Lick Beauty: Seven Million Followers vs. 420 Tenge

There's a moment anyone who works with marketplace data knows. You open the analytics dashboard, type in the name of a brand all of Kazakh Instagram was buzzing about last summer - and you see a chart shaped like the cardiogram of a patient they stopped treating. A peak, then a long, smooth, hopeless slide down.

That's exactly what I saw when I typed «Lick Beauty» into Redstat.

August 2025 - ₸43.6 million. December - ₸16. January - ₸6.3. February - ₸3.3. Down ninety-two percent from the peak. Every month worse than the one before. Without a single exception.

The data, it should be said, doesn't care how many followers you have. It doesn't watch Stories. It follows no one. It doesn't double-tap. It just counts. And what it counted is worth a long, honest conversation.

Not about specific people - about a model. A model that lands on the same result over and over. In Almaty, in Moscow, in Los Angeles. With creators who have seven million followers and creators who have ten. One model - one outcome.

Screenshot: redstat.kz · brand «Lick beauty» · February 2026

Screenshot: redstat.kz · brand «LICK» · February 2026

Behind a beautiful launch

For those out of the loop - and I suspect there aren't many - let me explain. Arman Yusupov and Karina Oksukpaeva are arguably the most recognizable couple in Kazakh Instagram. He has around two million followers. She has around five. They created Yuframe, a team that started shooting vines back in 2015 and became a cultural phenomenon long before Kazakhstan learned to say the word «influencer» without a smirk. Serial entrepreneurs - the production studio 2ANY1, the «Potok» project, a franchise business across several cities.

People who know how to make things. That's worth pinning down up front, so that later, when the hard numbers come, no one thinks I'm out to expose hacks. Hacks don't pull seven million followers.

In July 2025 they launched a cosmetics brand. The Cherry 01 lip gloss. Price: ₸4,499. The company, StartUp Studio, was registered in Almaty in November 2024 under Yusupov and his friend Rustem Zhali. Manufacturing: China - which, to be clear, is completely standard practice: it's how PUSY does it, and VOIS, and half of what sits on the shelves of Golden Apple, the region's big beauty retailer.

Lick Beauty launch post · Instagram @yusupov21

In December they added three shades - Twinkle, Cocoa, and Marshmallow at ₸5,990. And here's what happened next.

Launch - spike - slide. Second launch - smaller spike - bigger slide. That's not a glitch. That's a pattern.

In August, 7,241 people bought the gloss. In February - all four products combined - 596.

Of course, seven million followers isn't seven million buyers. The audience is scattered: some outside Kazakhstan, some men, some who simply never see the Stories. Reach for big creators usually runs 5–15% of the base. Say the real target is 250,000–350,000 people. Buyers: 596. Even by the kindest estimate - under 0.2%. Against an influencer-marketing norm of 1–3%.

February's fault? Let's ask the competitors

When I showed these numbers to colleagues, the first reaction was predictable: «February's short, the holidays are over, everyone's down.» A fair hypothesis. Reasonable. And completely testable - because we have data on more than just Lick Beauty.

The niche dipped 2–18%. Lick - 48%. Seasonality explains a third at most. The other thirty points aren't February. They're something else.

Four hundred twenty tenge

Now - the fact that may have been the whole reason to sit down and write this.

On Kaspi - Kazakhstan's dominant marketplace - the «Lipsticks, liners, glosses» category has products with no registered brand. Just «No brand». In February they earned ₸7.1 million combined. 55 SKUs, almost 12,000 units. More than twice what Lick Beauty made.

I dug in - and found something unexpected. Most of these «no-brand» products are Rhode. Yes, Hailey Bieber's brand. Except the original Rhode Peptide Lip Tint runs ~$16 - about ₸7,500. On Kaspi it sells for ₸420–515. One photo on the listing. No description. No brand story. Obviously Chinese knockoffs riding Rhode's name and visuals.

Rhode Espresso on Kaspi.kz · Screenshot: redstat.kz

3,274 sales a month. Lick Beauty's Cherry 01 - 195.

A knockoff with a single photo outsells the original brand - and its seven-million audience - seventeen to one.

And here I get to something every seller in our markets knows, but somehow forgets the moment the talk turns to «creator brands». Marketing textbooks give it a fancy name - «price elasticity of demand». Our market puts it simpler: price wins. In Kazakhstan, in Russia, across the whole CIS - price was, is, and will be the main filter on a purchase. Not the brand. Not the followers. Not the Stories. The price.

A ₸420 knockoff is an impulse buy. Saw it in the feed - added to cart - didn't think twice. Even if the quality's so-so, ₸420 is nothing to mourn. A ₸5,990 gloss is a deliberate decision. The buyer has to know this is the gloss they want. And how do they know? From the Stories. Which ran six months ago.

