‘Kate would have been better off launching a wine brand’: Insiders reveal the TRUTH behind the fall of Kate Moss’s wellness brand: ALISON BOSHOFF

The ‘Dusk’ and ‘Dawn’ blends of tea (respectively ‘calming’ and ‘uplifting’) have been out of stock for 22 weeks. The day and night face creams and Sacred Mist perfume (‘Fragrance for Soul, Self, Space’) are being offered at deep discounts on bargain sites.

The official website’s ‘shop’ no longer functions – and frustrated potential customers who complain don’t seem to have been heard. ‘The cart will not load,’ grumbles one on Instagram. ‘The website does not work,’ says another. Nobody from the team replies.

After only three years in business, supermodel Kate Moss’s beauty and wellness brand Cosmoss appears to have quietly met a less-than-beautiful fate.

A number of indignities have befallen the brand in recent weeks, including the removal of the Cosmoss counter from the prestigious beauty hall at Liberty of London. Department store Fenwick is offering everything from Cosmoss at a 30 per cent discount.

Meanwhile, the clearance website Discount Dragon has the brand’s Sacred Mist eau de parfum, which normally costs £125 for 100ml, on sale for just £39.99, while its Golden Nectar Pro-Collagen Oil – £84 on Moss’s own website – is also now available for £39.99. 

The Face Cleanser, touted as the core of the Cosmoss skincare ‘ritual routine’, is marked down from £48 to £11.99.

Perhaps not surprisingly, with the firm’s accounts for 2023 overdue, Companies House began a compulsory strike off action against the Cosmoss Group Ltd in March this year. This was suspended a day later, but things look far from good for the firm.

Kate Moss was spotted smoking with a Corona beer in hand earlier this year on a night out in London

Country girl Kate promoting her Cosmoss products. The brand’s counter has been removed from the prestigious beauty hall at Liberty of London and department store Fenwick is offering everything from Cosmoss at a 30 per cent discount

Nobody has posted on the Cosmoss Instagram page since February and nobody at the Cosmoss email address responded to enquiries. 

Yesterday, it was reported that staff at the ailing firm hadn’t been paid for months, with one manager saying that they’d ‘not been paid all year’. 

They added that they had had to take matters into their own hands last month and ‘shut down the website because there was absolutely no guidance’.

Ms Moss’s representatives did not respond to an earlier request for comment about non-payment of salaries or her company’s current trading position.

Perhaps the worst of it is that Moss herself, who founded the company after becoming sober and ‘mindful’ – a newfound fan of essential oils, gong baths and meditation – seems to have become essentially bored of the venture.

When it launched in 2022, she gave three interviews – unheard of for the tight-lipped Moss, who hadn’t given three in the 20 years before that. She talked about taking moon baths, using crystals, and discovering the work of ‘alchemist and homeopath’ Victoria Young.

In a statement on the website, she said the brand was inspired by her ‘personal journey of self-discovery and wellbeing’, adding: ‘I still like to have fun but also I look after myself and practise the rituals that I have found help me.’

But after that initial uncharacteristic promotional blitz, she’s gone quiet again. Indeed, you have to go back to October last year for a video of Moss actually using the products – in footage from the 2023 Met Gala, which shows her spraying on the perfume. In social media terms, that’s pre-history.

In a world where successful entrepreneurs such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Victoria Beckham post content multiple times a week, constantly speaking about what products they are using and why, Moss’s six month absence is glaring – and damaging. 

A beauty writer tells me: ‘You can’t come into a space as crowded as this if you don’t have Kate Moss constantly selling the brand. The only way to break through is to use her lifestyle and charisma – but you can’t do it part-time, or go AWOL, and still expect it to succeed.’

So why has she apparently turned her back on Cosmoss? There seem to be two reasons. First, Moss herself has changed. Sources tell me the emphasis on health and ‘balance’ which she was so proud of when she launched the brand in 2022 is now a thing of the past.

