Rooibos cosmetics

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 "...

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...

"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 worke...

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 reache...

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,...

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...

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 h...

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 b...

Sarah Kugelman compares having her products dropped from Sephora stores to “being on a date with someone you really like and them not wanting to go out with you again.” Sales at Sephora’s 200 stores represented 80% of Skyn Iceland’s business, until the beauty retailer cut the cord in 2010, a consequence Kugelman chalks up to the recession. “There were a lot of big brands that initially didn’t want...

Most businesses start with an idea before getting the right resources to make a product. With Beekman 1802, it was the other way around. Founders Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge had bought a farm together in upstate New York in 2006. Once they lost their New York City jobs in the recession that followed, they had their mortgage to pay and a bevy of goats (owned by a friendly neighbor of theirs...

8Greens founder Dawn Russell got the idea for her wellness business a painful way: by surviving a terrible diagnosis. "I hate to start the conversation with cancer, but it really was what brought me into what I'm doing today," Russell said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I got a bone infection and couldn't do chemo or radiation. I traveled the world for many years trying to f...

Vintner's Daughter founder April Gargiulo is the first person to tell you that her product doesn't come cheap. Consider the brand's hero Active Botanical Serum, which retails for $185. On the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Gargiulo insisted this price was despite leaner margins than what the beauty industry typically sticks to. "They are criminal, as far as I'm concerned," she said. "If I priced the Activ...

Beach House Group has launched four companies in the last 12 months, including Millie Bobby Brown's Florence by Mills and Tracee Ellis Ross' Pattern Beauty. While it may seem fast and furious, when founder Shaun Neff joined the company in 2016 he planned to shake up Beach House's model, from a private label partner for Target to full-fledged brands that responded to a white space. "I wanted to bui...

One nutritious meal doesn't mean a healthy diet, nor does going for something deep-fried once in a while mean you're will you be doomed. That's part of why Sakara Life, a meal and wellness delivery service founded by Whitney Tingle and Danielle DuBoise, doesn't tell you what you can and can't eat outside of its ready-to-consume products. They're instead focused on what they ship to customers, incl...

Serial entrepreneur Marcia Kilgore has no trouble calling out ineffective or unfair practices in beauty. "When you buy a $99 cream, you're probably getting something that's worth about $6," said the Bliss and Soap & Glory founder. Tired of the markup that working with a retailer requires, Kilgore launched her latest project, Beauty Pie, a direct-to-consumer membership service. Customers pay mo...

Today, the Glossy Beauty Podcast turns 1. If you've been listening, you know that, every week, we speak with the people making change happen in the beauty and wellness industries. For this special anniversary episode, we’ve rounded up three clips from the most popular interviews of the last year.

When Virtue Labs founder and CEO Melisse Shaban was first introduced to a new technical process for extracting keratin, which promised to upend the world of hair care, she was skeptical. "These guys sold me hard that they had a very unique piece of technology that would revolutionize the skin- and hair-care businesses," she said on the latest episode of Glossy Beauty podcast. "And I was sort of li...

Amanda Chantal Bacon is often ranked alongside Gwyneth Paltrow when it comes to seminal figures in wellness. But that's not to say she's fully comfortable with it. "I try to stay out of the fray of what the wellness world has become, which is odd, because I'm smack dab in the center of it, and have probably contributed to a lot of everything that I shy away from now," Chantal Bacon said on this we...

Zoë Foster Blake, the founder and chief creative office of DTC-first company Go-To Skin Care, has found many opposing marketing dynamics between her home country of Australia compared to the U.S. "In Australia, I say that we're not really taking customers from other brands, but instead, we're creating new skin-care customers," said Foster Blake. "These are women who have never tried a sheet mask o...

"At a certain age, every woman colors their hair," said Amy Errett on this week's Glossy Beauty Podcast. As the CEO and founder of the rapidly growing hair-color brand Madison Reed, she would know. Concretely, "every woman" means a market of about 90 million customers coloring their hair "on an average cadence of about seven weeks." Madison Reed first came to market as a DTC brand to be an at-home...

This week, beauty editor Priya Rao sits down with Bobbi Brown, the CEO of Beauty Evolution and founder of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics. Brown discusses her career's origin story in unwittingly creating the "no makeup" makeup look, her stint as Yahoo's beauty editor ("which was amazing for someone who doesn't know how to type"), and why 2016 was high time for her to leave Estée Lauder Companies.

This week, beauty editor Priya Rao sits down with Anne Maza, the co-owner and vice president of sales and marketing at hair brand Olivia Garden. Maza discusses evolving a 52-year-old brand for today's customer, walking the line between the professional and consumer hair segments, and protecting the company's top quality products against counterfeits.

This week, beauty editor Priya Rao sits down with Katia Beauchamp, CEO and co-founder of Birchbox, the company that sends monthly packages with a few samples of beauty products -- after that, it's up to the user to determine whether they want to take their relationship with this or that swatch of makeup to the next level. Katia discusses establishing Birchbox's appeal to the everyday beauty consum...

This week, beauty editor Priya Rao sits down with Nicola Kilner, CEO and co-founder of Deciem, umbrella company to cult-favorite skin-care brand The Ordinary. Kilner discusses why demand should lead product supply, why fashion retailers make good partners and how Deciem is faring following founder Brandon Truaxe’s removal from the company and subsequent death early this year. 

In two short years, direct-to-consumer company Hims launched a sister brand Hers, raised nearly $200 million in funding and became one of few digital-only unicorns. And it all started with taking medicines like finasteride and sildenafil (better known by brand names Propecia and Viagra, respectively), and repositioning them with the end customer in mind. On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty...