Jordan Samuel, a former ballet dancer, launched his eponymous skin care brand in 2013, with just two products: The After Show Treatment Cleanser and the Hydrate Facial Serum.

He has grown, since then, but remained small, which he calls, a “badge of honor.” The brand is beloved by leading skin care influencers like Caroline Hirons (776,000 Instagram followers). It is primarily DTC but is carried at the fast facial bar, Formula Fig, as well as C.O. Bigelow, and available to international customers via Cult Beauty.

In this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, he discusses his unique trajectory from ballet dancer to brand founder, the autonomy he’s been able to maintain by being carefully selective with retail partnerships, and staying small, and why launching less makes a big difference.

To her 769,000 Instagram followers, fitness entrepreneur-turned-brand founder Amanda Kloots feels like a friend who just happens to sometimes star in movies or host TV shows — she wrapped her gig on CBS's "The Talk" when the show ended last year and hosts "Live From The Other Side" on Netflix. Some of her fans have been following her journey since she started teaching fitness classes nearly a decade ago, in 2016. That was when she first transitioned out of her previous career as a Radio City Rockette and Broadway dancer and started building her fitness business, Amanda Kloots Fitness.

Earlier this month, Kloots launched Proper, a wellness brand that debuted with five powder supplements. It is the seventh brand to launch in partnership with Ben Bennett's incubator, The Center — its other brands include Naturium, which exited to E.l.f. Beauty at the end of 2023. Bennett and Kloots are striving to create products that appeal to the "everyday woman who comes to my classes, who is really just looking for something to keep her happy and to make her feel her best," Kloots said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Proper's first five products include the greens powder Daily Boost, Metabolism + Energy Boost, Digestion + Bloat Relief, Immune Support, and Calming Aid. Each is $28 and, for now, exclusively available direct-to-consumer. And they're brightly colored to represent the idea of "drinking the rainbow," Kloots said.

On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Kloots discusses how the early days of the boutique fitness boom made her social media savvy, what business lessons she learned from past ventures and collaborations, and what's next for Proper.

Dr. Jonathan Leary is on a mission to change how and where consumers socialize. 

“We're the world's first social wellness club. What I mean by that is we're not a gym, we're not a spa, we don't do beauty, and we don't do aesthetics. All we do is self-care, but made social,” said Remedy Place founder and CEO Dr. Leary. “I'm really trying to change the narrative of how people socialize, but in a healthy way.”

That means he encourages his clients to substitute happy hour for a group cryotherapy appointment or a work meeting for a group sauna session at one of Remedy Place’s three locations in L.A. and New York City. “We call them social substitutions with self-care experiences,” he said. 

This aligns with an overall sea change he’s seen in the U.S. that includes more interest in preventative health and less interest in drinking or socializing in bars and clubs. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, young adults are drinking less than previous generations: 62% of adults under age 35 say they drink, down from 72% two decades ago.

“We're the sickest we've ever been, and people are lonelier than they've ever been,” Dr. Leary said. “There are so many things that need to change, and I think social self-care has the potential to be the largest vertical in the health and wellness industry.” 

Dr. Leary has a doctorate in chiropractic medicine from USC and got his start as a wellness- and sports medicine-focused concierge doctor in Los Angeles, traveling to the homes or offices of wealthy clients, many of which were professional athletes. This allowed him to test and perfect the offerings now available at Remedy Place. Many of his private patients became investors in Remedy Place, and Dr. Leary opened his first location in 2019. 

Remedy Place offers acupuncture, chiropractic care, cryotherapy, infrared saunas, red light therapy, IV therapy, contrast therapy and many more wellness modalities, all of which can be booked for groups or individuals. The company is known for its 30-minute ice bath class which includes guided breathwork before a group-led ice bath plunge. Clients strive to join the “six-minute club” after lasting as long submerged in the 39-degree water. “You are getting a huge endorphin rush and dopamine spike, which is responsible for that mood change [people talk about],” he said. 

Remedy Place is privately held. The company took on an undisclosed round of seed investments in 2021, according to Crunchbase, and a $5 million bridge round of investment in 2022. Investors in the latter include music producer Zedd, NFL player Marcedes Lewis and Australian music group Rüfus Du Sol. The latter investment was part of a company valuation of $60 million. 

While memberships are offered for a small price break on services, Remedy Place operates like a traditional spa or fitness studio where appointments for classes, group rooms and individual appointments can be booked in advance. Costs start at around $40 per session. The ice bath class is around $50 a session, while other modalities such as the lymphatic massage, start at over $100 per session. 

Remedy Place has three locations: one in L.A.’s West Hollywood neighborhood and two in NYC in Soho and Flatiron, with a fourth planned for Boston early this year. 

To grow awareness, Remedy Place has a robust OOH events strategy that includes pop-ups at cultural events like the Cannes Film Festival and Art Basel. Back at home, Nike, Peacock and Saint Laurent have all rented out a Remedy Place location for private events. But perhaps the largest collaboration planned for 2025 is a luxurious ice bath created in partnership with Kohler. It retails for $15,000 and is available for pre-order now for home and commercial use. 

Dr. Leary joins the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss all of this, as well as the evolving role of self-care for wellness consumers, in today’s episode.

Dr. David Shafer has been a practicing plastic surgeon for 15 years, but since 2020, the Shafer Clinic, where he practices, has also operated Advitam, a metabolic aesthetics clinic. Through Dr. Shafer's work with both, he sees patients who are striving to lose weight or gain energy, and he's also had a front-row seat to the rise of GLP-1s. In the plastic surgery clinic, patients may come in for skin removal surgery, having lost a lot of weight taking a GLP-1. At Advitam, they may be supervised while taking one. If you've seen headlines in the past year about Ozempic face (or breasts, or butt), then you already understand how the two practices can work hand-in-hand. On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Dr. Shafer discusses them.

Despite being around for nearly 100 years, pilates has never been so popular. 

As previously reported by Glossy, search volume for “pilates” was at an all-time high in January 2004, with small yearly spikes each January since. It wasn’t until 2022 that search numbers topped those 2004 numbers before hitting an all-time in January 2023 and then again in January of 2024. 

However, searches have already topped 2024 numbers during the first week of the new year, according to Google Trends. The highest search numbers are coming from Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and the U.K. The U.S. ranks ninth for searches so far this year. 

Pilates is a low-impact strength and mobility training practice designed by Joseph Pilates in 1920s Europe to rehab injured WWI veterans. He developed its tenets on a machine crafted from bed springs and wooden boards, which later inspired the "reformer," a machine with straps and springs that’s been evolved many times over for pilates practices today. Pilates is also taught on a yoga mat using hand weights, stretchy bands and other props. 

Partially fueled by celebrity devotees like Hailey Bieber and Kendall Jenner, and propelled by viral fashion trends like 2024’s #PinkPilatesPrincess, the exercise modality shows no signs of slowing in 2025. 

It’s something that Australia-based Emma Stallworthy is betting on with 4-year-old pilates rental and digital class subscription company Your Reformer. The company is well-known in Australia and New Zealand markets and, as of September, has officially expanded to the U.S. with its signature $39-per-week in-home reformer bed rentals. They come with more than 800 high-quality training videos on a corresponding app. The company also sells its reformer beds to consumers as well as studios, gyms and hotels.

Your Reformer is fully bootstrapped by Stallworthy and her husband and co-founder Ben. The duo started as gym owners in Melbourne. After renting out their gyms' reformer beds during the pandemic, thy sold their gyms and doubled down on this new business. Emma is also a pilates instructor.

The company has nearly no competition for reformer rentals. Leaders in the space selling or financing equipment include Stott Pilates, Balanced Body and Merrithew. Your Reformer beds sell for around $2,500, while the reformer bed prices of the aforementioned manufacturers start at around $5,000.

Outside of the rentals, the company's reformer sales and corresponding digital classes mak up a unique business model that is best compared to Peloton stationary bikes. Peloton gained massive popularity during the pandemic but later experienced financial distress that led to cuts and the replacement of its CEO in 2024, as reported by CFO Drive. 

Stallworthy joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss the company’s growth and expansion to the U.S. in September, the secret sauce behind growing its digital class subscriptions, its beauty and wellness partnerships, and the overall rise of autonomous pilates classes.

For this week's special episode, Glossy Beauty Podcast co-hosts Sara Spruch-Feiner and Lexy Lebsack brought on colleague Emily Jensen to discuss six topics — all 2024 trends they expect will continue to dominate in the year to come or emerging trends they believe will be big topics of conversation. These included the pending TikTok ban and how it will affect beauty brands, the shifts in influencer marketing including the question of "authenticity," the rise-and-rise of the fragrance category, the boom in sports and beauty partnerships, the impact of GLP-1 drugs on skin care, and the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and the potential impacts on the wellness industry.

Listen in for a taste of what's to come in Glossy's beauty coverage this year.

Glossy reporters Lexy Lebsack, Sara Spruch-Feiner and Emma Sandler welcomed dozens of guests onto the Glossy Beauty Podcast in 2024. This included top executives at L’Oréal Group and Kendo Brands; longtime industry leaders from Retrouvé and Versed; and breakout indie brand founders from Flamingo Estate and Fazit.

But it was the six interviews highlighted below that best capture the ways in which the beauty industry changed in 2024. In today’s special end-of-year podcast episode, Lebsack and Spruch-Feiner walk through six can’t-miss clips.

In the clips ahead, Estée Lauder VP Chloe Green-Vamos discusses how the conglomerate is utilizing AI to better the business while longtime beauty exec Sarah Creal muses about reaching women over 40 with her new namesake line — two massive trends that swept the industry this year.

This special 2024 episode also highlights an important change in retail’s role in business, as heard in a clip from Black Girl Sunscreen founder Shontay Lundy’s September episode. Speaking of sunscreen, Beauty of Joseon founder Sumin Lee joined the pod this month to discuss entering the U.S. market with the TikTok-famous brand.

In another clip, Beachwaver’s Sarah Potempa shares the secret behind her knockdown success live-selling business on TikTok. And finally, in Glossy’s Tweens Talk Beauty episode, three Gen Alpha tween shoppers discuss the role beauty plays in their lives.

The Glossy Beauty Podcast will be back next week with another special episode looking ahead at 2025 and will return on January 9 with our regular episodes.

“I believe that every great brand should evolve its look and feel about every five years,” said Katherine Power, serial entrepreneur and the founder of Versed skin care. “Since our launch in 2019, we've seen that our core customer, who is primarily an older millennial or young Gen X — I call them Xennials — has really grown along with us, and we wanted to continue to grow with them and to create something fresh and modern.”

This included a refresh of packaging, visuals and language overseen by Lola Gonzalez Marra, Versed’s longtime creative lead. Power and Marra have worked together for more than a decade on Power’s many entrepreneurial projects, including editorial sites WhoWhatWear and Byrdie — which Power launched with Hillary Kerr in 2006 and 2013, respectively — as well as color cosmetics line Merit, which Power founded in 2021. 

“We decided we needed to evolve enough that it's a change, but not so much that you go on Versed one day and it's a completely different brand,” said Marra. As Power and Marra explained on this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, the refresh has been in the works for over a year. 

Versed was launched in 2019 from data and insights learned at Byrdie and WhoWhatWear, which Power and Kerr have since sold to publisher Dotdash in 2019 and publisher Future Brands in 2022, respectively. 

Thanks to Versed’s omnichannel strategy where 75% of its sales are through Target, switching over merchandise has required a unique strategy. Hint: Versed is selling off older products DTC for 30% off right now. The team also rolled out tweaks to its social media aesthetic and naming formula for products. The brand also used this as an opportunity to fine-tune the assortment by making product cuts. But perhaps the biggest change is in its packaging colors, which Marra desaturated and leveraged into category IDs, all of which the duo discusses in the podcast episode. 

Aliett Buttelman and Nina LaBruna launched Fazit Beauty in January 2022. When it first debuted, the brand focused on various skin-care patches. In the years since, it has built a following on TikTok (76,000 followers) with products like oversized acne patches, silicone scar patches and patches that help treat ingrown hairs. According to Buttelman, by October 2024, the brand had amassed around 200 million views on the app when its trajectory changed overnight.

That's because, in October, Taylor Swift wore Fazit's Faux Freckle Makeup Patches to a Kansas City Chiefs game. The patches, which come in a variety of metallic hues and some sports-themed shades, apply like temporary tattoos. They launched in April 2024.

Within 48 hours, the brand's site traffic spiked by over 3,500%, resulting in $1 million in sales. Last week, Fazit entered 400 CVS doors with its Gold Stardust Speckle Makeup Patches. It is also sold at Urban Outfitters and on Amazon. On the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast, Buttelman teased that a dream retailer is coming soon and noted that the experience with Swift gave her and LaBruna more confidence in negotiating such deals.

If you've scrolled TikTok lately, perhaps you've come across a sunscreen from K-beauty brand Beauty of Joseon. On the app, it's somewhat ubiquitous. Sumin Lee is part of a team that acquired the brand and totally reinvented it, introducing the version today's U.S. consumers know in 2019. In the five years since, it's become a hit, particularly for its sunscreens, including the Relief Sun Aqua-Fresh: Rice + B5 (SPF50+ PA++++). It not only uses advanced SPF filters that were previously unavailable in the U.S., but it's also relatively affordable, at $18.

The brand has taken off not only on TikTok Shop but also on Amazon. Lee credits the sunscreen's success to both its super-lightweight texture and TikTok itself. The brand is formulated around "hanbang" ingredients, meaning the formulas feature traditional Korean herbs as key ingredients.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, founder Sumin Lee discusses the brand's exceptional popularity in the states, especially compared to Korea, its upcoming retail expansion in the U.S. and its strategy for combatting counterfeiters.

According to market research analytics companies and retail industry trade groups, American consumers are forecasted to spend nearly a trillion dollars on holiday shopping this year. 

Specifically, shoppers could spend around $1,778 each, up 8% from 2023, according to new data released by Deloitte. Meanwhile, holiday sales could grow an estimated 2.5-3.5% to reach $990 billion in sales from November 1 to December 31, up from $964.4 billion in 2023, according to the National Retail Federation. 

However, how consumers will spend this money — and on what — has yet to be seen.

In this special Thanksgiving crossover episode with sister publication Modern Retail, Glossy Beauty Podcast co-hosts Lexy Lebsack and Sara Spruch-Feiner are joined by Modern Retail editor-in-chief Cale Guthrie Weissman to discuss BFCM retail trends. 

This includes the growing bifurcation between prestige and value shopping. For example, the new luxury experiential brick-and-mortar shops from Chanel, Dior, Laneige and Violet Grey fall in sharp contrast to the “crazy low prices” promised by Amazon’s newest site, Haul. The site seeks to compete with low-price shopping on Temu, TikTok Shop and Alibaba. 

The discussion also dives into current retail challenges, like abbreviated shipping times and the forthcoming return rush, as well as the concept of “chaos shopping,” all in today’s episode. 

The Modern Retail Podcast, hosted by Weissman and Gabi Barkho, senior reporter at Modern Retail, airs every Thursday.

Richard Christiansen has learned many priceless lessons since he began fundraising for his brand, Flamingo Estate, around two years ago. 

This includes his surprising realization that many investors care little about the brand or the founder’s story. Instead, he said, there's a near-universal desire among the VC set for 90% margins across personal care products. 

“Know your audience; they're there to look at the numbers. … No one cares about the [brand or founder] story,” he told Glossy. "I, too, spent so much time on the storytelling, but at that moment, in those meetings, it's only about the numbers.” 

In the 160 investor meetings he’s attended in the past two years, he’s been told to abandon key parts of his business to increase profitability and to trade its sourcing practices — many of which reflect a hallmark of the brand — for cheaper, faster ingredients. 

On the podcast, Christiansen also shares with Glossy that he has secured his dream investor and, pending contract finalization this week, will have funding for brand expansion in the coming months. 

Christiansen launched Flamingo Estate in 2020, during the pandemic, by selling boxes of produce in a Los Angeles parking lot. Nearly five years later, the brand has become an in-the-know measure of luxury and has expanded to subscription produce boxes, candles, books, and personal care products available at Anthropologie, Nordstrom, Bergdorf Goodman, Forward, Mecca and many smaller retailers. 

The story behind Flamingo Estate, which Christiansen shared on the Glossy Beauty Podcast three years ago, is a departure from the luxury marketing Christiansen was well known for over the past decades, but it still possesses the elevated luxury branding consumers love. 

The latest in his releases is “The Guide to Becoming Alive,” out this week from San Francisco-based Chronicle Books. The 600-page coffee table book retails for $50 DTC and across the brand's retailers. Its chapters are anchored around in-depth interviews with Jane Fonda, Martha Stewart, Kelly Werstler, Chrissy Teigen, Mecca CEO Jo Horgan and many more influential people. The book includes life lessons from Christiansen's garden, anecdotes from his life and stories about growing his business. 

Before the "aha" moment that led to the creation of JB Skrub, the brand she co-founded with "Modern Family" star Julie Bowen, Jill Biren worked in magazine publishing at Condé Nast for 16 years. But then, one day, she was packing her 9-year-old son up for camp and realized there wasn't a personal care brand made for him. He was too old to bring baby soap to camp, and she didn't want to send him with a synthetically fragranced men's product. And so, an idea was born.

Bowen, also a boy mom, related to this struggle, and the two came together to work on a brand of body care products for tween boys. They chose to do so independently and spent eight years taking it from concept to reality, until finally launching in January of 2023 with five products: a body wash, a body spray, a face wash, a face lotion and toner pads. Recently, JB Skrub added hair care to the mix with the introduction of a shampoo.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Biren discusses the moment she realized she'd stumbled upon a white space in the market, JB Skrub's unique motto for teaching boys good hygiene and the power of telling this rarely-spoken-to consumer that this product was, in fact, made for him.

After more than seven years in business, Angela Caglia Skincare is having its hockey stick moment. 

“Our sales are up 437% in the past year,” founder Angela Caglia told Glossy. “We'll finish this year at close to $4 million [in sales] and around 90% of that will be the Cell Forté Serum; it’s all we're promoting.”

Since launching the hero product in October 2023, the brand’s Cell Forté Serum has garnered several beauty industry awards from publications like Elle, Byrdie, TZR and Essence, and sold out three times on Violet Grey. And it was the catalyst for the brand’s expansion into Nordstrom last month. 

Caglia’s focus now is keeping the serum in stock, and she hopes to expand the franchise next year with face and eye creams. The serum retails for $395 for 1 ounce.

The serum’s value proposition rests on its ability to replace antioxidant and hydrating serums, like those focused on vitamin C and hyaluronic acid, as well as exfoliating products and retinols, Caglia told Glossy. 

The brand leads marketing materials with results from a 28-day clinical study where nearly all participants (87-91%) reported less hyperpigmentation, increased luminosity, improved skin elasticity and a more youthful appearance. 

The serum is powered by "human-derived adipose mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) conditioned media," a technology Caglia discovered when researching treatment options for her mother’s ongoing treatment of dementia. Today, she sources the material from a stem cell research lab based in Texas that specializes in stem cell banking and FDA-cleared clinical trials, she told Glossy.

MSC-conditioned media is sourced from fat, called adipose tissue, which is donated by young and healthy plastic surgery patients and then processed in a lab. As Caglia explained in the latest Glossy Podcast episode, the stem cells are removed from the tissue and placed in a human-like environment where they excrete growth factors, cytokines and proteins, which are then used in the serum. The stem cells, which hold the patient’s DNA, are removed before the broth goes into the serum. 

Growth factors are a bit like little emails: They tell the other cells how to regenerate and act younger, which we don’t fully understand yet. 

Caglia is only one of very few brands playing in this space. Whereas there are many brands — like Eighth Day and Dr Diamond Metacine — that offer "bio-identical copies" of growth factors, few brands offer human-derived versions of growth factors. 

According to market research company Spate, growth factors are a rising trend in online searches alongside skin care, with an average of more than 32,000 Google searches per month over the past year, marking a notable +202.7% surge.

Coglia joins the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss her new hero product, Cell Forté, as wll as her journey to the brand's hockey stick moment. 

Years ago, a strong retail strategy often included brands staying in one pricing category, such as mass, prestige or luxury. Today, those best practices have come into question. 

“It’s strategic, … and it's also nerve-racking at the same time,” Rosie Jane Johnston, founder of fine fragrance and body-care line By Rosie Jane, told Glossy about her company’s expansion into the mass market this month through Target. “It’s always been in the back of my mind to make By Rosie Jane, particularly the body-care side of the brand, accessible in a real way.” 

As of this week, Johnston is executing against that goal with a strategic expansion onto Target.com — the line’s first and only mass retailer — with just the brand’s body-care line, which Johnston developed during the pandemic. 

“Body care is a new category for us, [and] we take it very seriously,” Johnston said. “I don't want [this expansion] to just feel like an extension of my perfume line — that's a different experience. I want this experience to be something unique.”

By Rosie Jane launched with a clean, fine fragrance direct-to-consumer in 2012 before expanding into Sephora in 2019. The brand currently offers seven fine fragrances. It also sells through Revolve, Nordstrom and other select retailers, and has maintained its DTC channel. 

By Rosie Jane has sold limited-edition body-care extensions of its fine fragrance in the past, including body oil and body wash in best-selling scents like Rosie or Missy. But today, Johnston is focused on three new fragrance franchises called Wake the F Up, Calm the F Down and Chill the F Out. 

Based on mood-boosting ingredients like essential oils, the line is meant to evoke feel-good emotions and was inspired by Johnston’s menopause journey. The line includes body wash, oil, lotion and deodorant all priced between $15-$42. To start, the products will be sold on Target.com, though the hope is to further expand to Target stores. By Rosie Jane fine fragrances will remain exclusive to retailers like Sephora and Nordstrom, while the body-care will be offered at both mass and prestige retailers. 

According to a rep from By Rosie Jane, the company is set to reach $10 million in sales in 2024, with body care making up around 8% of revenue. 

Johnston joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss her brand's expansion, including her hopes for the body-care category. 

When the pandemic hit, Matt Newman, like many hairstylists, found himself at home unoccupied. Eventually, though, he took his expertise to TikTok — and today, he has 2.4 million followers on the platform and another 1.2 million on Instagram.

Regularly working with brands like Tresemmé, he's known for both his tutorials and his takes on viral trends and hacks. But what he is most proud of in his four years of content creation is simply teaching people how to do their hair, he said. "The thing people tell me when I meet my internet friends in real life, is, 'You taught me how to blowdry my hair.' That's my biggest accomplishment — and it's not always my most viral content, but it's my most meaningful content. It's empowering to know how to fall in love with your own hair in your bathroom, with the stuff you already own."

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Newman discusses the value of educational content, the power of creating with brand partnership opportunities in mind and the reason he's not creating tons of TikTok Shop-forward content.

Sarah Potempa, celebrity hairstylist and co-founder of The Beachwaver, is a live-selling expert.

It all started in 2012 when she launched her first product, the original Beachwaver rotating curling iron, live on QVC. “It was wild because they said, ‘Don't get too excited — you might get four or five shows in your first year.’ … And then I was on QVC over 50 times my first year,” she told Glossy. 

She thrived in the medium and was able to reach a growing number of consumers looking for an easier way to create beachy waves at home. She sold out frequently, became a viewer favorite and was asked to return time after time. 

Unlike traditional curling irons and waving wands, The Beachwaver allows the user to clamp the end of a section of hair in place before pressing a button to wrap the section of hair around the electric iron. This avoids an unintended arm workout and the likelihood of burnt fingers, both common with the then-popular waving wands. Although she was already a well-known celebrity hairstylist and a regular in beauty publications for her styling advice, Potempa’s ability to connect with viewers while live-selling forever shifted the trajectory of her career. 

Potempa has since launched more than 100 SKUs — including a variety of hot tools, hair care and accessories — and has sold more than 2 million Beachwaver irons, which retail for $99 and up. Her line is available at Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Target, Anthropologie and Dillards, among other retailers.

Today, she uses the skills she learned on QVC to be a leader in social media-based live-selling, often going live for hours at a time on TikTok, Amazon, Beachwaver’s own DTC site and anywhere else experimenting with the medium. This has translated to massive success on TikTok: As of October of 2024, she’s sold more than 1.1 million units on TikTokShop, making her one of the most prolific sellers on the platform. 

Beachwaver is an independently held family business co-founded with Potepa’s two sisters, Erin and Emily, and her extended family regularly appears in the company’s many TikTok content franchises, which she calls “shows”. Her team and family stream from Beachwaver’s Illinois warehouse and offices, and this month she opened a second office and content studio in New York City. 

Potempa joins the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss the nuances of live-selling and the benefits of an in-house content studio.

Claudia Sulewski's career started at age 11, when she launched her YouTube channel with a video about applying her mom's blue eyeshadow. Today, the channel has 2.46 million followers. On Instagram, Sulewski also has 2 million followers, and she has yet another 1.1 million on TikTok. Last year, she translated her success as a creator into the launch of her brand, Cyklar, which she bootstrapped and debuted with one product, a body cream.

In March of this year, Cyklar received investment from The Center, the brand incubator and investment firm that runs Phlur, Make, Prequel and Saltair — it sold Naturium to E.l.f. Beauty in August 2023. Now, Cyklar is relaunching with a wider product range, including four body washes and four body lotions, which will be sold direct-to-consumer.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Sulewski discusses self-funding the brand to get it off the ground, deciding to take on investment and emphasizing fragrance in the brand's second iteration.

“VICs are the driving force of the luxury business,” Sukeena Rao, co-founder of London-based personal shopping firm Luminaire, told Glossy. “They count for a large percentage of global sales with pretty much every brand.”

VICs, or "very important customers," is shorthand in the luxury market for a growing subset of high-end, wealthy shoppers that are “very low key, very off the radar [and] not known to the public,” Rao told Glossy. It’s part of what she calls a shifting market where, 15-20 years ago, the luxury shopper was mostly well-known celebrities or very wealthy public figures. Whereas now, luxury shopping has become more curated and discreet. To wit: The internet calls this "quiet luxury." 

“It’s not always about wearing [a luxury piece] on a red carpet or being shown to the public,” Rao said. “It's done in a much more stealth way.” 

This changing luxury customer also has changing needs. Whereas a high-profile individual or celebrity may not need an introduction to a luxury brand or referral to an in-demand makeup artist or hairstylist, today’s VIC is looking for access to top lifestyle, beauty, wellness, fitness and health brands and experts, as well as the fashion, jewelry and accessory markets. 

On today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Rao shares the ins and outs of this growing demographic, which she reaches through her London-based personal shopping firm, Luminaire. 

“We have a waitlist right now. … [We’re] very selective about new clients, because we never want to under-deliver,” she says. “We do keep people waiting until we really have the capacity to look after them.” 

Rao launched Luminaire in 2022 with co-founder Harriet Quick, a former fashion features director at British Vogue. While billed as personal shopping, the company is more nuanced than that. For around $57,307 (£45,000) per year, clients receive high-touch appointments with Luminaire’s stylists, personalized mood boards, unlimited sourcing and gift procurement, as well as brokerage of just about anything one can desire, from apartments to cars. 

Meanwhile, entry-level membership starts at $6,367 (£5,000) per year and includes recommendations, mood boards, unlimited sourcing, fashion edits and basic access to luxury wardrobe and gift procurement and planning. 

However, Rao told Glossy that beauty, wellness and health products and services are the fastest-growing requests from clients, whether that is a haircut with a celeb stylist, an appointment with a holistic doctor, a masterclass with a renowned makeup artist or a private shopping experience. “If you really drill down on the data, you will see that, for us, beauty and wellness — alongside jewelry, which is a hugely growing category — is leading,” Rao said. 

Rao discusses these topics, as well as her predictions for the future of the luxury industry, in today’s episode. 

With the fragrance industry expected to generate $59.9 billion in 2024, both new and heritage brands are strategizing to differentiate in the growing market. For some, the result is offering niche scents, and for others, it's leveraging communities. For 8-year-old DedCool, a genderless, planet-first and functional approach is what sets it apart, said founder Carina Chaz.

Since launching DedCool in 2016 with a self-investment of $10,000, Chaz has made her brand one to watch. In August 2022, Dedcool expanded to Sephora stores and its e-commerce channels and introduced three new product categories, including air fresheners, candles and laundry detergent. The latter, Chaz told Glossy, now drives 30% of the business.

"The fragrance category has expanded so much, and DedCool was never meant to be a true fragrance brand. We want to speak to fragrance in ways that our competitors aren't speaking to fragrance," Chaz said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Also on the podcast, Chaz shares how she grew DedCool in its early stages and how she has created a brand that appeals to people in different life stages. 

Shontay Lundy is on a mission to disrupt the sun-care space. 

She is the founder of Black Girl Sunscreen, a sunscreen brand she launched in 2016 as an alternative to the many sunscreen formulas that leave a white cast on skin, a problem that’s particularly noticeable on medium and dark complexions. The line was an instant hit and she quickly gained wide distribution at Target, CVS, Ulta Beauty, Walgreens, and Walmart, among other retailers. The brand also sells direct-to-consumer and on Amazon.

In 2019, Lundy launched a children’s line called BGS Kids, which features its own branding and social marketing channels, and just this month, a men’s line called BGS Mens. The latter also has its own branding, to match the matte finish and more masculine scent. 

All of the brands' products range in price from $10-$23 and are formulated to melt seamlessly into all complexions, whether the formula uses a chemical, mineral or hybrid UV filter. They also feature hydrating ingredients like jojoba oil and shea butter, which deliver a dewy, hydrated finish in some formulas. 

But beyond products, Lundy is on a mission to educate Black consumers about the value of sunscreen, in hopes of debunking the myth that people with dark complexions don’t need sunscreen. As we know, the deadliest form of skin cancer, called melanoma, impacts people of all skin tones and ethnic backgrounds. 

Lundy spoke about managing the line’s omnichannel distribution on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. She shares that being in the biggest retailers in the country comes with its own unique set of difficulties. What’s more, Black Girl Sunscreen's success means that resources must be allocated for battling counterfeiters on marketplace sites. She also discusses the brand’s robust out-of-home marketing strategy, which includes billboards celebrating its many campaigns. 

Lisa Guerrera and Emmy Ketcham, co-founders of Experiment, met in 2019 at an event for the Sephora Accelerate program, which Guerrera participated in with her first business.

Together, they soft-launched their skin-care brand in 2020 with a lime-green silicone sheet mask. Since then, the brand has grown to include products including a glycerin-based hydrating serum, a “micro-slugging” oil gel and a lip balm. Its first cleanser will launch in a few weeks.

In April, Experiment announced a $3.3 million seed round, led by Greycroft.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, the duo discusses how they launched the company with $8,500, why theirs is a brand for the “nerdy, smart girl" and why science ultimately beat out "clean" beauty.

Chloe Green-Vamos, the vp of global innovation strategy at the Estée Lauder Companies, leads the company's global research and development strategy, innovation portfolio insights and analytics, and enterprise innovation planning. She’s also the chief of staff to Estee Lauder Companies’ chief research, product and innovation officer, Carl Haney.

Green-Vamos represents a new kind of executive role at a company like Estée Lauder — one that heavily relies upon collecting and understanding all types of new and emerging digital and consumer data, as well as the newest forms of media, technology and social media.

On the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Green-Vamos discusses how she betters the company using AI, including a custom AI-powered tool made by Microsoft, and how social listening is driving innovation at ELC. She also breaks down Estée Lauder Companies' reverse mentorship program, which pairs an executive with a Gen-Z or millennial staffer to help the execs better understand new ways young shoppers think about and use technology. 

Sarah Creal got her start in beauty while working at a Clinique counter. But it wasn't long before Creal was working in product development and marketing at major brands including Bobbi Brown, Tom Ford and Prada Beauty. In 2018, she co-founded Victoria Beckham Beauty with the former Spice Girl herself — she was CEO of that company until 2022.

Then, earlier this summer, she debuted Sarah Creal Beauty, designed for luxury shoppers over 40. Sold direct-to-consumer since its launch, the brand is made up of a tight edit of skin-care and color cosmetics products including a concealer, a brightening and hydrating essence, a lip balm and a priming eye cream.

Next, on September 3, it will debut at Sephora. And on the 10th, it will launch a line of lipsticks.

On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Creal discusses her decision to launch a brand, her brand's upcoming lipstick and women's ongoing struggle to raise funds for their own ventures.

Sloane Stephens started playing tennis at 9 years old and quickly climbed the ranks, beating Serena Williams in the 2013 Australian Open at age 19. She is the founder of The Sloane Stephens Foundation, which works to introduce tennis to underserved students — and, as of August 21, she is the founder of Doc & Glo, a body-care line that debuted with two products: the $18 Game-Changing Deodorant and the $22 24/7 Hustle Deodorizing Body Mist. The brand is named after Stephens’ grandparents. Her grandfather was an OB/GYN, while her grandmother "had all these girls' groups and always gave back," Stephens said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

The brand will retail on its own DTC site, on Amazon and on the Free People Movement website — Free People Movement has sponsored Stephens since the start of 2023.

On this week's episode, Stephens discusses her venture into entrepreneurship, the target audience for her brand’s first two products and tennis’s current moment in the cultural spotlight. 

Back in 2014, Lindsay Dahl’s career trajectory took an unexpected turn. She’d spent a decade working at chemical safety- and environmental-focused nonprofits in Washington D.C. before she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. 

“I never thought I would go to the corporate side,” Dahl told Glossy. “If I'm being honest, I really liked being a part of the nonprofit community where I felt like I could be both challenging companies and also challenging those in power in government.”

But then she got a call from Beautycounter. “I sat down and talked to Gregg [Renfrew], the founder and CEO, and she said, ‘Look, I know how to start companies. But I don't know how to do what you know how to do, which is … to use this business model to essentially see if you can do advocacy at the company level.' And this was before corporate activism was cool.”

Dahl moved to the West Coast and served as Beautycounter’s head of mission for seven years. In this new type of executive role, she created a blueprint for a company to have safe, ethically sourced and sustainable products, while also educating consumers about industry-wide issues and lobbying for better regulation and a more transparent industry. 

Today, Dahl is bringing those learnings to another trailblazing company: Ritual, an 8-year-old brand of supplements founded on a mission of transparent sourcing, efficacy and purity. For the past two and a half years, she’s served as chief impact officer where she oversees much of the mission-driven side of the business, including traceability and sustainability — which Ritual is known for — as well as advocacy, certifications, PR and community.

Dahl joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss her career trajectory, the ins and outs of running a mission-driven company, and her hopes for the future at Beautycounter. She also speaks about the biggest issues plaguing the supplement space today, such as contamination, purity and unsubstantiated claims. And she shares the changes taking place at Ritual, including a recent shift from its DTC subscription model to an omnichannel strategy that includes retailers like Target and Whole Foods.

Nathalie Gerschtein’s career at L’Oréal started before she even graduated college. 

“One of the reasons I joined L'Oréal, [which I met] on campus [in college], was because it would give me the opportunity to work internationally, and I knew I really wanted to discover different cultures, different go-to-market strategies,” she told Glossy. “Then when I started to work in beauty, I realized how joyful it is because beauty is about self-esteem, it's about self-confidence, it's about self-expression. And it makes people happy to interact with this category. So here I am, 22 years after starting in L'Oréal, [and] I'm still working in beauty today.”

More than two decades into her tenure at L’Oréal, Gerschtein has accomplished those early goals and more. She started in a brand marketing role for L’Oréal Paris skin care in France, was able to work across European and Asian markets, and, most recently, became the first woman to hold the title of president of the consumer products division at L'Oréal, North America, now based in New York City. 

Today, she leads her team through a mix of experience and intuition. “Sometimes you have to look at all the analytics, understand your consumer, understand the data, and understand the market panels and everything — and sometimes you also have to trust your intuition and take a leap of faith,” she said. 

This strategy has served her well, allowing her to put steam behind the right trends and products while continuing to better understand the evolving shopping habits of the mass consumer. 

Gerschtein joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss her career growth and lessons learned, predictions for the future of the mass shopper, and recent challenges. 

When Javon Ford (@javonford16, 455,400 TikTok followers) graduated college, he knew he wanted to be a chemist and wanted to work in the cosmetics industry. What he didn’t anticipate was becoming wildly popular on TikTok with nearly half a million followers.

Ford’s background in chemistry, working on making new formulations for cosmetics companies, has given him an in-depth knowledge of what goes into beauty and skin-care products. His videos involve him busting some of the most widespread myths in beauty and skin care, pointing out which ingredients are harmful or, more commonly, useless. In a recent video, he helped diagnose what ingredient in a lip product was making Olympian athlete Simone Biles’ swell.

According to Ford, his newfound popularity has led to multiple brand collaboration offers, but he’s steadfast about refusing to do work with companies whose products he doesn’t trust or who don’t provide the scientific data to back up their claims.

Ford joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss his career development and where he’s going next. 

When it comes to influential families in the beauty industry, Jami Morse Heidegger and daughter Hannah Heidegger are in a class all their own. They represent the third and fourth generations of skin-care brand owners in the U.S. dating back to the late 1800s. 