A launch isn't a business. It's applause

In theater it goes like this: the show ends, the audience claps, the actors bow, everyone's happy. Then tomorrow comes. You have to walk back on stage. And the day after. And next month. And next year. And the audience is new every time. And they couldn't care less that last night was a sellout.

A creator brand launch is applause. Once. The creator films a run of Stories, shows the product, says something heartfelt: «I worked toward this for so long». The audience buys. Not the gloss - the belonging. Not the product - the loyalty. A piece of the life of a person they watch every day.

The first month isn't sales. It's a one-time conversion of social capital into cash. The capital took years to build. The conversion happens in a week. After that, the capital resets to zero. And the business begins.

And a business is logistics, purchasing, stock levels, listings, SEO, ads, pricing, distribution control, unit economics, repeat purchases, assortment, channels. A long, boring list, and not one item on it can be solved with a Story.

Nineteen sellers for one jar

Here I went deeper than usual. I looked past the sales and into a specific SKU. 143562625: «Lick beauty Lip Gloss, cherry, Cherry 01». One listing on Kaspi. One product. The same jar.

Nineteen sellers. Each with their own price.

Screenshot: Kaspi.kz · Lick beauty Lip Gloss Cherry 01

The creators themselves - LICK - price it at ₸5,990. But three sellers on the same listing: ₸5,800. Cheaper than the brand. Why pay extra for the brand when the same product sits right beside it for less?

At the other end - a sole proprietor, «Metaverse». Same gloss. Same listing. ₸16,995. Almost three times more. Between them - fifteen more sellers. One of them, ELEXIR COLLECTION, has a 3.0 rating, a «TERRIBLE» status, and 13% returns. A seller with an awful reputation is moving your gloss at ₸8,900.

To a Kaspi shopper, all of this is one face. Your brand's face.

These aren't resellers. It's more like uncontrolled distribution. It looks like the Lick team handed stock to third-party sellers but never set up recommended-retail-price control. The result: one jar - from ₸5,800 to ₸16,995. A three-fold spread. No single pricing policy, no control over the brand. This is the ABCs, and somehow no one reads them.

The new SKUs - Twinkle, Cocoa, Marshmallow - are sold by a single seller. The creators themselves. But even without the price chaos:

Marshmallow - down 66.6% in a month. With a 4.8–5.0 rating and 1,390 reviews on Cherry. Customers are happy. The product is fine. The problem isn't quality.

A product you buy once

The problem is the product itself.

Lip gloss is a one-time buy. One tube lasts months. You buy it, put it on the shelf, forget it. No repeat sales. No LTV. The customer came and went.

It's like a restaurant that serves only one dish - and one so filling you don't want to eat for a week afterward. A great dish. Everyone praises it. Everyone recommends it. But no one comes back.

If the line had consumables - micellar water, toners, masks, patches - customers would return every month. Gloss is a pretty souvenir bought once off a Story. A month later, there's no reason to come back.

The ones who built

Any diagnosis is only as convincing as the cure. If the problem is the model, then somewhere there must be people who built a different model and won.

PUSY: 500,000 followers and 3.2 billion

In late 2021 Ilona Drozh - a brow-lamination specialist with around 500,000 followers - and serial entrepreneur Artyom Borodavkin founded PUSY. Borodavkin became CEO of Drozh Beauty LLC. Ilona became the face. He built the business. She gave it a face. Literally.

Ilona Drozh · Instagram @ilona.drozh

Margin: 25%. For a brand with creator roots, that's an anomaly.

Per marketplace analytics (MPSTATS), over 30 days - January 26 to February 24, 2026 - PUSY earned ₽74.6 million (~$830K) on Wildberries alone. Average daily revenue - ₽2.4 million. Another ₽13.5 million was lost revenue: the stock ran out, the demand didn't. PUSY loses more to being out of stock than Lick Beauty earns in a month.

The brand has 1,377 SKUs. Lick Beauty has four.

Brow gels are the number-one consumable. It runs out - they buy again. But PUSY didn't stop at gels. Shampoos, masks, toners, mascara, self-tanner - 1,377 items. Every one a consumable. Every one a reason to return. The core price band: ₽400–1,060.

What did Borodavkin do? He didn't film Stories. He built: manufacturing, logistics, marketplaces, finance. Wildberries, Ozon, Magnit Cosmetic, Golden Apple, L'Étoile, four marketplaces in China. In 2025 - Amazon and the Middle Eastern Noon. Hundreds of micro-influencers instead of one big one.

Lick Beauty - four SKUs. One marketplace. One market.

VOIS: no creator at all - 2.5 billion rubles

Now a case that breaks the whole familiar scheme.

