Rooibos cosmetics

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.

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.