The Glossy Beauty Podcast

While many children begin to pursue hobbies around eight years old, they are not typically along the lines of curating a skin -care routine, unless of course, you are Shani Darden. The founder of her eponymous beauty line made a name for herself working as an esthetician for Hollywood celebrities like Jessica Alba, Kelly Rowland and Chrissy Teigen.Darden paved the way for her next role as beauty founder in 2013 after identifying a white space in the market for retinol products without the typical harsh side effects of flaking, irritation and redness, she said on this week’s Glossy Beauty podcast.After coverage in 2017 from publication US Weekly an influx of orders began. Michelle Shigemasa, former CEO of Murad and current CEO of Shani Darden Skincare, joined in July 2021 because of its “highly efficacious” products as well as Darden’s “authenticity and her approach to skin care,” said Shigemasa, who also joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast this week. Now, as the Beverly Hills-based brand approaches the end of its own eighth year, Shigemasa focuses on facilitating Shani Darden’s evolution from the inside out. In addition to building the internal team, influencer outreach, and overall brand awareness, “We want to win in a meaningful way with Sephora,” said Shigemasa. Shani Darden launched on Sephora.com and Sephora.ca in March 2020, and later in-store at Sephora in October of the same year. However, “We’re not yet a huge brand at Sephora, and that’s our ambition,” she said.

Today, "digital" is practically synonymous with fashion and beauty. But to boast an advanced knowledge of the digital world in the early aughts is what Alessio Rossi, evp of Shiseido and Clé de Peau Beauté and head of digital transformation for the Americas at Shiseido, considers "serendipitous.""I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, so that today, people can consider me a veteran of the space," said Rossi on this week's Glossy Beauty Podcast. Brands were taught to be "one talking to many," he said of the first wave of digital 20-plus years ago. "We weren't necessarily taught to listen, to get feedback and to engage in many multiple, concurrent, sometimes synchronous conversations with our audience... That was a huge change for brands around the world, specifically in luxury."Rossi landed at Shiseido six years ago, after over 12 years in the luxury industry with companies like L'Oréal and Kering. In January 2021, he transitioned to his current position, where his main task is discovering "the ongoing redefinition of what luxury beauty online means from an experiential standpoint," he said. Now, Rossi harnesses social as a community-builder, ensuring Shiseido's spot as a key successor in the U.S. beauty landscape and responding to customer preferences changed by Covid-19. The pandemic pushed shopping toward livestreaming and direct selling, he said. "We tried to reinvent the proposition immediately because this is what was needed. And we are in the process of reinventing it because consumers [have even more] options now."

With roles at Target, The Home Depot, Family Dollar and now Ulta Beauty, Kecia Steelman, Ulta Beauty chief operating officer, can legitimately affirm, “Retail is in my DNA."“Life has [come] full circle because I’m leading the Ulta Beauty at Target partnership,” said Steelman, who spearheaded the collaboration, on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast. (Steelman worked at Target between 1993 and 2005 and has been at Ulta Beauty since 2015.) Ulta Beauty at Target, which launched in August and consists of a 1,000 square foot, Ulta Beauty expert-staffed shop-in-shops in Target, is set to reach 100 new shops by the end of this year.The curated assortment of 54 prestige beauty brands is one of the ways that Steelman has facilitated a more convenient shopping experience for Ulta Beauty's existing customers as well as create a new ecosystem of shoppers at Target, said Steelman.Additionally, Steelman has worked to expand Ulta Beauty’s digital innovation with elevated curbside and same-day pickup capabilities last year. “We shifted to be focused on self-care, self-expression, and togetherness because that’s what our guests needed from us at that time,” she said.

When Carolyn Bojanowski, svp and gm of e-commerce at Sephora, joined the retailer team in 2005, it was an opportunity to pay homage to her childhood as the daughter of a candy buyer. In her mind, Sephora was the "candy store of beauty.""Sephora has always been committed to the digital experience," said Bojanowski on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast.And that e-commerce experience had to go into overdrive during the pandemic. Not only did Bojanowski spearhead the acceleration of Sephora's in-store pick-up, but she facilitated an unlikely ally in Instacart. She also launched Sephora's same-day pick-up service to expand its customer reach. "If you can give someone back time, that is another way to think about having a luxury experience," she said.During Covid-19, Bojanowski was also tasked with translating the in-store customer service experience to online, where the practicality of in-store product trial did not exist. In addition to its thorough product pages, shade finders, quizzes and UGC, Sephora launched on Sephora.com its live home chat, which enables customers to chat with Sephora's in-house beauty advisors from the comfort of their homes, said Bojanowski. This has also created a whole new retail role for the company.