After immigrating to the U.S. as a child, Jami’s grandfather Irving Morse apprenticed for John Kiehl, the founder of Kiehl’s Apothecary in New York City. In 1921, when Kiehl retired, he allowed Morse to buy the brand and, for the next eight decades, it was Morse’s family business. For Jami, Kiehl’s Apothecary was a second home. 

“I would go there after school and just play,” Jami told Glossy. “My father was wonderful. … He would let me take different ingredients and experiment with them … and I had control of a whole bathroom. That was my laboratory, and I used to mix things in the sink.”

Years later, Jami turned bathroom mixing into innovative formula development when she joined the business. Jami created more than 100 formulas for Kiehl’s, many of which still anchor the brand’s top franchises like Ultra Facial Cream and Calendula Toner. Other bestsellers, like the Blue Astringent, were created by her father, who ran the business after her grandfather passed away. 

Jami and her family sold Kiehl’s to L’Oréal in 2000, a bittersweet decision that ultimately allowed the brand to scale to what it is today. At the time, Jami was in her 40s and signed a 10-year non-compete with L’Oréal. With three small children at home and a payout that was estimated to be over $100 million, she thought it was her retirement from beauty, but the passion didn’t fade. 

In 2015, Jami and her husband, Klaus Heidigger, ended their retirement from the beauty industry and launched Retrouvé, a line of luxury skin care formulated by Jami and her favorite longtime chemist collaborators. Inspired by Jami’s “boosted” visions of products she would have made just for herself back at Kiehl's, the brand is based on clinically proven actives and a patented triple airless pump system to safeguard each formula’s efficacy. 

Today, Jami and her daughter Hannah are working hand-in-hand to build Retrouvé into a luxury skin-care leader. The formulas, which top out at $215, sell direct-to-consumer and at Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Revolve, Shopbop and Bergdorf Goodman. 

A decade in, Jami and Hannah are looking for a strategic partner to scale. Today, the family is challenged with stock issues: At the time of publication, three of eight of the brand’s skin-care products were running a waitlist.

Jami Morse Heidegger and Hannah Heidegger join the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss the early days at Kiehl’s, the decision behind selling to L’Oréal, the ins and outs of product formulation, the ways the beauty industry has changed through the years, and the future of Retrouvé. 

This week, the Glossy Beauty Podcast welcomed three very special guests: Ali, 10, of New York City; Riley, 11, of Merrick, New York; and Leora, 12, of Bay Shore, New York. The three girls joined us in a Flatiron, NYC recording studio, where we sat down to talk all things beauty.

Glossy Pop has fastidiously reported on the tween obsession with skin care for months, examining the rise of brands that cater to the demographic, younger and younger girls’ beauty obsession vis-a-vis social media, the rise of Gen Alpha influencer-queen Katie Fang, and the Sephora tween brouhaha.

On this week’s episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, we talk through all of it, including how these girls first became interested in beauty, what brands are resonating with them now, what products they’re allowed to buy and use, and what social media they consume and create.

Before business partners Nicole Collins and Corey Weiss launched the 213Deli text-commerce beauty shopping platform last year, they were behind the scenes working for digital commerce trailblazers like Ipsy and Flip. 

Weiss worked in media at Sony Pictures and Yahoo before spending a decade growing the business side of Ipsy, a beauty subscription service started by Michelle Phan in 2011, where he met Collins. Meanwhile, Collins spent four years at Ipsy growing the brand partnerships team before joining the founding team at Flip, a shopping social network. Collins was also the co-founder of Yume, a Chinese-American company responsible for launching American beauty brands into China via the popular Little Red Book social shopping platform.

Both found inspiration for 213Deli across these experiences, but it’s the changing commerce marketplace in China — where consumers are accustomed to live shopping, text commerce and shopping across social media — that drove the duo to launch a text-only shopping platform stateside. 

“There are so many really exciting ways to discover and shop beauty outside of traditional brick-and-mortar and e-commerce, which is really what's been going on in the United States for a long time,” Collins told Glossy. For 213Deli, meeting the company's millennial and Gen-X customers where they are means sliding into their text messages once a week with a new, can’t-miss beauty offer.

“You go to 213deli.com and give us your name and your phone number,” said Collins. “It's totally free, [and] once a week on Thursdays, at noon Pacific time, we're going to send you a text message about a really spectacular product.”

So far, this has included brands like Osea, Farmacy, Phlur, RMS and Saltair. “If you want to buy that product, you text back and let us know how many pieces you want to buy,” Collins said. “If not, you ignore it — no big deal. And you get a message [about a new product] the next week.”

213Deli does not have an e-commerce platform and consumers provide their credit card information over text during their first purchase. The allure for many shoppers is free shipping and a gift with purchase, which is often a full-size complimentary product from the same brand. 

Brands like Vacation and Thrive Causemetics, for example, have used 213Deli as part of their launch strategy. To wit: Vacation included a free full-size bottle of its after-sun aloe with the purchase of its Orange Gelée SPF, while Thrive Causemetics' GWP was a full-size mascara to accompany its new Sheer Strength Lip Plumper. Shipping is also fast and free. 

To a consumer, 213Deli is streamlined and simple. But behind the scenes, Collins and Weiss have developed a custom tech stack to make the concept possible. And they're growing the business through partnerships with trending beauty brands and industry thought leaders like editors, artists and influencers. 

Collins and Weiss discuss the advent of the brand and the future of text-to-shop commerce in the U.S. in today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

Jess Hunt, now 27, has been creating content for over a decade. She has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, where she got started, and another 184,000 on TikTok. Through her career as a content creator, she met Jenna Meek, formerly the founder of a beauty brand called Shrine, who eventually became her co-founder. Today, the duo runs Refy Beauty. Refy launched in 2020 and hit shelves at Sephora by 2021.

Hunt's bold, bushy brows provided the impetus for Refy. On set for a photoshoot, Meek watched Hunt doing her brow makeup and asked her for details. Hunt spilled that it took a multitude of products and varying brushes to get her signature look. Together, they dreamed up an alternative, which became Refy's first product, its $24 Brow Sculpt.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Hunt discusses her road to "influencer" in the early days of the role being a career, the founders' journey to creating Brow Sculpt and the brand's recent foray into the complexion category with its first concealer. 

In December, America’s first big move to regulate the beauty industry in more than 80 years went into effect with the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulatory Act of 2022, best known as MoCRA. But it isn’t until the end of this month that the industry will meet its first big deadline from the Food & Drug Administration. 

By July 1, brands and manufacturers must provide a list of their products and where they were made to the FDA through its online portal called Cosmetics Direct. It’s the first of many deadlines and requirements, some of which are still in flux, that will slowly reshape how the industry is regulated over the next few years. 

For example, MoCRA will give the FDA new visibility into what’s in beauty products and where they are manufactured. It also provides new authority to the FDA to issue mandatory product recalls and alert consumers to common allergens through mandatory warning labels. That’s thanks, in part, to new visibility into fragrance ingredient lists, which had long been classified as intellectual property but must now be shared with the FDA.

Previously, America’s regulation was made up of small federal and state laws, which created a growing movement for better regulation. For example, brands like BeautyCounter spent years lobbying for better regulation on social media and on the hill in Washington, while brands like Henry Rose by Michelle Pfeiffer was created to offer an alternative to the under-regulated fragrance industry.  

So how did this piece of legislation finally get passed? While you may not know attorney Katlin McKelvie by name, she is a Washington D.C.-based lawyer who was integral in the creation of MoCRA. 

McKelvie has more than two decades of experience working in food and drug law, including 11 years at the FDA. She also served as the Deputy General Counsel of the United States’ Department of Health and Human Services and as the Deputy Health Policy Director and Senior FDA Counsel to the Senate Committee on health, education, labor and pensions for chair Patty Murray. While working with Congress, she helped shape many pieces of legislation that have impacted us all, including MoCRA, before becoming a partner of a private D.C. firm called Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher.

On today’s episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, McKelvie shares the origin story for MoCRA, including the challenges and compromises made during its early days in the Senate. She also shares the challenges she suspects brands may face while navigating compliance, the requirements the FDA will release next and the changes consumers can expect in the coming years. 

In May, Live Tinted turned five years old. The brand was founded by Deepica Mutyala, a veteran of both the corporate beauty space, as a one-time manager at Birchbox, and the creator space — Mutyala has 502,000 followers on Instagram. Live Tinted launched in 2018, four years after Mutyala went viral on YouTube (333,000 followers) for a video about correcting dark circles with red lipstick. That video, which has 10 million views, landed her a segment on "The Today Show," and led to her quitting her full-time job and focusing full-time on the beauty brand.

Today, Live Tinted sells the Huestick All-Over Color Corrector, which is inspired by Mutyala's viral hack. The brand also doubling down on complexion products. Live Tinted's Hueguard Skin Tint SPF 50 Mineral Sunscreen Broad Spectrum, which has become a best-seller, was an inflection point for the brand, Mutyala said. She now believes Live Tinted can become known for its complexion category.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Mutyala discusses how she always knew she'd start a beauty brand and what progress has been made since the BLM movement in 2020. She also talks about why the complexion category has been, and will continue to be, a game changer for Live Tinted. 

Unlike many beauty executives, Sara Mitzner, vp of brand marketing at AS Beauty Group since 2019, started her career in fashion. Her resume includes roles a Complex, Fullbeauty Brands and Swimsuits for All. AS Beauty Group is a personal care product company that owns Cover FX, Laura Geller Beauty, Julep Beauty, Mally Beauty and Bliss brands.

Mitzner has led many of AS Beauty brands' biggest marketing moves, including Laura Geller Beauty pivoting its strategy to attract and acquire more mature consumers. According to Mitzner, in April, AS Beauty Group's sales were up 140% year-over-year. "It's been fun for me to be at a company in an industry that they always say is recession-proof," Mitzner told Glossy.

On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Mitzner discusses the future of AS Beauty Group and the Gen X opportunity in beauty.

Taylor Frankel is one of three co-founders of Toronto-based Nudestix. And, as the beauty brand's main face, she has been spending the year celebrating its 10-year anniversary. She founded the brand with her sister, Ally Frankel, and her mother, industry veteran Jenny Frankel, when the two sisters were teenagers.

In today's competitive beauty market, making it to the 10-year mark deserves to be celebrated. As such, the brand has kicked off a tour, during which Frankel will participate in brand activations in her home base in Toronto, as well as in New York, Los Angeles and London. These customer-facing events will include panel discussions, workout classes and influencer dinners.

On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Frankel discusses Nudestix's points of difference, the unique ways it works with influencers and celebrities, and the strategies it's using to grow its skin-care business.

When Mielle Organics founder and CEO Monique Rodriguez started the textured hair-care brand in her kitchen 10 years ago, her goal was to create healthy organic products for her textured hair.

Now, a decade later, Mielle Organics has become a household name and staple for many consumers with varying hair types. The brand is distributed in over 87 countries and over 100,000 stores across the U.S. In January 2023, Mielle Organics was acquired by consumer goods company Procter & Gamble for an undisclosed sum.

On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Rodriguez discusses what's next for Mielle Organics under the new ownership and what it means to be a 10-year-old beauty brand in 2024.

Prequel Skin is less than a year old. But the direct-to-consumer brand, founded by dermatologist Dr. Sam Ellis, in partnership with Ben Bennett's incubator, The Center, has caught on. That can be owed, at least in part, to Ellis's social following: She has 336,000 YouTube subscribers, 226,000 Instagram followers and over 129,000 followers on TikTok.

The brand's products span multitasking cleansers and moisturizers for the face and body, skin barrier-boosting ointments and a duo of serums, including one with vitamin C and one meant to address skin redness.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Dr. Ellis discusses how she came to create content as a dermatologist, why that's proven valuable, why she partnered with The Center and how her brand is inspired by favorite French pharmacy products.

When Prose launched in 2017, custom hair care was an untapped market, allowing the brand to disrupt the space. Since then, Prose has sold over 10 million units and expanded to skin care, in May 2023.

May 2023 also marked a significant milestone for Prose: It reached profitability before bringing in about $135 million in sales for the year. In 2024, co-founder and CEO Arnaud Plas estimates the brand will do about $160 million in sales. Plas credited the brand's skin-care line as a major driving force behind its profitability. It has been reported that the category accounts for about 10% of the brand's sales.

In its next stage of growth, Prose will use its learnings and tech innovation to expand into new categories, including textured hair care, and build upon its momentum in skin care.

Three years into leading marketing for Prose, CMO Megan Streeter joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to chat about what's next for the brand, how it's further revolutionizing beauty tech and how the customization market is expanding. 

Since launching in 2018, Westman Atelier has become one of the most covetable brands in luxury beauty. From the $68 foundation sticks that introduced the brand to the market to newer launches like the Lip Suede Matte Lipstick ($50) and, most recently, the Suprême C serum ($325), the brand's products are the kind that people like to show off on their vanities or pull out of their handbags. The Suprême C serum is its second skin care product — the brand will be leaning more heavily into the category in the months ahead, with plans to grow it to 10% of its business in the next year.

Westman Atelier was founded by husband-and-wife Gucci Westman, the celebrity makeup artist, and David Neville, co-founder of Rag & Bone. Before founding the brand, Westman had stints as Lancôme's international artistic director and Revlon's global artistic director. She is known for her clean, you-but-better aesthetic and has worked with actors including Nicole Kidman, Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Aniston.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Westman and Neville come together to discuss the start of their careers, the brand's first true lipstick and new serum, and the reason Westman has remained the brand's most powerful marketing tool. 

As more consumers indulge in self-care at home, the body-care category is continuing to grow, allowing brands to seize the moment.

For 7-year-old body-care brand Billie, which was acquired for $310 million by personal care company Edgewell in 2021, the body-care surge couldn't have come at a better time. Before the acquisition, Billie solely sold direct-to-consumer. But in 2022, it launched in Walmart before expanding to Amazon, Target, Ulta and Kroger last year. In February, Billie rolled out its biggest category expansion yet with new body wash, body lotion and deodorant products.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Cooley talks about Billie's trajectory post-acquisition and the plans the brand has in store this year.

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Digiday Media's WorkLife is proud to present season three of The Return, a podcast about the modern workforce, with this season focused on middle management.

Last season, we heard what it’s like for Gen Z to enter the workforce for the first time in a post-pandemic world. We highlighted themes like why values are so important to Gen Zers, whether or not they are loyal to their employers, how they use TikTok for career advice, what it means to be a young professional who is a boss to older workers, and so much more.

This time, we’re hearing from the population of workers that some argue is the backbone of a successfully-run organization: middle management. They are the ones who are navigating those RTO mandates, welcoming a new generation of workers that have a different approach than those who came before them, the rise of artificial intelligence – the list goes on.

In season three of The Return, we speak to middle managers themselves to hear beyond their everyday stresses of the job, but what they need to guarantee everyone they manage has what they need to be the best at what they do. C-suite, listen up because they need your help too.

We dive into how middle management stress is a decades-long issue (there are New York Times headlines dating back to 1971), how the wrong people are being chosen to be managers which is leading to the rise of “accidental managers,” what it’s like to have hard conversations and having to be a therapist at times, where people are finding support as a middle manager, and how AI is impacting the job of a middle manager.

With a Q+A format, you will hear in-depth conversations with folks including Colette Stallbaumer, Microsoft’s general manager of Microsoft 365 and Future of Work Marketing, Rob Pierre, former CEO of advertising services platform Jellyfish, and Emily Field, partner at McKinsey & Company who co-authored “Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work,” to name a few.

Season three of The Return is hosted by Cloey Callahan, senior reporter at Digiday Media’s WorkLife, and produced by Digiday Media’s audio producer Sara Patterson.

Subscribe to the WorkLife podcast now on Apple Podcasts – or wherever you get your podcasts – to hear the first episode on Tuesday, April 23.

Tina Chen Craig started Bag Snob, her original claim to fame, in 2005. She hustled her way to the front row of New York Fashion Week when "blogger" was still a dirty word and before "influencer" was in anyone's vocabulary. Then, in 2019, she did something she never expected to do and launched a beauty product, marking her first step in building a full beauty brand spanning skin care, body care and color cosmetics.

Called U Beauty, the brand launched on Net-a-Porter in November 2019 with Chen Craig's original product, the Resurfacing Compound. Based on units sold, it's still the brand's bestseller. The product, with various sizes priced $88-$228, is a multi-tasking serum with ingredients including retinol and vitamin C. Typically, these ingredients can't be combined, but the brand's patent-pending Siren capsule technology makes the mix possible.

On this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Chen Craig goes deep on everything from starting Bagsnob.com when a "Google domain thing" cost $10 to developing UBeauty's most recent launch, its Super Intensive Face Oil.

Get more from Glossy with the daily newsletter, sent out each weekday morning. Visit glossy.co/newsletters to sign up.

Running two beauty businesses without outside funding is no small feat, but Maria Hatzistefanis, founder and CEO of Rodial and Nip+Fab, is making it work. And her businesses are thriving.

Hatzistefanis launched the luxury skin-care and makeup brand Rodial in 1999, after being fired from her investment banking job in her early 20s. She went on to launch Nip+Fab in 2010. Now best known for its bestselling Glycolic Fix product range, Nip+Fab was originally meant to be Rodial's more accessible, mass-market little sister.

"My idea [for both brands] was to come up with products that would give you instant and long-term results," Hatzistefanis told Glossy. "I had a passion for researching ingredients that no one else was using."

Today, both Rodial and Nip+Fab are sold in over 10,000 stores across 35 countries. Rodial is distributed in luxury department stores, including Harrods, Selfridges and Blue Mercury, while Nip+Fab is available at Boots and JCPenney. "We have been growing double-digits year-over-year, for both brands," Hatzistefanis said. "Plus, profitability has been a driver of our business, and we've always been profitable."

On this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Hatzistefanis discussed the ins and outs of running a business for over 25 years and the next stage of growth for Rodial Group.

Get more from Glossy with the daily newsletter, sent out each weekday morning. Visit glossy.co/newsletters to sign up.

Along with being the founder of 7-year-old Megababe, Katie Sturino is an influencer (803,000 followers on Instagram, 25,000 on TikTok), a body positivity advocate and the author of the book "Body Talk," published in 2021.

Megababe is best known for its first product: Thigh Rescue, an anti-chafe stick of which over 1 million units have sold. In addition to being sold at Target, Ulta, Goop, Anthropologie and Nordstrom, among other retailers, the brand launched at Walmart in early March.

"Megababe is still self-funded; we have never taken $1 of fundraising," Sturino said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "It's a different type of approach than other brands that launched at the same time. Most people will take funding and grow really big."

Also on the podcast, Sturino discusses her start in content creation, Megababe's expansion to Walmart and new categories, the brand's first big marketing investments, and her response to the current heightened fixation on weight.

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Tattoos are now big business for the beauty industry.

Since 2021, tattooing and tattoo care products have attracted both investor and strategic acquirer attention. Brands like Mad Rabbit have raised millions in outside funding to provide tattooed customers with before, during and aftercare products. According to a 2015 Harris Poll, more Americans are getting tattoos, with 29% having at least one. Specifically, 47% of millennials have one compared to over 36% of Gen Xers. What was previously associated with only select groups of people, tattoos are now more common among people from all walks of life.

“A big agenda of Mad Rabbit overall is continuing to push and champion self-expression and make it normal and OK for someone to express themselves in any sort of room,” said Oliver Zak, co-founder and CEO of Mad Rabbit, on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.

Mad Rabbit launched in 2019 with $600 invested between its co-founders, Oliver Zak and Selom Agbitor. They bootstrapped the business until being cast on “Shark Tank,” where Mark Cuban invested $500,000 in the brand for 12% equity. Cuban has further invested in subsequent fundraising rounds. Mad Rabbit has raised $16 million in total funding thus far.

Speaking on the podcast, Zak detailed the marketing steps the brand took to support its 2023 launch into Walmart, the reasons why people need tattoo care in the first place and the factors driving interest in the tattoo care category.

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Love Wellness, the supplements brand created by "Laguna Beach" alum Lo Bosworth in 2016, is now eight years old. The brand's bestsellers include its Good Girl Probiotics and The Killer boric acid suppositories, both designed to support vaginal health, as well as its Bye Bye Bloat de-bloating supplement, of which 2 million bottles have sold. Last week, Bye Bye Bloat became a full-blown franchise with the launch of the brand's first true body-care products: a $14.99 Lymphatic Massage Roller, a $24.99 Firming Clay Body Mask and a $19.99 Detoxifying Body Oil.

On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Bosworth discusses the origin story and growth of Love Wellness plus the playbook she's leveraging to build a product franchise. 

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When Clinique’s 52-year-old Black Honey lipstick went viral on TikTok in 2021, it represented a major shift for both the decades-old brand and the beauty industry.

For the industry, it introduced the notion that viral TikTok moments could be a cash windfall for brands and worthy of their always-on marketing attention. For Clinique, it jumpstarted the need for the brand to act like a nimble startup and affirm its cultural currency. Since then, Clinique has been bullish on reaching younger consumers through college campus activations, building on its Black Honey fame with new products, and further developing its science-led background with new studies and liaisons with medical experts. At the helm of this growth is Michelle Freyre, global brand president of Clinique. She joined The Estée Lauder Companies in 2020 as svp and global general manager of Clinique. Previously, Freyre spent 20 years at Johnson & Johnson holding various leadership roles within its consumer health product division.

Freyre joined the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast to talk about post-Black Honey virality, the significance of Gen Z’s love for skin care and the new needs states of today’s beauty customers. 

Though actor, podcaster, investor and brand founder Sara Foster never intended to launch a clothing line, it turns out she's quite good at it. Four-year-old Favorite Daughter, which she and her sister Erin Foster created in partnership with Centric Brands, was profitable by year two, she said. In 2023, the brand tiptoed into beauty, launching a duo of lip oils with Saint Jane, the "clean" beauty brand founded by Casey Georgeson. Now, with Georgeson's help, Favorite Daughter is launching its first two fragrances — one for each sister. Sara Foster's signature is called "Grecian Nights," while Erin Foster's is "Italian Summers."

"We knew we wanted the packaging to be a beautiful moment. And we knew we wanted the fragrance to be the cleanest, but with real efficacy — that's a problem with clean fragrances; they don't last," Sara Foster said, regarding the fragrance development process.

On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Sara Foster discusses the road to launching a brand, the brand's expansion into beauty, the type of partners she wants to work with and the reason she prefers a customer event over an influencer blowout. According to Foster, beauty isn't the last new category you'll see from the brand. "I think, eventually, Favorite Daughter will be providing everything for you," she said.

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Maintaining the cultural relevancy of a 40-year-old brand is no small feat. However, Sarah Koch, svp and gm of Kendo Brands, is up to the task when it comes to OleHenriksen skin care.

“You have to be true to your core as a brand, but then you have to continue to evolve with the consumer so that you're relevant to where he or she is in their lives,” said Koch on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.

The anti-aging brand was founded in 1983 by Ole Henriksen, a Danish esthetician who developed a collection of products that exfoliate, treat and soothe the skin. The 40-year-old brand was purchased by Kendo Brands in 2011 and relaunched in 2017. At the time of the relaunch, the portfolio was streamlined into four franchises to target the top five skin-care concerns and sharpen the focus on the brand's Scandinavian roots.

But brand relevancy is also about where the brand is found. In January 2024, the formerly Sephora-exclusive brand expanded to Ulta Beauty. Also this year, the brand plans to expand its best-selling Banana Bright franchise with an undisclosed product.

“It's the sort of launch that brings everything together — like our Scandinavian heritage, efficaciousness and joyful glow — into one product. It will be potentially game-changing for the brand,” she said.

Koch further spoke on the Glossy Beauty podcast about brand relevancy, the reason OleHenriksen won't be launching scalp care anytime soon, and the motivation for teaming with TikToker Alix Earle. 

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Kyle Leahy, Glossier's first CEO after its founder Emily Weiss vacated the role in May 2022, has had a busy first year-and-a-half in the job. She brought the brand into wholesale for the first time. brokering its partnership with Sephora, which has been a great success. She's also continued the brand's WNBA partnership, launched its first college tour and increased the cadence of its launches. But perhaps most importantly, she can be credited with the revival of the brand, which, as she said in her 2023 Glossy 50 profile, is a long-haul job: “We genuinely believe we’re on year 10 of building a 100-year brand.”

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Leahy spoke about all of the above, in addition to what the brand did when Reddit leaked its eye cream launch and what Glossier has in common with Taylor Swift. She also addressed social media rumors regarding whether or not the brand had reformulated its bestselling fragrance, Glossier You. 

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Botox has dominated the neurotoxin market since its FDA approval for cosmetic use in 2002. However, its iconic status would not be possible without the backing of global company Allergan Aesthetics.

In addition to Botox, Allergan Aesthetics itself a subsidiary of pharmaceutical company AbbVie, which houses aesthetics brands including Juvéderm, SkinVive, Kybella and Coolsculpting, among others. In its full-year 2023 earnings released in February, AbbVie reported that the global net revenue of its aesthetics portfolio was about $5.3 billion, with global Botox Cosmetic's net revenue reaching $2.7 billion and global Juvéderm's net revenue equalling $1.4 billion. Leading this portfolio of aesthetics products, and guiding the future of the aesthetics industry, is Carrie Strom, svp of AbbVie and Global Allergan Aesthetics president.

Strom has kept busy over the last year. In May 2023, Allergan received FDA approval for Skinvive by Juvéderm, and in early Oct. 2023, it became available for patients to receive as a treatment. Skinvive has been available in Europe since 2017 and marketed under the name “Volite.” Plus, the company has driven countless marketing moments, including the first-ever Juvéderm Day in Aug. 2023 and the fifth-annual National Botox Day in Nov. 2023. In addition, Strom has busied herself by shoring up Botox’s status, as competitors, including Jeuveau and long-lasting neurotoxin Daxxify, nip at its heels.

In conversation on the Glossy Beauty podcast, Strom discussed how younger consumers are changing the aesthetics market and how Skinvive can serve as an entry point for new patients, among other topics. 

Renée Rouleau, the celebrity esthetician and entrepreneur, opened her first spa and launched her first product in 1996. By 1999, she had become an early entrant in e-commerce.

Today, rather than giving facials, Rouleau is focused on her role of founder and CEO of her brand, which offers a robust assortment of SKUs. Still, she makes time for celebrity clients, which include Lili Reinhart and Demi Lovato. Rouleau is known for her unique approach to categorizing skin — she does so by assigning it to nine types, rather than the traditional three or four. 

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Rouleau spoke about how she categorizes skin, how getting a headstart on e-commerce worked to her brand's advantage and why, after 27 years, she's rethinking her DTC sales focus.

Though Moroccanoil co-founder Carmen Tal initially launched the 15-year-old hair- and body-care brand with little to no beauty experience, she has been able to grow it into a global empire.

In February 2023, Moroccanoil, which is currently distributed through thousands of salons, announced a three-day, Las Vegas-based event for professional hairstylists called The Collective. Meant to showcase the brand's network of global talent, the sold-out event eventually hosted 2,000 people in Las Vegas.

"Every [attendee] had the opportunity to either learn or demonstrate their skills. It was incredible to see the [hair-care] community, which is very close, share information," Tal said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "Trends are changing and tools in the industry have changed, allowing [hairstylists] to do better work. ... Everyone left with a sense of accomplishment and education."

With the surprise success of the event, Tal said she is looking forward to producing similar opportunities to bring the brand's community together IRL this year.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Tal talked about the importance of community, as well as her brand's longevity in the hair-care space and its road to becoming a global brand. 

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This week, we’re doing things a little differently. Joining us on the Glossy Beauty Podcast is Laurie Lam, E.l.f. Beauty's chief brand officer, providing an up-close look at the beauty brand’s latest project: a 15-minute short film, “Cosmetic Criminals,” which is playing in select AMC theaters before the start of the movie “Mean Girls”. It is also streaming on Amazon Freevee. The film parodies the true crime genre, prompting viewers to piece together who is “E.l.f.-pinching,” which is the brand’s term for “borrowing” products without intending to return them. The concept, Lam said, was introduced to the brand by its community.

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With over a decade's worth of experience in the hair-care industry, entrepreneur Shelby Wild is now venturing into the mass hair-care space. In July 2023, Wild unveiled California Naturals, a clean hair-care brand that launched direct-to-consumer and with exclusive distribution at Target. Compared to her previous hair-care brand, Playa, Wild is taking a different approach to hair care by zeroing in on more affordable but still effective products. Currently, all of California Naturals products are priced under $10.

According to previous Glossy reporting, prior to launching California Naturals, Wild raised $4 million from consumer investors L Catterton, Sandbridge, Midnight Venture Partners and Elizabeth Street Ventures. Investors Eric Ryan and Roth Martin also contributed to the brand's funding round.

Though California Naturals, with its accessible price point, may target a different consumer, the core of why Wild got into hair care in the first place remains.

"Most of what I did at Playa informed California Naturals. I always knew that I wanted to create a mass market iteration of Playa," Wild said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I grew up in the South ... and we weren't a high-income family. So for me, throughout my childhood, product development and product discovery was happening on the shelves of Target, CVS and Walmart. It wasn't happening in Sephora or Ulta. While I was creating these prestige products [at Playa], I was also seeing and hearing the feedback — not only from our own customer service channels, but also from my peers at home — that the price point was just too high."

As California Naturals approaches its first anniversary, Wild said a few exciting things coming down the pipeline. For starters, the brand tapped pro-skater Tony Hawke, who also serves as the chief culture officer, to create a new fragrance for the brand set to launch this month. A-list actor Owen Wilson also joined the brand and will be a major part of the product development side of the business as well as future marketing campaigns. And in February, California Naturals is set to launch moisture shampoo and conditioner, which was mostly driven by the brand's community and audience.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Wild talked about the reason she launched a second brand and the differences between mass and prestige. 

After working in Hollywood for over two decades, Ashley Tisdale has now set her sights on the wellness space. In 2020, she launched an online community platform called Frenshe with the goal of making wellness and wellness-focused goals a bit more accessible to all. Two years later, that community transformed into the wellness brand Being Frenshe. And in July 2022, the brand launched at Target with a 45-product assortment spanning candles, body washes, hair masks and bath bombs.

"I wasn’t even thinking about doing a product line. I was very much just wanting to connect with people," Tisdale told Glossy in a July 2022 interview. "I started to understand what [people] were going through in the pandemic, together."

In the years since, Being Frenshe has had its fair share of TikTok virality due to the success of its hero products, the Body Serum Sticks, which have magnesium on the ingredient list. And in June, the brand won two Self Healthy Beauty Awards for its body lotion and body oil. Tisdale credits Being Frenshe's quick rise to fame to staying true to the brand's original mission of offering wellness with a non-intimidating and inclusive approach.

On this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, founder Ashley Tisdale talked about Being Frenshe's early stages and how staying authentic has helped the brand grow. 

Before the term "clean beauty" was coined, brands were making notable strides in the space. One of those was Pacficia Beauty, a 100% vegan and cruelty-free beauty brand founded in 1996 by Brooke Harvey-Taylor and her then-partner-now-husband Billy Taylor. The brand, which is currently based in Portland, Oregon, is partly a love letter to Harvey-Taylor's childhood, she said. She grew up on a ranch in Montana where she was first introduced to the world of clean, cruelty-free beauty.

"[Pacifica] is a beauty company based on the strong beliefs that animals, humans and the planet should be treated with compassion and that fearlessness is our greatest natural resource," Harvey-Taylor said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "We use this brand to make a difference in the world, and we work tirelessly to do that. I'm proud that this has been my trajectory in the beauty industry and my contribution. I've always had a very clear position on accessibility, fairness and justice."

Through the brand's progressive stances on sustainability, environmentally-friendly packaging and what Harvey-Taylor describes as "compassionism," Pacifica Beauty has been able to resonate with a diverse group of consumers, which has led to its longevity in the beauty industry. Now, Pacficia Beauty is looking to the future after a recent investment from private equity firm Brentwood Associates in 2022 and a newly focused business plan, which includes more innovative products and a prioritization of safe, accessible beauty.

On this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Harvey-Taylor talks about how Pacifica has been able to stay true to its core values while evolving and growing in the ever-changing beauty industry.  

Over the past year, the Glossy Beauty Podcast has provided an insider’s look into the beauty industry through thoughtful interviews, unique perspectives and forward-thinking commentary. But this week, we’re taking a look backward. 

For the final episode of the year, hosts Emma Sandler, Glossy’s beauty and wellness editor, and senior reporter Sara Spruch-Feiner, are joined by myself, Glossy’s West Coast Correspondent, to reflect on 2023 and offer our predictions for the year ahead. 

The changing finance landscape — and how it impacted brand closures, as well as mergers and acquisitions — was a topic du jour. As was the opportunity for brands using TikTok Shop. We dissect the growth and innovation in the fragrance category, which is having a gangbuster year, and what we can expect from influencer- and community-focused marketing in 2024. Keep scrolling for highlights, and be sure to listen to the full episode for the team’s end-of-year thoughts. We’ll see you next year!

Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight, the 23-year-old identical twins and co-founders of ITK Skin, got their start on YouTube in 2013, where they now have over 7 million subscribers. They also have 9.3 million followers on Instagram and 6.6 million on TikTok. Together, in partnership with the beauty incubator Maesa, the sisters launched ITK in August 2022. The brand started at Walmart, with 15 products priced at $7-$15. 

But, by the time they launched ITK, the McKnight sisters were already veteran founders, having launched their first business venture, clothing and mascara brand Lash Next Door, when they were just 16. 

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight discuss how they got their start on their mom’s YouTube channel, why Brooklyn got her esthetician’s license, why they think TikTok Shop will level the playing field for brands and what it was like to pitch their brand to Walmart.

Over the past five years, corporate venture capital (CVC) has emerged as a major player in the startup funding space. And CPG company Reckitt plans to be front and center of that change through its own CVC firm, Access VC.

In 2020, Rakesh Narayana, gm of Access VC, saw that most consumer venture funding was flowing toward traditional food and beverage consumer brands, not categories like sexual health and hygiene, to which Reckitt is dedicated. Reckitt owns brands like condom brand Durex, feminine hygiene brand Queen V and sexual wellness brand KY. Additionally, there was a dearth of brands serving or being led by people of color, coupled with a growth in better-for-you brands. Since its launch, in 2020 Access VC has invested more than $50 million in over 30 startups, including sexual wellness brand Maude and men’s wellness brand Asystem, across pre-seed to Series C rounds and beyond.

On the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast, Narayana shared that he grew up in India and was raised by a single mother before moving to London for higher education. From there, he worked at Boston Consulting Group as a consultant before entering the CPG category. He said his love for CPG stems from an appreciation for its tangibility and tactile nature and the way consumers interact with and are influenced by consumer brands. While at Reckitt in various roles, he saw the gap between large CPG conglomerates and more innovative indie brands, and the solution he spotted was corporate venture capital.

“There is a large difference and gap between big companies being able to do disruptive innovation and the startups and universities and laboratories that have real cutting-edge innovation,” he said. “Corporate venture capital, in some ways, is meant to bridge that gap. Large companies are exceptionally good at making $100 million brands into $1 billion brands but perhaps not as good at creating brands which don't exist [and growing them] to a $100 million brand.”

Narayana detailed the Access VC investing strategy, the way it differs from traditional venture capital and the role investors have in fostering innovation.

Cyndi Ramirez founded Chillhouse, a self-care spot in SoHo, in 2017. The idea was to solve for a white space she’d observed: a place to get an affordable massage, a manicure and an adaptogenic matcha latte, all under one roof.

During Covid, Chillhouse pivoted quickly to ensure its survival, launching press-on nails featuring its signature cool-girl nail art. Since then, the brand has also launched a suite of body-care products including a body scrub, mist and in-shower lotion. Today, these products account for around 70% of the brand’s business and are sold at retailers like Target and Urban Outfitters.

On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, senior reporter Sara Spruch-Feiner spoke to Ramirez about her original idea for Chillhouse, the pivot to press-ons and the process of choosing brand collaborators.

Olamide Olowe is a born entrepreneur.

The Topicals skin-care founder grew up in an entrepreneurial household and pursued track running, which enabled her to earn a scholarship to UCLA, where she initially studied pre-med to become a dermatologist. Topicals was born after Olowe's college roommate revealed a family connection to SheaMoisture. On the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast, Olowe said she learned that skin care, dermatology and beauty could be made accessible over the counter. The name Topicals serves a dual function because it means both something applied on the skin and something that is culturally relevant or topical. Topicals is dedicated to helping chronic skin issues like eczema and psoriasis for all types of consumers and is sold through Sephora and its DTC e-commerce.

Topicals has received wide praise since its launch in 2020, including being honored by Allure's Best of Beauty in 2023 and Women's Health 2023 Skincare Awards, among others. But the journey to get there was not easy. Just like many other female and BIPOC-founded brands, Topicals had a difficult fundraising experience, at first. But the brand went on to raise $15 million in outside funding.

On the latest Glossy Podcast, Olowe spoke with Emma Sandler, beauty and wellness editor at Glossy, about her entrepreneurial vision for the beauty industry, Topicals' early entry into Sephora and streetwear culture's influence on her business. 

