Nancy Twine built Briogeo into a multi-million-dollar clean beauty powerhouse, only to step back from the brand she founded. Now she's returning to the beauty arena with Soulstice, a hair care line that reflects a fundamentally different philosophy about who deserves premium products and how they should be formulated.
Soulstice launches with an emphasis on performance-driven formulations paired with attainable pricing. Rather than positioning hair care as luxury or aspirational, Twine frames Soulstice around what she calls "intentional self-care." The brand targets consumers who want effective, ingredient-conscious products without the gatekeeping that often accompanies clean beauty marketing.
This pivot matters. Briogeo rode the wave of clean beauty's explosion in the 2010s, proving that consumers would pay premium prices for products free from sulfates, parabens, and silicones. The brand became a Sephora staple and grew into a category leader. Yet Twine's exit from Briogeo and subsequent return to beauty signals something shifting in the market. Clean beauty fatigue is real. Price accessibility increasingly trumps "clean" as a brand differentiator. Consumers want results, not just ingredient lists.
Soulstice's positioning reflects this evolution. The line launches with core hair treatments designed to address common concerns like moisture, strength, and scalp health. Formulations emphasize plant-based actives and avoid controversial chemicals, but the brand doesn't center its identity around what it excludes. Instead, Soulstice leads with efficacy. Marketing materials highlight performance claims backed by testing rather than aspirational lifestyle imagery.
Pricing sits firmly in the accessible luxury tier. Soulstice products land below premium salon brands but above mass-market drugstore options. This sweet spot has become increasingly competitive as brands like Prose, Function of Beauty, and Olaplex have trained consumers to expect customization and professional-grade results at mid-market price points.
The timing positions Soulstice strategically. The hair care market has fractured into dozens of micro-categories: scalp-focused brands, curl-specific lines, color-safe systems. Soulstice takes a different approach by emphasizing holistic hair health across all hair types. This universality could appeal to consumers fatigued by niche positioning and ready for simplification.
Twine's track record matters. She built Briogeo from zero to significant scale by understanding what female consumers wanted from beauty brands: transparency, efficacy, and cultural authenticity. She didn't shy away from marketing hair care to Black consumers with textured hair at a time when mainstream beauty largely ignored them. That ethos appears central to Soulstice's DNA as well.
What Twine has learned matters too. Her first exit from Briogeo suggests she watched how beauty founders navigate growth, scaling, and institutional ownership. Soulstice appears designed with those lessons embedded. The brand's distribution strategy, manufacturing partners, and supply chain decisions likely reflect that hard-won knowledge.
The clean beauty boom made founders like Twine wealthy. But the market has matured. Soulstice enters at a moment when "natural" and "clean" no longer guarantee consumer loyalty or premium pricing. Performance, inclusion, and realistic pricing now determine winners. Twine's second act tests whether that foundation she built with Briogeo translates to a brand built from scratch with a clearer-eyed approach to what the market actually wants.