Clean or effective? It's a question that the beauty industry has tried to tackle for the last decade. For Tula, a probiotic-based, skin-care brand, it has attempted to combine its doctor-founded, science-backed approach with the appeal of being a modern, clean brand,said Savannah Sachs, Tula CEO, on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. Sachs joined Tula in 2018 and has seen the brand through the rapid expansion of its team, expanded retail distribution and technological development, much of which transpired under a Covid-19 lens. Though Tula launched with Ulta Beauty in 2018, its presence within the beauty retailer grew just prior to the pandemic. The brand launched its "Skin Bar takeover" in Jan. 2020. Although Ulta Beauty stores soon shut down due to Covid, Sachs said, "We retained our retail field sales team throughout the pandemic [and] cross-trained them to educate and serve customers via chat on our direct-to-consumer business."In addition to Ulta Beauty, Tula has also met its millennial and Gen-Z customer base on TikTok, where it has amassed 380,000 followers in the past year. "We have committed to being a positive force for change in the beauty landscape in social media," she said. Tula's commitment to unfiltered spon-con through the hashtag campaign #EmbraceYourSkin this September is just one way the brand has done so. 

True Botanicals chief marketing officer Rebecca Boston‘s work in the fashion industry led her to beauty, and then, specifically, clean skin care. Boston was motivated to take the True Botanicals role after working at Rihanna's Fenty Beauty because of the opportunity for a “branding refresh."“There wasn't a clean beauty brand that made a woman feel herself, feel sensual,” said Boston on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. “We need to do a better job showing that a clean beauty brand can do that for you.”But Boston’s passion for beauty started even before she worked within the marketing and social media sector for Fenty Beauty and Ole Henrickson. As a child, she traveled frequently because of her parents’ work with nonprofit organizations, said Boston. “I grew up being exposed to all different types of beauty,” she said. “I recognized the need in marketing and in advertising for more people to be able to see [the diversity of beauty for] themselves.”True Botanicals’ skin-care campaign with Olivia Wilde, in which she posed nude, as well as its sexier Instagram feed are testaments to the brand’s portrayal of diverse beauty. It also shows its transition from “granola [and] crunchy” to “glowing” and “sensual.”In the next few months, Boston plans to narrow in on launching new products and “filling gaps in our assortment.” She also wants to“[bring] on new folks who will help us reach new audiences and new age groups,” she said. “Once someone uses one of our products, they add more and more, and they want their entire skin-care routine to be True Botanicals.”Boston spoke to Glossy about the recent Olivia Wilde campaign, her plan to get people to pay attention to the brand, and the current demands of a CMO role.

While emerging from a decade dominated by sans-serif typeface and millennial pink, it may be hard to remember a time when an ode to simplicity could make a brand stand out. But when Malin+Goetz, a natural apothecary beauty brand, was founded in 2004, its “less is more” approach at a time when the market was about “more and more” initiated the brand’s journey. “We came at it from a minimalist, different direction, not only in our packaging and design, but also in our formulations and the protocols,” said Matthew Malin, Malin+Goetz co-founder, on the latest Glossy Beauty Podcast. “Nobody was doing unisex [in beauty] at that time."Eighteen years later, in a Covid-19 riddled world, Malin+Goetz has once again proven that it's not afraid to take the road less traveled. In this case, that's meant opening a retail location in Williamsburg, after the beauty industry saw a wave of door closures. “If a store doesn't have something special, which includes beautiful design, wonderful brands and products, and great service, it's going to be challenging in the post-Covid world,” said Andrew Goetz, Malin+Goetz co-founder (and Malin’s partner) on the podcast. And while the new normal, and how brands respond, may be uncharted territory, Malin+Goetz expects to take a multifaceted approach in its appeal to the consumer. The brand’s brick-and-mortar stores, luxury hospitality partners and e-commerce play via its own site and Amazon “are all important aspects of how to be a successful brand,” said Goetz. “Being able to support that customer through those different channels is critical.”

