The Glossy Beauty Podcast

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'Talking to those two extremes is where we come alive:' The Inkey List co-founders Colette Laxton and Mark Curry on their skin care brand Feb 20, 2020

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"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 worked [and] what didn't work," Laxton said. Curry, for his part, had a prior life starting a female feminine care line way before sexual wellness products were making a splash in beauty retailers.

Further trial-and-error was methodic. Laxton and Curry incubated several beauty lines via its umbrella company, Be for Beauty, before landing on its hitmaker.

Since debuting in the U.K. in late 2018, The Inkey List is available exclusively in Sephora in the U.S., as well as in select channels in Southeast Asia. As the brand has grown over the last two years, education is a big part of The Inkey List's awareness plans, even if consumers use said information to then buy the brand's products elsewhere or buy from other companies entirely.

"We want to be the brand that gives the consumer the right information to help them," Laxton said. The company plans on launching "Ask Inkey," a 24/7 chat service for anyone with a question or concern about skin care or ingredients. The brand is also in the midst of retooling its website.

Despite their insistence on careful growth, Curry said he hopes The Inkey List will "be a $100 million brand."

The founders joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about properly educating consumers, biding their time and how past failures helped them finally succeed.

E.l.f. Cosmetics CEO Tarang Amin on the strategies that turned the beauty company around Feb 13, 2020

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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 reached about $100 million in yearly sales when TPG invested -- in part by cracking how to sell $1 priced makeup online -- and was growing 20% annually, according to Amin. But 2018 saw a slump in both the company's sales and relevance online.

"For us it seemed like death," Amin said.

The year-long slowing of color cosmetic sales overall didn't help his outlook. E.l.f. closed its 22 standalone stores in February 2019. But freeing up $13.7 million in capital helped the company focus on e-commerce and wholesale via its "Project Unicorn" plan to turn the business around.

Thanks to a repackaging campaign (favoring colors, not just black); a renewed focus on fewer, but better prestige-level products; and a TikTok brand challenge, E.l.f. has seen four quarters of growth. And in many cases, the company has bested its competitors in the makeup segment.

Amin talked about the ongoing headwinds in the color cosmetics category, the white space opening up in India, the company's plan for incubation and M&A and his indifference, at first, to the rise of influencer-driven brands.

Francesco Clark on founding, selling and buying back his skin care company Feb 06, 2020

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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, Charlotte, had spirited away from the founder's home laboratory at a visit a decade ago.

"I got home and I was incredibly embarrassed because I was kind of like, 'Charlotte, this is not a brand.'"

Bailey called a few weeks later to insist that she feature the product in Harper's Bazaar's September issue. The ball was in Clark's court to package his homemade product ("'make it look chic,'") into something marketable. Clark's Botanicals launched in stores that same year.

Though the brand has been on roller-coaster ride the last four years -- Clark bought back his company last year after relying on private equity funding in 2016 -- he is feeling bullish about the future.

"You have to remove yourself from it, you have to look at the business holistically and how committed your customers will be to the brand after it is acquired," Clark said. "If the investment means the brand is growing in the right ways, then you should do it."

Beautyblender founder and CEO Rea Ann Silva on elevating "a throwaway product" Jan 30, 2020

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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 the Glossy Beauty Podcast of her hero makeup sponge, the Beautyblender. "I figured that my audience would be other makeup artists like myself."

Millions of product sales later -- and a reported $175 million in sales for 2019 -- Silva have proven her Beautyblender is anything but a niche product.

On this week's episode, Silva talked about how "retailers didn't really get" Beautyblender at first, learning from influencers and the critical opinions of her foundation launch.

Annie Lawless on making lipstick that's safe enough to eat Jan 23, 2020

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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 had trickled down to consumers, thanks to brands like Drunk Elephant, clean makeup was largely still unchartered territory.

"It seemed so crazy to me that I was spending more on clean skin care and then putting those ingredients right back on my face five minutes later with my makeup," she said. "We've all put on lipstick, and an hour later, it's off. Where did it go? I mean, we ate it, essentially," Lawless said.

In the latest Glossy Beauty podcast, Lawless talked about her brand founder story, what she thinks of acquisition and how why she's eager to get back to basics.

