The Glossy Beauty Podcast

The beauty industry is filled with experts, dermatologists, aestheticians and makeup artists, all trying to leverage their expertise in an increasingly crowded market. But the cosmetic chemist — the person who formulates products and oversees development — has long stayed behind the scenes. That changed when Ron Robinson debuted his skin-care brand, BeautyStat, where he is founder and CEO.After working as a cosmetic chemist at nearly all of the major beauty companies — including Estée Lauder Companies, Avon, Revlon and L’Oréal, for 25 years — Robinson decided to strike out on his own upon arming himself with compelling data. Robinson saw that there was a lack of stabilized vitamin C serums on the market and simultaneously saw strong Google search data for vitamin C. Thus, BeautyStat debuted with its hero product, the Universal C Skin Refiner in 2019, which Hailey Bieber now calls her “Holy Grail.” The brand, which started as a pure play DTC company, is sold at Violet Grey, Nordstom and Dermstore. Earlier this year, it launched in Ulta Beauty, where it is expanding nationwide.While Robinson was at ease formulating high-quality products, he didn’t expect to be such a forward-facing founder.“I had no idea that I would have that type of consumer reception,” said Robinson on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “I launched the brand with content creators and influencers being the face of the brand, but every time I stepped out in front of the camera and I showed consumers, ‘Hey, this is our vitamin C, this is why it’s important to use, this is why you need a stable form,’ consumers listened in. They asked questions, they were intrigued. They wanted to try it, they wanted to buy it.”

When Andrew Stanleick left Coty in February to become president and CEO of The Beauty Health Co., the parent company of Hydrafacial, some in the beauty industry were surprised. Stanleick was responsible for much of Coty’s recent turnaround, including the revamp of Covergirl, as well as leading the company’s joint ventures with Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics and Kim Kardashian West’s KKW Beauty. In other words, he had a dream job. But then again, the role of public beauty CEO doesn’t come up often.“I turned 50 last year, and I think what I realized was that it was a real milestone; I wanted to build and create a company and take it internationally, really leverage all of those experiences I’ve garnered from living all over the world and use that to build a company, a culture and a brand,” said Stanleick on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “Truth be told, I hadn’t heard of HydraFacial, which … I think you know, [awareness is] our biggest opportunity.”Though Stanleick has only been at the company for six months, The Beauty Health Co. has seen impressive results in his tenure — namely, the organization’s first $100 million-plus revenue quarter. Additionally, Hydrafacial has been thinking outside the box with partnerships, including with Galeries Lafayette and Jennifer Lopez’s JLo Beauty.But as Stanleick explained, there’s much more he wants to accomplish. “We feel we’re just at the start of this journey ahead of us,” he said.

Like many beauty entrepreneurs, Rachel Roff, founder and CEO of Urban Skin Rx, came up with the idea for her brand after a workplace epiphany. As a trained aesthetician, she discovered that the tried-and-true treatments found in dermatology and aesthetics environments were not suited for darker skin tones.“When it came time for me to do practicals [hands-on experience to graduate and receive a license], you have to service friends and family. I would bring in my group of friends and family, many of whom had melanin-rich skin. I would get from teachers, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that. Darker skin burns so easily. We have to keep it very basic,” Roff said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.Unsatisfied with the limited skin-care solutions that were offered for people of color, Roff opened the Urban Skin Solutions Medical Spa in 2006 in Charlotte, North Carolina. After seeing demand in that environment, Roff spun out the Urban Skin Rx brand in 2010 to serve more people. Today, it is sold in Target, Walmart and Ulta Beauty.Part of its more recent success was largely due to a viral TikTok moment in 2020. An unpaid influencer posted a before-and-after of the brand’s hero cleansing bar that forever changed the brand’s trajectory. Last year, Urban Skin Rx hit $30 million in sales.“One day at the office, my head of e-commerce [was like], our sales are triple what they should be at noon,” she said. “This girl ended up emailing us and was like, ‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I posted this on my TikTok, and it’s now at like a million views.’ We were not on TikTok at this point as a company,” she said. “It really has been a wild ride since, even to this day, the positive and negative effects of that moment will have forever changed our brand. It has given me a lot of life lessons as a leader, as a CEO, on what I would do if it happened again.”

The road from investment banking to baking to beauty isn’t obvious, but it's a circuitous career path that led Kate McLeod to launch her eponymous skin-care brand.“I was a trader at Goldman Sachs and ended up leaving Goldman and went to culinary school. I had a made-to-order bakery and I loved what I was doing, but then life always changes,” said McLeod on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “Something very unexpected happened — I was living abroad — that brought me back to New York City in 2015.”McLeod reunited with a former boyfriend, Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of Hinge, thanks to the help of a New York Times journalist, and the two married shortly thereafter. With her love life on track, McLeod started rediscovering her own passions and personal rituals. A chance introduction by her sister-in-law to solid cocoa butter, the key ingredient of her now hero body stones, led her to play with the material in a deeper way.“The pastry chef in me came alive,” she said. “I also have a really long history and training of working with chocolate, so I took the cocoa butter into the kitchen and I thought, 'If I play with this, pretend I'm making a good ganache, what can I do to enhance that application process?’ That's really what sets us apart.”Thanks to a key endorsement from Naomi Watts, McLeod went from handmaking her body stones for friends and family to selling 20 body stones in a day in Watts’ Onda Beauty and then 40 more on a weekend. It was then that McLeod went from wrapping her stones in parchment paper to repackaging them in canisters with an official brand label. Three years later, the line is now sold at QVC and Sephora. 

The indie fragrance market has gained steam in recent years as newcomer perfume brands attempt to reinvigorate the industry. One brand that is getting it right is D.S. & Durga, founded by husband and wife David Seth and Kavi Moltz.Like many small business owners at the time, the two founders launched their Brooklyn-based fragrance house nearly 14 years ago with their own funding. David Seth Moltz's love for the arts paired with Kavi Moltz's expertise in architecture helped create a brand that was different from anything on the market. Their unique approach to scents and packaging is still what separates D.S. & Durga from other competitors, but the two say, ultimately, their biggest goal is to spread joy through scents.The founders got their start in luxury through a merchandising partnership with Barneys in 2016 and recently secured a deal to sell their products in Bergdorf's in March. D.S. & Durga currently has one physical retail store in New York that opened in 2019, though there are plans to open more locations. As the company focuses on scaling this year, David Seth Moltz said those retail partnerships, and future ones, are crucial to building a strong foundation. The brand's three main business pillars are wholesale sales, direct sales and the founder."You have to know people who know how to sell well in wholesale and how that whole system works. We have such a great sales team that does that for us," he said.In terms of the other two pillars, he said "direct" refers to speaking directly to your consumer in your stores and online. Under the founder pillar, both David Seth and Kavi Moltz are tasked with going out, building relationships, growing as leaders and collaborating with like-minded partners.

With roots in science and technology, Suveen Sahib, co-founder and CEO of K18, has been able to crack the code behind the science of hair. For Sahib, an understanding of the biology of hair was the missing component in the hair-care industry."I took a deep dive into trying to understand the biophysics and biochemistry of hair to learn that what looks like a fiber is actually one of the most sophisticated biological composites. And, the solutions to our caring for a hair do not lie outside of hair, [but instead] they lie inside of hair," Sahib said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.After launching in the middle of the pandemic in Dec. 2020, K18 hit $75 million in sales in 2021 with just one consumer-facing product. This year, the company projects it will garner more than $100 million in sales. Though K18's strategic TikTok marketing strategy, which has included partnering with top beauty influencers Mikayla Nogueira and Brad Mondo, is partly to thank for its buzzy debut, Sahib credits the brand's tried-and-tested bio-tech formula as the main driver of its success."We launched it at the height of a pandemic and decided to go with a global launch in 50-plus countries. It was the most brutal way of testing the product. [We wanted to make sure] that it worked literally across every hair type, every generation and every [hair-care] service," Sahib said. "That's where it delivered on its promise. Stylists loved it because they could use it in every service, no matter what hair type. It saved them time, and it made [customers'] routine much simpler in a post-pandemic world."