Pritika Swarup has built a large following, thanks, in part, to her successful career as a model. A graduate of Columbia Business School, Swarup founded her skin-care brand, Prakti, in 2021. It was designed to blend Ayurvedic tradition with modern skin-care ingredients. It soft-launched with one product, an exfoliating powder.

Today, the brand has six products and sells direct-to-consumer, though expansion into retail will come next year. On this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Pritika discusses balancing modeling and brand-building, introducing the U.S. consumer to Ayurvedic ingredients, and giving back via Operation Smile, for which she is a global ambassador. 

Mona Kattan has been obsessed with fragrance her whole life. So after building Huda Beauty with her sister, Huda, following its launch in 2013, she decided to build her own brand, Kayali, starting in 2018. Now, Huda Beauty, Kayali and Wishful (which makes skin care) form the Kattan sisters' beauty empire.

Kattan's passion for scent is evident when she speaks about perfume. In January, she shared a video on YouTube displaying her "fragrance library," which stores over 3,500 bottles. Kayali, she shares on this episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast, had a big year. It launched its Yum Pistachio Gelato 33 perfume, a limited edition wedding collection timed to Kattan's own nuptials and, most recently, its biggest drop yet, "Oudgasm." The Oudgasm collection focuses on four interpretations of oud, a traditionally Middle Eastern wood note.

Kattan spoke with Glossy about her lifelong obsession with fragrance, her approach to building a brand at the right speed and her process of testing up to 500 new scents at a time. 

Dr. Dhaval Bhanusali's office is in New York City. But, on any given day, he could be in Miami or Los Angeles, or just about anywhere else, working on one of the various side projects that keep him busy both in and out of the dermatology office.

Dr. Bhanusali has founded multiple companies including Skin Medicinals, a prescribing platform allowing dermatologists to custom-create formulas for their patients at lower prices than traditional prescriptions. There's also HairStim Labs, which similarly aids in the creation of products helping patients experiencing hair loss, and Aire Health, which lets dermatologists create over-the-counter skin-care routines from vetted brands, at a discount. In addition, he's an adviser to Ephemeral — the long-lasting, but not permanent, tattoo startup — and the dermatologist-in-residence for Hailey Bieber's Rhode.

Dr. Bhanusali joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss his various businesses, including how he works with Hailey Bieber on Rhode and how he believes dermatologists can be most effective on social media.

Joey Gonzalez, CEO of Barry’s, said he used to hate working out in group settings.

Living in Los Angeles in 2004, Gonzalez found his way into the workout studio and fell in love with it. Barry's -- formerly Barry's Bootcamp until 2015 -- first began in Los Angeles in 1998 under Barry Jay. At the time, Barry's had a military boot camp theme with camouflage decorations and dog tags for clients. But over time, the fitness brand has shed that image in favor of a broader and more high-end aesthetic, including its well-known red lighting. The cult favorite workout studio now celebrates its 25th anniversary, building a solid following of devotees along the way. To date, Barry’s has 84 studios across 14 countries, with six locations in the U.S. It plans to soon expand into Israel, Spain, Bahrain and Egypt.

“There are mirrors all around the room [at Barry's]. And that is intended so that you can watch your form and have your eyes on yourself,” said Gonzalez. “It's very much you versus you. It can be competitive [between people], but for the most part, people are there to connect with themselves.”

Over the past 25 years, Barry’s has been able to withstand the fitness fads and Covid-19 impacts to emerge more resilient than ever. Today, Barry’s is once again profitable, surpassing $100 million in revenue in 2022, according to the company. It expects a 40% year-over-year increase in 2023.

In the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, fitness companies suffered. Gonzalez said that, as of the first quarter of 2023, Barry’s revenue is 99% back to where it was just before the pandemic. During this period, Barry’s debuted its virtual workout series called Barry’s X. Additional class forms include Barry’s original HIIT workout consisting of 50% treadmill running and 50% weightlifting, and Barry’s x Ride, which replaced running with stationary bicycling. There is also Barry’s x Lift and Barry’s x Release, which are strength training and recovery classes.

Gonzalez spoke with Glossy about how he went from client to CEO, what exercise habits around the world are like, and why when the doors open to the red room, you’re home. 

Violette Serrat, the mostly mononymous makeup artist behind the brand Violette FR, decided to become a makeup artist as the result of a costume party. She put some glitter on a friend’s face for the event, and inspiration struck. 

After pounding the pavement doing various makeup jobs, in 2011, she was discovered by Vogue France, which helped to kickstart her career. Since then, she has worked with the biggest beauty brands in the world. She's been a product development consultant for Sephora, an ambassador for La Mer and global beauty director of Estée Lauder. She is currently Guerlain’s global creative director for makeup.

In 2016, she launched a YouTube channel, where she started to build a following. She has 305,000 YouTube subscribers and 525,000 Instagram followers.

In 2021, she launched her namesake brand, with a small assortment of makeup products, skin-care products, a dry shampoo and a fragrance. Since then, she has continued to build the brand across categories, despite the fact that she built her career on makeup.

Violette joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss her brand's roots, evolution and future.

Digiday Media and WorkLife is proud to present season two of The Return, a podcast about what it’s like for Gen Z to enter the workforce for the first time in a post-pandemic world.

In season one, The Return followed an Atlanta-based advertising agency as the company returned to the office after a two-year pandemic hiatus. There were clear challenges among this population of workers who knew what a “normal” office used to look like. But what about a generation that is entering the workforce post-pandemic and has nothing to compare it to? That’s what we uncover across eight episodes in season two of The Return.

We see headlines repeatedly accusing this generation of being lazy, unmotivated, quiet quitters. But what's the real story behind this generation's attitude about work?

In season two of The Return, we speak with Gen Zers across the country to lift the lid on what motivates and inspires this young generation of workers, and how they’re not as work-shy as they’re often depicted. We also speak with seasoned workplace experts who can put the changing expectations of these young professionals into context.

We dive into why values are so important to Gen Zers, whether or not they are loyal to their employers, how they use TikTok for career advice, what it means to be a young professional who is a boss to older workers, and so much more.

Season two of The Return is hosted by Cloey Callahan, a Gen Zer and senior reporter at Digiday Media’s WorkLife, and produced by Digiday Media's audio producer Sara Patterson.

Subscribe to the WorkLife podcast now on Apple Podcasts – or wherever you get your podcasts – to hear the first episode on Wednesday, Oct. 18.

Jo Malone, CBE, was born special.

She was born with synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon wherein one sensory stimulation can create involuntary experiences for another. For Malone, this means she can experience smells visually. Malone parlayed this uniqueness into creating Jo Malone London, a global fragrance brand that The Estée Lauder Companies bought in 1999 for an undisclosed sum. Malone left the brand in 2006 after a breast cancer diagnosis, which rendered her unable to smell at the time. After a 5-year hiatus from fragrance, she reentered the category with Jo Loves.

“I've learned over the last few years that fragrance is not a business or a career. To me, it's my best friend and the thing I love doing most in the whole world,” said Malone on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.

Jo Loves has become a Gen-Z favorite. And it's notable for its fragrance paintbrushes, released in 2017, and an in-store tapas bar concept to introduce customers to scents in a playful way. As the brand steadily expands internationally, it’s also adding more hospitality partnerships including Shangri-La The Shard in London and the Park Lane Hotel in New York. For Malone, the goal is to change the world through fragrance.

Malone spoke with Glossy about how she restarted a brand from scratch, why Dubai inspires her creatively, what she thinks of clean-beauty fragrances and why she aspires to create 101 fragrances. 

For the past 10 years, Dr. Shereene Idriss has been a practicing dermatologist in New York City. And in 2018, she also became a social media star. Today, Dr. Idriss has 657,000 followers on Instagram, 441,000 on TikTok and 704,000 on YouTube. In October 2021, she opened her own practice, Idriss Dermatology, in Manhattan. Then, a year later, in October 2022, she launched PillowtalkDerm, her skin-care brand, named for the content series she'd become known for. In #PillowtalkDerm social media content, Dr. Idriss can often be found in bed, in her pajamas, educating her followers about skin care in her typical no-B.S. style. While Dr. Idriss built her robust following of "nerds," as she calls her followers, by calling out trends she's deemed unworthy of their hype and mostly shying away from paid brand deals, it's worth noting that she's also very funny.

When PillowtalkDerm, the brand, became available for pre-sale in September 2022, it sold out in less than 36 hours. It launched with three products, all aimed at hyperpigmentation and discoloration and labeled the Major Fade collection. Since then, it has released just one more product, the Depuffer, in April 2023. The arnica-filled roller serum was inspired by Dr. Idriss's patients recovering from treatments including injectables and Sculptra.

Dr. Shereene Idriss, spoke with Glossy senior reporter Sara Spruch-Feiner about the inception of #PillowtalkDerm on social, the reason she's turned down lucrative brand deals and the decision to kick off the brand with a focus on hyperpigmentation.

It is notoriously difficult to succeed in the luxury indie beauty space, and not many brands do. But by all accounts, Noble Panacea has superseded all expectations.

Noble Panacea launched in Oct. 2019, emerging as the result of the scientific discoveries of Sir Fraser Stoddard, a scientist who has received numerous awards, including the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His discovery of the organic super molecular vessel technology, also called OSMV, is the core of Nobel Panacea and its unique ingredient delivery system. The brand made a splash with a launch event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and has since signed on actress Jodie Comer as a brand ambassador. The brand is distributed in 13 countries and sold through retailers like Neiman Marcus, Harrods, Net-a-Porter and Moda Operandi. It has approximately 50 full-time employees.

Céline Talabaza, CEO of Noble Panacea, spoke with Glossy beauty and wellness editor Emma Sandler about what attracted her to the brand, how the brand is approaching the Asian market and what a luxury approach to social media looks like. 

When Idris and Sabrina Elba, husband and wife, launched their gender-neutral skin-care brand, S’able Labs, in July 2022, it was just ahead of the boom in celebrity beauty launches.

The brand had been in development for over a year, born during the height of the Covid-19 era. The impetus was an Instagram Live series the couple started together called "Together Tuesdays," in which they talked about couples. The idea of S’able Labs is that skin care is genderless and something that couples can share. Growing up in Vancouver, Canada and experiencing acne as a teenager, Sabrina Elba became a beauty aficionado from an early period. But the co-founder of S’able Labs said she also struggled as the only Black person in high school and felt the lack of representation in beauty, too.

“My relationship with beauty early on felt a lot like an investment on my part into brands that weren't investing in me,” she said. “I had a complete misunderstanding about how to care for melanated skin. But it wasn't only because I wasn't surrounded by people who looked like me, but it was also because the beauty industry didn't cater to people who looked like me.”

As her relationship and eventual marriage to Idris Elba blossomed, Sabrina was exposed to a more entrepreneurial culture and mindset, which eventually translated into S’able Labs. Today, the brand is just over 1 year old and sells five products ranging from $28-$50 through its e-commerce site and SpaceNK.

Zooming in from Camden, London, joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss how the Instagram Live series inspired the brand, what it’s like operating a celebrity brand and what it means to be a melanin-inclusive brand.

Sravya Adusumilli, the founder of Mango People, never thought she would become a makeup brand founder. But, after spending her academic career in a chemistry lab, she found she preferred being an entrepreneur.

Mango People is Sephora’s first Ayurvedic-inspired makeup brand, selling via Sephora.com. Mango People products include a bronzer stick, a highlighter stick and a multi-stick for cheek, lip and eye application. After becoming unsatisfied with the lipsticks she used, Adusumilli developed the brand around 2017 while she was a college student studying chemical engineering. After a series of experimentations, which included accidentally dying her mother’s kitchen pink, Adusumilli finally created the Multi-Stick, which sells for $27.

“Being a broke college student, I could barely afford to like get one makeup product, let alone several,” said Adusumilli. “That's how the idea of the Multi-Stick came to be; I focused on having safe ingredients on your eyes, cheeks and lips. And all you need is five minutes to look put together, which is all I had at the time.”

The hero ingredient, mango butter, helped inspire the name, as did the popularity of South Asian countries, many of which practice Ayurveda. Ayurveda is an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent. Popular therapies include yoga and therapeutic oils and ingredients like ashwagandha, ginger and turmeric.

Adusumilli joined the Glossy Beauty podcast to discuss how she created the brand, how her chemical engineering background is a boon to entrepreneurship and what it means to be the first Ayurvedic makeup brand at Sephora. 

When Jerrod Blandino and Jeremy Johnson first launched Too Faced back in 1998, the beauty startup world was a whole different game. Over the decades, the co-founders powered through all the big changes in the beauty industry, from the rise of Sephora to the onset of the influencer era.

After Estée Lauder Companies acquired Too Faced in 2016, Blandino and Johnson are at it again with a new company and two brand launches. Their new makeup brand, Polite Society, was unveiled on August 27 with Ulta Beauty as its retail partner. It joins the roster of Blandino and Johnson's new parent company, Toy Box Brands, which also recently unveiled jewelry-cleaner brand Diamond Drunk. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, the business partners share the history of their careers with Too Faced, as well as all the details on the new beauty brand, including the new products, the clean ingredients focus and the brand positioning. 

Related reads:

Sephora accelerates clean makeup push

‘More creative’: Why Too Faced is letting influencers produce its campaigns

It's no secret that natural deodorant gets a bad rap. Clean beauty consumers looking for brands that leave out ingredients such as aluminum have long complained of having trouble finding something that works.

These frustrations were what inspired Sarah Moret to found body-care brand Curie in 2018. Aluminum-free deodorant has come a long way since then, as Curie’s latest news shows: The brand launched into 4,300 Walmart locations nationwide on August 22. 

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Moret tells the story of the early days of the brand and the pivots she made along the way, including the introduction of hand sanitizer when deodorant buying fell off a cliff during the pandemic lockdowns. She also talked about her experience on the hit show "Shark Tank," and why it was as good for exposure as it was for fundraising. 

Patrick Ta has come a long way from the MAC counter, where he started working over 12 years ago in Scottsdale, Arizona. Today, the brand founder and full-time makeup artist travels the country creating looks for Gigi Hadid, Sydney Sweeney, Camila Cabello and Alix Earle, among other well-known names. He often documents the process or the finished looks for his following of 3.4 million on Instagram and 1.2 million on TikTok.

In 2019, Ta launched his namesake brand with a small array of products including a body oil, a lip gloss, a face mist and a fan to set the makeup in place. Since then, the brand has expanded to foundation, blush, contour, lipliner, lipsticks and a brow collection.

In the past few months, Ta has been active on TikTok, documenting a TikTok tour of sorts that took him from Alix Earle's Miami dorm room to Bretman Rock's Paris Fashion Week suite to his own hometown of L.A. for stops with Glamzilla, Kensington Tillo (aka @kensnation) and Patrick Starrr.

In this month's Glossy Pop edition of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Ta speaks about how he made it as a celebrity makeup artist, what celebrity makeup artists owe to the Kardashians and how Earle changed his perspective on TikTok.

Related stories:

Patrick Ta, Ashley Tisdale, Susan Yara and Glamzilla on leveraging a viral moment

‘It was easier for Kylie Jenner’: Makeup artist Patrick Ta on the launch of his brand and plans for expansion

Back in the day, the men’s grooming category was synonymous with shaving products. But not anymore. The rising acceptance of facial hair has led to a boom in beard-care products. 

Take Scotch Porter, for example. On top of the fact that it's the top-selling beard-care brand at Target, its beard conditioning balm is the No. 2 best-selling product in the retailer's entire men’s care category. 

“Beards have the staying power,” said Scotch Porter founder Calvin Quallis on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. Investors agree that beard care is big business, as well. The brand’s $11 million dollar Series B round was led by Pendulum, a firm founded by the Obamas' financial advisor. The brand is now expanding into body care, skin care and fragrance. 

In the episode, Quallis shares the founding story of the brand, which emerged from the popular barbershop he founded to serve as a hub for both hair care and events ranging from performances to political debates. He also talks about men’s care trends and the brand’s bet on new categories such as fragrance and skin care. 

Related reads:

Men’s grooming sales pick up momentum

Men’s brands remain ‘bullish on beards’

The mustache makes its comeback: How brands are getting on board

We all know that there are diehard skin-care enthusiasts out there who spend hours researching the ingredients. 

In 2021, Emily DiDonato and Christina Uribe launched skin-care brand Covey to target the opposite of that type of customer. Instead of "skintellectuals," they’re focused on the busy millennial who doesn’t have time to go down what they call the “skin-care rabbit hole.”

Both founders are bringing unique expertise to the brand. As a fashion model who has worked with countless brands including Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Givenchy, DiDonato has had firsthand experience with time-consuming skin-care routines. Uribe, meanwhile, is still working full-time at Google, which offers her firsthand knowledge of the process of researching search trends to find what beauty shoppers want. 

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, DiDonato and Uribe discuss the founding story of the brand, the Covey lip balm that went viral on TikTok, and the state of mainstream consumer awareness about popular skin-care trends like vitamin C and SPF.

In the past, most of the celebrity hairstylists that launched their own salons and hair-care lines were men. That’s been changing, as more female celebrity stylists are becoming founders.

Mara Roszak is a member of this new generation shaking up the hair-care market. You’ve probably seen her styling work on Natalie Portman, Emma Stone, Michelle Yeoh, Olivia Wilde or Zoe Saldana on the red carpet. When she’s not doing celebrity looks, she runs her salon, Mare, and her new hair-care line, Rōz, which launched in 2021.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Roszak shares the story of how she got started working with celebrities and how that led her to found her own brand. She also discusses the processes of coming up with silicone-free formulations and ensuring the efficacy needed for celebrity public appearances. And finally, she talks about how she's approaching sustainable packaging, and where she’s putting her focus during the ongoing WGA and SAG strikes.

In 2022, Chriselle Lim and Ben Bennett, re-launched Phlur, a dormant "clean" fragrance brand at the time, with Ben Bennett. Bennett is the founder of the brand incubator The Center, which is behind Saltair, Naturium and Make Beauty. The brand was a near-instant success, with its first fragrance, Missing Person, going viral on TikTok. That year, Lim was named to the annual Glossy 50, a list of people who made a mark on the fashion or beauty industry.

Last week, Lim launched the brand's ninth new fragrance, Father Figure. It launched with a splashy campaign featuring some of Lim's notable, powerful female friends, including influencer Aimee Song; founder of Make, Carrie Barber; founder of Arrae, Siffat Haider; co-CEO of Baby2Baby, Kelly Sawyer; and stylist Monica Rose.

Lim is also heavily featured in the campaign imagery, alongside phrases like, "I'll be your Daddy," and "One week they love me. Next week they hate me. Both weeks I got paid."

In this monthly Glossy Pop edition of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Lim speaks about Phlur's boom of a relaunch and newest perfume, and her journey from college vlogger to mega-influencer.

In a timely Glossy Beauty Podcast episode for the height of summer, this week features a category that has blown up in beauty: sunscreen. Long gone are the days when options were limited to a handful of brands like Coppertone and Hawaiian Tropic. In recent years, a wide range of chic new sunscreen labels have been hitting the market, while skin-care brands are churning out new SPF product launches.

One of these hip new brands is one-year-old Dune Suncare, which uses a colorful, nostalgic aesthetic to appeal to both men and women across all age groups. This week’s episode features the brand’s co-founders, Emily Doyle, an event production and marketing pro, and Mei Kwok, who also produces events and performs as a highly sought-after DJ. The founders have created a cool factor for the brand by working with luxury hotels, including QR codes to Kwok’s playlists in its packaging, and shooting campaigns with top fashion photographers. But its distribution plan is all about accessibility as they focus on scaling through wholesale partners including Amazon and Ulta Beauty.

When Snapchat first tapped into the power of augmented reality circa 2015, no one understood how impactful it would be to the social media platform and the beauty industry.

Snapchat's “Lens” feature was introduced in 2015. This feature, powered by augmented reality technology, allows users to change how they and the world around them look. But it wasn’t until at least 2017 that the beauty industry started to catch up through independent providers like Modiface, which was later acquired by L'Oréal Group in 2018. To help further Snapchat’s relationship with the beauty and fashion industries and promote its AR strategy, Snapchat hired Rajni Jacques, head of fashion and beauty partnerships at Snapchat, to lead the charge.

Jacques joined the social media platform in April 2021 from her previous role as fashion director at Teen Vogue and Allure. Jacques has been in the editorial world for the last two decades, holding positions at InStyle, Glamour, Nylon, The Fader, Vibe and Honey. 

Jacques sat down with Liz Flora, Glossy’s West Coast correspondent and host of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, to chat about all things augmented reality, Gen Z and the ways both play into beauty. 

The star of Netflix’s "Queer Eye," Jonathan Van Ness has captivated a massive fan base as a comedian, best-selling author and podcast host with a prolific social media presence. But he definitely hasn’t forgotten about hair. Nearly two years ago, he added hair-care brand founder to his expanding resume with the launch of JVN Hair. 

For this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Van Ness was joined by Teresa Lo, JVN Hair’s global vp and gm who has been with the brand from the start. Topics covered include Van Ness’s career journey, JVN Hair's founding story and the products’ unique formulations, which use hemisqualane and are silicone-free. Lo also addressed whether the brand is seeing any impacts from the recent changes at its parent company, Amyris, after the company announced layoffs and the departure of its CEO last week. 

While Van Ness is known for his humor and positivity, he’s also outspoken when it comes to more serious topics. In this interview, he reflected on the end of a Pride Month that was rife with homophobic rhetoric.

If you are one of Mikayla Nogueira’s 14.6 million TikTok followers, then you already know that one of the app’s biggest beauty influencers is getting married this weekend. But what you may not know is that she custom-created the lipstick and liner for her big day, with E.l.f. Cosmetics. The color resulting from the collaboration, which launched on Thursday, is cheekily named “Til Death Do Us Paht,” a reference to Nogueira’s famous Boston accent. Nogueira had partnered with E.l.f. before, and, as she struggled to find a lipstick she deemed perfect for her wedding day, she decided to reach out to the brand and ask if they’d like to work on one collaboratively.

Nogueira has been creating content on the app since the early days of Covid. Before becoming a full-time creator, she worked at Ulta Beauty. She has done product collaborations with brands including the indie makeup brand Glamlite and skin-care brand Glow Recipe, and has partnered on sponsored posts for brands including Charlotte Tilbury, L’Oréal, Maybelline, Rael and RoC.

In an April 2022 Glossy story, we reported on Nogueira’s ability to sell out a beauty product or catapult it into virality.

In late January, Nogueira was at the center of a TikTok controversy around a L’Oréal mascara ad she posted: She was accused of wearing false lashes in the “after” footage demonstrating the mascara’s results. After taking a few days off, Nogueira’s next video started with, “I’m sure we all know why we’ve all gathered here today. … It’s the month of love, bitches.” She never addressed the criticism further.

In the monthly Glossy Pop episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Nogueira speaks to the harsh realities of being an influencer with nearly 15 million sets of eyes on her, the pros and cons of going viral (and that ubiquitous TikTok sound of her saying Kim Kardashian’s name), and the creation of her wedding-day lipstick.

If you’re familiar with skin-care brand Dieux, you probably first came across its cult eye masks that all the cool kids have been wearing on Instagram. Now with multiple products, the brand’s celebrity fans include everyone from Hailey Bieber to Harrison Ford.

This week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast features an interview with Charlotte Palermino, who co-founded the brand in 2020 with Joyce de Lemos and Marta Freedman.

In addition to Dieux, Palermino is known for her prolific social media presence with a fan base of over 668,000 combined followers on TikTok and Instagram. In this conversation, she talked about how her social presence blew up on TikTok when she started sharing her strong viewpoints on everything from SPF to clean beauty. The conversation also touched on how this transfers over into running what she calls a “TMI” skincare brand that gives details on ingredients and clinical trials. On the creative side, she shared the concept behind Dieux’s “God’-like branding and the customer base it calls its “Angels.”

While economic headwinds are impacting the beauty industry these days, one area that’s still going strong is fragrance. Take InterParfums, for example. It’s the fragrance company that holds the licenses for over 20 fashion and luxury goods labels including Montblanc and Jimmy Choo. The first quarter of this year was its best in its 40-year history as it reported 24% sales growth and surpassed $1 billion in sales.

On this week’s podcast, InterParfums CEO and co-founder Jean Madar shared what’s driving that growth. He talked about the surge in sales that the category has been seeing globally since the pandemic began, and why fragrance is a means for a luxury brand to bring in new customers. And at a time when a new celebrity beauty brand is hitting the market virtually every week, he made it clear that InterParfums’ licensing business is still all about fashion partners. Madar gave the details on why the company has no interest in getting in on the fickle celebrity fragrance licensing business.

When Kim Chi made the finals on season 8 of "RuPaul’s Drag Race" back in 2016, fans were captivated by her stunning makeup artistry. Not long after, she became the CEO and founder of her own makeup brand, KimChi Chic Beauty. Launched in 2019 under Bespoke Beauty Brands, the incubator founded by Nyx Professional Makeup founder Toni Ko, the brand made its national retailer debut in CVS last year. 

On this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Kim Chi shares how she became what she calls an “accidental drag queen” back in 2012 and learned her elaborate makeup artistry techniques with no formal training. She also talks about the founding story of the brand and the way she's leveraging it to gain traction as one of the first beauty brands on TikTok’s shopping feature. Kim Chi also uses her platform to speak out about bias and discrimination, and is vocal about the drag queen ban attempts happening across the country. Below are some excerpts from the conversation.

Luxury fragrance brands have long relied on big celebrity brand ambassadors and traditional ad formats. Niche fragrance brands, however, are moving away from traditional strategies and finding major success on their own terms. 

For fragrance house Maison Francis Kurkdjian, the Baccarat Rouge 540 has earned cult status without a single official celebrity ad campaign. And despite not having partnerships, the brand has earned celebrity approval — Olivia Rodrigo wears it, and Drake has been rumored to wear it. On TikTok, the hashtag for the fragrance #baccaratrouge540 has received over 432 million views to date, and it was listed among the fragrance success highlights in parent company LVMH’s annual financial report for fiscal year 2022.

On this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast episode, the brand’s CEO, Marc Chaya, joins Glossy West Coast correspondent Liz Flora to share the story of the brand’s growth. He talks about how he co-founded the brand with perfumer Francis Kurkdjian and the ways in which the brand is disrupting traditional gender norms in fragrance. He also goes into the details of how Baccarat Rouge 540 became such a massive hit, and why the brand doesn’t work with traditional celebrity ambassadors.

Mike Einziger, the lead guitarist of the ’90s rock band Incubus, and his wife, science teacher-turned-rock violinist Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger, did not intend to start a beauty brand. 

Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger organically came upon her hero ingredient, a yeast-derived compound called malassezin, after being diagnosed with a harmless skin condition. The diagnosis led her to question whether something that "most people would view as a negative" could be harnessed to address common skin concerns — namely, hyperpigmentation and the common desire people have to lighten darkened patches of skin. 

That was over six years ago — that's how long it's taken the couple to build a team, complete extensive testing, develop a formula and bring it to testing. Plus, they fundraised to the tune of $6.2 million dollars, with key investors including The Female Founders Fund, Nyx founder Toni Ko and Paul Mitchell co-founder John Paul DeJoria. 

On May 9, the brand finally launched, with one product — Molecular Hero Serum — offered for sale on its e-commerce site.

Influencer brands might be common now, but that wasn’t the case half a decade ago. One of the original Instagram influencers, Marianna Hewitt launched Summer Fridays with her co-founder Lauren Ireland in 2018. As the first influencer brand at Sephora, Summer Fridays quickly became a top seller with its cult Jet Lag Mask. Funded by Prelude Growth Partners, the brand now has a full lineup of skincare and makeup products.

On this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast episode, Hewitt joined to talk about her career and how she discovered the power of Instagram early after starting out her influencer career on YouTube. She also shared strategies for going viral on social media with collabs like her Erewhon smoothie, as well as her thoughts on the most effective social platforms and formats for driving sales. While she may have gotten in on Instagram in its photo days, she discussed why the video format is the most effective sales driver on both Instagram and TikTok. 

If you’ve been into a CVS lately, you’ve probably noticed that the term “drugstore beauty” doesn’t mean what it used to. Amid the conglomerate-owned giants like Maybelline and Covergirl, you can now find hip indie startups on the shelves. Behind that strategy is Andrea Harrison, the retailer's vp of merchandising for beauty and personal care. For this episode of the podcast, Harrison talked about how CVS has been experimenting with its new "Beauty IRL" store format, what beauty trends are on her radar and what CVS looks for in startup brands ready to enter a major national retailer. She also talked about what happens when a product sold at CVS goes viral on TikTok.

If you’ve noticed hair has been getting a lot more colorful in the past few years, you’re not alone. Pink, purple, blue or orange hair is no longer just for rebellious teens and rock stars.

Hair dye brand Good Dye Young has been riding this wave of popularity—and helping drive it. Launched by Paramore lead singer Hayley Williams and her longtime hairstylist Brian O’Connor in 2016, the brand has been making its way into the biggest national retailers as it experiences double-digit growth. In addition to being stocked at Target and Walmart, it’s going to be launching in-store at Ulta Beauty on May 8.

Hayley and Brian join this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about the new launch and all things hair dye. They share the history of the brand and Hayley’s iconic Riot orange color, how they’re working to break down stigmas about colorful hair as it becomes more mainstream, their creative hair inspirations, their salon in Nashville that they opened last year, and more.

There are countless ways to launch a celebrity-founded skin-care brand nowadays. One can partner with an incubator (à la Peyton List and Pley Beauty), build a company within the framework of a larger conglomerate (i.e., Fenty Beauty and Rihanna with Kendo, or JVN and Jonathan Van Ness with Amyris) — or, you can build from the ground up. 

Some of the most successful celebrity-founded brands were birthed from the final option. They include Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez and Rhode by Hailey Bieber. 

Molly Sims has taken a somewhat hybrid approach to create her new skin-care line, YSE Beauty. She built her own team, tapping veterans from brands like Dr. Barbara Sturm and Poosh. However, she brought in a partner in the business, too —formulation expert and founder of SOS Beauty Charlene Valledor, who has created products for brands including Shani Darden and Patrick Ta. 

YSE Beauty is launching with six products, all focused on addressing hyperpigmentation, which became a major concern for Sims in her 40s — Sims will turn 50 in May. 

Sims has been working on the brand and its product development for the past three years, but she's been enmeshed in the beauty space for much longer. She has a weekly beauty podcast — "Lipstick On The Rim," which launched in 2021 — plus she's published beauty content on her shoppable blog, Mollysims.com, for the past seven years. Of course, she's also gained valuable beauty experience through her modeling and acting careers.

The latest Pop Edition of the Glossy Beauty Podcast features Sims discussing the development of YSE.

When Wende Zomnir co-founded Urban Decay in 1996, there was no Instagram or TikTok, and Sephora was still two years out from entering the U.S. Fast forward to today, she wrapped up her tenure at Urban Decay in December and has re-entered the beauty startup game with a new brand, Caliray. Since Zomnir launched Caliray in 2021, it entered Sephora in 2022 and just secured a Series A round of funding in February this year. In the episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Zomnir discusses what’s different about launching a beauty startup in 2022, compared to the ’90s. And with Earth Day this Saturday, she goes into detail about the brand’s sustainable packaging innovations, including its new compostable bamboo eyeshadow palette.

Launching Cheekbone Beauty in 2016 was a bit of a serendipitous moment for founder Jenn Harper. It all started in Jan. 2015 when she dreamed about "Native little girls with their brown little skin and rosy cheeks, covered in lip gloss." The dream, paired with Harper's recent sobriety journey and deeper discovery about her lineage and Ojibwe culture, inspired her to create a beauty brand. 

The journey to becoming a beauty founder was no easy feat for Harper. Until 2016, Harper's professional career was rooted in the food industry, specifically seafood. Though she had no formal experience in beauty, her determination to launch a successful brand and celebrate her indigenous culture were her biggest motivators. Through thorough research and sourcing, Harper launched Cheekbone Beauty in Nov. 2016 as a DTC brand.

"Going back, of course, I'd love to do things differently," Harper shared on the latest episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast. "However, I learned so much from starting things the way [I did], by being super scrappy about how we were going to build and learning how to [launch a business in real time]." 

In 2019, after Cheekbone Beauty's launch, Harper went on "Dragon's Den," a fundraising show similar to "Shark Tank." She did not accept an offer, but the exposure helped catapult Cheekbone Beauty's brand awareness. In addition to her experience on "Dragon's Den," Harper connected with Raven Capital, the first Indigenous investment fund in the world. The company initially offered Harper $350,000 to transition her business from being a private white label to creating its own products and packaging. Thanks to the funding, in March 2020, Cheekbone Beauty launched with its first proprietaryproduct, the Sustain Lipstick. 

As Harper looks to the future, she said she's excited about Cheekbone Beauty's direction. In 2021, the brand launched in Sephora Canada. And most recently, Cheekbone Beauty secured a partnership with Thirteen Lune — it will be available to shop on the marketplace's website and in 600 J.C. Penney locations. Apart from retail expansion, Cheekbone Beauty is also committed to innovation on the sustainability front through its packaging and clean ingredients. 

Like many people who rerouted their career path in the last three years, Cynthia Sakai made a mid-pandemic leap from the fashion industry to personal care.

"I had been in the fashion space for a really long time, and there was something missing. I felt I wasn't doing enough; I wasn't doing something that was making a difference," Sakai said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "The beauty space and the wellness space was something that, as a consumer, I always loved — but I never wanted to create a brand just to create another brand."

A CFDA designer who founded the Vita Fede jewelry brand, Sakai switched gears in 2020 by introducing evolvetogether with a line of medical-grade face masks. After proving popular among celebs including Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber, the masks’ sales funded the brand’s expansion to a range of gender-neutral personal care products, each with innovative sustainable packaging. Among them: a powder face wash with dissolvable packaging, refillable hand sanitizer in glass bottles and biodegradable storage bags. Its best-sellers are a lip balm, a hand cream and a deodorant. 

“Consumers today want high-performing products that feature beautiful design, and are good for people and the planet,” she said. 

She added that sustainability alone has never been enough to clinch the sale. “You can't expect to change consumer behavior,” she said. “So we want to create a brand [where] people love the product first. They love the performance of it. And even if it wasn't sustainable, they would come back to us to purchase it."

In the year ahead, evolvetogether plans to roll out new products, including candles and body care. It will also be fundraising, Sakai said.

If you’ve followed beauty dupe trends on TikTok, you’ve most likely come across a product or two from Milani Cosmetics. From its lip oil to its concealer, the mass makeup brand has seen multiple products go viral thanks to dupe-obsessed influencers like Mikayla Nogueira. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, the brand’s CMO, Jeremy Lowenstein, shares the details on the brand’s marketing strategy at a time when both TikTok and inflation are making price a big focus in beauty. Topics included how Milani responds to viral product moments on TikTok through campaigns and inventory, how it chooses its influencer collab partners, and why it’s important to have the right content for the right platforms. Also addressed: that viral TikTok video the brand made during the Depp-Heard trial last year.

Not long ago, the options for beauty consumers looking for clean hair care were limited to a handful of brands at either the luxury or the crunchy granola ends of the spectrum. Former business school classmates Lindsay Holden, Britta Chatterjee and Shannon Kearney saw an opening in the market for a mass premium brand appealing to millennials’ ingredient- and style-consciousness. Odele launched in 2020, quickly entering Target, where Holden was previously a senior buyer. Gender-neutral, minimalist, and at an accessible price point, it has since expanded to Ulta Beauty and CVS, and is in the process of launching products geared toward specific hair types. On this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Holden and Chatterjee talked about the opportunity they saw for clean hair-care at mass retail and their process for branding and design.

While she may be best known for her acting and singing, Vanessa Hudgens, is not new to entrepreneurship. The 34-year-old star, with 49 million Instagram followers, is behind Caliwater, a cactus water she said she drinks every morning. She also has a margarita line, which she co-created with Ashley Benson and Rosario Dawson for Thomas Ashbourne. 

She first launched Know Beauty in 2021 with singer, Madison Beer. It was a somewhat complicated concept in which users used a DNA kit, which was used to pair them with personalized products matched to their skin type and concerns. Hudgens admits it didn't land and decided to go back to the drawing board entirely. Yesterday, she re-launched Know Beauty as a completely different brand. This time, it is sold on Amazon and has just one product, the $35 Glacial Bay Clay Mask.

Hudgens partnered on the formulation with Cosmos Labs founder and CEO Mary Berry. And she noted in the conversation that the brand will continue to be "mask-forward." 

In the first Pop Edition of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Hudgens discusses what motivated the reinvention, what makes Know's starting SKU different and why Amazon made sense as a launch retail partner.

Meg Bedford has always been attracted to startups. Bedford, CEO of Loops Beauty, dabbled in editorial at Vogue before joining Tom Ford and eventually Pat McGrath Beauty, finally landing at Loops in Aug. 2022.

Loops, the 3-year-old hydrogel face mask brand, has made a name for itself as a buzzy celeb-loved brand. In Oct. 2020, Loops announced model Emily Ratajkowski as its partner and creative director. Then, in July 2022, Loops appointed “Riverdale” actress Camila Mendes as its partner and creative director.

