Dive Brief:

• Patrick Herning, founder and CEO of 11 Honoré, and Nyakio Grieco, founder of Nyakio Beauty, have teamed up to launch Thirteen Lune, an e-commerce platform designed to connect consumers with beauty brands created by Black and Brown founders, according to a Wednesday announcement. 

• The platform will officially launch this month, beginning with 13 brands, including Gilded Body, Lauren Napier Beauty, Liha Beauty, Marie Hunter Beauty, Skot Beaute and The Established, among others. The brands available on the platform will be featured across the company's homepage, social media channels and on an editorial hub with long-form content, per the press release. 

• The company will vet and curate brands that cater to the Black and Brown community, have Black and Brown founders, make non-toxic and effective beauty products, and demonstrate allyship to create change beyond the cosmetics industry, according to the press release.

Dive Insight:

Thirteen Lune aims to become an ally for diverse beauty brand founders and address financial inequities for beauty and wellness brands serving the Black and Brown community, per the press release. Grieco said in a statement that the platform's launch is a chance to address systemic racism by building generational wealth in those communities.

Prior to co-founding Thirteen Lune, Herning advocated for more luxury brands to offer inclusive sizing through 11 Honoré, a surprisingly difficult proposition despite the plus-size market's potential. With Thirteen Lune, he said in a statement that the retail platform will redefine inclusive beauty and speak to a broader audience of consumers. 

Thirteen Lune is creating spaces for beauty brands marketed toward Black and Brown consumers after a year that has forced retailers more broadly to address systemic racism. This year's protests, which took place after several high-profile killings of Black people by police officers, brought to light inequities within the retail industry and prompted retailers and brands to devote resources to addressing them.

The beauty space in particular was vocal about addressing racial injustice, with Sephora being one of the first retailers to take Aurora James' 15% Pledge, which asked retailers to take stock of how many Black-owned brands they sold and increase that to at least 15%. Uoma Beauty founder Sharon Chuter also launched an initiative, Pull Up for Change, that called on retailers to disclose their organization's representation of people of color.

The past month has been an active one for the beauty space more broadly, as Sephora announced a new 850-store deal with Kohl's to eventually replace its current partnership with J.C. Penney, while the department store said it would be creating its own beauty concept. Prior to either announcement, Ulta revealed a blockbuster deal with Target, wherein it will open 100 shop-in-shops next year and "hundreds more" in the future.