Kate Moss’s Cosmoss brand shuts down after less than three years

With a low-key-but-globally-watched launch in late summer 2022, Kate Moss’s Cosmoss beauty-meets-wellness brand appeared to have all the ingredients for a successful business.

But less than three years later, it’s being liquidated, a sharp contrast to other post-pandemic celebrity beauty brands such as Hailey Bieber’s Rhode that was founded in the same year as Cosmoss and is being sold to e.l.f. for a billion dollars.

Cosmoss’s accounts for the 2023 financial year had been due to be filed at Companies House by December last year but are marked as “overdue”. Instead, the most recent filings include the appointment of a voluntary liquidator and an extraordinary resolution to wind up.

It filed for voluntary liquidation late last month after speculation for some time that the operation was in trouble with news around the brand having gone quiet and Cosmoss having stopped posting on social media several months ago.

In its Companies House ‘statement of affairs’ Kate Moss’s talent agency is listed as the major creditor of the business, being owed £2.3 million. It’s not known how much revenue the business achieved during its short history.

Commentators have suggested that the product offer was too niche — despite its skincare and fragrances, having been highly praised — and that pricing was perhaps too high in an ongoing cost-of-living crisis with skincare coming in at over £100. 

Additionally, the famously hedonistic supermodel’s reinvention as a wellness guru may not have been convincing enough in a market crowded with celebrity labels. And there have also been suggestions that the air of mystery that helped her celebrity status for over three decades decades was actually a drawback in a market full of celebs who live and breathe their brands, taking every opportunity to publicise them and engage with their customers.

Not that the demise of Cosmoss in any way hints at Moss’s overall appeal diminishing. The 51-year-old remains in high demand and only recently fronted campaigns for Isabel Marant and Self-Portrait as well as launching another collab with Inditex’s Zara.