Start to Scale from The Beauty Center at FIT

Jenn Krouse is the founder and CEO of AUNU Beauty, a skincare brand built around medical-grade Mānuka honey. Before creating AUNU, Jenn worked at Tory Burch and WeWork and was part of the founding executive team at Victoria Beckham Beauty, where she served as CFO and COO as the business grew to more than $100 million in revenue.

Jenn and I talked about what happens when you’ve spent years building and scaling other, bigger companies and then you start your own from zero.

We talk about foundational lessons: understanding healthy growth, managing inventory and distribution, knowing where to invest money and time, and recognizing that operations and finance are as much a part of brand building as marketing and creative.

We also get into large-scale retail. Early conversations with major retailers made her realize that the brand wasn’t ready for what those partnerships would require, and that distribution alone can’t create the education, awareness, or customer understanding AUNU still needed to build.

Instead, AUNU has grown through DTC and through dermatologists and estheticians, where the medical history of its hero ingredient already has relevance.

Jenn is AUNU’s only full-time employee, relying on a network of experienced consultants, fractional executives, and agencies rather than building a large team before the business requires one.

And, of course, we talk about the metrics. For Jenn, bringing in new customers matters, but the repeat purchase is evidence that there is something real underneath the brand.

Since we recorded this conversation, AUNU has received 12 beauty awards, including an Allure Best of Beauty 2026 award for The Salve in clean skincare.

In this episode, we discuss:

* What Jenn learned at Tory Burch, WeWork, and Victoria Beckham Beauty

* Healthy growth and the financial discipline behind brand building

* Why AUNU decided not to rush into large-scale retail

* Medical-grade Mānuka honey and the idea behind AUNU

* Building a company with fractional talent rather than a large full-time team

* Why repeat purchase matters more than the first sale

* The tension between natural skincare and clinical efficacy

* What consumers are looking for from beauty now

* Why expertise and trusted voices still matter in an increasingly noisy market

Listen to Jenn Krouse on Start to Scale From The Beauty Center at FIT

Jasmine Bina is a cultural futurist, brand strategist, and co-founder of Concept Bureau, the strategy agency she built with Jean-Louis Rawlins. She is also the co-founder of Exposure Therapy, a community for strategists and cultural thinkers.

Her work is about how to read culture before it becomes a trend—looking across psychology, sociology, consumer behavior, media, and seemingly unrelated categories to understand what people are beginning to want and what may be “waiting to be born.”

Jasmine and I talk about how brands gain meaning in a culture where consumers are more sophisticated, influence increasingly comes from peers and subcultures, and money and media alone can no longer create cultural relevance but still create pressure.

We get into changing aspirations, “treat culture,” and the gap between what consumers say they value and how they actually behave. Jasmine also traces what is happening in fragrance back to cultural movements that seem to have little to do with perfume—from romantasy and shadow work to changing ideas about femininity, power, and identity.

For emerging brands, the conversation comes down to what is actually defensible. Jasmine argues that what is harder to replicate is a brand with a genuine point of view—a vision of what the future should be and a company that consistently builds toward it. We talk about what that means in an industry full of dupes, why a thin brand can generate early heat but struggle when it reaches retail, and why the founder is becoming increasingly important.

In this episode:

* How to read culture before it becomes a trend—and distinguish signal from noise

* Why brands can no longer manufacture cultural relevance through budget alone

* What changing aspirations and consumer behavior tell us about what people actually value

* What fragrance can reveal about changing ideas of femininity, identity, and the move toward more embodied experiences

* Why a founder’s point of view—and a vision of the future—may be the hardest part of a brand to copy

Listen to the full conversation above, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Start to Scale is a podcast from The Beauty Center at FIT, hosted by Alison Cayne.

Pierre Vouard has spent his career in fragrance and beauty, working at L’Oréal, Chanel, and Calvin Klein before moving into the independent side of the business. Today he advises established and emerging brands through PJV Advisory, teaches Fragrance Innovation at FIT, and writes Voir, C’est Savoir, his Substack about the business, culture, and changing consumer behavior around fragrance.

Pierre started his career in consumer insights, and that way of looking at the business still shapes how he thinks: what is changing, why is it changing, and what should a brand actually do with that information?

We talk about the extraordinary growth in fragrance and the forces underneath it. Luxury prices have made fragrance an accessible way to participate in luxury, while social media has created an enormous appetite for novelty, dupes, gourmands, and increasingly sophisticated fragrance knowledge.

