The global beauty market is on track to grow 5% annually through 2030, reaching $590 billion, according to McKinsey’s latest State of Beauty report . Most of the growth is expected concentrate in emerging markets, with the growth of the younger population, and rise of the middle class across the continent, leading to consumers with greater wealth. Within that population, a faster-growing slice of that market tells a related story. Taking one group alone, the global Black beauty market, valued at roughly $9.3 billion in 2024, is projected to more than triple to $30.8 billion by 2033, according to Custom Market Insights , the data represents a 14.2% annual growth rate. When the opportunity is widened to the BIPOC (Black and Indigenous people of Colour) community the market potential also grows. The business opportunity is immense.

The ‘Fix’ through favours

For years, the easiest way for many Kenyan women to find the beauty products they wanted was to bring them in from overseas travel. Sonal Haria, a Kenyan South Asian, remembers watching women from her family and wider community mix shades that weren’t quite right. In other cases asking friends traveling abroad to bring products back or pay a premium simply to access brands they were already seeing online. The challenge was never a lack of appetite for beauty, but a lack of accessable products and shades that addressed the needs of consumers in the local market.

“What I understood very early was that the African consumer wasn’t asking for a compromise,” Haria says. “She was just as informed, aspirational and trend-conscious as consumers in London, Dubai or New York, but she was often being offered less choice, less accessibility and products that hadn’t necessarily been created with her in mind.”

There was also an assumption baked into how the industry approached the continent. Global companies initially focused on skin-lightning products and cosmetics created for caucasian skin. Smaller scale cosmetic companies served local markets from the late 1990s and early 2000s. However when global celebrity Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty collection in 2017 with 40 different shades of foundation the market shifted. Fenty Beauty generated an estimated $100 million in sales in its first few weeks and pushed the global beauty industry to pay attention to under-served sectors.

Haria explains what most of the global brands overlooked for decades, “The biggest thing international brands were missing wasn’t demand. It was nuance. African consumers didn’t need beauty to be simplified for them; they needed to be taken seriously.” Her experiences and observations on understanding the nuances of the consumer market started with the business she co-founded in Kenya, Canvas Media, which later became CB Consulting Group, working with global brands. As she spotted a gap in the market, Haria founded Canvas Cosmetics in 2019.

While Canvas was launched in Nairobi, Haria had a clear plan to create and sell products internationally. Haria didn’t choose Nairobi as the base for convenience, but she saw the location as central to the ambitions she had to grow an international business from the gateway to East Africa. In her words, “Nairobi has this unique intersection of a young, ambitious local consumer, a significant international community, a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and constant exposure to global culture and consumer trends.”

Kenya’s high digital connectivity meant her customers were following the same product launches and creators as consumers in London or Dubai, often in real time and creating what Haria calls a tension between global aspiration and local access. That gap became Canvas’s opening. “The aspiration was global, but the access wasn’t always there,” she says. Building from Nairobi also gave the brand a natural testing ground for diversity, the city itself brings together African, Asian, European and Middle Eastern influences and a springboard into the wider East African region.

Haria’s answer to “why beauty” doesn’t start with product, it starts with her mother, and the complexity of the roles women hold simultaneously: leaders, mothers, daughters, entrepreneurs, caregivers.“There is power in being able to embrace your femininity while still being ambitious, commanding a room, breaking stereotypes and pushing through glass ceilings."

“I didn’t want to create products that told women they needed to look different. I wanted to create products that could become part of the ritual of becoming more of who they already are.”

Canvas is built around three wordsl; Glamour, Ambition, Independence, that Haria says capture what beauty means to her: a tool, not a transformation. “You don’t have to choose between being feminine and being powerful,” she says. “For me, beauty isn’t about changing a woman. It’s about giving her another tool to express the power that was already there.”

What “African brand” actually means

For Haria, being an African brand goes beyond geography of founding. It means treating the continent as a core market rather than an afterthought, visible in Canvas’s product development, regional pricing, and direct distribution. Roughly 20% of the brand’s production now happens locally in Kenya, a figure Haria says she wants to see grow as the country’s manufacturing ecosystem matures.

But she’s equally clear that heritage isn’t the brand’s competitive edge, product performane is core to the business. “We don’t want someone to pick up Canvas because being Kenyan makes us a novelty,” she says. “We want them to pick it up because the formula performs, the product is beautiful, the brand resonates and it deserves its place on the shelf. Being Kenyan is our point of origin, not our point of differentiation on quality.”

That same logic extends to how she thinks about inclusivity, not as representation for its own sake, but as strategy. Haria, who is South Asian, was born and raised in Kenya, and has lived and studied in the UK and Canada, says her own layered identity shaped how she built the brand. “Inclusivity isn’t simply about having more shades on a shelf,” she says. “It’s about understanding the complexity of the woman you’re speaking to. I don’t see inclusivity as a social responsibility that sits alongside the commercial strategy. It is part of the commercial strategy.”

Running a marketing agency taught Haria how to build brands. Building Canvas, she says, taught her how to build a business. “On the agency side, you often experience a company through the lens of the consumer,” she says. “But when you own a consumer brand, you quickly realise that marketing is only one piece of an incredibly complex puzzle.” She points to everything from formulation and manufacturing to supply chain, margins, and, as Canvas expanded, navigating different regulatory standards and import requirements market by market.

“A beautiful brand means very little without strong commercial fundamentals behind it,” she says. “My agency background taught me how to make people want a brand; Canvas taught me everything that has to happen behind the scenes to actually deliver it.”

Beauty without borders in Europe and UAE

Canvas is already present in the UK and UAE, with expansion into major retail partners underway this quarter and a goal of meaningful US retail availability by late 2027. Haria describes the strategy as intentional rather than opportunistic by building distribution and operational infrastructure market by market. She frames the expansion as part of a broader reversal. “For a long time, international expansion in Africa has largely been discussed in terms of global brands entering the continent,” she says. “I’m excited by the reverse opportunity: African-born brands building at home and then exporting their ideas, products and perspective to the rest of the world. We’re not trying to become less African in order to become more global. We’re taking an African-born brand global precisely because of the perspective we built here.”

The next chapter for Black and Asian Beauty

The next generation of African brands may not succeed because they are African. They will succeed because they solve consumer problems better, and happen to have been built in Africa. Targeting the Black, Asian and wider ethnic beauty market demonstrates the growth potential in the region.

For Haria, that distinction is the point. Canvas Cosmetics was never simply about a slap of lipstick and dash of eye shadow. Her business is about defining the consumer, who gets to build the brand, and where the next global beauty company might come from.