For Sugared + Bronzed, the retail outlook is sunny. The popular boutique salon specializing in professional spray tans and hair removal services is rapidly expanding their retail portfolio, with 12 to 14 new store locations opening in 2025 and a bold growth strategy to open approximately a dozen new stores every year thereafter.
Call it ambitious, but Sugared + Bronzed has proven they’re a powerhouse. The 15-year-old company has grown expeditiously since Courtney Claghorn co-founded it with her now-husband, Sam Offit, in her Santa Monica apartment in 2010. Remaining consistently profitable since their first year in business (the 2020 pandemic was their only blip), the brand has a projected revenue of over $50 million for 2025. They had a 20%-plus year-over-year growth in 2024 and 50% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) over the last five years.
The professional spray tanning market is booming in recent years, as advancements in the technology have improved results, giving consumers better options to get the look of a natural tan without the health risks and skin aging effects of going in the sun. The global spray tanning market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 4.6% from 2025 to 2033, with approximately 75% of the market being in professional spray tans (not at-home consumer products), according to Business Research Insights.
With 38 Sugared + Bronzed locations already going (or glowing) strong across nine key markets, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Austin, Miami, Philadelphia, New York City, and their newest store in Washington, D.C., the company — which owns all their locations and does not franchise — has captured a sweet spot in the beauty treatments market. They offer upscale services in bright, airy, modern spaces at accessible price points, with an average customer spend of $60 per visit. A one-time spray tan or Brazilian hair removal service (their two most popular treatments) is $69, but their membership program — which 60% of their clients do — lowers the price to $49 for either service once a month. Additional programs offer two or three services per month for greater cost savings per treatment, and all monthly memberships include rollover of unused services.
As the only beauty treatment chain focused exclusively on sunless tanning and sugaring services (a hair removal technique that uses a sugar-based paste instead of wax), Sugared + Bronzed has very little direct competition wherever they go. “We find that no matter where we open, if we build it, they will come,” said Claghorn, who is President and Co-founder of the company (Offit is CEO and Co-founder). Their customers are mainly women in their 20s to 40s, with men making up less than 5% of their clientele. “We’ve been fortunate to grow alongside the spray tan industry, with every one of our stores seeing a steady increase in business, aside from pandemic-related closures.”
The company credits much of their success to maintaining full ownership of each store, which gives them tight control over the customer experience, ensuring consistent, high-quality service and attention to detail across every location. New employees undergo a rigorous four-to-six-week training program and must deliver a steady stream of “absolutely perfect spray tans” before they’re allowed to set foot on the floor. “Customer service is the lifeblood of our business,” Claghorn emphasized. “We take training very seriously.”
Now a company of more than 500 employees, Sugared + Bronzed bootstrapped for their first nine years, remaining profitable throughout, then did their first and only round of funding in late 2019 (a small amount of additional funding from the same investors was added in 2021 to make up for pandemic-related store closures). By 2022, the company had bounced back from COVID-related losses and was once again growing — which led Claghorn, Offit, and their team to hatch a robust expansion plan.
“We set a goal to sign a new lease every other month, and when we became comfortable with that, amp it up to every month,” explained Claghorn. So far in 2025, the brand has signed leases for five new locations, with 10 to 15 more in the pipeline. “The opening dates will vary since each location has its own construction timeline, but our growth cadence for the foreseeable future is approximately 12 new locations per year. If we start to feel really comfortable with that, we might level it up even more.”
Quite an impressive feat for a brand with such humble beginnings. In her early 20s, fresh out of college and experiencing her first summer of working long hours in a corporate job, Claghorn — who was used to paying around $30 for a spray tan back in college — found that living in Los Angeles now meant paying upwards of $100 or more for a faux glow. Convinced she wasn’t the only one feeling sticker shock, she and Offit (then her boyfriend) each chipped in $500 to see if offering $45 spray tans out of her apartment, done by Claghorn herself, would attract a similar cost-conscious clientele. Offit, who worked in tech, helped build their website. They placed Google ads and offered a $10 credit for referrals — a program that’s still in place today. Women showed up in droves, and within three months, Claghorn had quit her fintech job to focus full-time on the venture known then simply as “Bronzed.”
The “Sugared” came on a bit later, when Claghorn noticed that many of her clients came in for a spray tan directly after getting a bikini wax, usually before going on vacation. When some told her that they preferred sugaring for hair removal because it was gentler on their skin than wax, Claghorn took note. Six months into the business, when they leased their first store space in Santa Monica to do spray tans, they rented the back room to an aesthetician who did sugaring. After seeing how well the two services paired together, Claghorn eventually decided to offer sugaring when opening more locations.
“The sugaring was born out of customer feedback,” she noted. “In the beginning, we could never find a space small enough to offer just spray tans, and we didn’t want to overpay in rent for unused space. Adding sugaring services not only met customer demand — it also made sense financially. It taught me the value of testing the market before making a big commitment, because what if we’d spent a ton of money setting up our first store just for spray tans, only to then have to expand or relocate a year or two later to add sugaring?”
Sugared + Bronzed takes a similar measured approach to their marketing. “We have always treated the business like e-commerce because when we launched in 2010, Facebook didn’t have much of an advertising platform, and Instagram didn’t exist,” said Claghorn. “Our first retail space wasn’t street level, so the only way people could find us was through Google ads or word of mouth. These days, our digital advertising strategy is focused on Meta and, more recently, TikTok and Amazon, though we still do some Google ads.”
“We also invest in selecting good real estate, which I think is a huge function of marketing,” noted Claghorn, adding that the company now self-funds its new stores. “In locations with a lot of foot traffic, there’s proven ROI on making our store fronts very pretty and eye-catching. When we’re opening a new space, we’ll add a QR code to the ‘Coming soon’ poster in the window so a passerby can sign up for a complimentary service to come check us out. We’re always thinking of new strategies, but they’re rarely location-specific and are typically things we can implement across the board at all our stores.”
When choosing where to open, Sugared + Bronzed aims for one new extension market per year — an area within a train ride or driving distance of an established store, which makes training new employees easy to coordinate — and one new flag plant market per year, which is an entirely new area such as opening their first Florida store in Miami. The company extracts the zip codes of their in-store clientele and online customers who purchase their at-home sunless tanning and body products to inform where they may want to open next. For instance, the company has seen an uptick in Chicago residents buying their sunless tanning products, so they’re exploring potentially opening a store there.
Consumer insights from the U.K. and Australia, where there’s high demand for sunless tanning products, also have the company considering international expansion. “Typically, if they’re buying sunless tanning products, they’re also interested in a professional spray tan,” said Claghorn. “And wherever our spray tan clients are, we tend to find our sugaring clients there as well.”
In addition to studying the data, Claghorn still relies on her intuition. “If a location doesn’t feel right to me, then I’m not going to do it,” she said. She credits learning her business from the ground up for teaching her how to make smart choices. “Doing the spray tans myself for the first year really helped me understand how to shape our business, from creating margins to choosing supplies. Then I managed our first store for about a year and worked the reception desk, which taught me how to create top-level customer service. I always tell people who are thinking of starting their own business, ‘Find a way to make your first dollar.’ People often want to dive in and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars right off the bat, but it’s better to test the market before going all in. The market will give you the feedback to shape your business plan. The more you grow, the harder it is to be nimble — but in the beginning, it’s really easy to be flexible, so you may as well start small and let the feedback guide your way.”
Sugared + Bronzed has 38 locations nationwide and offers a select range of sunless tanning and body care products from $28 to $48 on their website, sugaredandbronzed.com, and on Amazon.com.
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