Emily Doyle is anti-“anti-aging.” The marketing mantra of the beauty industry suggests that people — particularly women — should do the impossible: stop time and return to the skin they had in their youth.
Doyle, the 51-year-old cofounder of skin-care company Ursa Major, rejects that notion. Aging is inevitable, and she wants her customers to feel less stressed about it, to stop worrying about wrinkles and dark circles and sagging.
“Anti-aging is bullshit,” Doyle said, her own skin smooth and luminous under tendrils of blond curls. “The beauty industry came up with it, and they tell women that they’re not supposed to age, which is fucked up, frankly. So we’re supposed to be like porcelain dolls that never age and always look flawless and perfect.”
In the bright conference room of Ursa Major’s headquarters in Waterbury, she pointed to barely discernible creases around her eyes. “I earned these wrinkles. I earned my laugh lines.”
That no-nonsense approach has fueled 15 years of growth for Ursa Major. The company started in 2010 with a modest selection of men’s shaving and grooming products, earning $5,000 the first year. It jumped into the nascent but growing movement of “clean beauty” — emphasizing natural ingredients derived from plants, fewer chemical additives, and ethical and sustainable manufacturing practices — and has steadily climbed to about $30 million in revenue today, according to Doyle and her partner in business and life, Oliver Sweatman. Direct outreach to its core customers, mostly through social media, has bumped up Ursa Major’s sales momentum over the past four years.
A recent report from Fortune Business Insights estimates that the global skin-care market raked in $122 billion in sales last year, about a quarter of an estimated $450 billion global beauty industry. In that crowded field, Ursa Major has carved a niche vying for consumers who care about the contents and creation of the creams and cleansers they use on their skin. Today, the company’s founders describe their key customer as a “mindful explorer” or a “compassionate creative.” Women account for 90 percent of its new customers, and 40 percent of purchasers who try Ursa Major will order again within 12 months, said Sweatman, 54.
We wanted to flip the beauty industry on its head and have it be not about the way you look but the way you feel.
Emily Doyle
“We wanted to flip the beauty industry on its head and have it be not about the way you look but the way you feel,” Doyle said, “and not about vanity but about wellness.”
Following the “clean” ethos — embraced by popular brands such as Ilia, Nécessaire and fellow Vermont-founded Tata Harper, now owned by a Korean company — Ursa Major steers clear of synthetic fragrances, phthalates, parabens and other hormone disruptors, which research shows can harm human health but which still appear in many beauty products. Ursa Major is nonetheless known for its scents, using plant additives such as Douglas fir, damask rose, spearmint and bitter orange.
Last year, the company took a big clean step with a packaging overhaul, bowing to customer requests to drop plastic for most of its containers in favor of glass and aluminum. Only a few plastic product caps remain. Ursa Major’s redesigned look spans a rainbow of colors — orange for its Brighten Up Vitamin C Serum, deep indigo for Lunar Bloom Retinal Serum, sunny yellow for Mountain Glow Serum, and mint green for its body and hair products.
Bill Davis, a longtime investor and current Ursa Major board member, encouraged the owners to update the visage of the products and hailed the vibrant new version as a game changer. “You’ve got to make it easy for the consumer,” said Davis, who has held marketing and leadership roles in Vermont companies including Cabot Creamery and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, later bought by Keurig. “The new packaging is going to serve us well.”
For a company that touts itself as the antithesis of the traditional beauty business, Ursa Major’s ingredient lists resemble many others in skin care. Its Golden Hour Recovery Cream contains glycerin, seed oils and additional ingredients known for their hydrating benefits. Those same elements show up in hundreds of other facial moisturizers — those designated “clean” and not — sold online and on the shelves of retailers from Target to Sephora to Saks Fifth Avenue. In Lunar Bloom, Ursa Major uses retinal, a fast-acting synthetic derivative of vitamin A that’s known across the cosmetics cosmos as a wrinkle reducer and skin smoother.