Pierre also has an interesting explanation for why seemingly contradictory trends can thrive at the same time: enormous, projecting fragrances alongside intimate skin scents; nostalgia alongside constant novelty. Younger consumers in particular are building fragrance wardrobes rather than looking for one signature scent, using fragrance to express different versions of themselves.

Then we bring all of this back to building a business.

Pierre talks about what changes when you move from a company like Chanel or Calvin Klein to advising an emerging founder, where time, cash, inventory, and attention are finite. We get into the cost of too many SKUs, the temptation to keep making something new, and the difference between an interesting idea and something worth actually producing.

We also talk about sampling and distribution. DTC may be the easiest place to start, but fragrance still needs physical retail, and getting onto the shelf is the beginning of the work. Packaging has to work there. The economics have to work there. And the people selling the product need to know it well enough to choose it when a customer asks what they should try.

In this episode, we discuss:

* What’s driving the fragrance boom

* Nostalgia, gourmands, dupes, and skin scents

* The shift from signature scent to fragrance wardrobe

* Fragrance, identity, and fragmented culture

* The problem with constant newness

* What founders need to understand about sampling, retail, and distribution

Listen to Pierre Vouard on Start to Scale From The Beauty Center at FIT.

Before Sofie Pavitt had a skincare brand, she had a skincare studio. And before that, she spent years in fashion, designing accessories and traveling regularly to Seoul, where she became interested in a much more results-driven approach to skincare than what she was seeing in New York.

She eventually went back to school to become an aesthetician and opened her own studio. By the time she launched Sofie Pavitt Face in 2023, she had treated thousands of clients and had a pretty clear idea of what she thought was missing.

She saw people overwhelm their skin with too many products. She saw acne products that worked but were so clinical or unattractive that clients hid them under the sink. And she saw that people with problematic skin didn’t want that problem to become their identity.

So she launched with one product—a mandelic acid serum—and built from there.

We also talked a lot about branding systems and retail, because Sofie’s fashion background gave her a very helpful framework for thinking about design—what the entire line would look like together, how someone would understand the system on a shelf, and what the brand would look like from twenty feet away.

At her first market meeting with Sephora, she brought a design for the endcap she hoped the brand might have five years later. She had the endcap within six months.

And, we talked about money. She bootstrapped the launch with her life savings because she wanted to prove the product worked before taking anyone else’s capital. Eventually, growth changed the equation.

And then there is the team. Sofie keeps hers lean, has kept creative in-house from the beginning, and has strong opinions about hiring people who actually want to learn the work rather than accumulate titles. I had some opinions about that too.

In this episode, we discuss:

* Building products from what customers actually do, rather than what you assume they need

* Why Sofie launched with one product and built the assortment from there

* Designing a brand for the retail and the power of merchandising

* Bootstrapping, taking outside capital, and what changes when growth requires inventory

* Keeping creative close as a company scales

* Hiring for a startup, titles, and the difference between experience and being able to work without a lot of infrastructure

* Why solving a customer’s problem doesn’t mean making that problem the identity of the brand

Listen to Sofie Pavitt on Start to Scale from The Beauty Center at FIT.

Jean Godfrey-June has spent more than three decades writing about beauty, including at Vogue, Glamour, ELLE, Lucky, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and, most recently, as Executive Beauty Director at goop. Today she writes Godfrey’s Guide, her Substack about beauty and everything that inevitably surrounds it—style, aging, wellness, travel, food, culture, and life.

Jean has tested an extraordinary number of products and watched the beauty industry change from magazines and department stores to e-commerce, social media, affiliate commerce, and an almost overwhelming amount of choice.

We talk about her career, from writing about the very early days of Bobbi Brown to helping launch Lucky and later joining goop as it was building its beauty business. We get into what makes Jean notice a product after decades of seeing almost everything, why names and packaging matter so much, and why some beautiful products simply never sell.

We also talk about how much easier it has become to make and launch a beauty product—and how much harder it has become to get anyone’s attention. Jean talks about the danger of trying to make something for everyone, moving on from products too quickly, listening too closely to retailers, and why founders who stay deeply involved in the details tend to build better brands.

And we get into trust: what happens when editorial and commerce become intertwined, why Jean only writes about products she actually likes, and whether expertise and real human judgment become more valuable as there is more and more content, product, and noise.

In this episode, we discuss:

* Jean’s career advice

* What makes a beauty product get noticed

* Why names and packaging matter

* Products editors love that consumers don’t necessarily buy

* Building for a specific person rather than “everyone”

* Why founders should resist the pressure to constantly launch something new

* Editorial trust, affiliate commerce, and recommendations

* Scale, margins, and building a smaller, very good beauty business

* Why founder vision matters more than ever

Listen to Jean Godfrey-June on Start to Scale From The Beauty Center at FIT.