Maesa's Scott Oshry on why retail isn't dead: 'Newness drives sales' Jan 16, 2020

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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 brand incubator Maesa. Though Maesa has been in business for 25 years and helped build private label lines for Target, Zara and H&M, largely in the fragrance category, it has shifted its focus to get companies like Flower Beauty, Hairtage by Mindy McKnight, Kristin Ess and Believe Beauty off the ground.

Before starting Flower Beauty with Drew Barrymore, for instance, Oshry recalled the moment when he realized that "instead of building up other people's brands, we should be building up our own."

In this way, Maesa went from a hit-maker behind the scenes to one that has just started to flaunt its prowess publicly -- a majority stake from Bain Capital in 2019 certainly helped.

"We're a 25-year-old company, so we've constantly been growing," Oshry said. "We grew at about 50% just domestically last year, and we'll grow another 60% domestically this year," he added. In 2020, Maesa expects to reach $310 million in revenue.

Skyn Iceland founder Sarah Kugelman on surviving a break-up with Sephora and coming back stronger Jan 09, 2020

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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 to be at Sephora that now needed the distribution, and so we couldn’t compete with them on a dollars per square foot basis,” Kugelman said on this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. ”

Today, Skyn Iceland has moved on. The company brought in $20 million in 2019, a 50% increase over its 2018 sales. Partnering with Ulta Beauty was a big part of the company’s rebirth.

“I heard ‘No’ so many times from Ulta, but I just kept trying and trying, and one day they said, ‘Yes, come in for a meeting.'”

This was back when Ulta wasn’t exactly seen as a prestige player, but Kugelman thought she was on to the next big bet.

“I looked around and said ‘What’s going to be the next frontier?’ ‘What’s going to be the next distribution channel that’s going to create that inflection point for brands?’ And I thought that was Ulta,” Kugelman said.”Luckily, I was right.”

On this week of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Kugelman talked about the difficult years between Skyn Iceland’s partnership with Sephora versus Ulta, the value of taking one’s business to an international level and why not everyone can become the next Drunk Elephant.

Beekman 1802 founders Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge on the magic of goat milk soap Dec 19, 2019

Show notes

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, grazing on their land).

"We Googled 'What can we make with goat milk?'" Ridge said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. The first thing that came up, unsurprisingly, was cheese. "But you have to become a Grade A certified dairy, and there's a lot of expenses with that. The next thing on the list was goat milk soap."

Ten years later, their beauty business is a successful one -- it accounts for 90% of company sales. This is in no small part thanks to the couple's skill at marketing it on air at QVC and HSN (by way of Evine, now ShopHQ), Facebook Live and YouTube.

"I always say TV retail is like door-to-door sales except you are knocking on 120 million doors at once," Kilmer-Purcell said.

Ridge added, "That's what unlocked the potential of the brand. Otherwise we'd have just kept growing very slowly, very organically."

The two joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about starting the business with "less than zero" dollars, cold calling department stores and their interest in investment considering the very ripe beauty M&A scene.

8Greens founder Dawn Russell on establishing what a wellness brand should mean Dec 12, 2019

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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 find treatments to compensate for that, just to end up back in my little apartment in the West Village going back to the basics of food. That's when greens really started to come into my life."

8Greens' first product, a round tablet of dehydrated greens is meant to be dissolved in a glass of water and debuted in 2016; the company recently rolled out its gummy format in October. Both products are not only meant for those facing health challenges, which is why 8Greens is available at retailers like Nordstrom, Anthropologie, Sephora and Amazon. However, its DTC subscription model brings in more than 60% of 8Greens' revenue, Russell said.

"I want it to be easy. Health should not be so difficult and intimidating and trendy," she said.

Russell joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about the product's numerous prototypes, her company's surprisingly smooth relationship with Amazon and plans to enter the U.K. in 2020.

Vintner's Daughter founder April Gargiulo on launching a single-product brand before it was cool Dec 05, 2019

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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 Active Botanical Serum based on traditional beauty margins, it would be well in the $400 range."

Gargiulo joined the our show to talk about how she started a single-product brand before it was the norm, her Asian market distribution strategy and the pressure to make sure her brand's second product just as much of a hit as her first.

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