Loops is sold through Ulta Beauty and expanded to Target in February. It was founded by brand incubator Syllable, in collaboration with content production house Shots Studio. Loops offers a variety of need-based face masks, ranging in price from $25-$35 for a bundle of five. The brand also offers a subscription service. According to WWD, Loops was expected to earn between $8 million and $10 million in retail sales in its first year in business.

When Tiffany Scott got the idea for Róen Beauty in 2017, her goal was to create a glam luxury brand centered on clean beauty products. After two years of searching, she found lab partners that understood her vision and mission. And she launched Róen Beauty in 2019 with non-toxic eyeshadows and a makeup brush. 

Shortly after the brand's inception, Scott met Róen Beauty's current creative director, Kate Synott, and the two hit it off. Scott's passion and innovative vision have successfully complemented Synott's expertise in makeup and skin care; together, they've transformed Róen Beauty into a premiere clean beauty brand. Since its launch, the brand has expanded to product categories including skin care, mascara and blush.

For 2023, Scott and Synnott said continuing to produce new and exciting clean beauty products that are accessible is top of mind. Expanding into more product categories and physical retail stores are goals, as well. 

"The success has been really great, and the partnerships have been really great," Scott said on the latest episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast. "But we want to expand into [more categories] this year. And we have another exciting launch coming in Q2 that's a retail partnership. [The retailer] is a really beautiful, clean, well-known beauty retailer in the U.S. and abroad."

Growing up in communities of color, Jeff Lee and Courtney Shields were both early to understanding the importance of diversity and inclusion in beauty. When they met virtually through peers during the pandemic, they instantly connected over a shared desire to create a multicultural collection of beauty products catering to all. Their mutual passions for making all women feel seen and beautiful birthed DIBS Beauty, short for Desert Island Beauty Status, in September 2021. 

The co-founders secured $2.6 million in an initial funding round from Tula's co-founders, as well as major stakeholders at finance company L Catterton, which also invested in Tula, and influencers. DIBS Beauty's less intimidating and more inclusive approach to beauty also made it one of the fastest-growing brands in 2022, according to research firm Spate. Thanks in part to the virality of the brand's hero product, Status Stick, average monthly searches for the brand grew to 2,470 in 2022.

"The mission of DIBS Beauty is desert island beauty status. It's the makeup you would take with you to a desert island," Lee said on the latest episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

In January, the company reported 700% year-over-year sales growth. With expansion top of mind for the co-founders, creating new, innovative products and expanding to new distribution channels are the biggest priorities this year. 

When Lauren Otsuki and Vimla Black-Gupta launched skin-care brand Ourself in February 2022, their main goal was to provide beauty consumers with cosmetic enhancement options other than injections and lasers. To date, the indie brand has received $30 million in funding for its groundbreaking, at-home biotech alternatives to clinical products. 

Ourself's science-backed products are said to give the same effects as fillers and toxins. The company's ability to leverage science has helped it gain a large following in less than a year. Currently, the brand has 23 products, with some standouts being a two-step lip filler alternative and a five-product hyperpigmentation healer. 

"The idea of Ourself was about looking like yourself — because when did that actually stop being OK? The second meaning of Ourself is that you actually do it yourself," Black-Gupta said on the latest episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast. "What our technology offers for the first time ever is to be able to get visible results that are self-administered from the comfort of your home. It's easy to use, and you get visible results."

Co-founders Otsuki and Black-Gupta have long careers in the beauty industry. Otsuki previously founded five biotech firms, including SkinMedica and Alastin Skincare, and is the evp of Glo Pharma, Ourself's parent company. Black-Gupta was formerly CMO of Equinox and also held marketing roles at Estée Lauder, P&G and Bobby Brown.

The duo is confident Ourself will revolutionize topical skin care. And as the brand prepares to celebrate its first anniversary, Otsuki and Black-Gupta are working to strengthen its DTC channels to ensure longevity. 

From Kylie Jenner to Martha Stewart, 51-year-old skin-care brand Mario Badescu has been cited as a go-to by a wide range of celebrities known for their strong thirst trap game.

What started as a small facial studio in New York City has now become a brand stocked in thousands of stores at national and international retailers. Joseph Cabasso, the president of sales and co-owner of Mario Badescu, joins this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk the past, present and future of the brand. He tells the story of the brand’s history, including how his family acquired the brand and and who Mario Badescu was. During the episode, he shares accounts of its early days–including its big break with Henri Bendel and the start of its 40-plus-year relationship with Martha Stewart, who still goes into its New York salon for monthly facials to this day. He discusses the background of Mario Badescu’s best-selling hero drying lotion, as well as how the brand has evolved over the years to reach new generations, from Urban Outfitters and the VSCO girl era to TikTok today. He also gets candid about TikTok’s skin-care “cancel culture,” why his company is keeping prices low in a time of inflation, and why the brand is not big on paid influencer marketing.

One of only 17 artists to ever achieve EGOT status, singer-songwriter John Legend is also a man of many business ventures, such as wine, fashion and now skin care. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, he shares all the details of his newly launched brand, Loved01, which debuted in CVS on February 1 and enters Walmart in March. Speaking to Glossy not long after welcoming his third baby, he talked about the process of developing the brand, including how it caters to melanin-rich skin, what inspired him during the creative design process and why he chose the brand’s accessible price point. He also talked about the gender-neutral concept of the brand, as well as the state of gender in culture these days. Listen to hear him weigh in on why men are taking better care of their skin, sharing their feelings and embracing the “soft life.” He also discussed the backlash from patriarchal forces and the impact that’s having on politics.

Formerly the CEO of Ben & Jerry’s, Jostein Solheim took the helm of Unilever’s Health & Wellbeing division in June 2021. He’s drawing on over 30 years of experience at Unilever to guide the 4-year-old division through its acquisitions, which have so far included wellness and supplements brands including Nutrafol, Liquid I.V. and Olly. The company has high hopes for the new division with “well north of €1 billion” in net sales annually, he said. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Solheim weighs in on what’s driving “the fusion of wellness into beauty and beauty into wellness,” as he puts it; how wellness brands are breaking taboos on topics like women’s hair loss; and which wellness trends Unilever is looking at for future acquisitions.

A beauty industry veteran, Victor Casale knows a thing or two about building brands. After serving as the chief chemist at MAC Cosmetics from its inception through its acquisition, he later went on to found CoverFX. Now, he’s back in the beauty startup world in a big way as the co-founder of two brands he’s helping run simultaneously: custom skin-care brand Pure Culture Beauty and refillable makeup brand MOB Beauty.

His interest in revamping the way beauty is packaged and sold comes from a long-held interest in sustainability. In fact, he spearheaded MAC’s “Back to MAC” package recycling program 35 years ago, pre-dating municipal recycling in many cities. Now, he’s the co-founder of beauty recycling program Pact Collective, which has 160 members and partnerships with retailers including Ulta Beauty and Sephora. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Casale goes into extensive detail on refillable beauty, his experience with recycling in the early days, the way Pact Collective works and how consumers can demand change.

From an early age, Richard Parker was aware of his skin. When Parker was a teenager, he was diagnosed with a skin condition caused by sun damage called ochronosis. And in his early 20s, he suffered from acne. After meeting multiple dermatologists and learning more about products and ingredients that could help his conditions, Parker was inspired to venture into health and beauty to share that knowledge with others.

The knowledge Parker gained from medical experts and his own studies led him to launch Rationale in 1992. Since its creation, the skin-care brand's sole purpose has been to equip consumers with the necessary information and products to help repair damage caused by the sun and other free radical exposure. 

"The information [on how to maintain healthy skin] was so valuable to women [when we launched] because there weren't any of the codebreakers or websites that we all have access to today," Parker said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "Some of the vital components that we now know are important to skin health, like immune boosters and antioxidants, didn't exist in skin care at that time." 

Rationale's unique and medically-backed approach to skin care catapulted the brand's growth in Australia. Three decades later, Rationale is considered a cult favorite among many of Australia's biggest celebrities and skin-care enthusiasts. Parker is now grooming the brand to connect with consumers around the globe. He's currently focused on the U.S. and Southeast Asian markets. 

After selling her skin-care brand Nyakio Beauty to Unilever in 2017, Nyakio Grieco set her sights on beauty retail with the launch of Thirteen Lune in 2020. As multiple beauty retailers were pledging to offer at least 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned brands, she came up with a “90/10” model for Thirteen Lune: 90% of brands are BIPOC-owned, with 10% owned by those who demonstrate allyship.

With $1 million in funding from celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow and Sean Combs and a $3 million seed round led by Fearless Fund, Thirteen Lune is in the process of taking over all of JCPenney’s former Sephora locations. It also stocks Grieco’s new skin-care venture, Relevant, which was launched in 2022.

Physical retail is a big part of Grieco’s vision for Thirteen Lune, which will be launching its first standalone physical store early this year in Los Angeles. In this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Grieco shared her success story from the inspiration of her first brand launched in 2002 to her current beauty ventures.

It’s that time of year again. To wrap up 2022 on the Glossy Beauty Podcast, West Coast correspondent Liz Flora, beauty and wellness editor Emma Sandler, and senior reporter Sara Spruch-Feiner sat down from New York and Los Angeles to have a Zoom chat about the biggest beauty industry trends of the year.

The power of short video for beauty was more obvious than ever this year, thanks to not only the impact of viral TikTok trends driving sales spikes for brands, but also to an influx of social platforms emphasizing the format. But challenges with social advertising due to Apple’s iOS policies, along with Gen Z’s love of shopping at retailers, have driven more beauty startups offline and into retailers. Meanwhile, the jury is still out on what role the metaverse will play in future beauty sales, with brands experimenting with a variety of campaigns in virtual worlds.

For many consumers in the market for cosmetic procedures, busy lives often mean that anything with an at-home recovery period isn’t always possible. That concept has been a big selling point for Dr. Dennis Gross’ eponymous skin-care brand, which is still going strong with its cult Alpha Beta Universal Daily Peel after over two decades.

Created to offer a chemical peel with no skin redness or need to stay home, Dr. Dennis Gross Skincare’s peel is “now the number one selling peel in the world,” said Dr. Gross on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast. With a growing number of products added to its lineup, a minority investment from private equity firm Main Post, and plans to expand further internationally, the brand has seen “explosive” growth, he said.

On the episode, he shares its founding story and plans for expansion, while weighing in on the rise of dermatologist brands and why he’s not succumbing to TikTok trends.

In 2008, Mario Dedivanovic was working the retail floor at Sephora. Now, his own eponymous brand can be found on its shelves.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, celebrity makeup artist and brand founder Dedivanovic sat down to discuss his epic career journey and how it brought him from becoming a top celebrity makeup artist to launching his brand Makeup by Mario in 2020.

The conversation, of course, includes Kim Kardashian. Fans of her reality shows have likely seen him by her side in glam session scenes throughout the years. While most closely associated with Kardashian, he’s worked on a high-caliber client list over the years that includes Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, Kate Bosworth, Demi Lovato and Naomie Harris.

For Akash Mehta, Ayurvedic beauty is a family business.

Growing up in a British-Indian household, Mehta interacted with Ayurveda, an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent, through his mother and grandparents. Meanwhile, his father worked in the beauty industry as a fragrance entrepreneur. Despite not initially planning to work in beauty, Mehta now sees the value in his exposure to the industry through his father. In early 2020, Mehta launched Fable & Mane, an Ayurvedic-inspired hair-care brand, with his sister Nikita Mehta. It debuted out of SOS Beauty, an incubator behind brands like Summer Fridays, Ouai, Patrick Ta Beauty and Shani Darden Skincare.

Fable & Mane sells shampoo, conditioner, an oil mist and a scalp scrub, among other products. Products are priced $16-$49 and sold through Sephora and Fable & Mane's e-commerce site.

"At the same time [of our launch], there was no representation in the industry like us. We went to Sephora, and there was no Ayurvedic hair brand," Mehta said. "With Ayurveda products, [the issue] is that they smell. But we're all busy and going out, so I wanted [to introduce] something that smells great and performs."

On the latest episode of the Glossy Podcast, Mehta spoke with Priya Rao about building the brand, unexpected viral moments on TikTok, plans for 2023, and the brand potential within the buzzy and booming hair space. 

When Harry Slatkin and his wife, Laura, built Slatkin & Co., they disrupted the fragrance industry by making home fragrances accessible to a wider demographic.

Slatkin sold Slatkin & Co. to Limited Brands, which owns Bath & Body Works, in 2005. But he kept his role as executive chairman and president of the company, and eventually took over the entire home fragrance division. After growing the business to $1.3 billion, Slatkin stepped down from his role in 2012. Today, the company does $2.3 billion in home fragrance sales, according to Slatkin.

'When I started, I was entrepreneurial at Limited Brands. [Lex Wexner] let me set up offices in New York, and I had my own team," Slatkin said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "As soon as we started hitting $400 million and $500 million [in sales], I was becoming a part of these big teams, and the entrepreneur and the excitement of it starts to leave. … It was no longer what I could call hands-on, for me. I decided, after getting to a billion dollars [in revenue], that it was time for me to step down."

Slatkin consulted for Bath & Body Works for three years after selling his company, but at the same time, he pivoted into fashion through a partnership with Tommy Hilfiger. The duo went on to acquire apparel brand Belstaff in 2011.

Slatkin is now focused on growing the company's distribution for its current offerings, with no plans to expand to more categories in the near future.

When beauty and personal care executive Rod Little joined personal care conglomerate Edgewell as CFO in 2018, the company’s core businesses of shaving and feminine care were seeing mid-single-digit declines. Competing with giants like Procter & Gamble and DTC disruptors like Billie, the company was in need of a transformation. 

Rising to CEO in 2019, Little identified the areas that needed to change at the company, which owns household name brands such as Schick, Banana Boat and Playtex. 

“We had gotten into a rhythm of being too technology-focused, and we had been led by technology, as opposed to being led by the consumer,” he said on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

His turnaround strategy included not only moving the focus to the consumer, but also adopting a startup mentality and embracing new acquisitions in growth categories. While the company’s attempted acquisition of Harry’s was blocked by the FTC in 2020, the company has made four acquisitions in the past five years: men’s grooming brands Bulldog, Jack Black and Cremo, and razor startup Billie. With its new brands driving double-digit growth, Edgewell’s shaving and feminine care categories have moved up to “mid-single-digit” growth this year, while its sun-care category is going strong. On this week’s episode, Little shares details on the company’s acquisition strategy, his thoughts on the FTC decision and ways brands can stay innovative while scaling. 

Nearly every turn in Isamaya Ffrench’s career was unexpected. Ffrench grew up in a family of engineers and didn’t ascribe to the glamorous rituals her mother and grandmother practiced when she was a child. Her introduction to beauty came by way of discovering Kevyn Aucoin’s iconic beauty book “Making Faces.”

But even after studying that book cover to cover, Ffrench still didn’t have dreams of becoming a makeup artist, content creator or founder of her namesake beauty brand — all of which she is now. In fact, Ffrench danced professionally for 15 years. But a colleague at the contemporary theatrical performance group Theo Adams Company put her up for a body painting job at i-D magazine, knowing Ffrench painted faces at children’s parties. While unplanned, that gig planted the seeds for Ffrench’s future career.

“I was hired to do a very specific thing,” said Ffrench on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “I was using clay and mixed media and turning these models into Demigods. It was all very creative, but there was another makeup artist on set who had been booked to do the beauty because I guess I was a wildcard. I just remember there was this moment when I was washing up my really dirty, grubby brushes in the sink with washing liquid. I had big paintbrushes and sponges and all this grimy stuff. I looked over at this makeup artist who sat there with her beautiful kit laid out looking very clean. I was like, ‘Hold on a sec, why am I not doing that job? I should be doing that job, as well.'”

Ffrench continued to book editorial jobs, all while refining her subverted beauty aesthetic. Her work landed her ambassador and creative director posts at YSL Beauté, Tom Ford Beauty, Burberry and Byredo, which proved to be fortuitous primers to launching her own brand, Isamaya, in June.

“I don’t ever think I planned to do my own brand, or not until very, very recently, probably because I was very happy doing it for other people. … And then I sort of thought, ‘Well, maybe there are some things I would like to do for myself that brands wouldn’t let me do because they have their own language,'” she said.

Since debuting Isamaya this summer, Ffrench has leaned into the drop model, first launching the Industrial collection, a BDSM-inspired offering. Wild Star, a rhinestone cowgirl-esque drop, debuted Thursday with L.A. pop-ups supporting the collection.

When Harry's was founded in 2012, co-founders Jeff Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield were trying to connect the dots between quality razors, affordable prices and a brand that could connect with consumers.

"I can tell you exactly where it was' it was a Rite Aid on 14th and Wilshire in Santa Monica, California. I had run out of razor blades and was wandering through the store, looking for somebody to unlock the case, because they were locked away," said Katz-Mayfield, regarding the brand's inspiration. on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "They're locked away because they're so expensive and they get shoplifted all the time. It was this absurd experience. ... I was looking at the shelf and the brands that were on the shelf, and they didn't speak to me as a consumer. There was like a picture of a razor blade flying over the moon on one of the packages. Obviously, what the brand was trying to communicate was, 'Oh, there's all this space-age technology in this thing, and therefore you should pay $25 for a four-pack of razor blades.' But I was like, 'Should I really, though?'"

Katz-Mayfield Gchatted Raider, who had recently co-founded Warby Parker, another early DTC disruptor. The two met while in college as consulting interns at Bain & Company.

"We say he called me a lot, but actually, he Gchatted me. I was at work, and he said, 'Hey, I had this really bad experience in a drugstore, being overcharged for razor blades by these brands that don't really connect with me. Do you think you could take what you learned at Warby Parker, building [a] brand that people love, trying to do good in the world and for customers, and bring design and style to an industry that might have lacked it before, in razors and razor blades?' I remember reading that and thinking, 'Wow, this is an awesome opportunity,'" said Raider. 

Though the brand is just nine years old, Raider and Katz-Mayfield have lived many lives with Harry's. The brand has gone from a best-in-class startup to an acquisition target and the focus of the Federal Trade Commission, to now a different type of parent company that acquires and incubates its own brands. Those have included Lume and Cat Person.

"What Harry's and Flamingo both did was they found an unmet consumer need, an opportunity to do something that was actually better for somebody. … It started with delivering really high-quality products at a great value, and then also speaking to people how they wanted to be spoken to in these categories," said Raider. "We felt like we had the opportunity to build brands and unique products that differentially meet consumers' needs and do it on DTC. That could actually be applied anywhere in CPG."

As the barrier to founding a beauty brand is lower than ever, there is also more opportunity to spot the next big thing earlier in brands' life cycles.

Private equity firm True Beauty Ventures "was really born out of a frustration ... and being restricted on the types of businesses [we] could invest in," said TBV co-founder and general partner Cristina Nuñez on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Nuñez, the former gm and COO of Clark's Botanicals, had been approached by her co-founder, Rich Gersten, about building a beauty- and wellness-specific firm that could invest at the earliest stage. "[Prior, Rich] couldn't invest in any brand without a minimum check of $10 [million] or $20 million," she said.

True Beauty Ventures' sweet spot is between the $1 million and $3 million check size, and it has the goal of further supporting brands with more capital as they grow. Since founding True Beauty Ventures at the height of the pandemic, Nuñez and Gersten have invested in emerging brands like K18, Maude and Crown Affair, and best-in-class brands further along in their journey like Moon Juice.

When reviewing the beauty landscape, there are increasingly fewer companies that are built as family businesses. Today, the market skews heavily toward building a company and selling it at a faster-than-ever clip. Though deal flow continues to be hot, NuFace's founders Carol Cole and her daughters, Tera Peterson and Kim Morales, are focused on building their brand while keeping themselves at the helm for as long as possible.

"My mom, my sister and I started NuFace back in 2005. My mom's been an esthetician since the 1980s. After business school, I decided to go to esthetician school. We created our first device out of our family home in Leucadia, which is a little beach community of Encinitas [outside] San Diego," said Peterson on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Since founding the brand 17 years ago, NuFace has sold over 4 million devices. Peterson added that NuFace is up 24% in sell-through for 2022. The device category is typically a difficult market to create ongoing value, but NuFace has also avoided the fate of competitors, which saw initial buzz and interaction with their brands but never saw the repeat purchase.

"The innovation is key; that's where typical devices fail," she said. "They go, 'OK, I'm gonna do X and then I'm going to launch this completely non-related other device." Like, what are you? Are you cleansing? Are you microdermabrasion? It really confuses people, and that's where other devices have really struggled. They don't stay true to themselves."

There is no telling if beauty has reached its peak celebrity brand moment. But Lisa Sequino, co-founder and CEO of JLo Beauty, said that doesn't matter; her company doesn't solely trade on Jennifer Lopez's famous persona. In fact, Sequino said JLo Beauty is as much about pro-living as it is about Lopez.

"Over the past four years, at my old seat [at Estée Lauder Companies] — where I would sit and look at brands to potentially acquire [and see] where the market is going, where the customer is going — I always went to the same conclusion," said Sequino on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "Most companies are focused on a certain customer who's younger, [ages] 18-25. They ignored the subset, which I became part of: the power 40- to 50-year-old. To me, [that consumer] is at the peak of their power."

At 53, Lopez is arguably the most famous person exuding that power, making the thread of skin care and aging all the more impactful for JLo Beauty. Since launching in January 2021, the line, which is sold at Sephora and its own e-commerce site, has tripled in size, said Sequino. And it has over 1% market share.

"Any brand, whether it's celebrity or not, if it doesn't have a strong connection or reason for being with the consumer, it's not going to be as successful," said Sequino. "For us, one thing that rises to the top for Jennifer is her authenticity, in the sense of never giving up but also having a tremendous sense of self-worth, which took a long time for her to have and many of us can relate to. It's about making a discernible transformation in people's lives with an amazing product that works hard, feels good and makes a difference."

Below are additional highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

While health tracking devices are not new, Ōura, best known for its $300 Oura Ring, has somehow seamlessly bridged the worlds of technology, wellness and design, so much so that Kim Kardashian, Jack Dorsey and Prince Harry are all fans. That unlock happened largely due to the ring’s focus on sleep, according to Oura CEO Tom Hale.

“Most fitness wellness trackers are oriented around ‘get more activity,’ ‘get going’ and ‘get out there,’ and we’re like, ‘Hey, relax and recover, make sure that you’re well-rested,'” Hale said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

CMO Karina Kogan agreed, “There is now a movement in culture, a move away from sick care to self-care. Historically, when you think about tracking anything in your health people tended to count calories and count steps. It was all about weight loss,” she said. “Now, consumers are thinking about longevity. They’re thinking about their immunity. They’re thinking about how can I live longer.”

Ōura, the Finnish parent company of the Oura ring, launched in 2013 and on Kickstarter no less. While the original Oura ring was bulker in design, much like any piece of technology, the ring became sleeker and more technologically enabled. To date, the company has sold nearly 1.5 million rings and has a $2.55 billion valuation.

This week, the company launches its latest innovation, the Oura Gen3 Horizon which is reminiscent of a wedding ring and comes in a rose gold finish. It continues to track Ōura’s hallmarks such as daytime and live heart rate, advanced temperature sensing, blood oxygen sensing, all while providing consumers more options.

Below are additional highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

A culture shift

Kogan: “It’s all it’s a broadening the definition of health, so it’s not just about how many steps you took and how many calories you burned. It’s also about how well you slept, how much time you spent in REM or deep sleep, how much stress you’re undergoing, whether it’s physical stress or emotional stress, it’s about tuning into other aspects, other biometrics or biomarkers. I think consumers are very comfortable with metrics and there’s a certain gamification to scores. Oura gives you three daily scores, your readiness, sleep score and your activity, and those help guide you. The range of metrics that consumers are looking at are expanding, consumers want to optimize their life”

Future-proofing for uncertainty

Hale: “[With] all the things that are going on in the world today, Covid, a war, more economic upset, inflation, all the things, I think our mission is more important than ever because people are stressed out more than they’ve ever been. If we can do our part to help people understand where they are, meet them where they are, and provide them support for where they are, that’s immensely rewarding. It’s not about some giant outcome. It’s about doing good for the people of this planet, who are right now facing some really, really stressful times.”

Mara Beauty founder Allison McNamara was surrounded by beauty growing up — her father Michael McNamara is a longstanding executive in the space. But beauty wasn't an obvious career path for her, at least not at first.

"I was actually a television host and reporter before doing Mara," said McNamara, on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I worked at Popsugar, and for a long time, I did everything from fashion to beauty to entertainment, and hosted a show that was taken from digital to linear television. … I thought I was going to be the next Ryan Seacrest."

After that show got canceled, McNamara had a rethink, which led her to revisit her childhood notebooks. There, she found page after page of beauty brand and product ideas.

"I thought of the idea for Mara and I didn't know what would become of it," she said. "I went on the journey of creating the business but had no true intention of like, 'I'm going to build this type of brand.' It happened organically," she said.

Mara Beauty officially launched in 2018, DTC first before launching in Credo. In the four years since, McNamara has been sure to keep a thoughtful eye on what she delivers: new, innovative luxury products with a clear sustainability component. "When I started the business, it was a side hustle. Now it's become a true business, which is really exciting. But at the same time, I have such a clear idea of the products I want to create and where I want to go."

When co-founders and partners Matthew Herman and David Kien started developing Boy Smells, they weren't exactly sure they had a brand. In fact, Herman said the process of making candles in their living room in 2016 was a side hustle. Both Herman and Kien were working in fashion at the time; Herman was a designer at Nasty Gal and Kien worked in production at The Elder Statesman.

"We didn't have a ton of high aspirations for the brand when we first started it because we really wanted it to be a recreational little side hustle. It was in years two and three that we really started to get serious. We left our jobs. We were running the entire business out of the living room, then it was the living room and kitchen, and then the living room, kitchen and sunroom. All of a sudden, there was inventory in the hallways," said Herman on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

While "genderful" Boy Smells launched at Sephora this month, it first launched into retail via independent stores like Boy George in Austin and now closed Barneys New York, positioning the line as for a fashion savvy person but sold at a more accessible price. Equally thoughtful is the brand's perspective on collaborations. After the runway success of Boy Smells' Slowburn candle with singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves, it would have been easy for the team to take a rinse and repeat mentality to other partnerships. But Herman said whoever Boy Smells works with has to represent what Boy Smells is all about, which led the brand to its latest work with Grace Jones.

In essence, Hermand said, "[We asked ourselves], 'If we could choose one person that represents our genderful values and who we are as a brand, who would we want to work with?' And we went after that person, who is not the person that the digital people who want to inform every decision about ... audience reach or whatever [would choose]. We went after the person that we really felt represented our brand values," said Herman.

The beauty industry is filled with experts, dermatologists, aestheticians and makeup artists, all trying to leverage their expertise in an increasingly crowded market. But the cosmetic chemist — the person who formulates products and oversees development — has long stayed behind the scenes. That changed when Ron Robinson debuted his skin-care brand, BeautyStat, where he is founder and CEO.

After working as a cosmetic chemist at nearly all of the major beauty companies — including Estée Lauder Companies, Avon, Revlon and L’Oréal, for 25 years — Robinson decided to strike out on his own upon arming himself with compelling data. Robinson saw that there was a lack of stabilized vitamin C serums on the market and simultaneously saw strong Google search data for vitamin C. Thus, BeautyStat debuted with its hero product, the Universal C Skin Refiner in 2019, which Hailey Bieber now calls her “Holy Grail.” The brand, which started as a pure play DTC company, is sold at Violet Grey, Nordstom and Dermstore. Earlier this year, it launched in Ulta Beauty, where it is expanding nationwide.

While Robinson was at ease formulating high-quality products, he didn’t expect to be such a forward-facing founder.

“I had no idea that I would have that type of consumer reception,” said Robinson on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “I launched the brand with content creators and influencers being the face of the brand, but every time I stepped out in front of the camera and I showed consumers, ‘Hey, this is our vitamin C, this is why it’s important to use, this is why you need a stable form,’ consumers listened in. They asked questions, they were intrigued. They wanted to try it, they wanted to buy it.”

When Andrew Stanleick left Coty in February to become president and CEO of The Beauty Health Co., the parent company of Hydrafacial, some in the beauty industry were surprised. Stanleick was responsible for much of Coty’s recent turnaround, including the revamp of Covergirl, as well as leading the company’s joint ventures with Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics and Kim Kardashian West’s KKW Beauty. In other words, he had a dream job. But then again, the role of public beauty CEO doesn’t come up often.

“I turned 50 last year, and I think what I realized was that it was a real milestone; I wanted to build and create a company and take it internationally, really leverage all of those experiences I’ve garnered from living all over the world and use that to build a company, a culture and a brand,” said Stanleick on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “Truth be told, I hadn’t heard of HydraFacial, which … I think you know, [awareness is] our biggest opportunity.”

Though Stanleick has only been at the company for six months, The Beauty Health Co. has seen impressive results in his tenure — namely, the organization’s first $100 million-plus revenue quarter. Additionally, Hydrafacial has been thinking outside the box with partnerships, including with Galeries Lafayette and Jennifer Lopez’s JLo Beauty.

But as Stanleick explained, there’s much more he wants to accomplish. “We feel we’re just at the start of this journey ahead of us,” he said.

Like many beauty entrepreneurs, Rachel Roff, founder and CEO of Urban Skin Rx, came up with the idea for her brand after a workplace epiphany. As a trained aesthetician, she discovered that the tried-and-true treatments found in dermatology and aesthetics environments were not suited for darker skin tones.

“When it came time for me to do practicals [hands-on experience to graduate and receive a license], you have to service friends and family. I would bring in my group of friends and family, many of whom had melanin-rich skin. I would get from teachers, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that. Darker skin burns so easily. We have to keep it very basic,” Roff said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Unsatisfied with the limited skin-care solutions that were offered for people of color, Roff opened the Urban Skin Solutions Medical Spa in 2006 in Charlotte, North Carolina. After seeing demand in that environment, Roff spun out the Urban Skin Rx brand in 2010 to serve more people. Today, it is sold in Target, Walmart and Ulta Beauty.

Part of its more recent success was largely due to a viral TikTok moment in 2020. An unpaid influencer posted a before-and-after of the brand’s hero cleansing bar that forever changed the brand’s trajectory. Last year, Urban Skin Rx hit $30 million in sales.

“One day at the office, my head of e-commerce [was like], our sales are triple what they should be at noon,” she said. “This girl ended up emailing us and was like, ‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I posted this on my TikTok, and it’s now at like a million views.’ We were not on TikTok at this point as a company,” she said. “It really has been a wild ride since, even to this day, the positive and negative effects of that moment will have forever changed our brand. It has given me a lot of life lessons as a leader, as a CEO, on what I would do if it happened again.”

The road from investment banking to baking to beauty isn’t obvious, but it's a circuitous career path that led Kate McLeod to launch her eponymous skin-care brand.

“I was a trader at Goldman Sachs and ended up leaving Goldman and went to culinary school. I had a made-to-order bakery and I loved what I was doing, but then life always changes,” said McLeod on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “Something very unexpected happened — I was living abroad — that brought me back to New York City in 2015.”

McLeod reunited with a former boyfriend, Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of Hinge, thanks to the help of a New York Times journalist, and the two married shortly thereafter. With her love life on track, McLeod started rediscovering her own passions and personal rituals. A chance introduction by her sister-in-law to solid cocoa butter, the key ingredient of her now hero body stones, led her to play with the material in a deeper way.

“The pastry chef in me came alive,” she said. “I also have a really long history and training of working with chocolate, so I took the cocoa butter into the kitchen and I thought, 'If I play with this, pretend I'm making a good ganache, what can I do to enhance that application process?’ That's really what sets us apart.”

Thanks to a key endorsement from Naomi Watts, McLeod went from handmaking her body stones for friends and family to selling 20 body stones in a day in Watts’ Onda Beauty and then 40 more on a weekend. It was then that McLeod went from wrapping her stones in parchment paper to repackaging them in canisters with an official brand label. Three years later, the line is now sold at QVC and Sephora. 

The indie fragrance market has gained steam in recent years as newcomer perfume brands attempt to reinvigorate the industry. One brand that is getting it right is D.S. & Durga, founded by husband and wife David Seth and Kavi Moltz.

Like many small business owners at the time, the two founders launched their Brooklyn-based fragrance house nearly 14 years ago with their own funding. David Seth Moltz's love for the arts paired with Kavi Moltz's expertise in architecture helped create a brand that was different from anything on the market. Their unique approach to scents and packaging is still what separates D.S. & Durga from other competitors, but the two say, ultimately, their biggest goal is to spread joy through scents.

The founders got their start in luxury through a merchandising partnership with Barneys in 2016 and recently secured a deal to sell their products in Bergdorf's in March. D.S. & Durga currently has one physical retail store in New York that opened in 2019, though there are plans to open more locations. As the company focuses on scaling this year, David Seth Moltz said those retail partnerships, and future ones, are crucial to building a strong foundation. The brand's three main business pillars are wholesale sales, direct sales and the founder.

"You have to know people who know how to sell well in wholesale and how that whole system works. We have such a great sales team that does that for us," he said.

In terms of the other two pillars, he said "direct" refers to speaking directly to your consumer in your stores and online. Under the founder pillar, both David Seth and Kavi Moltz are tasked with going out, building relationships, growing as leaders and collaborating with like-minded partners.

With roots in science and technology, Suveen Sahib, co-founder and CEO of K18, has been able to crack the code behind the science of hair. For Sahib, an understanding of the biology of hair was the missing component in the hair-care industry.

"I took a deep dive into trying to understand the biophysics and biochemistry of hair to learn that what looks like a fiber is actually one of the most sophisticated biological composites. And, the solutions to our caring for a hair do not lie outside of hair, [but instead] they lie inside of hair," Sahib said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

After launching in the middle of the pandemic in Dec. 2020, K18 hit $75 million in sales in 2021 with just one consumer-facing product. This year, the company projects it will garner more than $100 million in sales. Though K18's strategic TikTok marketing strategy, which has included partnering with top beauty influencers Mikayla Nogueira and Brad Mondo, is partly to thank for its buzzy debut, Sahib credits the brand's tried-and-tested bio-tech formula as the main driver of its success.

"We launched it at the height of a pandemic and decided to go with a global launch in 50-plus countries. It was the most brutal way of testing the product. [We wanted to make sure] that it worked literally across every hair type, every generation and every [hair-care] service," Sahib said. "That's where it delivered on its promise. Stylists loved it because they could use it in every service, no matter what hair type. It saved them time, and it made [customers'] routine much simpler in a post-pandemic world."

Despite the bevy of beauty brands hitting the market, makeup artist and industry veteran Jeanine Lobell believes every creative has the right to do just that: create.

"I don't mind that [beauty is] crowded. I don't want to tell anyone not to do something. If you want to make something, go for it," Lobell said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I always feel like I need to say, 'Well, why?' 'Who are you making it for?' 'What are you making?' If you're just making it because it's an 'I want to have a brand, too' [type of] thing, that's a difficult way to go about it. But if you're making it from yourself, then — not to sound like a total nerd, but — you're trying to live your dream and I'm all for it."

After successfully founding '90s "it" brand Stila in 1994 and selling it to Estée Lauder Companies five years later, Lobell knows what it takes to start a beauty brand. But her latest venture, Neen, a DTC makeup line that operates via a subscription model, required considerable unconventional thinking. Case in point: Each month, shoppers receive a Neen postcard showcasing five models all wearing the same shades in varying makeup looks. The cards include color samples to encourage trying before buying, as well as a QR code for each look that leads to a tutorial video on the brand's website. And while Lobell is considered a master in cool-girl makeup, the models — not Lobell — lead the video tutorials. As for the products themselves, they are clean, and both the postcards and product packaging are made from recycled materials.

As for integrating multiple concepts into Neen, Lobell said, "I wanted to bring all these sides of myself, the person who likes to design, [prioritize sustainable] packaging [and] make product, and bring that into the culture of my brand."

Michelle Brett started her career as a travel agent before landing in beauty and working for L'Occitane and Living Proof. She worked her way up the ranks until January 2022, when she was appointed CEO of Ren, a buzzy British skin-care brand hoping to make a bigger splash in the U.S. market.

“I had fallen in love with Ren in 2002 in London. Ren has always been a brand that has been differentiated. It’s always had a large niche consumer to serve and such a strong purpose,” Brett said on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast episode. 

As a pioneer of clean skin care since its creation in East London in 2000, Ren has catered to sensitive skin. But as that conversation has become more mainstream, Ren sees itself as a leader in the space. In the last four months, Ren jumped from No. 56 to No. 24 in the U.S. skin-care brand earned media chart, according to Brett. 

Ren has made significant strides on the sustainability front: Last year, it met its 2018 zero-waste goal, committing to using recyclable and reusable packaging made out of recycled material. But Brett wants to remind shoppers about how good the product is. "Our job is to show people what sensitive skin is … and how our products can work on sensitive skin, not irritate it, and also deliver benefits," said Brett.