VOIS is a skincare brand. Founded in 2021 by Islam Gediev from Kislovodsk and Vladimir Zagorsky from Volozhin, Belarus. Two entrepreneurs. No founding creator. None at all.

Per Forbes and SPARK, VOIS revenue in 2024 was ₽2.5 billion (~$28M). Up from ₽388 million in a year. A 6.5× jump. Profit - ₽592 million. Gediev is 30. A 2025 Forbes «30 Under 30» winner.

VOIS · Wildberries

Their move: they were the first in Russia to put influencers on staff. Not one-off integrations. On payroll. Today - 200 creators. Half the company. A constant content conveyor that runs every day, not whenever someone's in the mood to film a Story. Revenue went from ₽388M to ₽2.5bn in a year, +544% (a 6.5× jump).

From Almaty to Los Angeles: the same pattern

If the Lick Beauty story were unique, you could write it off as bad luck. But it isn't unique. It's the rule.

Jaclyn Hill. One of YouTube's biggest beauty influencers. Jaclyn Cosmetics - launched in 2019 through Forma Brands. Customers found stray fibers in the lipsticks. A full recall, a relaunch, a rollout into Ulta Beauty.

Jaclyn Cosmetics · Source: Cosmetics Business

January 2023 - Forma files for bankruptcy. January 2024 - Jaclyn Cosmetics shuts down. Hill was offered the chance to buy the brand back. She declined. Forma's new president then said a line worth carving in stone: «Product first, not influencer first».

Different countries. Different industries. Different scales. The same ending.

The conveyor

There's one detail that, to me as an analyst, is the most telling in the whole story.

Lick Beauty isn't Yusupov's only beauty brand. The same founders - Yusupov and Zhali - own Glam Me, which makes BlushMe, a blush line by Aiym Seitmetova, a former Yuframe member.

The model is on a conveyor. Inner-circle creator - brand - China - Stories - first-month revenue. Repeat.

A conveyor isn't a flaw in itself. The flaw is when the conveyor has no part for where the business keeps running after the Stories end.

Even if you become #1 - is the market big enough?

Say it's all fixed. Distribution cleaned up, the line expanded, an operating partner found. You're number one.

The niche leader, Sen Sulu, does ₸26 million a month. The entire lipstick category on Kaspi - about ₸116 million. That's $230,000 for the whole niche. On all of Kaspi. For a brand with a seven-million audience, that's the ceiling of a single office.

Kazakhstan isn't a sentence. But Kaspi alone is a voluntary limit.

What the data shows but the Stories don't

These aren't accusations. They're things you see when you look at the market from behind the numbers, not from behind a phone camera.

Consumables. Micellar water, toners, masks, patches - anything that runs out. One gloss - LTV of ~₸5,500. A consumables line - ₸40,000–60,000 a year. An 8–10× difference.

Price. In our markets, price is the main filter. Rhode knockoffs at ₸420 are an impulse buy. A ₸5,990 gloss is a deliberate decision that won't happen without a fresh warm-up. Can't compete on price - offer value that justifies the gap.

A partner with unit economics. PUSY had Borodavkin. VOIS had Zagorsky and Gediev. Lick Beauty has two creators and a friend-cofounder.

Channels. WB and Ozon are already in Kazakhstan. The Russian market is 10–15× bigger.

Distribution control. 19 sellers, a spread from ₸5,800 to ₸16,995, a seller with 13% returns - chaos.

200 micro-influencers instead of one mega-influencer. A conveyor that doesn't depend on one person's mood.

The hype ends. The processes don't

Arman and Karina are talented people. That has to be said without reservation. Seven million followers can't be bought or botted. Yuframe is a cultural phenomenon. Lick's ratings are 4.8–5.0. Customers are happy. These people know how to make things audiences love.

But pleasing an audience and running a business are two different crafts. Followers are attention. A business is repeat sales. Between the first and the second sit operations, logistics, finance, and a partner who builds all of it.

The «launch a gloss and sell it through Stories» model doesn't work. Not here, not in America, not for anyone. What works is the other thing: an operating partner. Consumables. An army of micro-influencers. Many channels. Price control.

₸43.6 million in August isn't a business. It's a flash. The business is what's left when the flash fades.

Lick Beauty has a 5.0 rating. The product is good. The audience is huge. There's a chance. But it takes giving up on selling gloss through Stories and starting to build a company.

And one last thing - remember that fact from the middle? Chinese Rhode knockoffs at ₸420 - one photo on the listing, no followers, no face, not a single Story - earned ₸7.1 million on Kaspi in February. Lick Beauty, with its seven-million audience - ₸3.3 million. Is it worth pouring in months of work, manufacturing, logistics, and the warm-up of a multimillion audience - only to sell half as much as a knockoff with one photo and a ₸420 price tag?

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