Solawave:the wand that builta $13Mbeauty brand
Andrew Silberstein sold candy door to door as a kid to afford the dermatologist who first showed him light therapy. Two decades later he quit his job, moved into a one-bedroom, and built the at-home version on Shopify, profitable from the very first year.
Andrew Silberstein figured out how to fill a gap in a market before most kids learn long division. He ran a snack business at eight and a party-catering company at twelve. As a teenager he struggled with acne badly enough that it dented his confidence, and he sold candy door to door to afford a dermatologist, who introduced him to an idea he never forgot: that light, the right wavelength of it, could change skin.
He went on to build and sell companies. In 2013 the electronic-music platform he co-founded, Boomrat, was acquired by Live Nation. He ran a digital agency whose clients included Rihanna and Ludacris. But the acne kid's fascination with light therapy stayed with him, because the only versions that worked well were locked inside dermatology offices most people could not afford.
The pitch was simple: take the treatment a teenager could not afford to keep visiting, and put it in his hand.
When the pandemic sent the whole world's skincare routine home in 2020, Silberstein and his co-founders quit their jobs, moved into a small Los Angeles apartment, and built the at-home version, the Solawave 4-in-1 Advanced Skincare Wand, and sold it straight to customers on Shopify. It was profitable from the beginning, long before any investor was in the room.
The wand launched in September 2020 at $149. It does four things at once that you would otherwise pay an aesthetician for: red light at 630nm to support collagen, a microcurrent to tone, gentle warmth to boost circulation, and a facial massage. The argument was never that it replaced a dermatologist. It was that it was the next best thing, and that you owned it.
It worked because it was honest about what it was. Silberstein leaned on the one advantage a direct-to-consumer brand has over a department-store counter: he could hear from the people using it, every day, and build the next thing around what they told him.
Solawave did its first year the hard way. No seed round, almost entirely on digital, reinvesting what it made into the next batch. It grew the way a brand grows when it cannot afford to be wrong, and it earned the right to raise money long before it ever asked for any.
Ninety-five percent of that early growth came from digital, with no outside capital to absorb a mistake. Only after the wand had proven itself did Solawave raise a $10M Series A, in 2022, co-led by Serena Williams' Serena Ventures and the beauty group Waldencast, the kind of money a brand gets to choose once it is already working.
Solawave's revenue climb, profitable from the first year.
Then the wand started showing up, unprompted, in the hands of people with very large followings.
Sydney Sweeney, Vanessa Hudgens, Kate Hudson, Jennifer Coolidge, Mandy Moore, Lil Nas X. Each time one of them mentioned the wand, Solawave saw about a 130% lift in sales for the next few days, and none of it was a paid placement. By 2023 the brand that started in an apartment had launched in 650 Ulta stores, alongside Nordstrom, Saks, Neiman Marcus and Goop, and opened a content house in West Hollywood.
Four treatments, one wand
Red light, microcurrent, therapeutic warmth and facial massage in a single device you use for a few minutes a day. It is the product that turned a bootstrapped apartment project into a brand sitting on shelves next to the biggest names in beauty.
What the climb does not show is how much harder the second act is than the first. A brand can ride a profitable apartment year on one $149 wand and a feed full of unpaid celebrities. Staying national is a different job. Trade analysts had already called the peak of the direct-to-consumer beauty model by the time Solawave pushed into 650 Ulta doors, and a single-device brand that leans on organic virality is exposed twice over: to a slowing channel, and to a product line that has to keep widening past the one thing everyone first bought.
The content house is the tell. To keep the organic engine running, Solawave leased a West Hollywood house for a year purely to make and host content. "As a social media-built brand, we are constantly feeding that beast," its head of creative development told Glossy. "It's hard to keep up with." That is the honest cost behind the celebrity posts: a machine that has to be fed every day, and a brand that has to become more than its wand before the feed gets tired of it.
Solawave, in six moments
The arc
- 2013Andrew Silberstein co-founds the music platform Boomrat, which is acquired by Live Nation. He has been building and selling companies since grade school.
- 2020In a small LA apartment during the pandemic, he and his co-founders launch the 4-in-1 Advanced Skincare Wand at $149, direct to consumer on Shopify, profitable from the start.
- 2021Solawave clears $13M in its first full year, profitable, growing about 75% month over month, almost entirely on digital.
- 2022After proving the wand could sell itself, Solawave raises a $10M Series A co-led by Serena Ventures (Serena Williams) and the beauty group Waldencast.
- 2023The brand reaches 650 Ulta stores and Nordstrom, Saks, Neiman Marcus and Goop, and opens a West Hollywood content house.
- 2024Solawave is a national beauty-tech brand with a full lineup of wands, masks and serums, still selling the device that started it.
Strip away the celebrity feed and the Series A and what is left is the original trade: a kid who could not afford the treatment built the version everyone could, then refused to stop listening to the people who bought it. That instinct is also the way through the harder second act. The apartment brand now sells across the country and has to keep proving it is more than a single wand, and the only edge it ever really had was hearing its customers faster than anyone else. The brand that won on direct feedback now has to scale it.
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