores across CVS, Walmart and Ulta.

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Below, how Bubble got its start challenging the older players in drugstore skincare aisles. 

How it started

Before becoming the founder and CEO of Bubble, Shai Eisenman had always struggled with acne. And after she got pregnant, things got worse. “I started breaking out with very severe, hormonal acne. People asked me, ‘what happened to your skin?’”

Soon, Eisenman was balancing her 11-year-long career in the DTC space with being a young mother—and she was starting to realize that her niche in the industry lived at the intersection of the personal and the clinical. Both her own experience with acne and the experience of having a daughter, and thinking about the future of the skincare category, inspired her to start Bubble.

“If something really helps you fix your acne, nothing in the world can replace that feeling,” she said in an interview. “It was something that was very close to the heart.”

So Eisenman started doing research—and realized that the skincare industry had a major gap in it. 

“If you look at a price point of $30 or more, there are tons of different options for every skin type, for every skin concern, for everything consumers are looking for,” But when she looked at the $20 or less price point, she noticed that the skincare aisle looks pretty much the same as it did 10 or 20 years ago.

At that price point, Eisenman said, people were not only still using the same products that she did when she was younger—they were still using the same products her mother used. 

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So she got to work gathering young people together for focus groups. “In the beginning, it was truly just grassroots efforts of me calling every person I know who's related to any kind of teen, and convincing them to come to focus groups,” Eisenman said. 

Soon, she’d spoken to 200 people about what they wanted out of an affordable skincare brand. By the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Eisenman was building a community for the brand on platforms such as Geneva and rolling out an Instagram campaign asking people to be a part of a skincare brand launch. These efforts grew Bubble’s community to nearly 5,000 people before it even rolled out, according to Eisenman.

That community inspired many of the brand’s decisions in its early days, from the package design to the brand’s name, to products, to which influencers and celebrities it should work with.

Tipping point

When Bubble launched in November 2020, it was only sold DTC. Within just eight months, it had rolled out in 4,000 Walmart stores; a year later, it hit 4,100 CVS locations. By November 2022, Bubble was in Ulta, too. 

Recently, many DTC brands have been prioritizing entering an increasingly competitive retail landscape in an effort to scale, or vie for a buyer. But those weren’t Bubble’s reasons for the big box rush, according to Eisenman.

“We knew we were up against brands that are accessible in stores,” she said, adding that entering retailers where Bubble’s competitors were shelved was “always a part of like this brand’s strategy.”

“We have to be accessible. … This is where our target market actually shops,” Eisenman continued. “Think of the average 16-year-old, 17-year-old—they want to pay with cash. They want to be able to go with their friends to the store.”

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While the retail landscape has become competitive for DTC brands, Bubble was fortunate enough to be “approached by a lot of retailers,” Eisenman said. 

“We found ourselves really kind of being able to be approached by them rather than going through a whole process of reaching out to them and trying to get their attention. And that helped us tremendously,” she continued. 

Marketing strategies 

From a marketing perspective, Bubble’s secret sauce includes two key ingredients: community and timing. 

The community that stemmed from Bubble’s pre-launch focus groups, for instance, pushed Bubble to get on TikTok. “We jumped into the TikTok game fairly early … we discovered the right talent and signed deals with them in the first months of 2020,” before the brand even launched, Eisenman said.

Because the brand was early to TikTok when many major TikTokers were still building their followings, it was able to secure influencer partnerships that would be difficult for a major brand—let alone a small one that hadn’t rolled out yet—to score today. For instance, in Bubble’s first few months on TikTok, it partnered with creator Noah Beck when he only had 3 million followers; today, he’s up to 33.8 million. Of course, many of the influencers Bubble worked with came from community suggestions. “Being able to see them on the rise and securing them sooner helped us tremendously as a new and up-and-coming brand,” Eisenman said.

