There’s no keeping up with this Kardashian relative.
flipping a controlling share of her Kylie Cosmetics line to Coty — the parent company of CoverGirl and other beauty mainstays — for $600 million, the new business partners announced Monday.
The blush-inducing cash transaction lands Coty a 51 percent stake in the burgeoning beauty brand and makes Kylie the wealthiest member of the Kardashian-Jenner clan — at just 22 years old.
“Kylie is a modern-day icon, with an incredible sense of the beauty consumer,” Peter Harf, Coty’s chairman of the board, crowed in announcing the deal, expected to formally close in early 2020.
“We believe in the high potential of building a global beauty brand together.”
Indeed, Coty honchos characterized the industry-shaking news as a “partnership,” stressing that Jenner would maintain an active role in designing new products and would remain the face of the brand.
It’s that familiar face, first thrust into the mainstream on the smash reality show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” on which Coty will rely to inject life into the sagging cosmetics industry.
“On one side, Kylie brings her incredible strong brand equity … with unparalleled social media reach among Generation Z consumers,” Coty chief financial officer Pierre Andre Terrise said in a conference call.
“On social media, Kylie has over 270 million followers,” he added. “To put this in perspective, with a single post, she’s able to reach more than double the number of people who watch the Super Bowl every year.”
That global reach, particularly among young consumers, helped make Kylie Cosmetics a runaway success in the face of an industry-wide downturn.
Forbes in March labeled Jenner the youngest self-made billionaire in world history. But the title drew derision, with some objecting to the term “self-made,” given that Jenner derives much of her fame from being the half-sister of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian.
That valuation was also based on the notion that she pulled nearly $100 million from the company over the years. But with Monday’s announcement, there is no doubt she is a billionaire.
Using $250,000 she had squirreled away from modeling gigs, Jenner in 2015 hired an outside company to produce the first 15,000 Kylie Lip Kits, according to a 2018 profile in the business magazine.
Between Kylie’s own famously plump lips — admittedly aided by fillers, until she shunned them in pursuit of a “more natural look” with the 2018 birth of daughter Stormi, according to Harper’s Bazaar — and a relentless social media campaign, hype for the kits snowballed.
On their release, the initial batch of $29 lip kits sold out online in less than a minute, and a billion-dollar business was born.
Jenner made Kylie Cosmetics her primary hustle, and by 2018, it was a juggernaut with $360 million in annual revenue and a Forbes valuation of at least $900 million.