Makers Mindset by Nancy Twine

May 15, 2025 Susan Yara of Naturium on Marketing, Retail Strategy & Selling to e.l.f. Beauty for $355M

Susan Yara’s journey to redefining skincare didn’t start in a lab—it started in front of a camera. From reporting news in the Bronx to becoming a trusted beauty voice on YouTube, Susan built a community before she ever built a brand. With her platform Mixed Makeup, she offered something rare: expert-backed, educational content for women who were underserved by the beauty industry’s hype-driven approach.

But Susan wasn’t just creating content. In 2019, she co-founded Naturium Skincare. Just four years later, she made headlines when she sold her company to e.l.f. Beauty for $355 million—and became one of the first content creators to successfully scale and exit a skincare brand.

In this episode, Nancy and Susan go deep on the realities of building a digital-first beauty brand: funding operations before revenue, pivoting from an influencer to a founder mindset, and how it’s so important to build authentic relationships with your community and retail partners. Susan shares the failures that shaped her, the influencer marketing tactics that actually work, and how she’s balancing life as a founder, mom, and now solo parent.

This is a story of vision, resilience, and reinvention. It’s proof that you don’t need to start with a perfect plan—you just need to start with purpose.

Timestamps:

[00:00] Introduction

[03:12] Joining Forbes and building their first video network

[04:55] Learning the power of early digital media

[06:03] Getting into beauty and lifestyle content

[07:24] Launching Mixed Makeup to serve older audiences

[08:30] Early challenges funding high-quality content

[09:45] Lessons from Susan’s failed first business

[11:15] Trying to bootstrap her own skincare brand

[12:20] How COVID shut down her original plan

[14:42] Joining Naturium and shaping brand direction

[15:55] Why Susan moved away from “clean” marketing