Tribeca Citizen | Onda Beauty is now Sommetbeauty

K. caught sight of the sign: Onda, the clean-beauty shop and salon that is owned by Tribecan Naomi Watts, is now called Sommetbeauty and it seems the shop is still open, just under a new name — same products, same practitioners. The story as I understand it is Onda was sold to a company called Amyris last year; Amyris filed for bankruptcy a couple weeks ago. So the newish CEO of what was Onda, Jane Hong, changed the name to keep the business going.

Meanwhile, Onda’s website says it is “taking a pause while we figure out our next chapter.” And more: “It has been our honor and pleasure to bring you the best in clean beauty and we look forward to continuing to do so again in the future. Stay tuned!”

Onda was founded by Larissa Thomson, Naomi Watts and Sarah Bryden-Brown and has stores here, in Sag Harbor and Hampton Bays.

K. first sniffed out the sale to Amyris, the first retail acquisition for the synthetic biotechnology company that owns Biossance, Pipette, Costa Brazil and Olika. (I had to go to the google: synthetic biotechnology is a field of science that involves redesigning organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities. Here’s an interesting story from the Times on a pioneer in the field.) Retail Dive reported that it filed for Chapter 11 on Wednesday, listing between $500 million and $1 billion in assets and between $1 billion and $10 billion in liabilities.

Sommetbeauty now turns up in searches for Onda and vice versa while the new entity gets its own digital presence up and running.