Now, Bubble gets tagged on TikTok more than 4,000 times per day and has a long waitlist for its ambassador program, Eisenman said. Many of those ambassadors are young enough to need permission from their parents to join the Bubble program, adding an extra approval step to the Bubble team’s plate.

As a result, Bubble has grown its social media staffers from a team of about four people to roughly 20 people. 

Eisenman said the marketing channels the brand spends the most time and money on vary from month to month and product to product. “If we are currently in regular months that don’t have any launches, sometimes it’s on paid ads, sometimes it’s on influencers,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more on the retail side, ensuring that we have a beautiful experience in store. We are currently evolving and focusing a lot on the education team and field team, which is obviously a significant marketing investment as well.” 

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What the experts say

Targeting Gen Z shoppers in the affordable skincare aisle has put Bubble on the map. Plus, 2020 in some ways was a really great time to launch a skincare brand and get started on TikTok, according to experts in the space.

The Cetaphils and CeraVes of the world, which operate in the same space and price range as Bubble, were ripe for disruption in 2020. Unlike Bubble, with its bright colors and fun, bold fonts, these brands are not “particularly innovative or cool or trendy,” Sky Canaves, senior analyst, retail & e-commerce at Insider Intelligence, said of Bubble’s older competitors. She added that the cooler, trendier brands in the skincare space typically tend to exceed Bubble’s price point.

The $20 and below price range appeals to Gen Z “especially the younger Gen Z teen segments,” she added. While many of them would love to spend hundreds of dollars on high-end beauty and skincare products they can't quite afford that yet, Canaves noted—so they’re looking for the best value for their babysitting money.

“Affordability is also really important to that consumer demographic,” Emma Chozick, head of community and curation at brand discovery platform Thingtesting, said of Gen Z in an interview. “Especially since it's a younger demographic, they're not buying like Lancer skincare, they're not going to like Nordstrom and buying Caudalie.” 

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“That's part of what’s given rise to the huge dupe trend on TikTok, for example, and also ties into the de-influencing trend where creators review and discuss products that beauty shoppers really shouldn't be spending their money on,” Canaves said.

Chozick also noted that Gen Z likes shopping in-store. “They like accessibility. They like ease of purchase,” Chozick said.

Canaves seemed particularly impressed with Bubble. “They’re selling out some of their top products, and their products are going viral,” she said, adding that “they reportedly have a very strong product pipeline going into next year.”

Plus, it just happens to be a great time to be a skincare brand. “Skincare is a subcategory of cosmetics and beauty, which is a subcategory of health and personal care, and in 2023 it will be the fastest-growing of all of the retail categories and subcategories that we track,” Canaves said.

During the height of the pandemic, Canaves continued, “interest in skincare and taking care of yourself” increased. “That's really reached younger consumers through the impact of social channels. They're just a lot better educated and more sophisticated in their knowledge of products and the ingredients that go into them. … There's consumer demand.”

While Bubble might have the upper hand on TikTok, it has a long way to go in terms of beating out legacy brands such as CeraVe in market share. Canaves cited a recent WWD report which noted that unnamed “industry sources” expect Bubble’s sales to reach $85 million in 2023, “with those sales predominantly in the U.S.,” per Canaves.

For comparison, while L'Oréal, CeraVe’s parent company, doesn’t break out the brand’s sales, “it did note that it reached the $1 billion mark back in 2021, and sales have continued to grow at a rapid pace since then, so global annual sales should be more than $1.5 billion by now. The U.S. is the brand’s biggest market, accounting for 60% of its sales, per the latest earnings call. We forecast U.S. retail sales for skincare to reach $21.59 billion this year,” Canaves continued.

What’s next

This summer, Bubble has continued to expand its product line with a new moisturizer called “Cloud Surf,” and moved into more Ulta stores.

Looking ahead, Eisenman said Bubble is “definitely expanding and planning on expanding internationally and making the brand more accessible internationally.”

Eisenman said she is happy with the brand’s current U.S. retail partners and isn’t actively planning expansion to other U.S. retailers at the moment.