Image Studios Launches Gorgeous Collective Platform, Acquires Clean Your Dirty Face

Salon suite franchisor Image Studios has launched Gorgeous Collective, an acquisition platform designed to build a portfolio of franchised beauty and wellness concepts. The entity made its debut purchase with express facial chain Clean Your Dirty Face.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. With 40 locations open or under development across the United States, Clean Your Dirty Face established an early footprint in the express skincare market through 30-minute, streamlined facial treatments focused on convenience and accessibility. The brand also offers a proprietary 25-SKU skincare product line sold through its studios, e-commerce channel, and Ulta Beauty's online marketplace.

Gorgeous Collective enters a rapidly consolidating market for professional beauty and wellness services. As consumer demand for specialized services expands, consolidators are seeking to scale across fragmented spa, med-spa, and service concepts to capture operational and marketing efficiencies. The deal arrives as capital markets increase focus on service-led M&A, highlighted by recent sector moves such as Wells Fargo naming new investment banking leadership in beauty and wellness.

“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.”

Jason Olsen founded Image Studios in 2009 and is now building Gorgeous Collective, a portfolio of franchised beauty and wellness brands, on top of its salon suite platform.

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 with rigid investment horizons, Olsen says MPK operates without a predetermined exit timeline, granting Gorgeous Collective operational flexibility to pursue long-term brand acquisitions.

Launched in 2015 with a single studio in downtown Chicago, Clean Your Dirty Face expanded primarily through franchising, opening four to five locations annually in recent years. Founder and CEO Shama Patel will continue leading the brand 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.”

Patel launched the initial Chicago location with a $10,000 investment and kept the company bootstrapped despite prior investor interest. The brand has delivered sustained growth across both service sales and product retail.

For future acquisitions, Gorgeous Collective is targeting profitable beauty franchise businesses with at least 30 locations and established operating models that can scale faster with institutional resources. Over the next five to six years, it plans to purchase another four or five brands at a pace of roughly one acquisition per year, and is currently in conversations with several candidate companies.

“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 express skincare, future targets include service concepts in spray tanning, waxing, teeth whitening, med-spa services, and other non-overlapping beauty sectors.

Prior to establishing Gorgeous Collective, Olsen founded Image Studios in 2009, opened its first site in 2010, and began franchising the salon suite concept in 2015. Image Studios provides turn-key salon suites that allow independent beauty professionals to operate without heavy upfront capital expenditure. The franchisor now has 139 locations open, about 200 additional units in development across 31 states, and a network of roughly 5,000 beauty professionals.

Clean Your Dirty Face has 40 locations open or in development and marks the first acquisition for newly formed platform Gorgeous Collective.

While competitor suite networks historically focused primarily on hair stylists, Image Studios supports a broader mix of professionals, including aestheticians, injectors, lash artists, spray tan technicians, and waxers. Roughly half of its suites are configured for non-hair services. Beyond real estate, the company provides business education, enterprise software tools, and marketing infrastructure.

Image Studios’ built-out infrastructure will power Gorgeous Collective’s brand portfolio. Rather than requiring franchisees to wait a year or more for permanent standalone real estate, Gorgeous Collective plans to co-locate new Clean Your Dirty Face franchisees inside existing Image Studios facilities. This arrangement allows franchisees to begin operating in as few as six weeks before transitioning to dedicated brick-and-mortar stores, while gaining immediate access to site selection, lease negotiation, construction management, and centralized marketing.

“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 Collective aims to leverage its growing footprint to build a consumer-facing membership platform featuring 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.”