Like its competitors, Ursa Major touts its products’ luxurious textures and effective formulas. And it has price tags to match. A 1-ounce bottle of Lunar Bloom retails for $76; the Golden Hour cream is $54 for 1.57 ounces. Hoppin’ Fresh Body Wash costs $26 for 10 ounces. Fantastic Face Wash comes in three sizes, with the large 10.24-ounce pump bottle costing $46.
What really sets Ursa Major apart is its messaging. Its motto is “Made for skin and spirit.” To Doyle and Sweatman, that means consumers should get off the buy-more beauty treadmill, the 10-step nightly routines. No one needs so many products or the unrealistic promises that pressure them to purchase, they insisted.
“It can get pretty crazy,” Sweatman said. “I mean, just hop on to TikTok and take a look.”
“It’s the comparison culture and the needing more,” Doyle added. “It’s like a full-time job for women and even now younger girls doing this, which to me is really horrifying.”
Ursa Major sells in about 400 stores across the country, mostly high-end grocers and boutiques, including Healthy Living markets in Williston and South Burlington. Credo Beauty, the “clean” e-commerce purveyor, carries Ursa Major, but beauty retail biggies Ulta and Sephora don’t — so far.
“We were very strong proponents of having skin care and having the right skin care to provide to our local clients,” said Kate Carpenter, owner of home décor store Stowe Living, which has carried Ursa Major from its earliest product line. The company was ahead of the trend, she said, appealing to customers with an outdoor lifestyle who want skin care that reflects their concerns about the environment — eye cream they can wear under their ski goggles or on a daylong hike up Camel’s Hump.
“Now they’re matching the marketplace,” Carpenter said. “Ursa Major’s been doing this from day one. They are providing products that not only work for male and female. They’re providing products that work for the active skin, [creating] the most healthy components in the universe.”
About 65 percent of Ursa Major’s sales are direct to consumers via its website, according to Sweatman. He said Amazon Marketplace garners the company about 25 percent of its sales. Ulta and Nordstrom marketplace pages also list Ursa Major and send shoppers to the Waterbury company’s website to make a purchase, instead of those retailers carrying the inventory themselves.
Paid social media posts have become a major driver of Ursa Major’s business, especially since 2022, Sweatman said. In sponsored ads that pop up on Instagram and Facebook, Doyle serves as the face of the company, speaking frankly to the audience.
“I am not trying to stop aging, but I really want to look my best,” she says in a recent pitch for the “Glow Bundle” of three products. “This is the easiest way to just keep it simple but also keep it tight and effective.”
Carpenter said the social media campaign is a smart marketing move for Ursa Major. “Look at the person who’s behind this company,” she said. “The person is a walking billboard,” with “flawless” skin. And the effort helps retailers sell the products, too, she added: “They’re driving the brand recognition.”
Both Doyle and Sweatman have beauty industry bona fides. Doyle grew up in Milton, Mass., and studied nutritional biochemistry at the University of New Hampshire, thinking she’d encourage people to eat healthier. Instead, upon graduating, she ended up selling pharmaceuticals and excelling at it.
She always loved fashion and beauty products. “My lipstick color was Sugared Grapefruit,” Doyle said of her youth at the Clinique cosmetics counter. So after five years on the road, she got a job at the hair-care producer Bumble and Bumble, starting in sales and working up to lead that department before the company was sold to cosmetics conglomerate Esteé Lauder.
Sweatman was born in South Africa and moved with his family to London, then Connecticut and ultimately Stowe when he was a teen. He graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in history and moved to New York City to work for a big investment bank and learn about business. The summer before college, he had started one of his own: Oliver’s Exotic Wash & Wax, a car detailing service in Nantucket, Mass.
In New York, he left private equity to stretch his entrepreneurial muscles, doing some consulting for a startup skin-care line. With a partner, he founded a men’s grooming business called Sharps, which sold in high-end stores including Barneys New York and Fred Segal. Sharps later added a lower-priced mass-market line for 900 Target stores.