As sustainable products and packaging further cement themselves as top initiatives for beauty companies, luxury French fragrance brand Guerlain, owned by LVMH, is at the forefront of innovation.

At the helm of these initiatives is Cécile Lochard, the brand's chief sustainability officer. Lochard joined Guerlain in January 2019 and was quickly promoted to her current role, a first for the brand, in March 2020. That Lochard was not your typical tried-and-true beauty executive -- she came from World Wildlife Fund -- has enabled the heritage brand to be nimble and experimental.

"I was working for WWF because I was fond of animals. And I'm so lucky that integrated into Guerlain's purpose is to preserve the bee, the sentinel of the environment and the first pollinator," Lochard said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.

Under Lochard's leadership, bee preservation, biodiversity regeneration, climate change, eco-packaging and women's empowerment have been some of the biggest areas of the brand's focus. Alongside UNESCO, the company launched Women for Bees in July 2021, a five-year female beekeeping entrepreneurship program. The entrepreneur program is just one of the many ways the brand is sticking true to its mission.

Digiday Media is proud to present The Return, a podcast about what the return to the office can look like as corporate America adapts to the new, not quite post-pandemic normal. The Return follows the staff at one Atlanta-based advertising agency through Covid outbreaks, as well as the highs and lows of transitioning to hybrid work after two years of pandemic lockdown and working remotely. While the future of work is still under construction, employees across the country are forging their own paths to determine what that future looks like amidst parenthood, corporate mandates, long commutes and an ever-looming pandemic. The Return is hosted by Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter at Digiday, and produced by Digiday audio producer Sara Patterson.

Listen to The Return on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Bubble Skincare has been one of the most talked-about Gen-Z-focused beauty brands since launching in November 2020. 

“My passion was always about creating brands that could emotionally connect to consumers,” said founder and CEO Shai Eisenman on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast. Eisenman began her entrepreneurial journey at just 21 years old.

Out of the gate, Bubble launched its affordable skin-care products with fun packaging through its own direct-to-consumer website, but in June 2021, it went big, launching in 3,900 Walmart stores. While Walmart was seemingly an unusual beauty retailer to partner with, Eisenman said that 42% of U.S. teens shop at Walmart once or twice a month for skin-care products. Since its debut, Bubble has seen week-over-week sales growth in Walmart, and Bubble has been a key pillar of the retailer's larger beauty strategy.

Since the very beginning, Bubble has engaged with Gen Z; the company’s first focus groups were comprised of teens who provided feedback on the brand’s initial product lineup and formulations, as well as branding and marketing strategies. Eisenman engaged friends and family members' teens in exchange for Sephora gift cards. Looking ahead, Bubble is focused on further customizing its product offerings to satisfy customers' wants and needs. Additionally, the company is launching over-the-counter products which will enable it to steal more market share from heritage skin-care brands like Clearasil and Neutrogena.

In 1989, the six co-founders of beauty brand Lush created the now-iconic bath bomb. From there, they haven’t looked back.

Lush was officially founded in 1995 as an ethical beauty brand, which now has nearly 1,000 global stores, 210 stores of which are in the U.S. Its bath, skin and hair products are sold via its DTC website and owned brick-and-mortar stores. Amid today's common need among beauty brands for wholesale distribution, Lush has managed to remain independent, setting its own agenda.

“We're trying to create a cosmetic revolution and trying to get people [on board],” said Rowena Bird, one of the co-founders, on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.

From the start, Lush has always favored minimalism and activism. Early on, with a small budget, the company’s co-founders decided to minimize excess packaging. It is a part of the brand's DNA that has been maintained to this day; now nearly 60% of Lush’s products are sold without any packaging and are referred to as "naked." 

Its revolutionary agenda also extends to social justice campaigns. Lush uses in-store campaigns, like a 2015 "Gay is OK" U.K.-focused campaign, as a form of social justice education for consumers. In 2015, Lush used its retail stores as billboards when launching the limited edition Love Soap, with 100% of every sale going to the Love Fund that supports the LGBTQ+ community. It raised nearly $400,000 then and recently brought the special soap back in May to inform consumers of the "Don’t Say Gay" bill in Florida.

In 2021, the company also took a bold stance regarding social media, after studies demonstrated the harm of social media to young people. Globally, Lush left Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook. When someone goes to the brand's Lush Instagram page, they are confronted with nine posts forming the phrase "Be somewhere else." Despite this stance negatively impacting sales and brand awareness, Bird said, “You have to look at your ethics rather than your bank balance, and think [about] what's right to do.”

Since its inception, Lush has always been ahead of the curve, and still, many innovative plans are in the pipeline. The company is continuing to reduce packaging, develop self-preserving products to protect product freshness and become a carbon-positive company.

When indie makeup brand Lime Crime appointed Andrea Blieden as CEO in May 2020, her first order of business was to chart a more transparent and vocal era for the business. Despite being one of the first digitally-native indie makeup brands, Lime Crime was plagued by a series of controversial incidents in the 2010s. In 2018, Lime Crime was acquired by Tengram Capital Partners.  

“It was time to start humanizing the brand and being transparent, because [our internal team works] transparently. I want us to operate with our customers in that same regard,” Blieden said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Blieden is also focused on continuing Lime Crime’s legacy of never putting a price on creativity. As comparable beauty brands increase price due to supply chain and inflation, Lime Crime has dropped its prices. Its Glimmering Skin Stick went from $25 to $15, for example. Lime Crime’s recent expansion into Walmart, Target and Sally Beauty has helped offset the price drop strategy, she said.

Tina Bou-Saba didn't anticipate becoming a dedicated beauty investor, but the path become clearer once she started investing in indie brands.

"A few years into investing as an individual, founders started telling me, 'Tina, you've been our best investor. Could you lead our next round?'" Bou-Saba said on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. Bou-Saba started her career in investment banking before transitioning to angel investing. As an angel investor, she was early to makeup brands like Kosas. "As a small individual investor, that was certainly not something that I could do, but it highlighted the opportunity for a specialist investor that could lead deals at the early stage and truly be a value-add," she said. In 2021, she co-founded Verity Venture Partners, a consumer-focused firm.

The firm's focus is on female-founded beauty and wellness brands, and its portfolio brands include August, Dae and Noto. Bou-Saba said, "Independent beauty has been an incredible vehicle for female entrepreneurship. For me personally, that was something I was excited to get behind." Bou-Saba's said that, as an early-stage investor, she has to push herself and brands to think of what comes next and where consumers and the beauty industry are headed. 

"What I found, which gives me confidence, is that I have developed an informed perspective on the needs of [beauty and wellness] companies. I see the same questions coming up again and again," said Bou-Saba.

The Honey Pot is still only an 8-year-old indie brand, but co-founder, CEO and chief innovation officer Bea Dixon has seen her fair share of ups and downs. 

After a preservative system reformulation this year, the sexual wellness and feminine health brand has been involved in controversy since May. Customers took to social media to question the reformulated ingredient list, which now features the preservative phenoxyethanol and new emulsifiers. Rumors were even spreading that the company had been sold and was no longer Black-owned. In the latest Glossy beauty podcast, Dixon shares the pitfalls of going "viral."

"We admitted to the fact that we could have communicated better," said Dixon. "You work so hard to do something, and when people feel like there's an opposite communication happening, you want so badly to prove that that's not the case. Sometimes it can almost be worse to do that because it looks like you're being reactive and like you're defending something. [I] try to find the fine line between not being defensive, but [rather] owning up, being vulnerable and being responsible.”

However, Dixon states that the company's investors and retail partners have remained supportive throughout. "[They] understand the good preservative system, they understand things change, and they understand the complexity of social media," she said. Still, Dixon emphasized how important her customer's journey is, as the products came to life from a very personal experience. After suffering from bacterial vaginosis for eight months in 2014, Dixon woke up from a visionary dream from her grandmother with a list of ingredients to heal her condition. That led Dixon, who was then working as a buyer at Whole Foods, to found the brand as a plant-derived vaginal wellness brand. 

Glossy's Priya Rao spoke to Dixon about The Honey Pot’s founding story, growing list of retail partners and reformulation challenges that led to the recent social media backlash.

After becoming a mother in 2017, Sarah Paiji Yoo cut out all single-use plastics from her life for the sake of her family. In 2019, she took that practice a step further by creating Blueland, a brand offering sustainable home goods and hygiene products. 

Blueland sells hand soaps, home cleaners, dish soaps and laundry products, made with respective plant-based formulas. And all products come in a reusable bottle and are shipped in recyclable cardboard. Its newest product, body wash, released in May, further expands the brand into beauty. 

"Blueland tackles the bulkiest products people use in the personal care and beauty space," Yoo said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

In February 2022, Prelude Growth Partners, a female-founded growth equity firm, led Blueland’s fundraising round of $20 million. Blueland has raised a total of $35 million to date from investors including pop star Justin Timberlake; Nicolas Jammet, CEO of Sweetgreen; and Jennifer Fleiss, co-founder of Rent the Runway. 

After 15 years in the beauty industry holding various positions, Alisa Metzger founded Innbeauty Project in 2019. This clean beauty brand, which is aimed at Gen-Z consumers through an accessible pricing strategy, sells its products in major retailers like Sephora and Credo, as well as on its direct-to-consumer site.

"If you think about the average [skin-care] product price and even the average [skin-care] routine being $100 and up, and then you match that with the average U.S. salary being less than $45,000 a year, it became really evident that clean skin-care was not something that most Americans can afford," Metzger said on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

Metzger worked with Jen Shane, co-founder of Innbeauty, at Tula when they noticed, “The wellness movement had taken over [beauty],” Metzer said. The early pioneers of clean beauty were at the forefront of the industry because the ingredient messaging resonated with consumers within the wellness movement. However, Metzger and Shane said they noticed that clean products at an accessible price point seemed nonexistent. The two were passionate about democratizing clean beauty. Innbeauty's prices range from $15 for a single lip oil to $120 for a 6-piece kit, which is still more affordable than the prices of individual products from some competitors. 

“We wanted to create a brand that spoke to [Gen Z] that didn’t exist. This industry is driven by innovation, which comes in many forms, including creating something that doesn't exist for an audience that's starving to consume," Metzger said.

Metzer spoke to Glossy about the clean beauty industry, Gen-Z skin-care marketing and Innbeauty's future goals for further innovation in the beauty space.

“We're in a makeup [and] a self-expression renaissance right now," "Euphoria" makeup artist Donni Davy said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.

After three years in development, Half Magic, the beauty brand by Davy and A24, debuted this week to extreme fanfare. Davy sees the brand to be an expression of "dopamine makeup," where it encourages its users to experiment with their self-expression and identity through makeup. 

Half Magic is selling DTC to consumers and will stay that way in order to maintain Davy’s direct and close relationships with customers. Despite the bold colors and glitter rhinestone masterpieces seen in "Euphoria," Davy wants to showcase all types of looks with Half Magic. With a wide variety of beginner-friendly lip kits, rhinestone packs, eye paint and applicator tools, Half Magic reassures customers that the "magic" of a makeup look is within oneself. 

Created for BIPOC in mission and purpose, Tristan Walker’s health and beauty brand, Walker & Company, has been instrumental in shifting the norms of the beauty industry since its conception in 2013. At W&C, Black women and people of color hold the majority of leadership positions. It's changed the diversity in beauty aisles of department stores like Walmart and Target by putting razor and hair-care collections for all different hair textures on the shelves. 

After almost a decade of simplifying beauty and grooming for BIPOC, hygiene and home goods corporation P&G acquired Walker & Company in 2018 for an estimated $20 million to $40 million. 

Walker & Company's business has often been led by technology. But Walker, founder and CEO, said on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast that, moving forward, the business will be led by culture. 

Walker’s perspective on how closely culture affects business was instrumental in the creation of Bevel and Form, W&C’s grooming and beauty brands, respectively. And prioritizing the needs of BIPOC doesn't stop at W&C's products. W&C has partnered with various community outreach programs, like Urban Prep academies in Chicago, where it donated laptops for students forced to remote-learn during Covid. Plus, it provides free mental health resources on Headpsace for W&C customers. 

NYC-based makeup artist Meredith Duxbury is a well-known digital content creator among the TikTok beauty community with over 14.8 million followers on the platform. Referred to as “the complexion queen of TikTok,” she is also the face of the Morphe Making You Blush collection, which launched in March 2022.

Duxbury grew up following beauty creators like Jacqueline Hill before deciding she wanted to post her own beauty content on social media. “I started on TikTok. I would stack up some cardboard boxes and make a random tripod out of whatever I could find, and I started doing [before-and-after] transitions here and there," Duxbury said on the latest Glossy Podcast. "My videos took off when I started doing rap lip-syncing videos to Nicki Minaj’s 'I’m Legit' song. And I created a trend called #thefoundationchallenge where I would smear foundation all over my face. It would get hundreds of millions of views.”

The TikTok star hit 1 million followers in December 2020, and one month later, she reached 7 million followers.

“I created three videos a day during quarantine and learned so much about the [influencer] industry. But I’d say 2019 was when I [first] immersed myself in the beauty world,” said Duxbury. “[The TikTok algorithm] shows that, if you’re consistent, you can grow."

When Pinterest launched in 2010, it was pegged as a supplemental platform for bloggers. Fast forward to over a decade later and it's now a regular go-to for beauty brands, beauty fans and far beyond with its buzzy ecosystem of content creators.

At the helm of Pinterest's beauty division is Rachel Goodman, head of beauty partnerships, who has been with the company for seven years. During her tenure, she has witnessed the evolution of how Pinterest fits within people’s social media consumption. It has gone from being a special-occasion platform for people decorating apartments or getting married to becoming an “always-on” website for seeking inspiration and shopping. With this in mind, Pinterest has focused over the last two years on connecting the dots from providing inspiration for an idea to facilitating its realization through a purchase.

“People aren't coming to Pinterest to broadcast their thoughts and opinions to a social network,” Goodman said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “People come to Pinterest to look for ideas, to discover [ideas], to save them, and to go out and do them.”

In the last 12 months alone, Pinterest has launched an inclusive beauty search for hair inspiration for Black, brown and Latinx people. It launched the Creator Fund in April 2021, which aims to recruit and amplify creators of color on the platform through a mix of education, tools, free advertising and income-generating opportunities. Pinterest also became more shoppable through a new program called Idea Pins and launched a daily live-streaming show called "Pinterest TV" in 2021.

Goodman spoke further with Glossy about how Pinterest is working with creators differently, which beauty brands perform well on the platform and how Pinterest is helping brands adapt their tactics.

After a wide range of beauty collaborations under her belt from her 12 years as a beauty influencer, Desi Perkins finally took the plunge and became a beauty founder herself a year ago. 

Launched in April 2021, her skin-care brand, Dezi Skin, now has four products, with names such as “Claro Que C” and ingredients inspired by her Mexican heritage. 

With over 3 million YouTube subscribers and 4.3 million Instagram followers, Perkins is focused on Instagram for her brand’s marketing but is eyeing TikTok, too. 

“[Instagram] is targeting its platform toward brands and a shopping experience. For brands, this is still a really, really great platform. But I would also like to dip into TikTok with the brand, in a more casual sense. That's definitely in our forecast,” she said on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

Check out the entire podcast episode to learn about Perkins' development process for her brand and the way she uses audience feedback to develop products. She also shares her views on the beauty social media landscape and how it’s changed over the past decade. 

Hair care has been a passion for Annie Young-Scrivner, CEO of Wella Company, since she was 13 years old when she started a side business cutting and perming hair. So when the executive was recruited from Godiva where she served as CEO for three years to join the 140-year-old hair-care and nail company, she jumped at the opportunity.

Private equity firm KKR named Young-Scrivner as the CEO of Wella Company in Oct. 2020 following the announcement of its acquisition of 60% of the company from Coty. Wella distributes hair-care brands such as Wella Professionals, Clairol, Nioxin, GHD and nail polish brand OPI. In Dec. 2021, the company celebrated its first anniversary as an independent company. KKR and Wella Company have noted the ambitions to IPO in approximately four years.

“We have a tremendous opportunity to be an incredible company. The first thing we're focused on is making sure we have the right [products] to meet the needs of the consumer,” said Young-Scrivner on the Glossy Beauty podcast. “The second thing is making sure we're growing in the right way. There's going to be lots of [exit] options for us.”

When it comes to building a product and brand portfolio that stands the test of time, Wella is focusing on storytelling across all of its brands. This includes Wella Professional. Its Shinefinity long-lasting color glaze speaks to the health of hair, with the tagline “Shine you can feel." Wella has over 1,000 patented products and technologies it can use to position itself as a superior beauty company offering innovative products, Young-Scrivner said.

OPI has also looked to unique opportunities to capture new customers and communities by partnering with Xbox in January. So far these efforts are paying off, as Wella’s professional sales channel has experienced a double-digit sales growth compared to the fiscal year 2019, and both its e-commerce and retail channels are growing substantially, said Young-Scrivner.

Starting out on Etsy and made by hand in the kitchen of co-founders Alex Kummerow and Julia Wills, skin-care brand Herbivore is now a rainbow-colored powerhouse with $15 million in Series A funding and distribution at Sephora.

The brand’s Instagram-friendly aesthetic, emphasis on plant-based ingredients and glass-heavy packaging have attracted a loyal following. It has recently been rolling out a range of new products focused on active ingredients, including its latest vitamin C launch, as well as its bakuchiol Moon Fruit Serum, which launched this week.

For this Glossy Beauty Podcast, Kummerow joined us from his home base in Hawaii to talk about Herbivore's founding story, growth and next steps. He shared details on how Herbivore went from a homemade brand to being stocked in top national retailers, how it's approached sustainability, and where he predicts beauty is headed. 

After 26-years in business, Greek beauty brand Korres has a rich history to tell.

Korres began as a homeopathic herbal remedy brand within a Greek pharmacy that was founded by George Korres in 1992. In 1996, the beauty brand was born, and it has since built up a portfolio of skin care, body care and fragrance products. They include staple Greek ingredients like olive oil, Greek yogurt, white pine and Assyrtiko, a white grape variety from the Greek island of Santorini.

After first selling through Henri Bendel department store in 2000, Korres relaunched in the U.S. market in 2018 with a digital-first approach. This shortly followed Morgan Stanley’s investment of over $56 million into Korres in Nov. 2017, allowing the brand to push further into international markets. More recently, in Jan. 2021, the 26-year-old brand entered Ulta Beauty stores through the retailer’s Conscious Beauty program, following its Ulta.com launch in Dec. 2020. Korres is also sold at Sephora, HSN and Dermstore,

With Ulta Beauty, the Korres team hopes to reach Gen-Z customers, which is a big focus for the beauty brand. Additionally, Korres plans to set up livestream shopping on its DTC e-commerce site in April. The goal is to better control its brand story and introduce people to its history as a Greek apothecary-pharmacy brand, while focusing on ingredient harvesting within Greece, in-house formulations and productions.

“My vision is not to sit here and tell a story. My vision is to bring people in,” said Lena Korres, Korres co-founder and gm of North America, on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast. “That’s why livestream shopping and being able to show things and introduce people [to Korres] and [let them] ask questions [is important]. That’s where I see our brand heading toward and making a difference.”

In 2020, Korres earned $30 million in U.S. sales and $97 million globally. Korres expected to earn $120 million in 2021 global sales, she said, in a Glossy Jan. 2021 story.

After meeting while working at Glossier, Rebecca Zhou and Annie Kreighbaum went their own ways in the DTC world. But in 2019, they decided to get back into beauty. Nearly a year ago, they launched their body-care startup, Soft Services, which offers products addressing skin issues such as body acne and keratosis pilaris in chic packages you’d want to display on your counter instead of hiding it in your medicine cabinet. Investors have taken notice: The brand has already raised $3 million in seed funding. 

The idea was inspired by Kreighbaum’s beauty editorial years at Into the Gloss, where she learned that articles about common skin issues were incredibly popular, yet products offering solutions to them were hard to come by. Rather than joining the bandwagon of Gen Z-focused brands, Soft Services calls its approach “elastic branding,” when it comes to its target demographics -- and it’s not leaving out millennials. 

On the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Zhou and Kreighbaum discuss the need to remember millennial consumers, their approach to fundraising and the reason they don’t take a “purist” approach to DTC.

When Milk Makeup launched in February 2016, it brought a refreshing yet irreverent take on the beauty world and promoted that being bold and different was to be celebrated.

Born out of the NYC-based Milk Studios, Milk Makeup made a name for itself through daring and playful products like Kush Mascara and creating blotting papers that doubled as rolling papers for marijuana joints. Today, Milk Makeup is sold in 20 countries and is a Sephora U.S.-exclusive brand. It was acquired by a special-purpose acquisition vehicle from Waldencast in Nov. 2021 alongside Obagi skin care in a three-way transaction for $1.2 billion.

“Milk Makeup started with the objective of broadening and challenging the definition of beauty. The founders talk about it not as a business but as a movement rooted in the core values of inclusion, diversity, creativity, self-expression,” Tim Coolican, CEO of Milk Makeup, said on this week’s Glossy beauty podcast.

Milk Makeup was founded by Milk Studios co-founder Mazdack Rassi, fashion editor and entertainment reporter Zanna Roberts Rassi, creative director Georgie Greville and product developer Dianna Ruth. As the Milk Makeup team looks toward the future of its business post-acquisition, they are focusing business efforts towards merch and product collaborations, international expansion and what it means to be a “cool” brand.

There’s no doubt that beauty brands are lining up for the chance to sign Scarlett Johansson as a brand ambassador. But now, the award-winning actress is all about The Outset, her new skin-care brand.

“For a long time, I was a brand ambassador for different luxury beauty brands and beauty brands. And right around I'd say my late 20s, I was just done representing someone else's beauty, ideal or beauty standard, and felt like I was confident enough to do something that really was true to me,” she said on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Five years in the making, The Outset was unveiled March 1 with six products. Johansson teamed up with fashion and beauty executive Kate Foster Lengyel to found the brand, which is available via DTC sales now and will launch with Sephora on April 26.

Lengyel oversees the day-to-day business operations of the brand, “and then I look after Kate,” said Johansson.

The marketing strategy is focused on Instagram and TikTok, but through the brand’s accounts, specifically — Johansson famously steers clear of having a personal Instagram account.

“My ego is far too fragile for me to have my own social media,” she said. While she said “never say never,” when it comes to starting her own account, she added, “I cannot imagine it happening anytime soon.”

On the podcast, the business partners went into more detail on the brand’s founding, including how it was inspired by Johansson's straightforward approach to skin care, as well as consumer research.

For Julian Addo, founder and CEO of textured hair-care brand Adwoa Beauty, her business is deeply intertwined with her own life story.

Addo was born in Monrovia, Liberia to a Ghanaian father and Liberian mother and moved to the U.S. in 1982. She worked in a beauty salon as a stylist and then as a salon owner. After a period in banking, while still doubling as a salon owner, Addo began to see how the DTC space was disrupting not only business models, but also branding itself. Inspired by the likes of Glossier and Warby Parker, Addo saw a stark lack of such branding innovation in the natural and textured hair sector. She said she woke up one day in March 2016 determined to develop Adwoa Beauty, which shares Addo’s traditional Ghanian name meaning “female born on a Monday.”

“I knew that I had to pull from my life and my experiences and my vision super heavily so that I could enjoy the brand, because it came from a passionate place,” Addo shared on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Adwoa Beauty has been a Sephora-exclusive brand since Nov. 2019 and has 11 products. It plans to expand to an additional 158 doors in the first half of 2022, to a total of 448 U.S. Sephora doors. Adwoa Beauty is also in 48 Sephora Canada doors and will expand to all 98 locations. Approximately 65% of Adwoa Beauty sales are from Sephora, and Adwoa grew its Sephora sales 200% year-over-year between 2021 and 2020.

“For me, it’s about being smart on where we go and how we move. We want to grow but not grow too fast, because there are a lot of pain points that come with just spreading yourself too thin,” said Addo. “I never really saw Adwoa Beauty as a type of brand that was in 100,000 doors. I want this brand to provide its audience with an experience they hadn’t had before.”

With over 20 years of experience in her dermatology practice, Dr. Rose Ingleton is known as the “dermatologist to the stars.”

Reported to be the dermatologist of Iman, Chrissy Teigan and Adriana Lima, Ingleton took the leap and branched out with her own skin-care brand in 2019. Now stocked at eight retailers including Sephora and Net-a-Porter, Rose Ingleton MD Skincare was developed to address the most common skin issues that Ingleton sees among her patients.

Dr. Ingleton, who still practices dermatology, sat down with the Glossy Beauty Podcast from her Manhattan practice to discuss all things skin care. While she won’t confirm which celebrities see her — “Unless you see them coming in and out of my office, you’ll never know who comes here,” she said — she shared details on her approach to skin care, the growth of her brand and her belief that luxury skin care is shifting toward experts.

When Mina Chae, CEO of Farmacy, first joined the farm-to-face skin-care brand five years ago as director of marketing and consumer engagement, the team was small -- so much so that she had to help box up influencer mailers and even drive to the warehouse to pack shipments during Black Friday shopping.

Farmacy was founded in 2016 and was acquired by P&G for an undisclosed sum at the end of 2021. The acquisition coincided with the appointment of Chae as CEO of Farmacy. Chae stepped into the CEO role in January after previously holding the role of vp of marketing and consumer engagement. Now as CEO, her plans are to increase brand awareness, including through more advertising and marketing with out-of-home advertising and the Farmacy’s first-ever pop-up in April.

“When I first started, I was responding to all of the DMs in the [Instagram] comments myself. I would stay up all night reading all of the reviews, and I still stay up all night reading all of the reviews,” Chae said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast. “That puts me in a unique perspective, because I am connected to the consumer. My goal as CEO is to continue that [relationship].”

Chae spoke to Glossy further about her transition to the CEO role, her plans to boost brand awareness and the brand's focus on sustainability moving forward.

When Tisha Thompson was choosing her major in college, she listened to her parents’ advice to go with a “safe” career path and choose accounting. But her passion was always makeup. 

“My parents were really firm on, ‘We don't want you to be a starving artist,’” she said on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

Fast-forward to today, past several career moves that meant leaving her comfort zone, and she has a brand -- LYS Beauty, launched in February 2021 -- that's stocked at Sephora. 

Thompson became inspired to found LYS Beauty while spearheading the development of 100 foundation shades when she worked at PÜR Cosmetics. When her brand entered Sephora in the fall of last year, it became the first Black-owned cosmetics brand in the retailer’s “Clean at Sephora” category. 

LYS Beauty is bringing inclusivity to the clean beauty space with both product range and price point. Its foundation is its No. 1 seller, followed by its distinct triangle-shaped cream blush.

While COO at The Clorox Company and, prior, vp and gm of Burt’s Bees, Nick Vlahos knew the better-for-you categorywas a key driver of consumer-packaged goods' future.

The Honest Co. was first launched in 2012 by actress and entrepreneur Jessica Alba, and Vlahos has been at the helm as CEO since March 2017. Since his appointment, Vlahos has committed the brand to reinvest 2% of its revenue into research and development. He overhauled the beauty category in 2018 to have fewer products, new formulations and packaging, simpler names, and lower price points. He also moved the company from a DTC e-commerce strategy to an omnichannel one. Today, The Honest Co. products are sold online and in 32,000 retail locations, including Walgreens, Amazon and Nordstrom, and Boots in the U.K. Vlahos cites international expansion as a significant opportunity for the business in 2022, especially through its partnership with German retailer Douglas.

“As we look to the future, we're going to continue to partner with the right retailers, both domestically and internationally, to be able to drive our accessibility strategy through an omnichannel lens,” Vlahos said on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast.

The Honest Co. went public via an IPO in May 2021 at $16 a share. Currently, shares are trading below $7.

In the conversation, Vlahos explains recent updates to The Honest Co.'s beauty portfolio, questions over the company’s fallen stock price and the strategy for international expansion.

When Freck Beauty's founder, who goes by Remi, first launched her brand on Kickstarter, her idea was a novel one: a makeup product that could recreate the look of freckles. Not everyone understood the idea, at first -- Jimmy Kimmel even made fun of the brand on his show. But Remi is having the last laugh. 

Freck Beauty launched at Sephora in February of 2021, after receiving VC investment in 2020 and widening its range of skin-care and makeup products. The brand’s freckle pen, called “Freck OG,” is a TikTok beauty darling. Its fans include a wide range of "it" girls, influencers and celebrities, including Emily Ratajokwski, Doja Cat and Lady Gaga.

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast, Remi discusses the history of the brand, including its founding story, as well as its organic rise on TikTok, where #FreckleTok has billions of views. She also went over the product lineup, which has expanded well beyond the “freckle franchise.” Her approach to edgy branding and her plans for upcoming product launches were also covered. 

When U.K.-based brand Pai Skincare first launched 14 years ago as an organic beauty brand, the clean category was barely in its infancy.

Since then, Sarah Brown, founder and CEO of Pai, has seen the rise and transformation of the clean category. She credits the clean beauty concept for "exploding" the natural category, but said she sees a lot of greenwashing and supports legislation and regulations around clean claims.

Brown came from outside the industry when she launched the brand, after trying to soothe her skin condition known as chronic urticaria, she said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. Pai has since become known for its hero Rosehip Oil, as well as products including its Rosehip Fruit Extract Cleansing Oil and Chamomile & Rosehip Soothing Moisturizer. Pai sells through U.S. retailers like Credo, Free People, Bloomingdales and Skinstore.

In 2020, Pai underwent a rebrand to focus on two main areas: packaging design and third-party certification. The packaging was updated to be more sustainable and better communicate Pai's brand positioning, and to incorporate third-party certification to provide credibility.

"We wanted to make the brand look more contemporary and relevant, and [ensure that it also] embodied and communicated our values," said Brown. "It took about two years. It was really about [asking], 'How do we sit within this clean category and this big movement?'"

In April 2021, the brand raised a Series B investment round of $9 million, which it used to increase its manufacturing output and distribution. The brand maintains a vertically integrated supply chain with a 12,000-square-foot office in West London, which houses a corporate office, a lab and a manufacturing facility.

In the heart of Los Angeles lies a seven-acre oasis known as Flamingo Estate.

Flamingo Estate, the brainchild of Richard Christiansen, is a modern take on an apothecary-meets-sanctuary. Nestled in the foothills of the City of Angels, Flamingo Estate began in March 2020 during the initial upheaval of Covid-19, when all industries were reeling from its sudden shock. But what started as a passion project soon blossomed into something much more. Today, Flamingo Estate works with a collective of farmers, horticulturists and herbalists to develop a 150-product portfolio. It sells products including soap, wine, candles and condiments for the bath, garden, home and kitchen.

Christiansen is also the founder of the creative agency Chandelier Creative, which he formed 16-years ago. It has since grown to have 60 employees across three offices in Los Angeles, New York City and Paris. The Australian native grew up on a honey farm but always dreamed of working in luxury goods.

"I used to say to everyone at the office that our job was to fight for fantasy, because the real world is so boring," said Christiansen on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.

The formation of Flamingo Estate was ultimately a confluence of coincidence, opportunity and the ineffable desire for the paradisiacal. Christiansen, whose hobby was beekeeping while living in New York, gifted people honey while on a photoshoot in Los Angeles, and one recipient asked for a favor: The favor was to place some bees in a seven-acre garden in the city, owned by an eccentric older man. When Christiansen first arrived, the man wore a leopard-print G-string and a red silk bathrobe. Eventually, Christiansen took over the Grey Gardens-esque property and turned it into a modern version of the Garden of Allah.

"I put some bees in, and I saw this garden -- this amazing garden. And I thought, 'Oh my god, this is my dream.' It was all rundown and overgrown," he said. "A couple of years went by before I purchased the house."

Christiansen spoke with Glossy about the origin of Flamingo Estate, his philosophy around brand building and the lifestyle brand's next steps.

In a special edition of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Jill Manoff, editor-in-chief, sat down with senior beauty reporters Liz Flora and Emma Sandler to review the year in beauty news.

The previous 12 months were, in many respects, a rollercoaster. The year started and ended with a bang, in the form of multiple high-profile acquisitions and investments. Plus, the burgeoning worlds of the metaverse and NFTs ruled conversations, and social shopping and shop-in-shops increasingly dictated where and how people shop.

Not long ago, skin-care options for teens were limited to the traditional players in the market. In November 2019, beauty industry veterans Alison Haljun and Christin Powell set out to change that with the launch of Gen Z-focused skin-care brand Kinship. On this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast, the co-founders shared the brand’s founding story, as well as their approaches to distribution, marketing and learning from a younger audience. 

With colorful branding and a focus on sustainability and meeting clean ingredients standards, Kinship was founded by Haljun, its president, and Powell, its CEO, after they had struggled to find products for their own kids. Since its launch, the brand has entered Credo Beauty and Ulta Beauty, and collaborated with top Gen-Z skinfluencer Hyram Yarbro. 

The co-founders’ strategy in running the brand is based on their years of beauty industry experience. Powell co-founded original clean brand Juice Beauty, and Haljun is a Benefit Cosmetics alum, plus they sought out input from young consumers and investors. The brand consults with a Gen-Z focus group called its “Kin Circle” for everything from packaging design to product testing, and its first investor was only 18 years old.

When Dr. Yannis Alexandrides first formulated a healing serum for patients of his London-based plastic surgery clinic, he had no intention of turning it into one of the beauty industry’s most sought-after luxury brands.

The brand came about after Dr. Alexandrides, a still-practicing plastic surgeon, sought a post-operative treatment that patients could use to heal any residual wounds and marks. But when one of his patients mentioned her affinity for the serum to a Harrod’s personal shopper, the famous luxury department store sought to stock the brand, and things took off from there. The location of Dr. Alexandrides' practice, at 111 Harley Street in London, inspired the brand name.

Since starting with a single shelf in Harrods in 2012, the brand has slowly and quietly grown a global distribution network that includes Bergdorf Goodman, Net-a-Porter, Neiman Marcus, Harvey Nichols and Mecca. When the business was formed, 111Skin brought on board Eva Alexandridis, Dr. Yannis Alexandrides’ wife, as a co-founder to help with retail expansion. She now also oversees the brand's creative direction and new product development.

“We never made decisions based on a board meeting or according to trends,” Dr. Alexandrides told host Priya Rao on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "We make product decisions based on patients that I see in the clinic -- on real skin problems and on real skin solutions with great results. That's what sets us apart -- being a highly scientific brand that doesn't chase the trends.”

This strategy has paid for the brand, which earned $20 million in wholesale sales in 2020 and approximately $50 million in retail sales. In Feb. 2020, 111Skin raised an undisclosed amount in outside funding from Vaultier7, which previously invested in hair-care brand Gisou and fashion resale platform Vestiaire Collective.

At L’Oréal, Erica Culpepper has overseen a portfolio of brands that have been at the forefront of the beauty industry’s transformation, when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. 

With a tenure of over 17 years in the L’Oréal Consumer Products Division, she has worked across much of the company’s brand portfolio including holding positions at L'Oréal Paris, Maybelline and Garnier. Now the general manager for Carol’s Daughter, Softsheen-Carson and Thayers Natural Remedies, Culpepper candidly discussed the direction of the industry with host Priya Rao on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

“It's important to support Black-owned brands. It's also important to support Black-founded brands, as well as Black-led brands. So it's all a very big and important conversation, and we need all of it in order to be successful,” she said during the interview, discussing the backlash that some founders receive when they sell their companies. 

She also discussed the positive changes she’s seen in the industry, including retailers’ efforts to stock a more diverse range of brands, and the way social platforms like TikTok and a new generation of brand ambassadors are helping legacy brands reach a younger audience.

While many children begin to pursue hobbies around eight years old, they are not typically along the lines of curating a skin -care routine, unless of course, you are Shani Darden. The founder of her eponymous beauty line made a name for herself working as an esthetician for Hollywood celebrities like Jessica Alba, Kelly Rowland and Chrissy Teigen.

Darden paved the way for her next role as beauty founder in 2013 after identifying a white space in the market for retinol products without the typical harsh side effects of flaking, irritation and redness, she said on this week’s Glossy Beauty podcast.

After coverage in 2017 from publication US Weekly an influx of orders began. Michelle Shigemasa, former CEO of Murad and current CEO of Shani Darden Skincare, joined in July 2021 because of its “highly efficacious” products as well as Darden’s “authenticity and her approach to skin care,” said Shigemasa, who also joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast this week. 

Now, as the Beverly Hills-based brand approaches the end of its own eighth year, Shigemasa focuses on facilitating Shani Darden’s evolution from the inside out. In addition to building the internal team, influencer outreach, and overall brand awareness, “We want to win in a meaningful way with Sephora,” said Shigemasa. Shani Darden launched on Sephora.com and Sephora.ca in March 2020, and later in-store at Sephora in October of the same year. However, “We’re not yet a huge brand at Sephora, and that’s our ambition,” she said.

Today, "digital" is practically synonymous with fashion and beauty. But to boast an advanced knowledge of the digital world in the early aughts is what Alessio Rossi, evp of Shiseido and Clé de Peau Beauté and head of digital transformation for the Americas at Shiseido, considers "serendipitous."

