When CEO Mary van Praag joined Milani Cosmetics six years ago, the 25-year-old mass beauty brand had survived two and a half decades on drugstore shelves but had not meaningfully grown. Under her leadership, Milani doubled annual revenue to $250 million in five years, according to Glossy, by doing what most mass brands avoid: cutting SKU count, raising formulation standards, and repositioning the brand upward without abandoning its mass retail footprint.

Van Praag, a veteran beauty executive with prior stints at L'Oréal and Revlon, diagnosed the core problem as product sprawl. Milani had accumulated hundreds of SKUs across categories, diluting focus and retailer shelf presence. She systematically pruned the line, eliminating underperformers and consolidating around hero products with higher velocity. At the same time, she upgraded formulations and packaging to compete with prestige brands on quality while maintaining mass price points. The move allowed Milani to defend shelf space against both legacy competitors and digitally native disruptors entering physical retail.

The mechanism here is executive repositioning married to SKU discipline. Van Praag did not chase trend cycles or launch new sub-brands. She made fewer, better products and told a clearer story about what Milani stood for: accessible luxury with no compromise on performance. Retailers responded because velocity per SKU improved, and consumers responded because the brand felt premium without the prestige tax. The strategy works in mass beauty because shelf space is finite and retailers prioritize turn rate over assortment breadth. A tighter line with stronger sell-through wins more facings and better placement.

A small physical-product brand can steal this play by auditing its own SKU bloat and killing the bottom third by revenue. Start with your last twelve months of sales data. Rank every SKU by gross contribution, not just units sold. Cut anything that does not pull its weight in margin or strategic positioning. Then take the freed capital and upgrade the winners: better materials, tighter tolerances, stronger packaging. Raise the price 10-15% to signal the quality shift. Rewrite product pages and sales materials to emphasize craftsmanship and comparison to higher-priced alternatives. If you sell wholesale, approach buyers with the velocity story: fewer SKUs, higher turn, better margins per linear foot. If you sell direct, run the repositioned line as a contained test with a single hero product before rolling it across the catalog. The cost is in the product upgrade, not in marketing spend.

Milani is now positioned to double revenue again, per van Praag, using the same playbook: disciplined expansion into adjacent categories and geographies without diluting the repositioned brand. The lesson for any physical-product operator is that growth does not require more products. It requires better products and a tighter story, executed with the discipline to kill what does not work.