My first guest is Stephan Kanlian, Chairperson of The Beauty Center at FIT and one of the people responsible for making beauty management a field of academic study.

Before I began building Choulie, I spent fourteen years in two food businesses. I understood product development, manufacturing, margins, retail, brand building, and the multitude of decisions involved in turning an idea into a company.

But even though Choulie is a CPG product, beauty has its own history, economics, distribution channels, power structures, and assumptions about how brands grow.

Stephan has spent his career inside that industry, working across education, business, and industry and watching beauty evolve from a category that was often dismissed as frivolous into a sophisticated global business.

In this first conversation of Start to Scale, Stephan gives us the larger context.

We talk about how he found his way into beauty, and how working inside a cosmetics company—spending time with chemists, manufacturing, marketing, and customers—gave him an education in the business from the ground up.

That experience eventually led him to FIT, where he was hired in 1999 to create its graduate program in Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management. The idea was unusual at the time: instead of bringing traditional MBAs into beauty and teaching them the industry, why not develop leaders who already understood and cared about beauty and teach them to run the business?

More than 25 years later, the industry has changed enormously, but the fundamental mission of the program has not. He is trying to create leaders, not specialists—people who know enough about finance, marketing, operations, culture, technology, and the consumer to ask the right questions, understand the implications of their decisions, and lead across disciplines.

And we talk about where beauty goes from here.

Changing demographics and channels (marketing and sales) are altering how brands understand and reach consumers. Technology is forcing companies to move faster. And the boundaries between beauty, wellness, medicine, and science are becoming increasingly difficult to separate—bringing new opportunities, but also much greater responsibility.

Above all, Stephan sees beauty as an expression of the culture around it. Consumers have access to more information, cultures and identities overlap in different ways, and beauty has become one of the most important ways people express who they are.

In this episode, we discuss:

* Why FIT created its graduate beauty program

* What Stephan has learned about identifying and developing strong leaders

* How FIT’s capstone approaches complex, long-term industry problems

* Why culture and consumer understanding are fundamental to beauty

* How technology and changing demographics are reshaping the industry

* The growing convergence of beauty, wellness, science, and medicine

* What beauty tells us about culture and self-expression

Listen to Episode 1 of Start to Scale From The Beauty Center at FIT, with Stephan Kanlian.

This fall, I’m launching Choulie, a fine fragrance body care company.

It’s my second time building a consumer brand, but my first time in beauty. And while plenty of what I learned building Haven’s Kitchen applies, the beauty industry has its own language, economics, gatekeepers, rituals, and history.

So when The Beauty Center at FIT asked me to create and host a podcast about how beauty companies are actually built, I jumped at the opportunity.

The Beauty Center is home to FIT’s Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management graduate program, the first and longest-running program of its kind. For more than 25 years, it has educated executives who have gone on to lead some of the biggest companies in beauty.

Start to Scale comes out of that world, but it’s made for anyone interested in the work of building a beauty business.

I spent fourteen years building Haven’s Kitchen, first as a cooking school in New York and then as a national food brand. For the past eight years, I’ve hosted In the Sauce, where I’ve had hundreds of conversations with founders, investors, retailers and operators about what happens between having a good idea and building a company that lasts.

Now I’m doing it again with Choulie, in a different industry, with a whole new set of questions.

How do you know when a product is actually good enough? What makes a brand distinctive in a category already full of beautiful things? When should you go into retail, and what are retailers looking for now? How much does cultural relevance matter? How does beauty shape culture, and how does culture change what we want from beauty? How do you grow without losing the thing that made people care in the first place?

Those are the conversations I’m having with some of the most interesting people in and adjacent to the industry.

This season I’m talking with founders including April Gargiulo of Vintner’s Daughter and Sofie Pavitt; longtime beauty editor Jean Godfrey-June; fragrance expert Pierre Vouard; strategists Jasmine Bina and Chris Danton; and executives from e.l.f., L’Oréal, TikTok, and others.

Some have built companies. Some have helped brands find an audience. Some decide what gets stocked, funded, talked about, or remembered.

I’m new to beauty, but I’m not new to building a consumer business. And building Choulie means I’m making many of these decisions in real time: formulation, fragrance, packaging, positioning, pricing, retail, distribution—and what kind of company I actually want to build.

That tension is part of the show.

Start to Scale from The Beauty Center at FIT launches September 14, with new episodes every Monday.

You’ll be able to listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And everything will live here too—full episodes, show notes and some of what I’m learning along the way.

For now, here’s the trailer.