Do Retailer Exclusives Still Matter?

Vacation, the Miami-based, nostalgia-fueled sun care brand, will make a small bit of beauty retail history on June 20.

The label will become the first beauty line to debut at LVMH-owned Sephora after already launching in competitors like Ulta Beauty (2022), Target (2024) and Costco (2025).

It’s a momentous feat and shows serious momentum. In the five years since its founding, Vacation has scaled into 15,000 doors and over half a million points of distribution. Sephora.com is its latest attempt “to be in all the places where people buy sunscreen,” co-founder Lach Hall exclusively told The Business of Beauty. The brand projected $80 million in sales in 2025; secured recent investment from VMG Partners, bringing its total funding to over $11 million; and hired Raymond James to explore options for a minority stake sale.

But the move also shows the waning influence of the coveted exclusive, a one-time dealbreaker for retailers hoping to capture and cultivate the market’s most exciting entrants.

Vacation, which combines lush retro marketing with fine fragranced sun care, thrives on a crowded shelf: Products like its Whipped Sunscreen, an SPF 30 that dispenses via nozzle tip, feel more premium compared to Coppertone and more fun compared to Supergoop. And despite launching only at Sephora.com for now, the brand will be the centre of the retailer’s online sun care assortment for the critical summer months, with hotel-pool pop-ups planned in Brooklyn, New York and Key West, Florida and partnerships with Sephora Squad ambassadors.

“We’re calling it the summer at Sephora.com,” said London Krupski, the brand’s general manager.

Sephora has long been the premier retail destination for beauty brands of all kinds, and wields considerable power. For over two decades, choosing Sephora meant locking out other destinations for at least a two-year period. But those dynamics are changing as sought-after brands realise their power, imagining their shoppers as retail-agnostic nomads and hoping to meet them everywhere, or anywhere, all at once.

“If you’re locked in exclusivity, and then you’re looking for investors with only one retailer, they’re saying, ‘What’s next? How can we be confident that when you expand, [you’re] going to be successful?’” said Coye Nokes, a partner at OC&C Strategy Consultants.

Likewise, Sephora’s merchants have to appease a consumer base who is constantly discovering new brands elsewhere; they decided to carry Vacation only after overwhelming community feedback, with around 35,000 “Vacation”-related searches on its website, according to a statement from the company.

“This is an example of a well-known brand becoming so culturally relevant you can’t ignore it,” said Sunia Pervez, a former merchant at Sephora and the founder of The SP Collective.

A Black-and-White Strategy

Vacation’s move does not diminish the power of Sephora, which has been the world’s most influential beauty retailer since disrupting the department store channel in the 1990s.

But the retailer has loosened its grip due to the rise of global competitors, the proliferation of social media-driven commerce platforms and the fact that, to grow, even Sephora brands eventually need to scale beyond its walls.

The ability to rewrite the rules of retail exclusives shows the power of a specific set of social mediagenic brands like Vacation or others like Medicube, which arrived in Ulta stores last year and recently branched into Target. (Medicube will roll out to Walmart and Costco stores in the latter half of 2026.)

“[Brands] can generate so much awareness and buzz through TikTok Shop or Instagram,” said Nokes. “I find it difficult to see how they would go back to a world where the retailer has as much power as they used to.”

For years, a line that launched at Target or Ulta Beauty in the US first would be verboten from coming to Sephora, whose strategy favours exclusivity to uphold its reputation as the world’s beauty editor. While a number of Sephora-first brands like Drunk Elephant or Rare Beauty have expanded into its sherbert-hued competitor to access growth after exclusivity terms run out, Sephora prefers to have first go at brands, partially for its incubation process. That grip has become even firmer as it the company is able to leverage its access to its fleet of stores across the globe.

More than a brick-and-mortar store, Sephora is composed of an ever-moving matrix — a dense but dynamic swarm of the buzziest brands in human cosmetic achievement at any given moment. In the US, the retailer keeps a consistent roster of around 320 brands at any given time, with more globally, essentially adopting a one-in-one-out strategy.

Vacation will launch an edited assortment of its best-sellers on Sephora.com including its Classic Whip sunscreen franchise, SPF 30 body oil and hero “Vacation” eau de toilette. It also created two “uniquely Sephora” retail-exclusive sets of its skincare and fragrance offering.

It’s likely that Vacation will use its Sephora connection to delve deeper into new body and skincare products. “Body oils, after sun-care, seasonal collections — that’s the growth strategy that could potentially be exclusive,” said Pervez.

Sephora’s sun care section has long been synonymous with Supergoop, an early purveyor of premium, “beautified” sunscreen, which entered Target in February. Its growing assortment centres on the Australian line Ultra Violette or piecemeal SKUs from brands like Beauty of Joseon.

“It’s interesting how sunscreen has evolved from being a purely need-state product to something that’s blended into your daily beauty routine,” Hall said. “For us, that means the distribution has evolved, too.”

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Editor’s Note: This article was amended on June 9 2026 to clarify Vacation’s Sephora launch date, which is June 20, and specify that the brand projected $80 million in sales in 2025.