For years, whenever friends in the U.S. heard Natacha Bonjout was heading home to France, they handed her a shopping list. As a French-trained pharmacist, she was the obvious person to ask what to buy. The lists routinely ran to 20 products: a retinal serum from one brand, a vitamin C serum from another, creams, toners, boosters. To her, this shopping list was the opposite of French skincare. “For me, French skincare is all about less is more,” she says. “I was looking for the one hero product you need, or two or three maximum, especially when you work and you are so busy you don’t have time for a 10-step routine.”

That instinct now underpins Bonjout , the skincare brand she launched in 2023. The beauty industry typically grows by adding steps, products and shelf space. Bonjout has grown by doing the reverse. Call it the Discipline of Subtraction : removing what the industry adds, at every level of the business, from the formula to the product range to the routes to market. With just two products, the company expects to reach $50 million in sales this year.

The formulator behind other people’s brands

Natacha grew up in the south of France, watching her mother and grandmother use French pharmacy skincare. From the age of twelve she was focused on building a career in skincare – specifically on formulation, a traditional French approach where pharmacists are trained to formulate. Dermatologists write the formula, and the pharmacist makes it.

She focused her pharmacy studies on cosmetic science, added a master’s in cosmetic formulation, and completed her Masters thesis with Chanel’s research and development team in Paris. The project, in 2010, explored how to measure skin radiance scientifically, grading colour, luminosity and texture to prove whether a product made skin glow. A six month internship in the U.S. launched a sixteen year career working in formulation labs, starting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, developing products for other companies and later supplying natural actives to formulators across the industry. That vantage point shaped her view of the business. “Usually, I launched the same formula for three or four different brands,” she says. “They just put a different name and a different price tag.” Customers, she realised, often had no idea they were buying near-identical bases at very different prices.

The ambition to launch her own brand continued to fuel her ambition. Depsite leading a team, a strong career trajectory ahead of her and young family settled in the U.S. A personal tragedy served as a wake up call for her. In 2017, her first son died suddenly in his sleep.

“I woke up one day and I was not the same person anymore. This was the day I decided to quit everything. Nothing frightened me anymore.”

Subtraction one: the formula

Bonjout knew she wanted to take a radically different approach to her formulation. Her first decision was to take out the water. Most serums are largely water, usually distilled, which she argues adds nothing to the skin. “It doesn’t make sense to have a serum, which is supposed to be the most concentrated product, and dilute the actives,” she says. “It’s really like the water you use in your iron.”

Removing water created room for waxes, oils and actives. The result, Le Balm, is a solid serum with 68 actives designed to nourish, protect and repair the skin barrier. She formulated it like a medicine, starting with what the skin needed rather than how the product would feel. The first version was so hard it was unusable. It took five years and 12 labs to get right, with a Japanese lab finally solving the texture.

The barrier comes first, she argues, because everything else depends on it. “You can’t add retinol or vitamin C on a skin that is already damaged.” The second product, La Cream, targets skin longevity: dark spots, firmness and radiance. It is a water-in-oil emulsion, a structure she says sits closer to the skin’s own and is rare in skincare, where around 90% of creams are made the other way round. It uses patented actives, including an NAD+ booster added late in development.

Innovation and growth mindset are at the heart of her product development. Products continuosly go through processes of iteration. No formula is every final, Bonjout explains her approach to ongoing product development, “If I find a new active or a new technology that doesn’t exist yet, I’m going to add it,”.

Subtraction two: the range

The pressure to broaden her product range came early on in her business growth.”My investors told me, ‘Natacha, after five years in the lab, you can’t launch with just one product. This is not the way we do it in cosmetics,’” she says. A consultant with 30 years in the industry offered a team of chemists to fill out the range. She declined. “The formulas are really my babies,” she says. Le Balm took five years, La Cream three years, and a third product has been in development for eight.

Her focus and commitment to simplifying the process has paid off in loyalty. The skin care market is highly competitive and research shows customer retention averages 20 – 35% increasing to 50% for ‘strong brands’. When a challenger like Bonjout has a 40% retention rates the product is doing something right. Natacha argues customers come back because they would rather use one product for months and years than switch brands and buy a five-step routine.

Simplicity is also about education. Many of her U.S. customers apply retinol every day, or layer products that can irritate their skins through thinning and inflaming the skin barrier. Bonjout’s line will never exceed five products, including an eventual SPF and cleanser. “It’s always going to be the most sophisticated cream with the most simple gesture,” she says.

Subtraction three: distribution and markets

Bonjout’s main distribution channel is online. Though every product is made in France, the brand launched in the U.S., with a small number of selective partners such as Credo Beauty , chosen to signal its clean credentials, and Goop. What is unsual is how Natacha turned down around 90% of the large retailers that approacher her for distribution. She placed customer centricity at the heart of her sales strategy. “When we work only with retailers, we miss the knowledge of who our client is, what she wants, and how we can improve her routine,” she says. Her emails and direct communication with customers create intel that she uses in product and business decision-making.

Discipline and focus is at the core of how Bonjout makes decisions with her team. For three years, Bonjout focused entirely on the U.S. until Le Balm spread through word of mouth. Only in the past few months has it expanded to other English-speaking markets, including the UK and Australia, using English-language Meta advertising. When expanding to Australia, one of the hardest no’s was rejecting distribution with the nationwide brand, MECCA, the largest prestige beauty and cosmetics retailer operating over 110 retail outlets across Australia and New Zealand creating a platform for challenger brands like Glossier cosmetics . The offer of an exclusive deal prevented Bonjout from selling online in the same market. When Natacha rejected this offer, her investors were frustrated. Today Australia is the brand’s largest market after the U.S., and it sells there online.

“Saying no was the hardest thing for us,” she says. “But I say no every single day.” The team is still small, and Natacha still reads every customer email and checks every word of every newsletter. “If we were a team of 40 people, I think I would have lost this.”

The results are impressive, surpassing Natacha’s initial expectations. Bonjout made $500,000 in sales in 2023, its first year. That rose to $1.7 million in 2024 and $10 million in 2025. With the same two products, the company expects to reach $50 million in 2026. “I am very proud to say today that I showed my investors they were wrong,” she says.

What leaders can take from it

Bonjout’s story is easy to file under beauty trends. It is better read as a strategy case. Every subtraction Natacha made cost something in the short term: a slower route to market, frustrated investors, retail deals left on the table. Each one also bought something harder to copy: direct knowledge of her customers, repeat purchasing, and a brand voice that has not been diluted by scale.

Most founders are told to grow by adding: more products, more channels, more markets, more people. The Discipline of Subtraction asks a different question. What can you remove, so that what remains works harder?

For Natacha, the answer has stayed close to the way her mother and grandmother approached skincare: the simplest ritual for the customer, and the most sophisticated formula behind it.