PARIS — Typology, the eco-conscious, direct-to-consumer French beauty brand, is entering hospitality for the first time, with amenities launching in more than 30 MGallery Collection luxury boutique hotels by yearend around the world.
This comes at a time when the boundary between beauty and hospitality keeps blurring, as each takes on more lifestyle and experiential attributes.
Typology’s products have minimalist formulas, with sustainably sourced ingredients that are up to 98 percent natural.
Five Typology amenities products were created for MGallery, including a shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, hand soap and body lotion. Each product has antioxidant properties, vitamin E and camelia extracts, plus no PEGs, sulfates or silicone. They are certified vegan and gluten-free, while soaps are RSPO-certified.
The products will first appear in the Domaine de la Reine Margot Paris Issy hotel location, followed by rollouts in Albania and Biarritz, France, this summer.
Since the beginning of 2025, MGallery has opened three new locations.
“As we are in this momentum, we want to have a very few but really curated partnerships,” said Xavier Royaux, chief marketing officer of MGallery Collection, adding such tie-ins are about strong brand fit. “We have the same approach on wellness and beauty. We are about quiet luxury. But for us, it goes really far beyond that. It’s about long-term vision and commitments.”
Ning Li, a digital entrepreneur, launched Typology in early 2019. The B-Corp company has always had a strong commitment to planet Earth.
Ning Li
Courtesy of Typology
“One of the weaknesses as a DTC brand is when people want to experience their products, they don’t have a place to go to,” said Li, who explained a typical response for many digital players has been to open many stores or sell through brick-and-mortar partners. “That seems to be the classic playbook now.”
Li considers Typology, six years after launch, to be still at the beginning of its journey.
“We don’t want our brand to be sold at places where we don’t have total control of the shopping experience,” he said. “So far, we remain very much on our DTC route.
“When the partnership opportunity came up, it appeared to me as a very good way to have curated places — but not necessarily shopping destinations — where people can experience our products in a different way, as a complement to our online experience rather than as a distraction to our brand-building exercise,” continued Li.
He said that since Typology is a small, French indie brand, partnering with MGallery, which has a global footprint and a local boutique hotel feel, made for a good brand fit. The main goal of this partnership is to deepen the brand connection with consumers, rather than to build sales.
Today, Typology is mainly present in the United States, its largest market; France, where the brand has one corner, in Printemps Haussmann; Germany; the United Kingdom, and Japan.
“MGallery will bring us to even more international destinations,” said Li.
For its launch in February 2019, Typology raised a $10 million seed round of funding with Alven, Marc Simoncini, Xavier Niel and Firstminute Capital. Li is Typology’s majority shareholder.
He would not discuss numbers, but said the brand’s sales momentum has been strong: growing by triple digits in the first couple of years, then more recently by high double digits.
Today, Typology has a broad skin care offering, making up 98 percent of the line, from face moisturizer to serum and cleansing lotion. Adjacent categories include tinted skin care — serum and cream — which is a very popular category for the brand, and scalp treatment.
“[It’s] an extension of skin care knowledge to the hair,” said Li. Typology hair care, also with shampoo, serums and a hair mask, will launch in the U.S. in June. There, the brand’s product prices range from about $20 to $60.
Typology today has about 100 stock keeping units. Its bestseller by far is the 9-Ingredient Face Moisturizer. By comparison, most moisturizers are formulated with 20 to 50 ingredients.
“The ethos of Typology has always been to remove all the non-essential ingredients, but to keep the highest concentration of active ingredients,” said Li. For packaging the goal is to remove all composite materials, so as to have mono-materials that are both recyclable and recycled.
Li had previously founded MyFab and Made.com.
MGallery, part of the Accor Group, has more than 120 boutique hotels around the globe.