The clean beauty pioneer—started by Karen Behnke in 2005, it filed for a trademark on the term “clean beauty” a decade ago and launched National Clean Beauty Day in 2021—is liquidating its assets as part of a bankruptcy alternative called assignment for the benefit of creditors that publication Women’s Wear Daily, which discovered its staff was let go in February, covered first.

An industry source told WWD that Juice Beauty’s retail sales shrunk to $25 million last year, when private equity owner Invus Group appointed Lance Patterson, former CEO of Kate Somerville, to take over the CEO post from Behnke, the brand rolled out a rebrand emphasizing its history and clean beauty values along with clinical trials and effective results, and its distribution spanned Ulta Beauty, Sephora Canada and Amazon, from a reported $100 million in sales six years earlier. Previously, it was available at Whole Foods, Bluemercury, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Credo.

Behnke filed a lawsuit on March 1 against Patterson and Invus Group accusing them of discrimination and pushing her out of Juice Beauty. All told, the financial information resource PitchBook approximates the company raised around $31 million. In addition to Invus, its investors included Able Partners founding partner Amanda Eilian, TPG Capital founder Bill Price and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Paltrow served as Juice Beauty’s creative director for makeup in 2017. The brand partnered with Paltrow’s lifestyle company Goop to introduce the now-defunct skincare line Goop by Juice Beauty in 2016. Kate Bosworth was the face of Juice Beauty in 2021, and Kate Hudson collaborated with it in 2022.

Juice Beauty’s unraveling comes as its once-distinguishing feature, leadership in the clean beauty category, has been muted amid crowding. To understand more about what clean beauty brands face in the current market, for the latest edition of our ongoing series posing questions relevant to indie beauty, we asked 10 founders, retail, marketing and design consultants, investors and brand builders the following: What does Juice Beauty’s liquidation say about clean beauty today? Does a clean beauty brand stand a chance?