"I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, so that today, people can consider me a veteran of the space," said Rossi on this week's Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

Brands were taught to be "one talking to many," he said of the first wave of digital 20-plus years ago. "We weren't necessarily taught to listen, to get feedback and to engage in many multiple, concurrent, sometimes synchronous conversations with our audience... That was a huge change for brands around the world, specifically in luxury."

Rossi landed at Shiseido six years ago, after over 12 years in the luxury industry with companies like L'Oréal and Kering. In January 2021, he transitioned to his current position, where his main task is discovering "the ongoing redefinition of what luxury beauty online means from an experiential standpoint," he said. 

Now, Rossi harnesses social as a community-builder, ensuring Shiseido's spot as a key successor in the U.S. beauty landscape and responding to customer preferences changed by Covid-19. 

The pandemic pushed shopping toward livestreaming and direct selling, he said. "We tried to reinvent the proposition immediately because this is what was needed. And we are in the process of reinventing it because consumers [have even more] options now."

With roles at Target, The Home Depot, Family Dollar and now Ulta Beauty, Kecia Steelman, Ulta Beauty chief operating officer, can legitimately affirm, “Retail is in my DNA."

“Life has [come] full circle because I’m leading the Ulta Beauty at Target partnership,” said Steelman, who spearheaded the collaboration, on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast. (Steelman worked at Target between 1993 and 2005 and has been at Ulta Beauty since 2015.) Ulta Beauty at Target, which launched in August and consists of a 1,000 square foot, Ulta Beauty expert-staffed shop-in-shops in Target, is set to reach 100 new shops by the end of this year.

The curated assortment of 54 prestige beauty brands is one of the ways that Steelman has facilitated a more convenient shopping experience for Ulta Beauty's existing customers as well as create a new ecosystem of shoppers at Target, said Steelman.

Additionally, Steelman has worked to expand Ulta Beauty’s digital innovation with elevated curbside and same-day pickup capabilities last year. “We shifted to be focused on self-care, self-expression, and togetherness because that’s what our guests needed from us at that time,” she said.

When Carolyn Bojanowski, svp and gm of e-commerce at Sephora, joined the retailer team in 2005, it was an opportunity to pay homage to her childhood as the daughter of a candy buyer. In her mind, Sephora was the "candy store of beauty."

"Sephora has always been committed to the digital experience," said Bojanowski on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast.

And that e-commerce experience had to go into overdrive during the pandemic. Not only did Bojanowski spearhead the acceleration of Sephora's in-store pick-up, but she facilitated an unlikely ally in Instacart. She also launched Sephora's same-day pick-up service to expand its customer reach. "If you can give someone back time, that is another way to think about having a luxury experience," she said.

During Covid-19, Bojanowski was also tasked with translating the in-store customer service experience to online, where the practicality of in-store product trial did not exist. In addition to its thorough product pages, shade finders, quizzes and UGC, Sephora launched on Sephora.com its live home chat, which enables customers to chat with Sephora's in-house beauty advisors from the comfort of their homes, said Bojanowski. This has also created a whole new retail role for the company.

Clean or effective? 

It's a question that the beauty industry has tried to tackle for the last decade. For Tula, a probiotic-based, skin-care brand, it has attempted to combine its doctor-founded, science-backed approach with the appeal of being a modern, clean brand,said Savannah Sachs, Tula CEO, on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

Sachs joined Tula in 2018 and has seen the brand through the rapid expansion of its team, expanded retail distribution and technological development, much of which transpired under a Covid-19 lens. 

Though Tula launched with Ulta Beauty in 2018, its presence within the beauty retailer grew just prior to the pandemic. The brand launched its "Skin Bar takeover" in Jan. 2020. Although Ulta Beauty stores soon shut down due to Covid, Sachs said, "We retained our retail field sales team throughout the pandemic [and] cross-trained them to educate and serve customers via chat on our direct-to-consumer business."

In addition to Ulta Beauty, Tula has also met its millennial and Gen-Z customer base on TikTok, where it has amassed 380,000 followers in the past year. "We have committed to being a positive force for change in the beauty landscape in social media," she said. Tula's commitment to unfiltered spon-con through the hashtag campaign #EmbraceYourSkin this September is just one way the brand has done so. 

True Botanicals chief marketing officer Rebecca Boston‘s work in the fashion industry led her to beauty, and then, specifically, clean skin care. Boston was motivated to take the True Botanicals role after working at Rihanna's Fenty Beauty because of the opportunity for a “branding refresh."

“There wasn't a clean beauty brand that made a woman feel herself, feel sensual,” said Boston on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. “We need to do a better job showing that a clean beauty brand can do that for you.”

But Boston’s passion for beauty started even before she worked within the marketing and social media sector for Fenty Beauty and Ole Henrickson. As a child, she traveled frequently because of her parents’ work with nonprofit organizations, said Boston. “I grew up being exposed to all different types of beauty,” she said. “I recognized the need in marketing and in advertising for more people to be able to see [the diversity of beauty for] themselves.”

True Botanicals’ skin-care campaign with Olivia Wilde, in which she posed nude, as well as its sexier Instagram feed are testaments to the brand’s portrayal of diverse beauty. It also shows its transition from “granola [and] crunchy” to “glowing” and “sensual.”

In the next few months, Boston plans to narrow in on launching new products and “filling gaps in our assortment.” She also wants to“[bring] on new folks who will help us reach new audiences and new age groups,” she said. “Once someone uses one of our products, they add more and more, and they want their entire skin-care routine to be True Botanicals.”

Boston spoke to Glossy about the recent Olivia Wilde campaign, her plan to get people to pay attention to the brand, and the current demands of a CMO role.

While emerging from a decade dominated by sans-serif typeface and millennial pink, it may be hard to remember a time when an ode to simplicity could make a brand stand out. But when Malin+Goetz, a natural apothecary beauty brand, was founded in 2004, its “less is more” approach at a time when the market was about “more and more” initiated the brand’s journey. 

“We came at it from a minimalist, different direction, not only in our packaging and design, but also in our formulations and the protocols,” said Matthew Malin, Malin+Goetz co-founder, on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. “Nobody was doing unisex [in beauty] at that time."

Eighteen years later, in a Covid-19 riddled world, Malin+Goetz has once again proven that it's not afraid to take the road less traveled. In this case, that's meant opening a retail location in Williamsburg, after the beauty industry saw a wave of door closures. 

“If a store doesn't have something special, which includes beautiful design, wonderful brands and products, and great service, it's going to be challenging in the post-Covid world,” said Andrew Goetz, Malin+Goetz co-founder (and Malin’s partner) on the podcast. 

And while the new normal, and how brands respond, may be uncharted territory, Malin+Goetz expects to take a multifaceted approach in its appeal to the consumer. The brand’s brick-and-mortar stores, luxury hospitality partners and e-commerce play via its own site and Amazon “are all important aspects of how to be a successful brand,” said Goetz. “Being able to support that customer through those different channels is critical.”

For many people, a bad hair day would result in a few shed tears and some variation of a head covering. However in the case of Yve-Car Momperousse, CEO and co-founder of Kreyol Essence, a beauty brand specializing in natural hair-care and skin-care products from Haiti, what started as a solution to a “hair catastrophe” evolved into a “social impact brand.”

“Hair, dry skin, eczema -- for any issue you had in the Haitian community, you found [a solution in] this bottle of this product,” said Momperousse on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast. The product in question, Haitian Black castor oil, served as the solution to Momperousee’s hair loss at the time and the foundation of her brand, launched in 2014.

“We're not only looking [at] how we impact our tribe, which is what we call our customers, but we’re also looking at how we impact our producers and every part of the supply chain that it takes to make the castor oil,” said Momperousse. Aside from providing “women of color” with products for “kinky, curly hair," Kreyol Essence is “creating work for farmers, helping with the environment, exporting and changing the relationship that people have with Haiti,” she said.

Now, the brand has expanded with more products, like Moringa powder, which also includes “collagen, ashwagandha and vitamin C,” for a holistic approach to beauty, she said. Simultaneously, Kreyol Essence continues to expand its retail presence, from "Shark Tank" to the shelves of Ulta to QVC.

Looking ahead, Momperousse continues to look at “the larger picture,” she said. The guiding question is, “Are you doing something above and beyond what a traditional business would do, with [a] clear intention for impact either on the environment [or] for a specific group of people?”

Kristen Noel Crawley, KNC Beauty founder, knows that it takes more than being a “lover of skincare” to become a successful beauty brand founder.

The launch of the Black-owned brand in 2016 was “a natural evolution” for Crawley, who networked her way through the beauty industry, starting as a beauty columnist for Elle magazine, she said on this week's Glossy Beauty Podcast. “I started the brand because I had those dry and crusty lips. Since I launched my brand, I haven't had any problems with my chapped lips,” said Crawley, who had found a solution to her lip dilemma in the form of a lip mask in Japan. “The only thing I didn't like was that there were probably 50 ingredients in this one little sachet.”

What started as a means to fill the all-natural lip mask void in America evolved into a line of products including KNC’s retinol-infused star-shaped eye mask and collagen-infused lip scrub and lip balms.

Beyond trend spotting, Crawley is adept at tapping into larger social and cultural movements. She launched KNC’s School of Beauty, a mentorship program for Black female beauty founders, in 2020, and a collaboration with streetwear brand Bape in July 2021. “School of Beauty was actually a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement,” she said. “Black women and women of color contribute so much to the success of the beauty industry and I want to see more female founders in that space.”

Covid forced social activities, like bar crawls and date nights, to go on hiatus, or move to Zoom. So the fact that fragrance sales increased by 82% in the first half of 2021, compared to the same time in 2020, demonstrates that in the age of wellness, perfume has been added to the list of self-care.

Ilaria Resta, global president since March of 2020 of the perfumery division at Firmenich, a fragrance and flavor company, said this shift in consumer preference is just one aspect of change that she has been tasked with reacting to. “The key pillars of my vision are related to anticipating and being on the leading front of the transformation of this industry, and future-proofing the business by anticipating or creating trends,” said Resta on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast.

That’s included navigating the “shift from fragrance [being worn to] appeal to others to being [worn] for our own relaxation and feeling better with ourselves,” she said.

Additionally, Resta has had to determine, “How do we communicate the fragrance in a virtual way [during Covid]?” she said. Fittingly for the digital-centric nature of the world today, Firmenich launched Scentmate, an “AI-enabled platform” that enables users to create a personalized fragrance based on data, as well as their personal preferences.

“Innovation is critical as a driver for value creation and differentiation [in fragrance],” she said.

Below are additional highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity

On the evolution of the fragrance industry

“The power of fragrances in triggering emotions [and] memories. It’s outstanding, and [it] is used also for therapies in order to trigger specific emotions. There are ingredients proven to aid concentration and focus, in lowering the heartbeat rate and improving well-being. It’s an industry that is evolving from being pleasure-focused [and] hedonic-focused to being an industry that is also adding real physical and mental benefits. And [it] is very much science-driven, as much as it is hedonic and creative. It is a fascinating sweet spot between the left and the right brain.”

Firmenich’s relationship with sustainability

“The company started working on [sustainability] before it became even a word or before it became a necessity and a demand from consumers. Decades ago, at Firmenich, we started defining critical roles to assess the role of biodegradable, renewable ingredients in the palette of ingredients that our perfumers work with. But also when it comes to biochemistry, we develop fragrances that mimic nature but do not deprive nature [of these] ingredients. At the same time, we started looking at the broader role of sustainability when it comes to social responsibility. [We] make sure that all the sourcing strategies are [responsibly sourced] from communities that are treated in the best way, not only for the workers, but [also] for the communities they work with. We [ensure] there are equal wages and minimum wages for men and women. We look at the broader ecosystems of sustainability. And this has been inspiring the work at Firmenich, this has been an important glue between us and our clients.”

The launch of Fenty Beauty in 2017 marked a turning point for diversity within the beauty industry, as makeup brands were tasked with matching the new standards of Fenty’s foundation shade range of 40 colors. Brands like Revlon and Dior stepped up to the plate with more inclusive shade ranges. Meanwhile. a blank space remained in the beauty industry for brands catering to Afro-textured hair. Maeva Heim, founder and CEO of Bread Beauty Supply, a Black-owned hair-care brand catered to textured hair, aimed to fill this gap with Bread Beauty Supply.

Heim, an Australia native, worked within the beauty industry prior to launching Bread, so she experienced the lack of inclusivity in the hair-care sector from an insider's perspective, as well as from the perspective of a Black female customer. “The brands that I was working on personally -- and even the brands in the beauty industry, in general -- weren't speaking to me as a woman of color,” she said on the latest Glossy Beauty podcast.

Bread, which offers products including a scalp-serum, hair masks and oils for curl types 3a to 4c, came into fruition during the pandemic, in July of 2020. Since then, sales for the brand, which has a core customer who is “young in her career" and "on that cusp between Gen Z [and] millennial,” have tripled, said Heim.

Now, Bread Beauty Supply is available on both breadbeautysupply.com and sephora.com. According to Heim, she's successfully created an indie brand that “resonates” with customers in a way “that a giant, multinational corporation can't.” And, while Bread’s partnership with Sephora is set to continue, Heim aims to expand her brand in a bigger way.

“Our priority is existing where our customer wants us to exist, and we're constantly refining what that looks like in the next 3-5 years, and where we need to go and exist internationally,” she said. “Because this issue and this gap exist not just in the U.S., but [also] in pretty much every Western market.”

When you reach for a bottle of shampoo in the shower, you may not be familiar with the brand founder -- or know if he or she actually uses the product. But as Crown Affair founder and CEO Dianna Cohen tells it, her hair-care line was launched as an extension of her own routine and the products that she recommended to her friends.  

She wanted to create a brand that fit within the "luxury world” of products she gravitated toward, said Cohen on the most recent episode of Glossy Beauty Podcast. “[With those products,] when you held the tool or used the product, it brought you joy. And it felt like a part of who you were.”

Crown Affair's line includes scrunchies, hair oils, towels and combs, and aims to transform the health of customers’ hair. This month, Crown Affair is venturing into tried-and-true hair must-haves, like shampoo and conditioner. And next year, it will launch in a national retailer. But above all, the brand, which remains digitally-focused, prides itself on its focus on community. "Our customer and community is the woman who is super dynamic. And she does care about her hair, but she has a lot of other things going on in her life," she said.

The Crown Affair community is made up of its loyal customers and even non-customers, who learned about the brand by word-of-mouth. It also includes the 100 women who make up Seedling, the brand's mentorship development program.

“If you're thinking about launching a brand into the world, one of the most powerful things that you can do is build a community,” she said.

“That's [an] important lens as a founder, to [think], ‘How are you shopping for other things?' 'How are you finding out about products?'” said Cohen. “The only way to build authentic relationships is by taking time to build authentic relationships.”

In New York City, one can find a nail salon almost as easily as a bodega. But across the Atlantic, in London, the same could not be said -- at least until the early 2000s, according to Charlotte Knight, founder and CEO of Ciaté London, Lottie London and Skin Proud. After noticing the overall void for nail care within the beauty industry in London, Knight, an interior designer turned celebrity nail technician, founded nail-care brand Ciaté in 2009. 

“I wanted to bridge that gap between runway to retail,” and expand the availability of the nail art seen on the runway and in magazines to the public, said Knight on the Glossy Beauty podcast.  

“We have become known as innovators and disruptors in all things -- pigment, innovation and color,” said Knight, who later founded Gen-Z makeup brand Lottie London. “Lottie’s collaboration strategy is all about ’90s nostalgia,” with nostalgic characters like My Little Pony.

“What I love about this Gen-Z community [is that] they have bundles of confidence like never before,” said Knight, who attributes this, in part, to social media. 

Like the company’s Gen-Z consumer, Lottie London and its sister-brand Skin Proud, which launched in April of 2020, have also tapped into TikTok, a factor that may have helped them to “[stand] firm” amid the challenges of the pandemic. In terms of sales channels, the company also expanded into Walmart, which has worked to reach the Gen-Z consumer’s radar.

“Their commitment to social challenges and environmental issues is incredible, [which] is so meaningful to the Gen-Z consumer today,” she said. 

As for the future, Knight pledges to maintain a focus on her current brands, along with new brands that are in the works. “We [the Lottie brand] create product that enables that demographic to unleash their creativity,” she said. “We're going to be using all of our efforts to double down with the three brands that we currently have.”

Alastair Dorward may be new to the biotech company Amyris -- he joined as chief brand officer in August -- but he's not unfamiliar with the better-for-you beauty and personal care space. Dorward was the founding CEO of natural, non-toxic brand Method and CEO of hand sanitizer brand Olika. The latter was acquired by Amyris in June.

"I've been a close student of Amyris, [their] trajectory from malaria into the world of production of really valuable and rare molecules and the whole conversation around making the scarce abundant... Over the course of the last year or so, there's been this emergence of the portfolio of beauty, and that's when I really started leaning forward," said Dorward on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. 

In many ways, Dorward considers beauty the last frontier of the progression for consumers to natural, organic or clean. Having worked across the food, toddler, personal care and beauty categories, he said, "There's been a trade-off that is unacceptable -- a trade-off between results or efficacy and clean."

For its part, Amyris and its swathe of brands have been a tugboat that has pushed other conglomerates forward. Its portfolio includes Biosannce, which popularized industry-wide the use of squalane derived from sustainable sugarcane; clean baby brand Pipette; Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's clean color line, Rose Inc.; and most recently, Jonathan Van Ness' vegan hair-care launch, JVN.

While beauty consumers are just starting to have more options at their fingertips, Dorward said, "The beauty industry has had the greatest challenge. [Mastering] cleaning [products] is one thing, but beauty and results are a much harder proposition to get right."

Long gone are the days of popping pimples in secret or attempting DIY acne solutions, like toothpaste or liquid Advil, as an influx of acne-positivity brands have entered the market. In turn, the stigma surrounding acne is slowly being erased.

Peace Out Skincare, a brand dedicated to acne and aging products, launched in 2017 “to market effective products that deliver on the promises,” said Enrico Frezza, Peace Out Skincare founder and CEO, on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. Frezza struggled with acne as both a teenager and adult. As a beauty outsider (Frezza's background is in cybersecurity), he hoped to “build a strong, accurate, positive community where people can talk openly about the mental struggles of acne and educate one another.”

Notably, among the brand’s repertoire are the Peace Out Acne Dots. Despite the small size of the patches, the acne healing dots contain a complex ingredient profile of salicylic acid, retinol, aloe vera and calcium. Nowadays they're considered as much an acne treatment as a fashion statement. Peace Out has also released products that address wrinkles, dark spots and puffy eyes, as well as topical products like its acne and retinol serums. 

And while the brand started as a Sephora exclusive, Peace Out looks forward to its partnership with Kohl’s through the retailer's shop-in-shop to reach the everyday customer through its “affordable pricing,” he said. Peace Out products start at $5 and range up to $34. Additionally, the brand found success on its DTC website, as online shopping became the new normal as a result of the pandemic.

Apart from the success found on its website, Peace Out's digital presence has manifested into an acne docuseries, "Acne Champs." The brand can also be found on Facebook, with a focus on anti-aging, as well as TikTok, where the brand reaches its Gen-Z audience through acne education and fun videos, he said. “Instagram is a balance between the two,” targeting the millennial consumer.

You may know her best as an actress, but Tracee Ellis Ross’ efforts to highlight diversity, equity and inclusion do not stop in Hollywood. In 2019, Ross launched her line of natural hair products, Pattern Beauty, to fill a void she witnessed in beauty and culture at large.

“My journey in hair care started with my own personal journey,” said Ross, who spent 10 years fine-tuning her vision to embrace the “authentic” beauty of Black hair. “The mission of the brand is to meet the needs of the curly, coily and tight texture community.” 

The peak of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was when “people started to understand that diversity and inclusion need to be anti-racist,” which is why “equity” is the key to implementing change within the beauty industry, she said. “That’s one of the spaces that I have worked on with Ulta Beauty, in holding them accountable and creating measurable goals." Ulta Beauty has been Pattern's exclusive retail partner for the last two years.

As Ross heads into the eighth and final season of the ABC show “Black-ish,” her journey with Pattern is far from over. “If you can't keep growing, if you can't keep expanding the narrative and expanding the dialogue with your customer, [the brand is] not going to grow,” she said. 

Dialogues with customers showed the need for larger sizes of hero products, for example, which resulted in the release of Jumbettes, or Pattern’s styling cream and curl gel in jumbo-size bottles. Down the line, Ross hopes to expand Pattern into other beauty categories. She is currently looking to widen Pattern's reach at retail.  

“One of my original goals and visions for the company [was] that it be accessible to everybody,” she said. Pattern Beauty is currently available at PatternBeauty.com, at brick-and-mortar and online at Ulta Beauty, and at Ulta Beauty shop-in-shops at Target. The brand is set to release in Sephora this fall. 

"My goal is to change the industry, so that all of us have choices," said Ross. 

While many industries took hits during the pandemic, Covid-19 set the stage for brands within the wellness industry, like Uncle Bud’s CBD, to grow.

Customers “were coming to us not necessarily because of hemp and CBD, but because they wanted hand sanitizer. “From just buying hand sanitizer now we’ve gained a longtime customer,” said Bruno Schiavi, Uncle Bud's CEO, on the Glossy Beauty Podcast this week.

Schiavi co-founded Uncle Bud’s in 2018 with Garrett Greller, a sufferer of arthritis since he was 14. “I wanted [Greller] to be the pillar of the brand,” said Schiavi, who added that his co-founder is “at the forefront of every campaign” along with mega ambassadors including basketball player Magic Johnson and actress Jane Fonda.

“We wanted Uncle Bud’s to be a brand for the people,” from 15 to 99 years old, said Schiavi. “We have everything for everybody, again, from pain relief to sun care to anti-aging, to pet products, [to] personal wellness,” ranging from $2.50 to $46.99 retail, he added. 

Before launching the brand’s DTC site in January 2020, Schiavi ensured that Uncle Bud’s CBD was “linked to big national retailers” like Walmart and The Vitamin Shoppe. This was largely for awareness, but also to combat the still challenging digital landscape that exists for hemp and CBD brands. As for the future, Schiavi hopes to expand Uncle Bud’s reach even further as he looks to increase penetration in China and launch in Australia.

“We have a strong plan for the next two to three years in terms of making sure that we grow our DTC business, making sure that we grow with the customers, and also expand with new customers," ” said Schiavi.

Although growing up in an “organic lifestyle” meant eating “turkey and sprouts” at school instead of tater tots, Jessica Richards, founder of Shen Beauty, benefitted from that "granola" upbringing in Southern California, she said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. It allowed her to narrow in on her future niche of clean beauty.

“It was 100% the mission and the proposition of Shen from day one to import products that were not sold in the U.S. -- that my friends, family, everybody always wanted -- and to focus on and only sell organic and natural [products],” said Richards. She opened Shen Beauty in Brooklyn in 2010, when the borough was still a beauty desert of sorts.

Although Sephora is now filled with a mix of both heritage and indie beauty brands, at the time, consumers were more focused on “brand recognition and buying from marketing” in magazines, Richards said. To appeal to the brand-focused consumer audience at the time, she brought Bobbi Brown products into the store, which “made people more confident and OK with shopping brands that they had never heard of before.”

Simultaneously, “[customers] also wanted the heavy payoff of the pigments that mainly come from non-clean beauty brands," said Richards. "That was the catalyst for me in realizing that people want organic, natural, clean -- whatever you call it. But they [also] want results.”

Moving forward, while Richards doesn’t have an interest in opening up any more store locations in New York, she does plan to open brick-and-mortar in California and to launch a “full site rebuild” next year. Regardless of whether customers shop on the East Coast, the West Coast or online, Richards plans to maintain a focus on “showcasing products and giving the consumer the understanding of what it will do to their skin and how it will help them."

“[It’s] an interesting thing to see a woman feel better about themselves after buying products," said Richards.

Like many of the hopeful young adults before him, Sean Garrette, an esthetician and influencer, moved to New York with his sights set on a career in fashion. But when his dreams to be a fashion editor or stylist didn’t work out, he leaned into the beauty space, which he found to be “more inclusive."

“You didn't have to be super-skinny or super-rich to fit into the beauty space. It was all about your creativity, your knowledge and your skill,” said Garrette on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Since then, Garrette has amassed 158,000 cumulative followers across Instagram and Twitter, an esthetician license, and partnerships with some of the top skin-care brands like Paula’s Choice and Fenty -- the latter branched into the skin-care world in June 2020. His journey to becoming an esthetician, and later a ‘skinfluencer’, was fueled by his need to fill a “void” that he saw within the skin-care industry.

“There weren’t many people talking about skin care that was specifically focused on treating Black skin and skin of color,” said Garrette, who began to work as an esthetician in a spa in 2016 before quitting three years later to start his own business.

Garrette began to build his social media presence by posting facials and clients' before-and-afters, and contributing to the skin-care conversation online. In the “Last 3-4 years, skin care has taken over the conversation,” said Garrette. He attributed the success of his business, in part, to social media and hopes to tap back into the tangible aspect of his business with spa pop-ups in the near future.

Regardless of where his career takes him, whether that be on social media or in the spa, “My focus and passion will always be treating black skin and treating people of color,” said Garrette. “We're still marginalized in the health and beauty spaces.”

Although QVC may have set the blueprint for modern-day livestream shopping, which was accelerated by the pandemic, the televised home shopping network was not exempt from the challenges of the past year.

“[QVC] still had its own complexities for the way that we thought about the business, the way that our associates were engaged and [the way that our] team members were engaged in connecting with customers,” said Brian Beitler, CMO of QVC U.S.A and HSN.

QVC was also tasked with adapting to changes in customer preferences, as the demand for categories outside of the beauty and wellness spaces increased. “We saw those categories that were built around creating a sanctuary at home take off,” said Beitler.

“That included everything from [investing in] home decor to bringing your gym inside your home, so that you could take care of your body and your health, to evolving even your beauty routines and rituals."

In conjunction with evolving alongside consumers, Beitler said that the unique experience that QVC provides its customers is also crucial for its success.

“People [were] looking to be able to get the kind of experience and education that they might have been getting in a retail experience,” said Beitler. “We're set up very much from a video commerce perspective to give you some of that social experience that happens in the store."

And while QVC and HSN may be “the original innovator[s] in this space,” there is still room for the network to grow, especially as competition ensues between different livestream shopping platforms, said Beitler.

“We've been working over the last several years to innovate our storytelling in these spaces and to access more of the places that we tell these stories,” said Beitler. Since launching on Roku in 2013, QVC has recently expanded its accessibility to devices like Amazon Fire TV and Comcast Flex.

Despite taking a self-proclaimed non-traditional career path, Julian Reis, founder and CEO of beauty incubator SuperOrdinary, credits his initial experience in the conventional finance industry as the catalyst to understanding the potential of the e-commerce beauty market. 

“E-commerce 1.0 was just beginning,” said Reis, who, while working in finance in Singapore in 2013, successfully facilitated the growth of laser-facial company Skin Laundry. But that was not the end of his innovation within the beauty market in China. 

“I noticed that a lot of the luxury store counters -- many of the big shops like Lane Crawford -- were being dominated by Chinese tourists. [They were] buying lots of product and bringing it back to China,” said Reis, who made it his mission to “solve this problem in a much more efficient manner.” 

While Reis was aware of the many marketing agencies and “trade partners” present in China, “No one was bringing all this together under one roof to provide a full service,” said Reis of distribution, marketing and influencer relationships.

Reis has begun to fill this gap with SuperOrdinary, which has brought buzz-worthy U.S. brands like Farmacy and Drunk Elephant into China via TMall. The company hit $90 million in revenue alone this past year, but Reis asserts that there is still room for growth. 

SuperOrdinary comes into play in this area by serving as an “extension of the brands’ arms, eyes, [and] ears,” said Reis. “What we did is focus on each and every brand that we work with to make sure we understand the DNA of the brand and to see whether it would translate in the local market.”

Now, Reis is taking that same expertise and applying it to another mega-market and platform: the U.S. and Amazon.

From pouring over Revlon magazine ads as a young girl to becoming the first female CEO of the company in 2018, Debra Perelman personifies the “emotional connection” consumers have with beauty.

“A big focus of mine has always been, ‘How do you utilize these iconic brands and products in order to really leverage this emotional connection that we can have with the consumer?'” said Perelman on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. For Perelman, this emotional connection is rooted in her own mainstay products, like Revlon’s Super Lustrous lipstick, which she used as a teen, and her grandmother’s perfume.

By maintaining the aspect of heritage while also adapting to changes in the beauty industry and the world, in general, “We’re able to create beauty innovations to inspire confidence and ignite joy in the consumer,” Perelman said.

While Revlon has maintained a focus on personal beauty and confidence throughout the brand’s history, the emergence of Covid pushed to the forefront of the beauty industry the ideas of “[making] sure that people are staying safe” and “[giving] back to the communities around us,” she said.

Perelman facilitated Revlon’s adaptation to the pandemic by not only transforming some of the company's production lines to make hand sanitizers and donating to underserved communities but also navigating the management of employees who were managing Covid in their personal lives.

The pandemic also accelerated the desire for digitization within Revlon. “I was focused on making quick decisions, in terms of further accelerating our digital transformation,” said Perelman. To achieve this, Perelman “focused on moving from a siloed organization to a much more collaborative organization,” with small “pods”, or teams, centered on e-commerce, product development and marketing.

In addition, Perelman emphasized her mission to transform Revlon's oldest, most iconic beauty brands, Revlon and Elizabeth Arden. The focus: diversity, inclusion, and sustainability -- not only for consumers, but also for Revlon employees behind the scenes.

“For Revlon, the future is just so bright,” said Perelman, who hopes to “leave [the company] in a way that's a bit more positive than when I started.”

Gillian Gorman Round may have spent her career in big beauty, from L'Oréal to Gucci Group to most recently Revlon, but she couldn't turn down the opportunity to become CEO at Kjaer Weis, even in the middle of a pandemic. Like her former boss Revlon CEO Debbie Perelman, Gorman Round is one of the few female CEOs in the beauty industry today. She joined the organic and refillable makeup brand in December 2020.

Many of Kjaer Weis' points of differentiation are catching on industry-wide, namely its organic formulas, high performance, and sustainable and refillable practices. As such, Gorman Round believes the brand awareness opportunity is ripe for the taking. This is especially true since founder and makeup artist Kirsten Kjaer Weis has been perfecting that proposition for 11 years. It helps that Waldencast, which recently announced its better-for-you SPAC, recently took a majority stake in the brand.

"Kirsten, when she founded the brand a decade ago, was the very first creator to be able to develop certified organic, high-performance, refillable, sustainable products. Now we see a decent amount of activity within that space...but [in] certified organic, which is our principal and our philosophy, we really stand alone, " said Gorman Round on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Throughout the pandemic, Kjaer Weis was able to own that point of view digitally and with retail partners. To date, its DTC business, which is up 300% for the year, accounts for 50% of the business. Sales in the wholesale segment, which makes up the remaining 50%, doubled year-over-year.

"It's not that we are shifting 50% of our business to DTC because our wholesale business isn't performing," she said. "A rising tide lifts all boats."

If the idea of Walmart as a beauty hub seems new, then the expansion of the nation’s leading grocer’s beauty e-commerce business by Musab Balbale may be equally disruptive.

Balbale, the merchandising vp of omnichannel beauty at Walmart, has worked within consumer retail for the past 20 years and most recently has transitioned from wellness to the beauty space. This transition, which he said is “exciting” began when he had the chance to spearhead the beauty and health e-commerce businesses for Walmart in 2016. “[Beauty] combines considered purchases -- those that are infrequent higher price points [alongside] daily regimen purchases. And [the consumer] is also looking to be inspired,” said Balbale on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Within the last year, Walmart's beauty team has “nearly doubled" the number of new brands coming into the beauty aisle by “[evolving] our stores to work in a new way to accelerate the freshness of our assortment on our shelves and to make it easier for the customer,” said Balbale. The ingenuity of products on Walmart’s shelves isn't the only measure that the team has taken to increase customer engagement. They have also begun to step into the popular worlds of TikTok and livestream shopping, hosting their first live shopping event through TikTok in March.

According to Balbale, Walmart’s involvement with TikTok has to do with its new customer base: Gen Z. “This was the first live selling event on TikTok,” said Balbale. “We were striking the balance between showcasing products that you care about and talking about it in an authentic and genuine way, while also making it a selling event.” He said the ultimate goal was to “create energy in the industry.”

Along with their identity as “digital natives,” Balbale admits that Gen Z is “leading us to be more focused on inclusivity and equality,” a core value that the omnichannel beauty team has capitalized on through their selection of mission-driven beauty products.

The current political climate, with calls from the public for racial and environmental justice, has become “articulated in the beauty shelves” in the past 12 months, according to Balbale.

Walmart beauty’s new partnership with Uoma by Sharon C, a Black-owned, sustainable beauty brand from Sharom Chuter that is inspired by Gen Z, exemplifies the team’s push to “change how we engage the beauty community” through “diversity," as well as “inclusivity, accessibility [and] sustainability,” said Balbale.

Uoma by Sharon “has pushed the boundaries on sustainability” by including vegan, eco-friendly and cruelty-free products within the line. Both the omnichannel beauty team and Chuter shared the desire to “bring these values that we all care more about now than we did pre-Covid and make them more accessible, both in terms of price point and physical reach to consumers.”

Also during the pandemic, Balbale said the beauty team translated to beauty products the “simplicity and convenience” of grocery pick-up. “We were conscious about making sure that the beauty products she was already purchasing were in front of her [and] easy for her to reorder,” said Balbale.

From growing up on a cattle ranch to having his face grace the shelves of Sephora, skinfluencer Hyram Yarbro, 25, has taken the beauty world by storm due to his honest yet informative persona. 

“When you're brand new to this world of skin care, you ask, ‘What do all these things mean?’” said Yarbro, on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. He himself had wondered just that at 18, when he first started to notice signs of premature aging in his skin. “I realized that there was a gap where there wasn't anyone simplifying skin care and teaching people how to do the basics -- how to have a good, simple skin-care routine.”

Just a few years later, in 2017, Yarbro started his YouTube channel to try and fill that gap with an authentic “documentation of [his] personal skin-care philosophy.” Yarbro’s progression to TikTok at the height of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020, was a natural extension of his philosophy to remain “reliable and trustworthy,” while also simplifying important skin-care information in short 60-second videos. 

“I wanted my videos to feel like you were talking to a friend -- like you're just sitting down with your best friend,” said Yarbro. “What I try to do is unapologetically show my skin-care opinions and push brands to be more accessible, while still being respectful.”

In doing so, Yarbro captured and held the attention of millions. He experienced rapid growth from 4,000 to around 4 million followers within six months -- a milestone that he doesn’t take lightly. “Every single day, I'm still in awe and in shock, and I don't take it for granted,” he said. The exponential growth of his following yielded a plethora of sponsorship opportunities, which, according to Yarbro, can be “a slippery slope.” 

“I see the mistake of a lot of people taking sponsorships that don't align with their personal philosophy,” said Yarbro. “I only accept the ones that fall in line exactly with my philosophy, and I encourage that for other creators, too.”

With the release of his own skin-care brand, Selfless By Hyram, in partnership with The Inkey List, Yarbro is living proof of the benefits of staying true to one’s own philosophy in what can be a cutthroat industry. When looking at his options for launching his own brand, Yarbro “didn't want the purpose and entire philosophy of the brand to be swept away by corporate semantics.” The philosophy in question for Yarbro is about social change, specifically through reforestation and clean drinking water efforts, which he found to be perfectly aligned with The Inkey List, founded by Mark Curry and Colette Laxton. 

“I think it's amazing, and it's definitely not something that fell into our laps. Mark and Colette can attest to the sheer workload that is involved,” said Yarbro. “But it's a testament to the power that we as a collective can have when everyone is aligned on the same philosophy.”

It was Ben Bennett’s first job working at Limited Brands that showed him the power of working on a portfolio of businesses. Early in his career, Bennett, the founder and CEO of beauty brand incubator The Center, worked on 14 different apparel businesses at Limited Brands, but it was his time helping to conceive Bath & Body Works that got him hooked on beauty.

“I’d never considered developing fragrances or personal care products,” he said on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “I looked at Bath & Body Works like this was another specialty business that I was brought in to help influence seasonality and trend: What would that mean, season after season, to look at what was happening culturally in the world and how we could incorporate that into the things that we were developing?”

At the time, body wash hadn’t quite upended bar soap and consumers were shopping in drugstores. “Body wash was something that maybe wealthy people used when they went to a spa. It wasn’t such a common item. Bath & Body Works opened up a whole new category of personal care for consumers and created almost a frenzy around coming in and experiencing the new fragrance,” he said.

Since then, Bennett has been instrumental in creating the next guard of beauty brands, first at incubator Hatchbeauty and now at The Center, which he founded in 2020. At just over a year old, The Center has been busy, relaunching Make Beauty under new ownership and debuting Naturium with skin-care influencer Susan Yara. Bennett will bring Phlur’s rebrand to market in fall and launch a fourth brand in the first quarter of 2022.