The Ursa Major founders met when Sweatman needed a new head of sales and a recruiter sent Doyle. After about six months of working together, “the sparks started to fly” between them, Doyle said. She left to join the U.S. office of Australian holistic skin-care company Jurlique, but the two continued dating, living in different apartments in the same Manhattan building.
Sharps unraveled, having overstretched with the Target line, Sweatman said: “It was a great example of a small business taking on too much.”
He sold out to a partner and decamped to Vermont for the summer. “I’m hiking every day, and I’m reading Moby-Dick,” he said. He spent many nights at the now-closed Bee’s Knees bar and café in Morrisville.
He wanted to start another company but stay in Vermont. Doyle hired a moving truck and arrived in a snowstorm in 2008. They embraced the farm-to-table concept and pondered starting a food business. They admired Lake Champlain Chocolates, Darn Tough and Seventh Generation. “We thought about socks, chocolate, spirits, beer,” Sweatman said.
“Anything but beauty,” Doyle added.
But beauty made sense. They were eating healthy and spending time outdoors. When they looked for “clean” skin care, they were underwhelmed by the brands they found in health food stores, such as Weleda and Dr. Hauschka, which lacked a certain appeal for a modern beauty shopper, Sweatman said.
They figured that discerning consumers who spend money on top-quality olive oil and artisanal coffee would do the same for a “sophisticated and elegant” skin product without the “crunchy vibe,” he said.
The name Ursa Major, referencing the big bear constellation in the northern sky, evoked a sense of aspiration to them, not to mention the big animals they saw in the Vermont woods.
Today the couple live in Stowe and aren’t married. They have a daughter, Camilla, who is 8, and a beloved 10-year-old boxer, Lola.
Ursa Major has grown from half a dozen employees in a small Burlington office to 32 today, moving its headquarters to an open second-floor space on Waterbury’s Stowe Street in 2018. It’s a certified B corporation, which designates a for-profit company that factors employee well-being and social and environmental impact into its decisions. Ursa Major has a six-member board of directors and several investors, most of them in Vermont.
Since the pandemic, it has retained a largely remote workforce, with about half of Ursa Major’s employees now living out of state.
Jenni Ewing, Ursa Major’s senior director of product development, works from Fort Collins, Colo., and tries to source most of the company’s ingredients from North American forests. “That’s our guiding light,” she said.
Currently, Ewing is developing a balm for cold, dry weather to protect the face, hands and lips. She started with beeswax as a good “barrier” builder that she can ethically source. She added spruce to help with circulation. And she discovered a South American tree sap known for its red color and traditionally used in herbal tinctures to promote healing, she said.
Once she develops the formula, partner labs will make samples that Ursa Major tests for texture and efficacy before choosing the ideal option. The process typically takes four to five months but can stretch past a year. The body wash, Ewing said, required many tries to blend the essential oils for fragrance into the surfactants, or cleaning agents.
“We had a whale of a time trying to get that thing to not separate out over time, because we were not using synthetic stabilizers or solubilizers,” Ewing said.
Ursa Major works with about six U.S. suppliers, including Winooski’s Twincraft Skincare, which at first made only the company’s bar soap but has since invested to expand its capability. Beauty industry powerhouse Autumn Harp, based in Essex Junction, was an early Ursa Major partner, as well. Sweatman and Doyle initially hoped to source and produce everything in Vermont, he said, but some manufacturers elsewhere specialize in particular categories of products or ingredients.
The new Ursa Major packaging comes from China, the least expensive source, even with recent tariffs raising the components’ cost by almost 48 percent. The company hasn’t upped its prices, except for offering the face wash in a larger size.
This year, Ursa Major is focused on marketing its newest products and boosting sales across its channels, Sweatman said. Doyle will keep telling Ursa Major customers that they’ll love the products — even if they don’t stop them from aging.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Skin They’re In | Waterbury’s Ursa Major went all in on clean ‘beauty’ and straight talk to win customers”
This article appears in The Wellness Issue 2026.
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