As we shall see, the ‘new’ Kate Moss is very much like the old one – super-cool, inaccessible to mere mortals and fond of indulging her taste for alcohol and partying.

And second, the brand has failed because she’s not willing to shed her privacy to the required extent.

Though we all know Moss’s face almost as well as our own, the demand that she lay bare her lifestyle in order to sell her goods in the end proved an insurmountable stumbling block.

Moss seems to have reverted to her old ways late last year, around the same time she broke up from 38-year-old boyfriend Count Nikolai von Bismarck.

The near-decade-long relationship was always off and on, but this seems to have been final.

Kate had been sober since 2018 – von Bismarck from 2017 – but since they parted she’s been seen clutching a bottle of beer and a bottle of vodka, and she definitely had a very good time indeed on her 51st birthday in January, when a dinner in a private room at China Tang was followed by a late night at the Globe club in Notting Hill. 

Jewellery designer Jade Jagger, fashion designer Stella McCartney and make-up tycoon Charlotte Tilbury celebrated with her, and it’s notable that she has returned to many of those who were in her inner circle during her 1990s heyday.

Photographs of her with ’90s icon Patsy Kensit at a recent magazine launch were the perfect throwback to the days of Britpop and Cool Britannia.

‘She’s gone back to her roots and is loving life,’ I’m told. Footage of her ‘twitching’ at Paris Fashion Week in March, appearing to swivel ‘frantically’ in her front row seat at a show, was misinterpreted, I’m told. Kate was merely dancing in her seat – there is no health crisis.

And then there is her reluctance to open up her life purely to sell Cosmoss products. A long-time friend tells me: ‘She seems to have fallen out of love with the idea, perhaps having seen what it would take to make it fly. I think she has got bored of it.’ 

The friend adds: ‘She does not promote it and misses meetings or doesn’t want to go to any. I do know one of her regular phrases when asked to do something is “Let me think about it” and that seems to mean “No”.

‘She hates talking on camera and she hates the sound of her own voice. She actually says that she is “shy” of being filmed so she does not do it.

‘Victoria Beckham has dozens of people in her brand team, and they set aside days in her diary for shoots for Instagram and TikTok and have their team following trends for posts and music. Kate doesn’t have a massive brand team so I can’t see how it would ever work. It’s a competitive world out there in wellness.

‘I remember when she had the TopShop collaborations, Philip Green used to send car after car for her as she was always late.

‘It’s a model thing – but it isn’t how you run a business. It comes across as lazy. The bottom line is that she is not a businesswoman and she prefers to get paid – very well – for doing a few jobs [rather than constantly being present].

‘She won’t live online, which is what you need to do to run a beauty brand.’

Now 51, Moss has managed to retain a very lucrative career as a model well into middle age and is worth £70 million, give or take.

In January, for example, she was launched as the face of US designer Donna Karan’s new collection, and in November last year she was handsomely paid to bring her glam rock aesthetic to a ‘party capsule’ collection for Zara.

The clothes were designed in association with stylist Katy England, her long-time collaborator who also did some of the heavy lifting for the TopShop partnership decades earlier.

England and her husband, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, are among the longest standing of her friends – she calls them ‘family’. Their son Lux is on the books of her model agency and friends with daughter Lila.

Indeed the Kate Moss Agency Ltd is largely successful, with most recent accounts showing net assets of £5.1 million.

A hint of trouble emerged recently when Kate’s friend Rita Ora reportedly left the agency to seek new model representation. The roster is otherwise mostly stable, however – essentially comprising Kate, Lila and the children of Kate’s friends.

The source says: ‘She set the agency up mostly because she was sick of paying huge commission to her model agents. The business is doing perfectly well but I don’t think it’s what gets her out of bed in the morning.

‘She’s got her house in the country and she has a social life which involves lots of travelling, lots of drinking wine, lots of lying by a pool in the sunshine.

‘Honestly she would have been better off launching a celebrity wine brand like Kylie [Minogue].’