Charlotte Cho, Soko Glam co-founder and Then I Met You founder, was one of the original purveyors of K-Beauty in the U.S. But nearly nine years after launching the e-commerce platform Soko Glam, she acknowledges that the category has changed significantly.

"Korean beauty has never been about one product, one category or even one brand. It's been a skin-first philosophy. It's really helped introduce skin care as a self-care moment. It's been about the general innovation at large; it's helped push the envelope in the beauty industry to innovate," said Cho on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

While there have been murmurs that K-beauty has plateaued, with Innisfree's recent store closures in the U.S., Canada and China, Cho disputes that point.

"Maybe you're not seeing K-beauty trends popping up in the media, because honestly, the industry and the brands have wised up and they've actually started producing and manufacturing a lot of their products in Korea," she said.

And though some of Cho's original K-beauty peers -- think Glow Recipe, Memebox and Peach & Lily -- have moved beyond curation to branded products, Cho was clear to state that curation will always be a part of her founder's story, even with the addition of her skin-care brand, Then I Met You, which will be launching at Cult Beauty this week.

"I truly take delight in introducing Korean brands and innovations through Soko Glam, and providing a platform for new and exciting indie brands. I think that people in our community really trust us and want to hear from our lens -- a K-beauty lens but, ultimately, a quality skin care lens… That will never change," she said.

Like many beauty executives, Andrea Alvares, Natura chief brand, innovation, international and sustainability officer, saw her business completely change with the onset of Covid-19. Meetings on Zoom became commonplace and a digital-centric model became priority No. 1. But while the U.S. is close to normalcy, the bulk of Natura's business is in Latin America where the pandemic ravages on.

"We're still in a weird space. In Latin America, you've got some countries like Chile that are a bit further down, in terms of the vaccination programs for everyone. The majority of the Latin American countries are still in the initial stages of vaccination," said Alvares on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "It was very difficult also to do complete lockdowns because the whole socio-economic landscape isn't a favorable one, in terms of ensuring that you keep people really in isolation. There are some situations where it's just not possible. We've seen a reduction in overall death rate -- it's dropped by half -- but it's still very high, and we can't get used to it."

Still, the Natura brand saw net revenue grow by 12.6% in Brazil and 60.4% in Hispanic Latin America for the most recent quarter, announced in May.

Alvares largely credits the wins to Natura's holistic approach to beauty and the brand's social selling model. Of the latter, she said. "It has been absolutely critical to the fact that we've been so resilient and that we actually fared well in 2020. We were a social network before social networks existed; they've been dialed up with digital tools [now] that actually amplify the reach of that business model. We actually helped many of our consultants up their capabilities in digital -- so, their skills using digital tools and actually be[ing] able to sell in this environment. We reached 1.3 million virtual consultants in Latin America over the past year, which is incredible -- that's more than double the size we were seeing pre-pandemic."

Lauryn Bosstick, the blogger, podcast host and beauty brand executive -- she launched her Skinny Confidential-branded product line in April -- has had an unusual route to becoming a founder. But being a disrupter has always been her m.o.

"I am not an expert. I do not claim to be an expert. I am a practitioner of beauty. I am someone who's tried every product," said Bosstick on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I want to show women that you can be a bartender and be broke, and you can go disrupt a space that's cliquey."

Bosstick was, in fact, a bartender and a Pure Barre instructor while attending San Diego State University, when she started her blog in 2011. It later spawned a podcast show and a line of products.

"I joined a sorority, and in the sorority, they told me it was $800. I was like, 'What do you mean, it's $800 to have friends and community?' I couldn't believe it. I was already broke. I couldn't afford $800. So I left the sorority after two seconds, [thinking,] 'This isn't gonna work for me.' And [I thought,] 'How can I do this online? How can I do it better? And how can I do it for free?" she said.

Bosstick was more than able to grow that community: She has 1.3 million followers on Instagram, 278,000 fans on Facebook, 38,000 newsletter subscribers and 2.6 million monthly impressions on her blog. The Skinny Confidential podcast has 90 million downloads, and the new line of "beauty wellness" products, which started with a facial roller and oil, has beat projections since launch by 300%.

"Sustainability" was a buzzword in beauty and wellness well before the pandemic. But due to 2020's stay-at-home orders, coupled with the sheer volume of boxes and waste from online shipping, beauty companies recognized they needed to up their focus on sustainable practices.

For British beauty brand Bybi, which came to market in 2017, its road to "sustainability" has been a work in progress. "The term sustainable is a little bit problematic in itself. It's not regulated, so what does it even mean?," said Elsie Rutterford, co-founder of Bybi, on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Rutterford started the natural brand focused on performance with Dominika Minarovic, a friend and colleague from their time in advertising. With no professional beauty experience, the twosome first started a natural beauty content platform called Clean Beauty Insiders before going on to make products in their kitchen. A full-fledged beauty line wasn't in the cards.

"When we first started, we grew this content platform... We had a book published by Penguin, which was kind of a recipe book for your skin, your hair -- all centered around natural ingredients. We were running these events, workshops in central London, where we would bring together people who were interested in making their own beauty products. We spent quite a lot of time just testing out different ways of monetizing the content that we'd sort of begun to do as a hobby. [Products] were never our end goal," said Rutterford.

But their authentic approach to beauty building yielded more than they bargained for. In December 2020, Bybi raised a $7 million Series A, and it launched into 1,800 Target doors in January. Minarovic said that the brand grew 200% in the pandemic and has high hopes for Target to be a $10 million to $20 million account.

Below are additional highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

Trinny Woodall was well-known and beloved in her native U.K. as style writer and "What Not to Wear" host, well before she started her DTC makeup brand Trinny London in 2017. But, Woodall, who acts as founder and CEO of her brand, doesn't think of herself as an "influencer" who is dabbling in beauty.

"I'm not really an influencer who's launched a brand. I think I always knew I would launch a brand," she said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Woodall said her business was on her mind for at least five years prior to its debut, but actually started taking shape when she was a child. "From six years of age, I did makeovers on girls in my boarding school, and I think I got the bug then of how you could transform how a person feels by these different aspects: by doing their makeup, their hair, their clothing. I spent 20 years refining that."

The pandemic helped solidify Woodall's point of differentiation. Her brand remains digital-only -- a saving grace during Covid-19 -- and banks on its Match2Me technology that personalizes the makeup assortment a customer sees based on their hair, eye and skin color. Last year, Trinny London hit about $62 million in revenue, and growth is on Woodall's mind -- but not necessarily in the same way that others increase their market share.

"I don't want to be a [founder] that goes in and says, 'OK, here's brow. Let's see if the 28 different variations of brow we can do [work],'" she said. "I feel that, because we have so much choice, it makes it harder and harder to decide what woman you are and what you want to buy."

Unlike many beauty entrepreneurs, Melissa Butler, founder and CEO of The Lip Bar, wasn't a makeup or skin-care fanatic. Butler started her professional career at Barclay's, and her entree into beauty was driven by being frustrated with how women were judged by their looks -- this was especially true on Wall Street.

"I oftentimes was having to show up for myself in a multitude of ways, thinking about what my hair looked like, what my makeup looked like, and also, ultimately, thinking about what my core work performance was," she said on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "In thinking about how I showed up and what beauty meant to me, I became incredibly frustrated -- frustrated with the beauty industry, its lack of diversity, not seeing people who look like me. [It] really was just this idea that beauty was linear. And I was like, 'Wait, no'. Beauty doesn't look like one thing. It looks like all things, and I'm included within that."

In many ways, The Lip Bar, launched in 2011, was the opposite of what was prevalent in beauty at the time.

"I very vividly remember the beauty industry and the media essentially putting the Kim K. look on a pedestal. That Kim K. look was supposed to be aspirational for every single woman in the United States. Meanwhile, only probably 2% of the women in the country look like her," said Butler. "It's like, 'Well, if she is the standard of beauty, then how am I to be made to feel?' That's something that I was questioning -- I was questioning it for myself, for my friends, for my family and just everyday women."

The Lip Bar, which first debuted with lip products, launched with unexpected colors like purple, blue, yellow and orange. "We didn't even have a single red or nude lipstick... [That was] really to say I'm making a statement that beauty is a matter of self-expression," she said.

Ten years later, the once DTC-only Lip Bar has expanded beyond lip to complexion products, launched in national retailers like Target and Walmart, and doubled its sales every year for the last four years.

When Jenna Lyons left her role as president and executive creative director of J.Crew in 2017, few assumed that her next act would be in beauty.

But in September 2020, Lyons debuted LoveSeen, her eyelash extension brand with digital connection and content at its core. Lessons Lyons enforced at J.Crew -- personality, individuality, stretching the boundaries of style and owning your message -- have been amplified tenfold with LoveSeen.

"Having felt not seen when I was young, feeling left out of a lot of things or just not feeling beautiful, I realized how powerful it is to feel attractive. It really is transformative. It can make you happy, simply happy," she said on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Like many beauty founders, Lyons zeroed in on a category, eyelashes, because of personal experience. She doesn't have any, due to a genetic disorder, and wasn't able to participate in the growing trend of professional eyelash extensions.

"Anyone who has something that they feel deficient in, I'm sure that's the thing that you notice on everyone else," she said. "I was super attuned to other people's eyelashes. I noticed all the women in my office coming in with eyelash extensions that literally would arrive in the room before they did. I was doing research for a beauty company separately, and I was watching all these Huda Beauty videos, where she was putting on, like, seven layers of concealer, eyeliner, eyeshadow and highlighter. How many products can one person put on their face? But I loved it. At the end, [she always] put on an eyelash. I thought it was really interesting that it was two really opposite ends of the beauty spectrum: these girls at J.Crew who were wearing no other makeup and Huda Beauty candidates who were, like, full makeup."

Amy Liu, founder and CEO of Tower 28, had dreams of being a beauty founder, in large part because she watched her father live out his own entrepreneurial dreams. But instead, she chose to work for some of the biggest founder-led brands before starting her own clean makeup company in 2019.

"I sought out founder-based brands here in Los Angeles, and prestige ones, color, skin care. I worked at Kate Somerville, Smashbox Cosmetics, Josie Maran. And really, with all the companies -- I went to went from bigger company to smaller company -- my role kept getting bigger. The hope there was that I just wanted to see what it was like to have a seat at the table," she said on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Because of Liu's own chronic eczema, Tower 28 was created to go beyond the proposition of clean. "I tried to make the switch to clean beauty, but a lot of clean beauty felt like it was actually pretty hard on my sensitive skin because there are essential oils and plant botanicals in it." Moreover, there were few clean color cosmetics options when Liu was conceiving of her brand.

Layering a youthful and accessible positioning has been a boon for the new brand --- products are all under $28. It's ranked No. 7 at Sephora, and it's penetrating 1% of Sephora sales worldwide. "One percent of all Sephora customers are buying Tower 28, which is actually a feat that a lot of big brands never get to; that is partly because of the fact that our price point is low, so then a lot of people can have the ability to try our products."

After 20 years in big beauty, with stints at L'Oréal and Procter & Gamble, Waldencast founder and CEO Michel Brousset set out to start over, with an eye on the future.

"We started with a dream, which was to create this big global company, but you [have to] start as an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur, just like founders are," said Brousset on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Brousset was most recently group president of L’Oréal's consumer products division in North America. In 2019, he started Waldencast by investing in and providing operational support for emerging brands. Early investments included refillable cosmetics line Kjaer Weis and Francisco Costa's beauty debut Costa Brazil, which was recently sold to Amyris. And while that is still one arm of the business, brand incubation is also a focus. It debuted its first foray last week, a travel-inspired line dubbed Whind, and it has three other brands in the works.

With multiple goals and scale as its focus, Waldencast recently announced its special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC), Waldencast Acquisition Corp, with $633 million to invest.

"As we were developing these two areas of how to create this new, next-generation company -- in a way, we're creating it from a blank sheet of paper, the way we want to create it and with the values that we want to create -- we started thinking relatively early that we wanted to do larger acquisitions," he said. "When we started developing and firming up how to do that is where we landed with a SPAC, as an efficient way of building that capability."

Still, Brousset said the focus for Waldencast is to bet on brands with a similar ethos. "If you look at all the brands in our portfolio, they have certain threads or flows between them, some commonality between them. They are brands that have in their DNA, not just a perspective on beauty, but also a perspective relative to important social values like sustainability, inclusivity, responsibility and conscious entrepreneurship, which happen to be our values," said Brousset.

Private equity firm VMG Partners has invested in some of beauty's biggest disrupters: Drunk Elephant, Briogeo and Perfect Diary. But the 16-year-old firm didn't have a firm playbook when it first started out, said Robin Tsai, a general partner at VMG who leads the company's beauty and wellness practice.

"As a first-time fund, you're really more defined by what works and what doesn't," he said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "You can have all these great theses at that point in time, but it's a lot easier to connect the dots when you're actually looking backward than when you're looking forward. What I would say that we're good at is working with founders. It's just something that was part of our DNA. It probably also came from the fact that we were a startup, as well, so we could really empathize with what people were going through. We found that we were very good with brands and had a certain gut in terms of what consumers really cared about and where they were headed."

To date, VMG has realized many of its beauty and wellness investments, including Drunk Elephant, which sold to Shiseido for $845 million in 2019, which is something that Tsai said founders recognize. "We have sold the most businesses of any consumer fund to strategics over the last 15 years. That track record is an important one, and it's something that founders truly care about," he said.

And while the investing landscape is changing rapidly, with firms investing earlier and SPACs becoming part of the equation, Tsai said VMG's focus is on "elevating" the businesses it invests in. "Our M.O. is really more about investing deeply within the ecosystem of the categories that we're investing in, so that's food and beverage, beauty and personal care, the wellness space, alcohol and spirits, the pet space. It really is having a super, super deep knowledge of who the stakeholders are, what makes them tick," he said

During a full year of uncertainty and change, companies found few things they could bet on. But for Estée Lauder Companies, its hero product strategy provided to be fundamental. In its latest quarterly earnings, 10 of ELC’s brands saw growth. La Mer and its namesake brand Estée Lauder saw double-digit sales growth, thanks to iconic franchises.

"[The strategy is] really to focus on our hero products. Because first and foremost, these products are absolutely loved," said Jane Hertzmark Hudis, executive group president of the Estée Lauder Companies, on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "They will drive the greatest amount of recruitment, which is new consumers to our brand, and repeat business, which is the loyalty to the products. Advanced Night Repair and Crème de la Mer are great examples. However, we do innovate in what we call those franchises."

A long-term ELC veteran, Hertzmark Hudis started at Prescriptives within the company before taking leadership roles at Origins and Estée Lauder. She is often pointed to as the driver of the organization's skin-care wins. In July, she became the first woman promoted to executive group president at the conglomerate.

Though the concept of prestige beauty is evolving, Hertzmark Hudis affirmed that Estée Lauder Companies will "be pure-play, focused on prestige and luxury."

"The luxury business is booming, and people want more and more luxury, and more and more luxury experiences. So luxury is, quite frankly, here to stay," she said

Casey Georgeson, founder and CEO of Saint Jane Beauty, was building brands for others, like LVMH's Kendo and Cupcake Vineyards, before she saw herself as a "founder."

"I've always been that behind the scenes," she said on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. Oftentimes people would ask me, 'When are you going to start your own brand?' 'When are you going to be a founder?' I never felt like I had the big idea to do that, to make the leap. I knew what went into it, and I knew how extraordinarily difficult it would be."

That changed, however, when Georgeson was introduced to CBD while working in the wine industry. Though many people had negative opinions of CBD because of its connection to marijuana, Georgeson believed it had greater appeal. "I fell in love with what it promised," she said.

And despite the stoner presentation in dispensaries, she also believed that CBD had the power to be a luxury skin-care and wellness ingredient. Today, Saint Jane is sold at Sephora and Credo, and on its own DTC site. The company's sales grew 300% in 2020.

Though a 15-year-veteran in beauty, Guive Balooch, head of L'Oréal's technology incubator, considers his outsider-turned-insider perspective a skill. Balooch started his professional career as an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley before working in pharmaceuticals.

"I spent almost half of my life really focused on academia and science," he said on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I fell upon this job in L'Oréal, because I was moving to Chicago for family reasons .. I didn't know anything about the company. I will say that I did like fashion and beauty, in general, even before joining L'Oreal, but I didn't really know much. I discovered this incredible industry ... I feel like if I didn't grow up in an academic family that I probably would have ended up being a marketer, because I really like business and product and consumers. At the same time, I feel a bit lucky because I have this fundamental science background, and I used my experience of being at L'Oréal almost 15 years to learn the marketing and the consumer part."

In the early to mid 2000's L'Oréal's technology and digital ambitions were just getting started. Balooch found his footing in the now timely skin and hair sectors, but he knew technology had the power to transform the beauty industry, even back then. "The idea that we've have had from day one on my team has been: How can we really elevate the beauty experience for people around the world by using tech?"

When Julien Bouzitat, AmorePacific chief marketing and digital officer, started working in marketing in 2000, his proposed path ahead looked very different from what he does today.

"In the early 2000s, it was actually trade marketing, working with retailers or distributors on promotions and displays, pricing, and a little bit of advertising. There was no social media, there were no influencers, there was not even e-commerce," said Bouzitat on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "Not to date myself, but we were just at the very beginning of adding websites to present the brand or present the product. I would say 80% of what I do today did not exist, literally."

After stints with L'Oréal, Bastide and Fresh, Bouzitat landed at AmorePacific's Innisfree about five years ago, where he led the indie brand's expansion from Korea to the U.S. In August 2020, he was appointed to his current role, where he oversees the conglomerate's U.S. brands, Laneige, Innisfree, Sulwhasoo and AmorePacific. Like most beauty companies operating under the veil of Covid-19, the AmorePacific's digital strategy has never been more important.

"When the pandemic hit back in March, we were actually finalizing all our re-platforming and optimization of our ecosystem, so we got kind of lucky. We were able to maximize that growth very quickly and, of course, change our investments and our programs to go digital-first," he said.

But the right partnerships are still driving growth in the U.S. Case in point: the company's partnership with Sephora for Laneige.

As startup beauty brands and newly minted founders emerge almost daily, it's easy to forget that some companies are not made overnight. Take, for instance, makeup artist-turned-founder Danessa Myricks, who has been building her authority in beauty for more than two decades. After a layoff from a publishing company, Myricks decided to change her future by teaching herself how to do makeup.

"I started at [age] 30. I've been doing makeup now for over 20 years, so you get a sense of how old I am," said Myricks on a recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "So back then, there was no Instagram, there was no social media. There weren't all these beauty schools. They weren't masterclasses. There was nothing. You can go to the library, you can buy a book. And so there really weren't resources that way, and [the same for] even in cosmetology school -- not that I had the time to do it because I needed to earn money."

That lack of public access and education led to one of Myricks' first business endeavors. She began to sell makeup DVDs to beauty enthusiasts. "I don't even know anyone who owns a DVD player player right now, but that really was the thing. Early on in my career, I always had a business mindset; I wanted to turn this into a business, [because] it was going to be the thing that I used to feed my family... When one hairstylist asked me if I can come to their salon and teach them and their staff how to do makeup, a bell went off. I was like, 'I can hold little classes.' These sessions started off with, like, five people, and then 20, and it started to grow. I started getting invitations from different hair shows to teach the audience how to do makeup. And I was like, 'Wow, how can I amplify this?' Because I can't be everywhere. I can't go to every show."

In many ways those, original DVDs set the stage for Myricks' cult following on Instagram (she's largely responsibly for the neon trend on social) and her namesake online university, which she launched during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But product development has always been Myricks' true calling, especially with the lack of diverse and inclusive shade ranges she experienced as both a customer and a makeup artist. Today, her self-funded Danessa Myricks Beauty line that launched five years ago experienced 100% sales growth in 2020. It is sold in 50 stores in 13 countries worldwide; this month, it made its foray into Sephora.

When Tata Harper launched her namesake skin-care brand over a decade ago, she was one of the first beauty pioneers who decided that all-natural formulations and luxury were not mutually exclusive.

"It was about making the best products in the world, always -- and using the best ingredients, which are natural ingredients," said Harper on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Harper's road to her own brand began when her stepfather was diagnosed with cancer in the mid 2000s, and she was introduced to the concept of toxic load, which is an accumulation of toxins and chemicals in our bodies that people ingest, by one of his doctors. After transitioning to natural home cleaning products, skin care was the "last frontier," she said.

"I was very attached to the products that I bought; I had bought them since I was a little girl," she said. "They were the most high-tech, the highest quality. My mom had always been like that, that 'It's really important to invest in beauty.' I remember looking for natural beauty and, at the time [around 2004], that meant going to Whole Foods and little apothecaries here and there. I would find things that weren't natural, or they were so simple like three oils together."

Frustrated with the experience, she rushed to department stores for advice. There, associates provided her with products with roses or orchids mixed with synthetic ingredients for so-called efficacy. "I started Googling ... and I'm like, 'Oh, this is petroleum,' and then, 'Oh, propylene glycol. What is this stuff? Oh, it's antifreeze.' I don't want to be putting ingredients that belong in my car on my skin. Why are they there? This obviously can't be what's giving results."

In the last five years, a rush of new clean, natural and organic brands have made the white space Harper found more crowded, but she isn't concerned with the competition. This is especially true as Tata Harper Skincare remains a product company first and limits outsourcing to PR, she said.

"I had no idea how revolutionary [focusing on skin care] was gonna be or how or how different it was. I had no idea the extent that the industry did," she said. "I just wanted to make sure that I fulfilled that compromise, that commitment that I had with the customer that I'm going to do this."

K-beauty was certainly taking off in the U.S. in 2012. But, when Hero Cosmetics cofounder and CEO Ju Rhyu discovered hydrocolloid patches to treat acne in Korea, it was one innovation that had not landed stateside.

"I was living [in South Korea] as an expat, and I was breaking out. I don't really know why -- maybe it was a different environment, different lifestyle stress -- but I was breaking out and really frustrated. I saw a lot of people in Korea walking around with these stickers on their faces. I had asked around, like, 'Oh, what is this? Why are people wearing these patches?' And someone told me that it was for acne. I bought some and I tried it for myself; I was blown away at how well it worked," she said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

After putting the Hero Cosmetics stamp on hydrocolloid patches, the brand debuted first on Amazon in 2017 and then launched its own DTC website the following year. Though Amazon dissenters in beauty have existed for some time, Rhyu said the platform was the "fastest, cheapest and easiest" way to come to market as a startup. "I wanted to prove out my hypothesis, which was that if I create an acne patch brand for the Western audience, it was going to be successful," she said. Rhyu was more than right. Hero Cosmetics has spurred an acne patch phenomenon and is expected to close the year with more than $80 million in retail sales.

For 26 years, beauty brand Paula's Choice has traded on the principles of truth and transparency in skin care. This was pioneered by its founder Paula Begoun, known in beauty as "The Cosmetics Cop."

But when Erika Kussmann, CMO and general manager, arrived at the clean beauty brand about five years ago, she knew Paula's Choice had an opportunity to reintroduce its story with a larger audience. Begoun had stepped back from daily operations, and though Paula's Choice was a cult beauty brand, Kussman admitted it was a "pretty small cult" at the time.

"Awareness is so important," said Kussmann. "If you're going to be raising and really driving awareness, you want to be consistent so that you get that recognition and it's working harder for you." This was especially true as Paula's Choice was facing more competition from emerging skin-care brands like Drunk Elephant and The Ordinary. Both -- and many others -- had adopted their takes on non-irritating, fragrance-free clean ingredients.

Following a rebrand complete with visual cues, the digitally-native indie brand has found its way to a Gen-Z audience. "These younger generations are quite savvy; they're doing a lot of ingredient research. Specifically, what's interesting about TikTok is that it's a place where you can have quick education and hacks," Kussman said. "We have everything from this long-form, more serious research content that can be translated into a skin-care routine to [content] that's fun for these channels."

As the skin-care category boomed in the last decade, there were certain standout brands that captivated consumers and industry executives alike. Alongside Drunk Elephant, Tatcha, Augustinus Bader and others, there was Dr. Barbara Sturm.

A celebrity in her own right, founder Dr. Barbara Sturm's clients include Kate Moss, Cher, Angela Bassett and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley -- and she's been credited with creating the A-lister favorite vampire facial. Sturm's aesthetics business gave her the concept for her namesake brand, which is now a best seller at Sephora and Net-a-Porter, and sells on its DTC site. But as a trained German aesthetics doctor, she never planned on becoming a beauty brand founder and CEO.

"I started creating products, and that's how I got into that industry, but [it was] still only designed for helping my patients," Sturm said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "Because of distribution issues -- I actually only wanted to be on Net-a-Porter to be able to distribute to my patients [around the] world -- they launched me. From that point, every retailer called me up and said, 'Dr. Sturm, we want your products.'"

Despite the pandemic, the brand has grown from a cult beauty favorite into a mainstream business. The company has seen DTC sales grow 400% since March, and it relaunched its website last September.

"It's kind of tricky to launch a new website during this period, but we did super, super well with it. It could have been quite a catastrophic experience," said Dr. Strum. "We are so happy to have it. We put a lot of love and effort into it to really serve our customers as well as we can. It's not just like, 'Oh, buy my products.' It's more like you get education here; you get so much more insight."

Winky Lux may be in growth mode, but it’s faced its fair share of pandemic-driven challenges.

“It's such a fun mental exercise to go back to pre-pandemic life. I think our mental outlook was super arrogant,” said Natalie Mackey, co-founder and CEO of The Glow Concept and Winky Lux, on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Still, Mackey’s been pushing forward with Winky Lux. The brand has cemented a strong wholesale partnership with Target, which it launched in early March 2020, just prior to the pandemic hitting the states. And earlier this month, it joined a long list of color cosmetics brands that have expanded to skin care in the last year.

Earning market share in the skin care category won’t be easy, said Mackey, but she’s up to the challenge.

“We really believe this is a 360 [degree] brand,” said Mackey. “But it's going to take time to build trust with the [skin-care customer]. Skin care is a more intimate relationship.”

And despite slumping makeup sales industry-wide, Mackey said has no plans to turn her back on the category.

“My take is that color will come back with a vengeance. I think it's going to be 6-18 months, depending on what happens with the vaccine. But women have been wearing color cosmetics for 2000 years. We're not giving it up.”

Mackey also discussed the importance of profitability, Instagrammable products and product reviews.

Despite the difficulties of 2020, some beauty brands made strides that have set them up for long-term growth. Case in point: customized and personalized Function of Beauty, best known for its hair care products.

The 4-year-old startup closed out December 2020 with a $150 million Series B raise led by L Catterton, which it followed with a brick-and-mortar retail expansion with Target. And before that, the brand made several strategic moves, such as extending into body care and skin care, and launching national linear television ads.

Of the success, on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Function of Beauty co-founder and CEO Zahir Dossa said, "It's getting borderline politically incorrect to ever say you had a great 2020, so I will not commit to having a great one. For the business itself, we've had some wins, but we had a lot of tough challenges to overcome, as well. Overall, I think it was a huge success with the ability to carry out all our ambitious plans, all in one year."

Alpyn Beauty founder and CEO Kendra Kolb Butler had plans to leave the beauty industry in 2015. She moved from New York City to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, following long-term stints in marketing and public relations at Dr. Dennis Gross and Clarins. But, after living in her new hometown for a week, she "missed talking to women about their skin and their problems," she said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Kolb Butler quickly set up a beauty shop, Alpyn Beauty Bar, to cater to locals' skin-care needs, but customers kept coming in saying they needed different solutions for dryness and hyperpigementation caused by the Jackson Hole climate. "I started to notice a trend that they would come back in with the product they purchased, and they would say, 'What else do you have in the store? This isn't working,'" she said. "I didn't really know what to do. I was selling the best brands in skin care and the best cosmetic lines, and I didn't have anything else to offer. I was sitting in my backyard one summer, and I was looking at the National Forest. I'm pondering, 'I'm going to go out of business in these stores,' and as I'm thinking about this, I'm looking at the plants that are growing in the wild. They are so plump, juicy, hydrated and full of nutrients. And I'm thinking, 'What is growing here?'"

Those wildcrafted plants sparked the idea for Kolb Butler's skin-care brand Alpyn Beauty, one of the fastest-growing new beauty brands. Sales of the 2-year-old company, which is sold at Sephora, QVC and Credo, have grown 115% in the last year. And though plenty of private equity and VC firms have taken notice of the company, Kolb Butler is taking her time, in order to strive for long-term, global growth.

In this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, our editorial team takes a look ahead at what 2021 may have in store for the beauty industry, from the rise of livestreaming and TikTok influencers to genuine strides in product sustainability.

In the winner-takes-all conversations around beauty, much has changed including what a winner looks like in the midst of a pandemic. Fortunately for Sally Beauty, it had embarked on a digital-centric strategy before Covid-19 became an industry-rocking crisis.

“We had a pretty extensive brand relaunch that we were in the throes of. It was about modernizing the brand, showcasing to consumers that we will deliver the confidence they needed to DIY at home. The strategy honestly has not changed, because that’s become even more important during the pandemic,” said Sally Beauty group vice president of marketing Carolyne Guss on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Online sales for Sally Beauty Holdings were up 250% in the third quarter of fiscal year 2020, compared to the prior year.

Alongside food, no industry has driven the way companies and influencers use social media quite like beauty.

"Beauty brands and creators have always been early movers in that space," said Kristie Dash, Instagram's manager of fashion and beauty strategic partnerships, on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "And Instagram continues to evolve based off of those behaviors."

In recent years, beauty giants like Sephora have taken to connecting with their followers in the same casual way that individual creators might, Dash said.

"If you're not a creator-led brand that has an obvious face of the brand -- in those examples, that's what people love to connect with, almost like a FaceTime with your followers -- then brands like Sephora and MAC Cosmetics, with their built-in creator network of hundreds of global makeup artists, are leaning into that. A creator mentality has really helped them," she said. "They're utilizing those personalities almost to replicate the in-store experience of having that conversation with the makeup artist or the ambassador; they're replicating that on Instagram Live." 

If there's one thing that makes Tracy Anderson's workout routines stand out, it's the iteration. Joseph Pilates "stopped at 350 moves," Anderson said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "And I've got thousands upon thousands of sequences."

That extends to live workouts, which Anderson favors over a rote streaming approach. "I'm not nervous to put the pressure on me. Every week, no matter what's going on in my life, I have to show up for everybody."

This includes running the business side of her eponymous company, which she previously parsed out to other people. Despite having high-profile clientele like Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez, Anderson has preferred the slow and steady approach to growth versus rapidly scaling.

"I'm the CEO now because other CEOs did not share my vision, and they felt really uncomfortable to me," she said. "At the end of the day, when you want to own a business, or if you're a founder, it's like parenting, in a sense. You might wish that the nanny can teach your kid all the lessons or parent them, but that's not parenting at all. That's giving away all of your power. That's not going to inject your child with all of your magic and all you have to offer.... There have been chapters of owning this business that I'm definitely not proud of. So me being in the CEO position is the moment for me to say, 'OK, you can't let somebody else change all the diapers.'"

This past January, JuE Wong joined hair-care brand Olaplex as its CEO -- not because it had budding potential, but because of the strength of its existing assets.

For one, the demand is there. "What we are seeing is that, when people are looking at their hair, they look at it as an extension of their skin care," Wong said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. And skin care, of course, has emerged as a major category in recent years.

Olaplex has also developed a strong reputation among stylists and other salon professionals, "which gave it a lot of credibility and authority," Wong said. "So when I joined I saw that equity."

Olaplex launched in 2014 and only developed a few products to start. "They knew that if they were going to launch anything else, it had to be best in class and best in category," Wong said. "And that is what I mandated myself to do. I told my team that we are not going to go for SKU proliferation, but we are going to hone in on innovation."

For La Prairie Group regional vice president François Le Gloan, what the luxury beauty brand didn't do in response to the coronavirus pandemic is as important as what it did. Le Gloan is responsible for the company's operations in the Americas and Oceania.

"We have seen a flurry of promotions," he said about the larger beauty industry, on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "With the help of our retail partners, we have managed to stay a bit away from this surge of promotional activity."

One front for change, however, is how the company sells product online. La Prairie organizes online events; participants receive samples in the mail in advance, so that they can mimic the typical learning and sampling experience that was the industry's bread and butter in-store before the crisis.

Le Gloan anticipates that many of La Prairie's digital pivots will stick around for the long haul. "Looking back maybe two or three years time, we will realize that it has enriched the palette of the way we are doing things," he said.

When Luxury Brand Partners founder and CEO Tev Finger pitched his idea to Estée Lauder Companies -- an in-house brand incubator that he would run after the company bought his brand Bumble & Bumble -- the company almost went for it.

"I give a lot of credit. It's hard for a company that buys brands that are profitable to even contemplate taking a risk on incubators," Finger said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "It ended up not happening."

That was around 2006, Finger recalled. But all these years later, he still sees Luxury Brand Partners, which he founded in 2012, as an incubator for beauty conglomerates in everything but name.

"I'm actually an arm of them," Finger said. "We kind of line it up for them to make an easy acquisition. We know the things they're looking for." Since the Bumble & Bumble acquisition, Finger has sold Becca to ELC, Pulp Riot to L'Oréal and Oribe to Kao Corporation. Other brands in the LBP portfolio include R+Co, Patrick Starrr's One/Size and Camila Coelho's Elaluz -- the latter two launched during the pandemic.

Which of the giant beauty companies ends up buying the small companies he sets up is beside the point, as long as one of them does. Not that it's easy.

"It has to be profitable, and it has to be well executed. And you have to have trademarks around the world and licenses -- so when they buy it it's seamless," Finger said. "If you can erase the roadblocks and put it to them on a platter, you're going to get a lot of buyers."

Fragrance isn't what it used to be, according to Acqua Di Parma CEO Laura Burdese.

"I don't wear a fragrance anymore to represent my personality to someone else," Burdese said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I do it because of myself, because it's part of my personal, intimate life."

That's partly due to the pandemic that is hitting with renewed strength, of course, both in the company's native Italy and around the world. If people are still wearing perfume, they're doing it for themselves.

"On top of fragrances, we've seen the rise of so many bath and body products and home fragrances like candles and diffusers," Burdese said of the self-care momentum. "This is a shift that was probably somehow already there, but the pandemic really accelerated it."

Acqua Di Parma's customer base is slowly skewing younger, Burdese added. For those generations and overall, the meaning of luxury has changed from being a simple price bracket to requiring an emotional resonance with customers, "something they believe in and feel is relevant to them," Burdese said. "To me, luxury is becoming something more personal." And that, she said, is oftentimes "more difficult."

When Covid-19 hit the U.S. in March, Ipsy, like all beauty companies, had to rethink its year ahead. But CEO Marcelo Camberos said he hoped the larger economic and consumer changes would allow Ipsy, best known for its monthly subscription Glam Bags, to become "a bigger part of members' lives."

"In this world where they really need us, where it's much harder to go to physical retail and feel confident doing so, how can we provide more value?" said Camberos, on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "We thought that the key way we could do that was to give them more control."

Ipsy aims to give its customers more control by allowing them to choose the merchandise that they get in Ipsy's Glam Bags and to offer more personal care products in tandem with beauty. Camberos said the big question for his team when thinking of customers is always, "Was it worth it for me this month?" in regard to the monthly shipment of products.

And this line of thinking has been applied to all of Ipsy's franchises, including its events, which the company had previously gone heavy on in 2019, and incubation, as seen in its August launch of Item Beauty with TikTok star Addison Rae Easterling.

"We probably changed more than half of our business initiatives for the year," said Camberos of the company's pivot. "This is a new world; we need to act quickly."

Glossy is proud to present Unfair, a podcast about the global skin-lightening industry and everything it touches, from the demand for lighter skin to the beauty companies selling to it.

In this bonus episode, we share a live Q&A first hosted by Unfair host Priya Rao and its producer, Pierre Bienaimé. They were joined by a source from the series' first episode: activist and speaker Nina Davuluri. Together they discuss the industry and the podcast itself, and take audience questions.

Glossy is proud to present Unfair, a podcast about the global skin-lightening industry and everything it touches, from the demand for lighter skin to the beauty companies selling to it.

In episode four, Unfair considers the future of the skin lightening industry -- and how the criticism it has faced this past year will or won't lead to systemic change among its biggest stakeholders.

Unfair is hosted by Priya Rao, executive editor at Glossy, and produced by Digiday senior producer Pierre Bienaimé.

Glossy is proud to present Unfair, a podcast about the global skin-lightening industry and everything it touches, from the demand for lighter skin to the beauty companies selling to it.

In episode three, Unfair explores the deep -- and often surprising -- history of the market for skin-lightening that existed in the United States and South Africa.

Unfair is hosted by Priya Rao, executive editor at Glossy, and produced by Digiday senior producer Pierre Bienaimé.

Glossy is proud to present Unfair, a podcast about the global skin-lightening industry and everything it touches, from the demand for lighter skin to the beauty companies selling to it.

In episode two, Unfair covers the health problems and psychological harm these products pose to consumers at large. We hear from Minnesota and California state health department workers, the World Health Organization, and Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

Unfair is hosted by Priya Rao, executive editor at Glossy, and produced by Digiday senior producer Pierre Bienaimé.