Despite the bevy of beauty brands hitting the market, makeup artist and industry veteran Jeanine Lobell believes every creative has the right to do just that: create."I don't mind that [beauty is] crowded. I don't want to tell anyone not to do something. If you want to make something, go for it," Lobell said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I always feel like I need to say, 'Well, why?' 'Who are you making it for?' 'What are you making?' If you're just making it because it's an 'I want to have a brand, too' [type of] thing, that's a difficult way to go about it. But if you're making it from yourself, then — not to sound like a total nerd, but — you're trying to live your dream and I'm all for it."After successfully founding '90s "it" brand Stila in 1994 and selling it to Estée Lauder Companies five years later, Lobell knows what it takes to start a beauty brand. But her latest venture, Neen, a DTC makeup line that operates via a subscription model, required considerable unconventional thinking. Case in point: Each month, shoppers receive a Neen postcard showcasing five models all wearing the same shades in varying makeup looks. The cards include color samples to encourage trying before buying, as well as a QR code for each look that leads to a tutorial video on the brand's website. And while Lobell is considered a master in cool-girl makeup, the models — not Lobell — lead the video tutorials. As for the products themselves, they are clean, and both the postcards and product packaging are made from recycled materials.As for integrating multiple concepts into Neen, Lobell said, "I wanted to bring all these sides of myself, the person who likes to design, [prioritize sustainable] packaging [and] make product, and bring that into the culture of my brand."

Michelle Brett started her career as a travel agent before landing in beauty and working for L'Occitane and Living Proof. She worked her way up the ranks until January 2022, when she was appointed CEO of Ren, a buzzy British skin-care brand hoping to make a bigger splash in the U.S. market.“I had fallen in love with Ren in 2002 in London. Ren has always been a brand that has been differentiated. It’s always had a large niche consumer to serve and such a strong purpose,” Brett said on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast episode. As a pioneer of clean skin care since its creation in East London in 2000, Ren has catered to sensitive skin. But as that conversation has become more mainstream, Ren sees itself as a leader in the space. In the last four months, Ren jumped from No. 56 to No. 24 in the U.S. skin-care brand earned media chart, according to Brett. Ren has made significant strides on the sustainability front: Last year, it met its 2018 zero-waste goal, committing to using recyclable and reusable packaging made out of recycled material. But Brett wants to remind shoppers about how good the product is. "Our job is to show people what sensitive skin is … and how our products can work on sensitive skin, not irritate it, and also deliver benefits," said Brett.

As sustainable products and packaging further cement themselves as top initiatives for beauty companies, luxury French fragrance brand Guerlain, owned by LVMH, is at the forefront of innovation.At the helm of these initiatives is Cécile Lochard, the brand's chief sustainability officer. Lochard joined Guerlain in January 2019 and was quickly promoted to her current role, a first for the brand, in March 2020. That Lochard was not your typical tried-and-true beauty executive -- she came from World Wildlife Fund -- has enabled the heritage brand to be nimble and experimental."I was working for WWF because I was fond of animals. And I'm so lucky that integrated into Guerlain's purpose is to preserve the bee, the sentinel of the environment and the first pollinator," Lochard said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty podcast.Under Lochard's leadership, bee preservation, biodiversity regeneration, climate change, eco-packaging and women's empowerment have been some of the biggest areas of the brand's focus. Alongside UNESCO, the company launched Women for Bees in July 2021, a five-year female beekeeping entrepreneurship program. The entrepreneur program is just one of the many ways the brand is sticking true to its mission.

Digiday Media is proud to present The Return, a podcast about what the return to the office can look like as corporate America adapts to the new, not quite post-pandemic normal. The Return follows the staff at one Atlanta-based advertising agency through Covid outbreaks, as well as the highs and lows of transitioning to hybrid work after two years of pandemic lockdown and working remotely. While the future of work is still under construction, employees across the country are forging their own paths to determine what that future looks like amidst parenthood, corporate mandates, long commutes and an ever-looming pandemic. The Return is hosted by Kimeko McCoy, senior marketing reporter at Digiday, and produced by Digiday audio producer Sara Patterson.Listen to The Return on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.