Thirteen Lune launched in late 2020 as an e-commerce platform dedicated to Black and Brown-founded beauty brands, co-founded by Nyakio Grieco and Patrick Herning. The name is a reference to the thirteen-lunar calendar -- a nod to the founders' belief that a different kind of counting, a different kind of time, was needed for the beauty industry to catch up to its consumers.
The JCPenney partnership, announced in early 2022, moved Thirteen Lune from digital-only to physical retail at scale. JCPenney operates more than 650 stores across the United States, with a customer base that skews more diverse than many of its competitors in the department store category. The Thirteen Lune shop-in-shop format brought curated Black and Brown-founded beauty brands into a physical retail environment where those brands had historically had little presence.
The brands carried by Thirteen Lune -- including PATTERN Beauty, Golde, and several others -- gained access not just to JCPenney's footprint but to a customer who might not have already found them through direct-to-consumer channels. Physical retail discovery is different from digital discovery: it is slower, more tactile, and it reaches consumers who do not follow beauty on social media but who shop department stores.
“Physical retail discovery reaches consumers who never find you on social media. That is the whole point of being inside 650 stores.”
Grieco has been direct about what Thirteen Lune is building: not just a marketplace, but an infrastructure for Black and Brown-founded beauty brands to reach consumers at a scale that the brands' own resources could not achieve independently. The JCPenney partnership is one expression of that infrastructure. It will not be the last.