Glossy is proud to present Unfair, a podcast about the global skin-lightening industry and everything it touches, from the demand for lighter skin to the beauty companies selling to it.

In four episodes, Unfair will explore the industry’s origins, history, systems of regulation and its future.

Unfair is hosted by Priya Rao, executive editor at Glossy, and produced by Digiday senior producer Pierre Bienaimé.

Glossy is proud to present Unfair, a podcast about the global skin-lightening industry and everything it touches, from the demand for lighter skin to the beauty companies selling to it.

In four episodes, Unfair will explore the industry’s origins, history and systems of regulation. It will also lay bare the societal and health problems presented by these products, whether found on store shelves around the world or sold as bootleg items on online marketplaces.

This narrative series will hear from academics, activists, dermatologists, government employees and industry analysts to bring listeners a fuller understanding of this segment of the beauty industry.

Unfair includes more than 30 voices, like those of U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar and former Miss America Nina Davuluri. The podcast will uncover how familiar consumer packaged goods companies and their customers have a lot to win or lose, especially as these companies seek to walk a line between progressive marketing and profits.

Unfair is hosted by Priya Rao, executive editor at Glossy, and produced by Digiday producer Pierre Bienaimé. Subscribe to the Glossy Beauty Podcast now on Apple Podcasts -- or wherever you get your podcasts -- to hear the first episode on Thursday, September 17.

80% of Foreo's business comes from Luna, a small line of handheld gadgets that promise to clean the face through vibrating silicone bristles. Despite the demand for the brand as <a href="https://www.glossy.co/beauty/how-beauty-device-brands-are-avoiding-clarisonic-fate">facials have only recently resumed in cities like New York</a> -- "business is amazing," said Beki Hoxha, the vp and gm of business operations for Foreo Americas -- the Swedish company won't be making any changes to pricing.

"There's nothing in the world that is the 'white truffle' of technology, that we'll actually charge $1,000 and be able to justify it," Hoxha said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "That's why we follow the model where Luna 1 launched at $199 -- Luna 2 came out and was a much better, improved product, but it didn't go higher in price."

Hoxha talked about TikTok's big advantage over incumbents like Facebook and Instagram, what makes for a great influencer in 2020 and how one of their product lines caters to the "anti-anti-aging" crowd.

It hasn't been the best year to start a whole new venture in beauty. But Victoria Beckham Beauty has done just that, launching in September 2019 and already tackling a huge market that brands with less star power might hesitate to tackle: China.

Co-founder and CEO Sarah Creal (formerly of Estée Lauder) pointed to China's claim to have "the most advanced social media" as one of the big attractions to the region. "It will inform the rest of our digital strategy in the other parts of the world where we sell," Creal said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. Despite retail interest, the brand is sold exclusively online.

Victoria Beckham Beauty is primarily selling skin care in China, alongside a few makeup items on Tmall, the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform.

"We are seeing upticks in eye makeup, and that makes sense because of the mask-wearing," Creal said.

The pandemic has meant an uncertain forecast for growth in the direct-to-consumer company's first full calendar year. But sales have grown by double digits in recent months, said Creal. "And I don't see that slowing down. I only see that increasing." Three-quarters of customers have returned to make a purchase, she said.

For skincare brand Youth To The People, the death of retail comes to what kind of store you're running. "I think the luxury stores, the specific stores, will actually do really well because people will want that customized, very succinct experience," said co-founder Joe Cloyes on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "Whereas I think the bigger stores, people are realizing how easy it is to buy online."

The company's own pop-up store in Los Angeles, which only lasted a few months until January of this year, was in the former camp, said Cloyes. He and his cousin (and fellow co-founder) Greg Gonzalez are still planning on opening their own space at a later date.

Youth To The People also sells through Sephora, it's biggest partner, but "we want people to come in and generally walk into something unique," Gonzalez said. "When you walk into a strong retail environment, especially one that's specific to a brand, you feel the essence of that brand. You know it. There's something specific you can call out."

Cara Sabin joined Sundial Brands as its CEO last December. That was when the coronavirus pandemic was a regional story rather than a global one, and before months of social unrest would renew the challenge for companies to hire and serve diverse groups.

"We are so fully in support of these conversations around supporting Black founders and businesses," Sabin said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "At SheaMoisture, we developed what we call a 'Shea List' -- a listing of over 100 businesses that we admire, first and foremost, but that we've also personally invested in to help cultivate and help them grow." SheaMoisture also announced a $1 million fund for founders of color.

In addition to SheaMoisture, Sundial's brands include Nubian Heritage, Madam C.J. Walker and Nyakio. Sundial Brands was acquired by Unilever in 2017.

One brand Sundial Brands recently partnered with is Brown Girl Jane, which was founded by three Black women. "Through that partnership, we're encouraging consumers to take the 'Brown Girl Swap' pledge, where they take five of their existing beauty products and swap them for products that are founded by Black women," Sabin said.

The pandemic has made Ulta Beauty's most progressive goals tougher to reach, but the beauty retailer's president, Dave Kimbell, doesn't want to put them on hold.

"Increasingly, guests of all ages and all types are making choices based on their values," Kimbell said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

This is coming to life most dynamically in Ulta's Conscious Beauty platform, which debuts fully in October and focuses on "five pillars:" "clean ingredients, cruelty-free, vegan, sustainable packaging and positive impact," Kimbell said.

Sustainable packaging is the one Ulta Beauty (and the industry as a whole, according to Kimbell) can flex on most. "We probably have the most runway ahead of us to drive greater change and have a more positive impact as it relates to packaging," Kimbell said. Last month. Ulta announced that by 2025, half of its in-store packaging will be either recycled, bio-sourced, recyclable or refillable.

As for economic headwinds, Kimbell is optimistic that beauty will enjoy a rebound after the end of the pandemic.

"There will be in some ways I think a new renaissance in beauty, a new resurgence in beauty," Kimbell said.

Before joining Sephora, Sol de Janeiro's premium body products had another retailer stumped. "They said, 'You know, we don't know what to do with you guys,' recalled Heela Yang, one of the company's three founders and its CEO, on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. The company's butt cream, foot cream and body hair lightener put them apart from brands in beauty. "And then she said, 'You know, I think Sephora might be really into you guys.' And she was right."

Yang founded the company with Camila Pierotti and Marc Capra in 2015. It partnered with Sephora the following year, going into stores nationwide weeks after its Bum Bum Cream for the derrière and its foot cream performed well on Sephora's site.

A few years ago, Yang said, it was unclear whether the market for upscale products for the body was even sustainable. "If we had made a decision based on the size of the premium body care category back then, we probably wouldn't have launched this brand," she said.

According to Yang, the company started with the idea of sharing Brazil's inclusive beauty culture before it started a product line. Yang lived in Brazil for a time (as did Capra), and Pierotti is from Rio de Janeiro. "There is something that starts in the beach culture of Rio -- that beauty is not any sort of universal standard to achieve, it is a feeling. Feeling comfortable in your own skin and feeling happy in your own skin. Brazilians love taking care of their bodies," said Pierotti.

In the months since the Covid-19 pandemic went global, Sol de Janeiro has pivoted from in-person promotion of its products and events to a DTC-focused model. Its first fragrance, launched in mid-March just as the world came to a halt, had to be quickly shipped back from Sephora stores to fulfill online orders. But, the company's digital business is three times what it was last year, Yang said, and now makes up almost half of its total business.

Skin care isn't just for the face, according to Nécessaire co-founder Randi Christiansen. Christiansen founded the company with Nécessaire co-founder Nick Axelrod in 2018 and debuted digitally first. Their original lineup of clean products -- a curated assortment of body washes, body lotions and sex gels -- was quite unorthodox for the beauty industry just two years ago.

"Nick and I really felt philosophically that skin doesn't stop at the neck," she said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Christiansen saw a gap in how much money people were willing to spend on skin care for the face, as well as for their favorite matchas. "It was very clear to both of us that there was just room for what we call real ingredients in body," Christiansen said.

Nécessaire's now expanded product line <a href="https://www.glossy.co/beauty/clean-beauty-brands-revert-to-self-care-focused-marketing">entered Sephora.com last month</a>, and pandemic permitting, will debut in its stores in August. The company plans to grow 300% to 400% this year, Christiansen said, in part thanks to this new relationship with Sephora.

The age of ongoing confinement seems tailor-made for the industry's clean beauty segment.

"We couldn't be in a more timely position in terms of what we've been pushing for as a brand," said Kosas founder Sheena Yaitanes on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Kosas launched in 2015 with lipstick before moving on to a full clean color assortment. It recently flexed its personal care muscle by debuting deodorant. The company closed a series B in January, on the tail of revenue in the $50 million to $60 million range in 2019. It's expected to triple that business, according to previous reporting by Glossy.

"I have long believed that the look of beauty was changing. I have long felt alienated from the beauty conversation when you're talking about a makeup routine that requires 15 products or an hour and a half. And I'm a makeup lover, so I know I'm not alone," Yaitanes said.

Some beauty products trickle down from medical use to everyday consumers by happenstance, but Augustinus Bader's skincare line is the opposite, according to the company's CEO Charles Rosier.

Rosier first learned about Professor Augustinus Bader's research around a "wound gel" in a case study involving a young burn victim. "Basically, using that wound gel [Augustinus] was able to prevent skin graft and scarring to that child," Rosier said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I was really shocked that the thing could exist, but was not widely available."

As Bader -- a professor of stem cell biology at Germany's University of Leipzig -- told Rosier then, he felt that pharmaceutical companies weren't as willing to fund clinical trials because "the number of cases of burned people in the Western world was not so high. Most cases are actually in the third world," he said. "For a pharmaceutical group, it's not necessarily the most valuable customer."

Rosier decided to step in and co-found a consumer-centric version of the company in 2018. He thought a skincare brand could help fuel Bader's greater work -- "he's the brain doing the research, I'm the guy behind the scenes," he said. The line has gone on to earn accolades among Hollywood celebrities for its rejuvenating effect, not just its medical expertise. That was by design -- in lieu of a pricy marketing campaigns or influencers, the company distributed samples through a personal connection in Los Angeles in its early days.

Since then, Augustinus Bader has slowly added new products to its line-up to complement its cult status "The Cream" and "The Rich Cream," which retail for $265. The company expects to earn $70 million in 2020, up from an estimated $24 million in 2019 -- but Rosier doesn't see the company putting dozens of products on store shelves (or online, where it makes most of its sales), despite the demand.

"We can't lie about it. That product is efficient on its own and it nourishes the skin cells' environment so your skin cells make the right decision," Rosier said.

Credo is betting that customers stuck at home are as beauty-minded as always, but that more than ever, they now have the time to do their research about clean beauty.

"Health is what anyone is thinking about right now," Credo co-founder Annie Jackson said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I think if we didn't have a customer before this and we do now, it's because she's really understanding that investment in health -- really educating herself on certain chemicals and how they could impact health or the environment."

Credo carries items from about 135 brands, according to Jackson, and incentivizes them with "more kudos and marketing" to create transparent packaging -- and to stay away from what Credo considers less-than-clean substances.

Still Jackson doesn't think of clean beauty as an exclusive part of the market anymore. Case in point: the retailer's latest collaboration with Ulta. She talked about the benefits of partnering with Ulta , consumer trends during the pandemic and just how many product submissions Credo entertains on a monthly basis.

Millions of Americans are still out of work as the coronavirus pandemic's ripples through the economy, and many are unlikely to return to the jobs they held a few months ago.

A few companies -- including Stella & Dot, Ever and Keep -- have stepped into that vacuum, offering gig economy work for people willing and able to sell cosmetics, clothes and fashion accessories.

"We really started growing when unemployment was at 8 and 9%. And in some ways you could say the growth of our business was somewhat counter-cyclical, because when people had a greater financial need, not only did you see more people join, but you saw the people that did join work more and earn more," Stella & Dot founder and CEO Jessica Herrin said on the Glossy Podcast of the 2008 final crisis.

The company counts about 30,000 "ambassadors," though the number of people actively selling on a monthly basis is between 8,000 and 10,000, according to Herrin.

Prior to Covid-19, Stella & Dot, Ever and Keep went through a $50 million tech revamp to connect sellers with a digital platform (inspired by Shopify, Pinterest and Polyvore) allowing them to set up a curated selection of products -- a storefront, essentially -- which they can then email or text to customers.

That foresight has been key to surviving as a business during coronavirus.

"Browse commerce is just done," Herrin said. "Who wants to go to a website and search and come up with a thousand options and look for reviews that may or not be real, rather than get a curated assortment texted to you with personalized recommendations?"

Ted Gibson and Jason Backe had to close one business to make another work.

The married couple (a hairstylist and colorist, respectively) and business partners say it took closing down their flagship salon location on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 2017 to allow them to rethink their futures. What they landed on was a L.A. smart salon "powered by Amazon," that had no receptionist and no inventory -- their hero product, the Shooting Star Texture Meringue, was not sold in store, but on Amazon.

"We knew that that model of 25 chairs, 12 assistants, a huge front desk staff, the overhead of the product -- we knew that that model was a dinosaur," Backe said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

In the latest Glossy Beauty podcast, Gibson and Backe talk about bouncing back from having just $2,500 in the bank because of Covid-19, how some beauty companies are all talk when it comes to supporting Black businesses and what the salon of the future looks like.

Uoma Beauty founder Sharon Chuter is more than ready for the reckoning coming to monocultural corporations in America.

"Now I can be more vocal about it because I have little to lose," Chuter said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I didn't start my business to be a billionaire. It was part of me using a platform to speak up against what was going on."

The Nigerian-born founder launched the #PullUpForChange campaign earlier this month, calling for the brands that had come out in support of Black Lives Matter to disclose the number of Black employees on their own payrolls, including those at the corporate and executive level.

"You're not giving them jobs," Chuter said about the brands. "You take their culture, you repackage it and you sell it back to them at a premium. Meanwhile, you're not employing them."

Some beauty companies divulged these statistics, alongside promises to improve, but for Chuter, "pulling up" also means being held accountable for that down the line -- every six months, specifically.

"In six months, some people won't have made much progress. That's reality. Especially right now in the Covid-19 era," she said. "So we want to establish two national days where all national companies pull up for the Black community and let us see."

The Black population makes up 13.4% of the country as a whole, but Black employees only account for 8.6% of Fortune 500 board seats and 3.2% of senior managers, according to data reported in The Economist. According to McKinsey & Company, only 1% of Black business owners get a bank loan in their first year of business, compared with 7% of white business owners. And The Washington Post found that only 1% of founders who have raised venture capital are Black; in 2018, 81% of VC firms didn’t have a single Black investor.

Chuter is ultimately optimistic. "I have to be," she said. By way of solutions, she urged companies to develop executive talent from within a company's ranks while putting out calls for employment at historically Black colleges and universities; to front ad campaigns and messaging with Black models and organizers even at the cost of alienating certain consumers (or investors) who don't understand the moral urgency; and creating diversity boards that exist outside a company's own workforce.

"Unless they're independent, they do not have power to implement change because they answer to you, so they're going to give you the answers that you want to hear," Chuter said. "And that's something that every big company should be thinking of right now."

Beauty companies that fail to bring diverse employees into their teams, for executive-level to entry-level roles, aren't just at risk of failing on a moral front -- they're also leaving money on the table, according to Mented co-founders KJ Miller and Amanda Johnson.

"Money talks. So maybe you don't understand why it's important that I have a lipstick that works for my skin tone, but you can understand that black women outspend their non-black counterparts by 80%," Miller said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "The smart investors got it and they are now investors in a really successful brand, and the other investors didn't. And that's on them"

Miller and Johnson graduated from the same 2014 class at Harvard Business School, and launched Mented in January 2017. Sales grew by roughly 400% in the following year, during which -- after pitching 80 VCs -- they raised a pre-seed investment of $1 million. In 2018, the company raised $3 million in further funding.

In Johnson's view, "Diversity in beauty has always been 'a trend.' Sometimes it's really up, sometimes it's really down. It depends on what models are on the runway, what's chic in a season," she said. "But the reality is people of color have always been around."

Regarding the killing of George Floyd and the protests that continue to sweep the country, Johnson acknowledged the gravity of the climate, especially as black founders and leaders.

"We’re making it," she said. "The thing that continues to brighten the day and push us forward is obviously, our families and our passion for the thing we’re building, but also our customers. We have had some of the most heartfelt emails and social comments over the last couple of months and weeks, whether it was about Covid[-19] or about social injustice, encouraging us to keep going, to keep fighting, that our company matters, that what we're doing is important. Sometimes just that one message is the thing that can keep you going in what is an incredibly difficult day."

The coronavirus pandemic has created more uncertainty for brick-and-mortar locations, but it's an opportunity for companies to ramp up the expertise and service stores were known for digitally.

"That is not going away," Unilever Prestige Group CEO and EVP Vasiliki Petrou said in regard to virtual consultations and other digital innovations. "It just will grow stronger. Being future fit is definitely taking that muscle to the next stage," she said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast of the group's brands such as Tatcha and Murad.

And while that aspect of a brand's presence demands evolution, Petrou thinks that conversely, consumers these days are especially attracted to hero products from the brands they know and love.

"In crisis people tend to go back to the bigger, credible, iconic products versus, let's say, the more 'discovery' ones," Petrou said. "Consumers want to go to a safe haven."

Petrou wouldn't confirm or deny rumors that Unilever Prestige was in talks to acquire British makeup brand Charlotte Tilbury, only teasing that "some [rumors] are true, some are not." But she did explain the company's overall approach to M&A.

"We're always about founder-led brands. We're always looking at new business models, new approaches, whether there's a big idea that's globally relevant, and definitely looking at all categories," Petrou said.

When Murad CEO Michelle Shigemasa turned the skin care company's focus to direct-to-consumer sales versus wholesale last year, it was with the goal of getting to 50% DTC within five years.

Now Shigemasa estimates a much faster timeline. "I think that'll happen in the next two years, max," Shigemasa said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

"We've seen digital sales that frankly surprised us. We knew that they would accelerate, but to this degree, I don't think we understood," she said. Sales on Amazon and Murad's own website have also at last doubled, Shigemasa added.

Like just about every company in the industry, the Unilever-owned brand is aiming to take as much customer engagement as it can online with the onset of Covid-19. Shigemasa called virtual events "One of the big challenges we have on our list that we're working on."

Virtual "skin check-ins," an effort that involved shifting personnel from frozen brick-and-mortar outlets -- including Sephora, Ulta, Macy’s and Nordstrom -- have led to 300-400 appointments a day, she said

Considering the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, Shigemasa sees no reason to look back. "When we look forward at brick-and-mortar, I'm not sure they'll ever be the same, to be frank."

In beauty, Biologique Recherche is the industry's definition of a cult brand. The French skincare company's products are only available in a limited assortment of spas globally, despite regular inbound requests from retailers. And on partners' digital sites, product prices are at first hidden; viewers must log in to see what they're in for. That might seem like a tough sell in a world where brick-and-mortar is struggling or still shut down because of Covid-19, and every beauty brand is multiplying its online reach to keep customers engaged and purchasing.

But interest in Biologique Recherche's kind of beauty is on the rise, according to U.S. general manager Laura Gerchik. This is especially true online, where the the treatment brand has found a voice by leaning into virtual consultations and social media posts led by aestheticians.

"The online piece of the puzzle for us has always been about not diluting our brand equity, meaning that we really want online to be like a store experience," Gerchik said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Telemedicine visits may be up, but people have less usual access to their doctors and other hair specialists (like stylists and plastic surgeons) for less than urgent care.

Hair and wellness company Nutrafol works with more than 1,500 specialists, using them as their frontline to reach consumers with their clinically tested products. "We started to sell in doctors' offices, we started to sell in salons, because people trust their stylist," Tsetis said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "Their stylist is never going to recommend something that they truly don't believe in. They're not salespeople."

At least, that was before the coronavirus pandemic took hold and lockdowns around the world began. Nutrafol reacted by creating a platform for those experts on its DTC site. "We did this in about three weeks. And this platform really enabled product sales in the professional channel while salons and offices are closed," Tsetis said. "It's a typical drop-ship model."

A slump in customer acquisition costs "because a lot of other companies reduced advertising spending" has helped contribute to it. In April, according to Tsetis, Nutrafol's CAC cost fell 30% alongside a tripling of new customers.

Tsetis talked about the importance of treating hair loss, especially as stress is at an all-time hight, steady sales growth on Amazon and how the company has avoided Covid-19-related layoffs.

Biossance president Catherine Gore has always considered skin care as medically significant, and believes customers will be more inclined to share that thinking as coronavirus lockdowns continue around the world. "Our skin is our largest organ, and it's also our first line of defense against outside aggressors," Gore said on the latest Glossy Beauty podcast.

Education is a big part of Biossance's marketing strategy and value to customers. One of Biossance's central ingredients for skin care, for instance, is squalane, which it derives biochemically from sugar cane -- the larger cosmetics industry sourced a similar squalene (with an e) from a not-so-vegan source: shark liver.

That makes a big difference for the typical customer who has more time to do her research, according to Gore: "What's actually driving her is a curiosity to do better for her own skin and the planet and to make better choices," she said.

Korean-based and -inspired beauty companies expanded rapidly in the U.S. and globally in the last few years, but AmorePacific turned to e-commerce sooner than others, a saving grace in this coronavirus climate.

"E-commerce was already very top of mind for us. This just sped that up. Right now, our penetration of our own brand dot coms has already doubled for year to date," Jessica Hanson, the company's U.S. president and general manager said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "

In the U.S., Amorepacific sells its portfolio brands Amorepacific, Laneige, Sulwhasoo, Innisfree, Mamonde, Primera and IOPE. The company closed all 10 of its brick-and-mortar Innisfree stores in the U.S. on March 17, the same day as Sephora, where five of its brands are sold.

And though the pandemic has halted those retail sales, Hanson said that customer loyalty is strong enough to keep sales afloat, especially on the domestic front. "The biggest piece of the luxury business has been in that traveler. And that's what is lost right now," Hanson said. "The level of travel is just not happening anywhere in the globe. But domestic sales have not shifted."

Beautycounter isn't your typical beauty brand. Given its network of roughly 50,000 independent consultants marketing and selling its products, company founder and CEO Gregg Renfrew feels "an enormous sense of responsibility to make sure that we are operationally sound," she said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

"I say it's both our opportunity and our responsibility right now," she said of the company's place amid the current coronavirus' outbreak. "Because it may be just a three-month, short term gig for them." But for others, she added, it could be a way to "continue to pay their mortgages, their rent, when other things have dried up."

Renfrew said Beautycounter has seen a rise in younger consultants joining as a way not just to make money, but to find community in a time of frequent isolation.

Overall, she thinks the pandemic will amplify the advantage of direct-to-consumer businesses like hers. "I think the wholesalers in general are in a lot of trouble right now. I hope some of them weather the storm. I think some of them will not, unfortunately," she said.

RéVive Skincare CEO Elana Drell-Szyfer has been in the beauty industry long enough to weather past global crises. "I've lived through them all," she said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, in reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 financial crisis.

But this is her first time at a smaller, independently-owned company. Drell-Szyfer was at L'Oréal and Estée Lauder Companies, respectively, during those past challenges.

"I think the measures are the same, you just feel them much more acutely, probably because your resources are much more constrained and the effects are much more immediate," Drell-Szyfer said of Covid-19's impact on RéVive

RéVive felt the effects of the pandemic early, because of its large customer base in China -- the company expanded to Tmall, Little Red Book and Taobao last year, and 15-30% of its customers in the U.S. are actually Chinese tourists.

"Even before the virus spread to the West, we were going to re-forecast our year based on things that were happening in China," Drell-Szyfer said. "And then of course March hit."

The company is adapting much the way every sector is: by taking previously offline efforts into the virtual world, from deskside promotions (where the company representatives present products to customers, influencers and reporters where they work) to meetings with retailers. "I don't think it's been a hindrance to communication at all," Drell-Szyfer said.

Despite the concept of luxury "revenge buying" RéVive is still anticipating lean times, projecting no domestic demand in April and May. "Domestically, we're essentially expecting no orders -- or that's how we're projecting our own cash flows, from a very conservative perspective," she said.

Sylvie Chantecaille has no illusions about the commercial difficulties presented by the coronavirus pandemic.

"Basically our business went dead overnight," she said of her eponymous prestige beauty company, Chantecaille, where she serves as president and CEO.

And whereas her industry competitors anticipate a run back to stores once the world-spanning practices of social distancing soften, Chantecaille isn't so sure.

"Before we could figure out 'Neiman's will buy this, Nordstrom will buy that, Saks will buy this.' Now we have no idea. We don't know what they're going to buy, if they can buy, if there's anyone to buy. And if they're going to be there!" Chantecaille said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

She added that the beauty business is now focusing on survival, and assumed that its revenue forecast for 2020 is down 30% (the company doubled its retail sales in 2018 to $200 million, and has grown since then, according to Chantecaille).

At the same time, the company's forced focus on e-commerce has seen that side of the business mushroom. "We did last month the amount of money we do in six months normally," Chantecaille said.

That focus concerns Asian markets in particular, where the company is working with KOLs in China and doing direct videos on Taobao.

Chantecaille talked about how she considers Amazon "the death of retail," her ideas for Chantecaille's future product direction and how people want to wear makeup even just for video calls.

Like many entrepreneurs, hair colorist Josh Wood has had to change how he does business in the midst of the pandemic.

"We have no salon operations at the moment, but boy oh boy, the DTC has gone crazy," Wood said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast, regarding product sales.

Wood founded Josh Wood Colour a year and a half ago, after 30 years of working as a hair colorist and 20 as the owner of a salon in London.

The company has transitioned its hair stylists and colorists to instead head up video consultations and live chats, and it soon plans to publish tutorials on finding the right hair color product and how to apply it at home -- which was always a big part of Josh Wood Colour's business.

"It's only through DTC that I can really have direct communication," said Wood.

Overall, Wood said the pandemic is "really giving me and the team great creativity and great bandwidth to be able to really think how we can best support our person at home with every element of what they need."

Wood joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about the market gap he saw before starting his own color line, the emotional value of keeping to a beauty regime even while in isolation and his huge respect for competitor Madison Reed.

BeautyBio founder and CEO Jamie O'Banion describes part of her job as "always thinking through worst-case scenario and planning for it." With the coronavirus pandemic overtaking consumers' health and simultaneously slowing down the U.S. and global economy, that scenario is now -- with one respite, according to O'Banion.

"Most beauty brands are really seeing this hockey-stick revenue uptick, the back half of the year," she said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "So from a timing perspective, I think as an industry we're all grateful. If there was a time for this to happen -- which god forbid, we would never wish it upon anyone -- I think we're all really grateful that this is the time of year."

BeautyBio, which sells skin care products and a micro-needling tool, had been looking to expand considerably into brick-and-mortar this year. That included plans for 50 Sephora stores this month with the the remaining 400 Sephora stores in the U.S. by fall. It had also planned launches in Australia through Mecca and Sephora’s Southeast Asia in Q2.

Now O'Banion sees her company's omnichannel sales capability as a strength against the pandemic's devastating blow to physical retail. "That was a really important initiative to me in the last five years. My number one goal was making sure that we were never totally exposed by single-channel distribution," she said. "And I think [now] it's going to help brands really pause and think about their overall distribution strategy."

In the episode, O'Banion also talked about the importance of keeping the company's team together and the test of marketing and messaging in today's climate.

Sasha Plavsic is pretty clear that she picked the right beauty category to start a business in. "The clean category, as they're calling it now, is on an extreme growth pattern," Plavsic said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast, calling it "one of the fastest categories in Sephora, if not the market in general."

Plavsic founded Ilia Beauty in 2011, a few years after turning 30 and returning to her hometown of Vancouver. "I had left the guy, left the job and was really searching for something new," Plavsic said.

What started as a brand that sold mostly lip products soon became a hot newcomer for complexion and eye products. Though known for those products, lip sales went from 60% to 15% of Ilia Beauty's business after building on other clean product categories." That's not uncommon if you're growing in complexion, but what really took over for us was our mascara," Plavsic said.

Ilia Beauty is now carried across approximately 200 doors at Sephora, Plavsic said. Seeking to fuel continued growth, the company raised <a href="https://www.glossy.co/beauty/clean-color-brand-ilia-focuses-on-offline-marketing">Series B funding in January</a>, not long after its first funding round in 2018.

This episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast was recorded prior to the coronavirus pandemic. A spokesperson for Ilia Beauty said in a statement that the company is "monitoring the situation daily regarding the coronavirus and will adjust accordingly as needed with our forecasts. Like many businesses in our position we believe it is very early still, and too soon to make an estimated guess on what to expect. We have not yet re-evaluated our 2020 revenue projections."

With ample funds for retail, marketing and product, Plavsic talked about what the white space she originally felt in the market and the broader demographic for clean beauty products.

When Kim Kardashian 'broke the internet' by way of a photo shoot in Paper magazine, Drew Elliott was its chief creative officer. Now a few months into his new role as global creative director at MAC Cosmetics, he sees continuity between the two roles.

"If pop culture could be a brand of cosmetics, it would be MAC. So to me, it was just a new kind of editorial challenge," Elliott said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Indeed the Estée Lauder Companies-owned brand has its own ways of working with influencers and driving shoppers' attention in the age of social media. Those include its latest collaboration with "Euphoria" star Alexa Demie and campaign ideas that come from influencers themselves.

Elliott talked about how the world of influencers is changing, MAC's mission and of course, that notorious photo shoot.

Lilli Gordon knew she wanted to start a beauty company before even settling on its place in the market.

"I was studying the landscape because I had this crazy idea that I wanted to start my own beauty company. You know, me and thousands of other ladies and men," Gordon said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

The niche that skin care brand First Aid Beauty would come to fill in 2009 was to sit between "very clinical" companies like Eucerin and Aquaphor and the prestige offerings that seemed to only address one thing: "the challenge of aging," Gordon said.

Gordon launched First Aid Beauty in 2009 with Sephora and QVC. Sans conglomerate support, the company's products are also now widely available at Ulta stores in the U.S., too. International expansion was made possible, Gordon said, by FAB's $250 million acquisition by Procter & Gamble in 2018.

Ahead, Gordon talks about beauty's white spaces, the reason she wanted to sell her company and the difference between Gen-Z and millennial shoppers.

Before co-founding Kopari Beauty with Kiana Cabell, James Brennan and her husband Bryce, Gigi Goldman was already using its star ingredient with abandon. "I don’t know if you’ve seen ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ where they use Windex to solve all their problems -- well, I was that way with coconut oil," Goldman said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

At the time she was a stay-at-home mom concerned about the best natural products to use while raising three children. After starting the company in 2015, the brand is one of the leaders in the body care category; Kopari products include deodorants, scrubs, toothpaste, masks and sexual wellness products.

These items are found at a number of retailers including Ulta, Sephora, Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters, but you won't find every Kopari Beauty product at each of these stores. "We tailor our assortment to each retailer, and we collaborate with them to see what's really going to be mutually beneficial for each," Goldman said. "You have to consider price point, you have to consider assortment, you have to consider if it's a lifestyle store."

Goldman talked about acquisition rumors, the company's recent foray into CBD, what makes coconut oil a hero ingredient and the company's efforts to build homes in the Philippines, where their coconuts are sourced.

"We've been in failed startups, we've been in tough times in early days," said The Inkey List co-founder Mark Curry. But Curry credited early business non-starts for the cautious and measured way he and co-founder Colette Laxton are stewarding their latest company, The Inkey List, a skin care line with products under $15.

"With The Inkey List, it was all of our learnings that we took of what worked [and] what didn't work," Laxton said. Curry, for his part, had a prior life starting a female feminine care line way before sexual wellness products were making a splash in beauty retailers.

Further trial-and-error was methodic. Laxton and Curry incubated several beauty lines via its umbrella company, Be for Beauty, before landing on its hitmaker.

Since debuting in the U.K. in late 2018, The Inkey List is available exclusively in Sephora in the U.S., as well as in select channels in Southeast Asia. As the brand has grown over the last two years, education is a big part of The Inkey List's awareness plans, even if consumers use said information to then buy the brand's products elsewhere or buy from other companies entirely.

"We want to be the brand that gives the consumer the right information to help them," Laxton said. The company plans on launching "Ask Inkey," a 24/7 chat service for anyone with a question or concern about skin care or ingredients. The brand is also in the midst of retooling its website.

Despite their insistence on careful growth, Curry said he hopes The Inkey List will "be a $100 million brand."

The founders joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about properly educating consumers, biding their time and how past failures helped them finally succeed.

When E.l.f. Cosmetics went public in 2016 after a majority investment from TPG just two years earlier, it seemed like the sky was the limit for the millennial-minded beauty brand.

"E.l.f. has always been this brand that had the best of beauty, but made it accessible at these incredible price points," E.l.f. Chairman and CEO Tarang Amin said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

The company had just reached about $100 million in yearly sales when TPG invested -- in part by cracking how to sell $1 priced makeup online -- and was growing 20% annually, according to Amin. But 2018 saw a slump in both the company's sales and relevance online.

"For us it seemed like death," Amin said.

The year-long slowing of color cosmetic sales overall didn't help his outlook. E.l.f. closed its 22 standalone stores in February 2019. But freeing up $13.7 million in capital helped the company focus on e-commerce and wholesale via its "Project Unicorn" plan to turn the business around.

Thanks to a repackaging campaign (favoring colors, not just black); a renewed focus on fewer, but better prestige-level products; and a TikTok brand challenge, E.l.f. has seen four quarters of growth. And in many cases, the company has bested its competitors in the makeup segment.

Amin talked about the ongoing headwinds in the color cosmetics category, the white space opening up in India, the company's plan for incubation and M&A and his indifference, at first, to the rise of influencer-driven brands.

When Francesco Clark started experimenting with skin care formulas, it was to help himself. At 24, a diving accident left him paralyzed from the neck down.

That might sound like the beginning of Clark's Botanicals, the skin care company he founded, but it took a nudge from his former boss, Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Glenda Bailey. She applied the contents of a glass vial that Clark's sister, Charlotte, had spirited away from the founder's home laboratory at a visit a decade ago.

"I got home and I was incredibly embarrassed because I was kind of like, 'Charlotte, this is not a brand.'"

Bailey called a few weeks later to insist that she feature the product in Harper's Bazaar's September issue. The ball was in Clark's court to package his homemade product ("'make it look chic,'") into something marketable. Clark's Botanicals launched in stores that same year.

Though the brand has been on roller-coaster ride the last four years -- Clark bought back his company last year after relying on private equity funding in 2016 -- he is feeling bullish about the future.

"You have to remove yourself from it, you have to look at the business holistically and how committed your customers will be to the brand after it is acquired," Clark said. "If the investment means the brand is growing in the right ways, then you should do it."

As a makeup artist for 25 years, Rea Ann Silva was intimately familiar with the pain points for those in her line of work. She tried to avoid bringing unwieldy airbrush kits on set when she could, and worked hard to create natural-looking makeup looks for high-definition video without much product.

"My main and number one concern was creating and making a product that was effective," Silva said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast of her hero makeup sponge, the Beautyblender. "I figured that my audience would be other makeup artists like myself."

Millions of product sales later -- and a reported $175 million in sales for 2019 -- Silva have proven her Beautyblender is anything but a niche product.

On this week's episode, Silva talked about how "retailers didn't really get" Beautyblender at first, learning from influencers and the critical opinions of her foundation launch.

Annie Lawless is on a mission to make clean makeup as luxurious as its classic counterparts.

"As a makeup girl who loves full coverage and wears a full face of makeup every day, I just couldn't find clean products on the market that performed the way a lot of the conventional makeup I was used to using did," Lawless said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.

Though clean skin care had trickled down to consumers, thanks to brands like Drunk Elephant, clean makeup was largely still unchartered territory.

"It seemed so crazy to me that I was spending more on clean skin care and then putting those ingredients right back on my face five minutes later with my makeup," she said. "We've all put on lipstick, and an hour later, it's off. Where did it go? I mean, we ate it, essentially," Lawless said.

In the latest Glossy Beauty podcast, Lawless talked about her brand founder story, what she thinks of acquisition and how why she's eager to get back to basics.

Scott Oshry didn't get into the beauty industry because of a life-long love of cosmetics or hair care. He, alongside his college friend Sean Brosmith, created the CD storage sleeve in the early 90s, which solved a basic need through design.

Still, as he put it on the Glossy Beauty Podcast, that experience of making a suite of successful products informed Oshry's work as partner and CMO of beauty brand incubator Maesa. Though Maesa has been in business for 25 years and helped build private label lines for Target, Zara and H&M, largely in the fragrance category, it has shifted its focus to get companies like Flower Beauty, Hairtage by Mindy McKnight, Kristin Ess and Believe Beauty off the ground.

Before starting Flower Beauty with Drew Barrymore, for instance, Oshry recalled the moment when he realized that "instead of building up other people's brands, we should be building up our own."

In this way, Maesa went from a hit-maker behind the scenes to one that has just started to flaunt its prowess publicly -- a majority stake from Bain Capital in 2019 certainly helped.