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Three years in, Cyklar—the multisensory beauty brand offering a range of bodywashes, lotions, oils, and fragrances—is not just hitting milestones. It’s blowing past them. Since its launch in 2023, the brand has been an Allure Best of Beauty and Who What Wear Beauty 100 winner and a recipient of Marie Claire’s 2025 Prix D’Excellence Award, and it was included on Oprah’s 2025 Favorite Things list. This spring, it announced its first major retail distribution deal with Sephora, rolling out in roughly 450 U.S. stores, a game-changing next step for the brand.
So to what does Cyklar and its founder, Claudia Sulewski, owe its success?
If you look at the Venn diagram of Sulewski’s career, you’ll see that great storytelling is at the intersection. Through her many successful endeavors, we’ve come to learn that Sulewski is a master storyteller. It dates back to 2009, when she launched her YouTube channel, BeyondBeautyStar, at 13. The platform—where she shared makeup tutorials, product hauls, brand reviews, and unedited vlogs—taught her how to build a powerful community and, in many ways, informed the launch of Cyklar 14 years later. And then there’s the more literal version of storytelling as an actress and director. It’s all to say Sulewski knows how to speak authentically to audiences and consumers, making her an anomaly in an oversaturated market.
“My years of making YouTube videos have really taught me how to tell a story, both in a small way and also in a big-picture way,” Sulewski tells me over Zoom on a beautiful spring morning in Los Angeles. “And so much of owning a brand is telling a story through your product launches, through your marketing, your imagery, everything.”
Sulewski likens her YouTube content-creation days to beauty boot camp. Not only did she watch some of her favorite brands evolve and grow and see what worked and what didn’t for them, but experimenting and talking about other brands also allowed her to better speak on her own. “YouTube has been such a great, great vehicle to help transition into this next chapter of my life,” she adds.
From the beginning, Sulewski set out to create a brand that combined high-performing formulas with a luxury feel. The decision to launch bodycare over a cosmetic or skincare line is explained by Sulewski’s personal relationship with taking care of herself and listening to her body. “There is something so inherently intentional and luxurious about putting on body cream or a body oil. Oftentimes, we’re so focused on the face, the hair, the nails, the things that you see, but underneath your clothes, our skin is our largest organ,” she says. Sulewski was answering the question of, How do we turn those rituals into moments of nourishment and stillness? Thus, Cyklar was born.
Coupled with a sleek, gender-neutral design; a “luxury feel for less” approach; and tight product launches, like its recent Rose Bud scent, the brand immediately appealed to Gen Z and millennial consumers, leading to an estimated $15 million in generated revenue in 2025, according to Forbes.
With Cyklar’s third anniversary approaching this fall, I ask Sulewski about her biggest learnings in this time. She half-jokes that owning a beauty brand is “to be putting out small fires at all times,” but in all seriousness, she says she’s truly learning through every phase and chapter and product launch.
“I’ve learned to not be too precious about anything because, wow, do you need to stay flexible, nimble, and not sweat the small stuff,” she tells me. “Perfection is the thief of joy, and it cannot exist within owning a business. We are constantly evolving and growing. And what’s been really fun is I’ve been bringing that mentality into my own content and in my own personal life and just not tripping up about the thing that I said at dinner. We can’t sweat the small stuff.”
Now with Sephora in the mix, it’s a whole new world, and Suleweski tells me the partnership with the beauty retailer has elevated everything. Her favorite thing is walking into a Sephora store and seeing the Cyklar endcap a mess. “It means that people are coming up, and they’re interacting with it and experiencing it physically, which is so satisfying because up until now we’ve been a direct-to-consumer brand. You can only describe a fragrance so many ways online versus someone actually being able to smell it,” she says. Indeed, fragrance sales have boosted since, she tells me.
The support of Sephora also means eventually expanding internationally, which Sulewski can’t wait to do. Her fans around the world have been clamoring for it, so it’s the number one goal she thinks about when growing the brand. Product-wise, though, Sulewski’s dream is to continue to innovate formulas that cover skin concerns in different areas of the body.
How Sulewski has time for a personal life, much less additional jobs, I’m not quite sure, but in between running a multimillion-dollar business, she can be found in front of and behind the camera as an actress and director. As we said, she is a storyteller at her core.
Sulewski made her feature-film debut in the 2022 comedy I Love My Dad before landing a recurring role in the Apple TV+ series Shrinking. “If I’m looking at the priority list or the pie chart of my life, Cyklar is certainly sitting at the top, and acting is right next to it or maybe, let’s say, number two,” she says. What acting offers that Cyklar can’t is access to a completely different side of her brain and creative process as well as a surrendering of control. So many of the final choices in film and TV are out of her hands. It scratches another itch for Sulewski.
She tells me she’s a sucker for those “slice of life” movies that are kind of about nothing but also about everything and hopes to one day be in one, but right now, she’s taking things day by day and is open to anything that comes her way as long as she can continue to flex her acting muscles.
When I ask about stepping behind the camera, she flashes a grin and says, “Oh my gosh, yes, I dream of it!” She’s already building a résumé thanks to the two music videos she directed, “2001” and “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa,” for fiancé Finneas. (The two plan to wed this summer.) She again credits her YouTube days for informing that process and making her feel qualified to do it. “It was like a mini master class and [experience of] something that I’ve always dreamt of doing being a YouTuber for so long and really appreciating cinematography, lighting, storytelling, editing,” she says. While she’s not sure where directing on a larger scale will fall in the grand scheme of her life, she’s putting out a call to people: “If anyone needs a music video or if someone has a script!”
Telling thoughtful and exciting stories—whether it’s via a great script, a new Cyklar product launch, or an in-store activation—is at the heart of every strategic move Sulewski makes. And with her proven track record of success, whatever Sulewski is selling, we’re buying it.
Photographer: Lauren Leekley
Stylist: Thomas Christos Kikis
Hairstylist: Ericka Verrett
Makeup Artist: Jen Tioseco
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