Image Studios Launches Beauty Services Acquisition Platform Starting With Clean Your Dirty Face

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. With 40 locations open or under development across the United States, Clean Your Dirty Face was an early mover in the express facial space with its streamlined, 30-minute treatments designed to make professional skincare convenient and affordable. The chain has a branded line with 25 products that’s sold through its studios and online, with select products recently launching at Ulta Beauty through the retailer’s digital marketplace.

Gorgeous Collective is the latest entrant seeking to consolidate beauty and wellness service businesses. As demand for professional beauty and wellness services grows, the company joins an increasing number of consolidators seeking to assemble larger businesses in a fragmented field of spas, med-spas and other concepts. They aim to unlock efficiencies through integrated operations, marketing and branding.

Growth and expansion plans

“We see Clean Your Dirty Face being much bigger. It’s an awesome brand. They’ve got their own product line,” says Jason Olsen, founder and CEO of Gorgeous Collective and Image Studios. “Our goal over the next five years is trying to get that to 200 locations open or more. There’s a whole lot of opportunity here to really help them build out more of that franchise support.”

MPK Equity Partners, a Dallas-based franchising investment firm that acquired a majority stake in Image Studios in 2024, is backing Gorgeous Collective. Unlike traditional private equity investors, Olsen says MPK doesn’t have a predetermined exit timeline, giving the company flexibility to pursue its vision and make acquisitions without short-term constraints.

Launched in 2015 with a single location in downtown Chicago, Clean Your Dirty Face has expanded primarily through franchising and opened roughly four to five locations annually over the past several years. Founder and CEO Shama Patel will continue leading the business under Gorgeous Collective’s ownership.

“We knew that if and when we partnered up, it would have to be with the right company with our shared vision in order to position Clean Your Dirty Face for long-term success,” says Patel. “We weren’t interested in short-term visions. We were only interested in ensuring that Clean Your Dirty Face thrived for decades to come.”

Although Clean Your Dirty Face had previously been approached by potential investors, it remained bootstrapped until the transaction. Patel opened its debut location with a $10,000 investment. She reports Clean Your Dirty Face has experienced consistent product and service sale growth over the past several years.

Acquisition strategy and goals

For future acquisitions, Gorgeous Collective is targeting profitable beauty franchise businesses with at least 30 locations and established operating models that could use greater resources to scale faster. Over the next five to six years, it plans to purchase another four or five brands at a pace of about one acquisition per year. According to Gorgeous Collective, it’s currently in conversations with numerous businesses.

“I call it the messy middle,” says Olsen. “Founders have great vision. They’ve done a great job building out this foundation, but they don’t have enough royalty revenue to hire more professionals that have expertise to support franchisees. We have the bandwidth to layer in that support.”

Gorgeous Collective’s acquisition strategy is intentionally cross-category. With Clean Your Dirty Face occupying the fast facial category, it’s turning its focus to service concepts such as spray tanning, waxing, teeth whitening, med-spa and other beauty service concepts that extend its portfolio without overlap.

Prior to launching Gorgeous Collective, Olsen founded Image Studios in 2009, opened its first location in 2010 and began franchising the salon suite concept in 2015. Image Studios offers fully equipped salon suites that allow independent beauty and wellness professionals to operate their own businesses without the capital burden of opening their own salons or studios. The company has grown into one of the country’s largest salon suite franchisors, with 139 locations, around 200 additional locations in development across 31 states and about 5,000 independent beauty professionals within its network.

While salon suite competitors such as Sola and Phoenix have catered primarily to hairstylists, Image Studios accommodates a broader mix of beauty professionals, from aestheticians and injectors to lash artists, spray tan providers and waxers. Roughly half of its suites are configured for non-hair services. Beyond real estate, the company provides business education, technology tools and operational support intended to help professionals run sustainable businesses.

Image Studios’ infrastructure will power Gorgeous Collective’s platform of brands. Rather than asking franchisees to wait a year or more for permanent brick-and-mortar locations, the company plans to initially place many Clean Your Dirty Face franchisees inside Image Studios locations, enabling them to serve customers sooner before eventually transitioning to standalone stores. Franchisees will gain access to Image Studios’ site selection, lease negotiation, construction management, marketing, operational support and educational resources.

“We’ve got all this great real estate, and we should have our own brands within these spaces…to create that synergy across the network,” says Olsen. “We’ll help you get open within six weeks in a salon suite so you can start making money within two months…By the time they’re ready for a real grand opening at the brick-and-mortar, they’re much more confident.”

Looking further ahead, Gorgeous hopes to leverage its growing portfolio to create a consumer-facing membership platform with centralized booking and cross-brand benefits. “We’ll have thousands of different beauty brand locations that are operating, whether they’re in our salon suites or in brick and mortar,” says Olsen. “We start to also then build this massive consumer base where my goal long-term is that we start to be able to create our own ClassPass.”