AS Beauty CEO Joey Shamah on shuttering CoverFX and Mally Beauty (for now), plus warning signs a brand is going under

Over the last week, the beauty industry has seen the closure of three major makeup brands: CoverFX and Mally Beauty are shuttering, while Pat McGrath Labs, once valued at $1 billion, is headed to bankruptcy. This comes on the heels of unexpected 2025 closures that included Ami Colé, Drew Barrymore’s Flower Beauty, REN Clean Skincare, Apostrophe telehealth skincare and Gwyneth Paltrow’s mass line Good.clean.goop.

At the helm of two of these brands, CoverFX and Mally Beauty, is AS Beauty CEO Joey Shamah, the founder and former CEO of E.l.f. Cosmetics.

“We’ve been coined as a purchaser of distressed assets [at AS Beauty], but we’re not only buying [brands in] distress,” Shamah told Glossy. “We look at them in three buckets. Distressed or challenged is definitely one of them, a second one is divestitures, … and then the third way is similar, but different, where private equity funds have invested in a company, and their funds are sunsetting, so they’re looking to exit.”

AS Beauty was founded in 2019 by Shamah and three co-founders. It is the parent company of CoverFX and Mally Beauty, as well as Laura Geller, Julep and Bliss. While the latter two were sunset this past week, Laura Geller has grown more than 10x to over $300 million in sales, Julep has been the No. 1 selling eyeshadow brand on Amazon for several consecutive years, and Bliss has evolved into a multi-category lifestyle brand, according to AS Beauty. In total, AS Beauty’s annual revenue is around $500 million, Shamah told Glossy.

Shamah is also the founder and operator of Fit for Life, a fitness equipment licensing company behind brands like GAIAM, New Balance and Fila.

AS Beauty purchased Mally Beauty and CoverFX in 2021 and 2022 from investment firms Beauty Visions and L Catterton Partners, respectively.

In today’s episode, Shamah joins the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss the decision to shutter CoverFX and Mally Beauty — at least for now, we learned — and the economic pressure that led to the decision. He also discussed the challenges of running an underperforming brand, the warning signs that a brand is in distress, and the way an operator comes to the decision to sell, shutter or file bankruptcy.