For many people, a bad hair day would result in a few shed tears and some variation of a head covering. However in the case of Yve-Car Momperousse, CEO and co-founder of Kreyol Essence, a beauty brand specializing in natural hair-care and skin-care products from Haiti, what started as a solution to a “hair catastrophe” evolved into a “social impact brand.”“Hair, dry skin, eczema -- for any issue you had in the Haitian community, you found [a solution in] this bottle of this product,” said Momperousse on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast. The product in question, Haitian Black castor oil, served as the solution to Momperousee’s hair loss at the time and the foundation of her brand, launched in 2014.“We're not only looking [at] how we impact our tribe, which is what we call our customers, but we’re also looking at how we impact our producers and every part of the supply chain that it takes to make the castor oil,” said Momperousse. Aside from providing “women of color” with products for “kinky, curly hair," Kreyol Essence is “creating work for farmers, helping with the environment, exporting and changing the relationship that people have with Haiti,” she said.Now, the brand has expanded with more products, like Moringa powder, which also includes “collagen, ashwagandha and vitamin C,” for a holistic approach to beauty, she said. Simultaneously, Kreyol Essence continues to expand its retail presence, from "Shark Tank" to the shelves of Ulta to QVC.Looking ahead, Momperousse continues to look at “the larger picture,” she said. The guiding question is, “Are you doing something above and beyond what a traditional business would do, with [a] clear intention for impact either on the environment [or] for a specific group of people?”

Kristen Noel Crawley, KNC Beauty founder, knows that it takes more than being a “lover of skincare” to become a successful beauty brand founder.The launch of the Black-owned brand in 2016 was “a natural evolution” for Crawley, who networked her way through the beauty industry, starting as a beauty columnist for Elle magazine, she said on this week's Glossy Beauty Podcast. “I started the brand because I had those dry and crusty lips. Since I launched my brand, I haven't had any problems with my chapped lips,” said Crawley, who had found a solution to her lip dilemma in the form of a lip mask in Japan. “The only thing I didn't like was that there were probably 50 ingredients in this one little sachet.”What started as a means to fill the all-natural lip mask void in America evolved into a line of products including KNC’s retinol-infused star-shaped eye mask and collagen-infused lip scrub and lip balms.Beyond trend spotting, Crawley is adept at tapping into larger social and cultural movements. She launched KNC’s School of Beauty, a mentorship program for Black female beauty founders, in 2020, and a collaboration with streetwear brand Bape in July 2021. “School of Beauty was actually a direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement,” she said. “Black women and women of color contribute so much to the success of the beauty industry and I want to see more female founders in that space.”

Covid forced social activities, like bar crawls and date nights, to go on hiatus, or move to Zoom. So the fact that fragrance sales increased by 82% in the first half of 2021, compared to the same time in 2020, demonstrates that in the age of wellness, perfume has been added to the list of self-care.Ilaria Resta, global president since March of 2020 of the perfumery division at Firmenich, a fragrance and flavor company, said this shift in consumer preference is just one aspect of change that she has been tasked with reacting to. “The key pillars of my vision are related to anticipating and being on the leading front of the transformation of this industry, and future-proofing the business by anticipating or creating trends,” said Resta on this week’s Glossy Beauty Podcast.That’s included navigating the “shift from fragrance [being worn to] appeal to others to being [worn] for our own relaxation and feeling better with ourselves,” she said.Additionally, Resta has had to determine, “How do we communicate the fragrance in a virtual way [during Covid]?” she said. Fittingly for the digital-centric nature of the world today, Firmenich launched Scentmate, an “AI-enabled platform” that enables users to create a personalized fragrance based on data, as well as their personal preferences.“Innovation is critical as a driver for value creation and differentiation [in fragrance],” she said.Below are additional highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarityOn the evolution of the fragrance industry“The power of fragrances in triggering emotions [and] memories. It’s outstanding, and [it] is used also for therapies in order to trigger specific emotions. There are ingredients proven to aid concentration and focus, in lowering the heartbeat rate and improving well-being. It’s an industry that is evolving from being pleasure-focused [and] hedonic-focused to being an industry that is also adding real physical and mental benefits. And [it] is very much science-driven, as much as it is hedonic and creative. It is a fascinating sweet spot between the left and the right brain.”Firmenich’s relationship with sustainability“The company started working on [sustainability] before it became even a word or before it became a necessity and a demand from consumers. Decades ago, at Firmenich, we started defining critical roles to assess the role of biodegradable, renewable ingredients in the palette of ingredients that our perfumers work with. But also when it comes to biochemistry, we develop fragrances that mimic nature but do not deprive nature [of these] ingredients. At the same time, we started looking at the broader role of sustainability when it comes to social responsibility. [We] make sure that all the sourcing strategies are [responsibly sourced] from communities that are treated in the best way, not only for the workers, but [also] for the communities they work with. We [ensure] there are equal wages and minimum wages for men and women. We look at the broader ecosystems of sustainability. And this has been inspiring the work at Firmenich, this has been an important glue between us and our clients.”