Rooibos cosmetics

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.