The Glossy Beauty Podcast

Chloe Green-Vamos, the VP of global innovation strategy at Estée Lauder, leads the charge in merging data with beauty innovation. She shares insights on using AI to shape product offerings and how social listening informs trends. Green-Vamos discusses a unique reverse mentorship program that pairs executives with younger employees, fostering fresh perspectives on consumer behaviors. The conversation highlights the significance of understanding Gen-Z engagement and how these strategies are revolutionizing the brand's approach to market agility.

Sarah Creal got her start in beauty while working at a Clinique counter. But it wasn't long before Creal was working in product development and marketing at major brands including Bobbi Brown, Tom Ford and Prada Beauty. In 2018, she co-founded Victoria Beckham Beauty with the former Spice Girl herself — she was CEO of that company until 2022.Then, earlier this summer, she debuted Sarah Creal Beauty, designed for luxury shoppers over 40. Sold direct-to-consumer since its launch, the brand is made up of a tight edit of skin-care and color cosmetics products including a concealer, a brightening and hydrating essence, a lip balm and a priming eye cream.Next, on September 3, it will debut at Sephora. And on the 10th, it will launch a line of lipsticks.On this week's episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, Creal discusses her decision to launch a brand, her brand's upcoming lipstick and women's ongoing struggle to raise funds for their own ventures.

Sloane Stephens started playing tennis at 9 years old and quickly climbed the ranks, beating Serena Williams in the 2013 Australian Open at age 19. She is the founder of The Sloane Stephens Foundation, which works to introduce tennis to underserved students — and, as of August 21, she is the founder of Doc & Glo, a body-care line that debuted with two products: the $18 Game-Changing Deodorant and the $22 24/7 Hustle Deodorizing Body Mist. The brand is named after Stephens’ grandparents. Her grandfather was an OB/GYN, while her grandmother "had all these girls' groups and always gave back," Stephens said on the Glossy Beauty Podcast.The brand will retail on its own DTC site, on Amazon and on the Free People Movement website — Free People Movement has sponsored Stephens since the start of 2023.On this week's episode, Stephens discusses her venture into entrepreneurship, the target audience for her brand’s first two products and tennis’s current moment in the cultural spotlight. 

Back in 2014, Lindsay Dahl’s career trajectory took an unexpected turn. She’d spent a decade working at chemical safety- and environmental-focused nonprofits in Washington D.C. before she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. “I never thought I would go to the corporate side,” Dahl told Glossy. “If I'm being honest, I really liked being a part of the nonprofit community where I felt like I could be both challenging companies and also challenging those in power in government.”But then she got a call from Beautycounter. “I sat down and talked to Gregg [Renfrew], the founder and CEO, and she said, ‘Look, I know how to start companies. But I don't know how to do what you know how to do, which is … to use this business model to essentially see if you can do advocacy at the company level.' And this was before corporate activism was cool.”Dahl moved to the West Coast and served as Beautycounter’s head of mission for seven years. In this new type of executive role, she created a blueprint for a company to have safe, ethically sourced and sustainable products, while also educating consumers about industry-wide issues and lobbying for better regulation and a more transparent industry. Today, Dahl is bringing those learnings to another trailblazing company: Ritual, an 8-year-old brand of supplements founded on a mission of transparent sourcing, efficacy and purity. For the past two and a half years, she’s served as chief impact officer where she oversees much of the mission-driven side of the business, including traceability and sustainability — which Ritual is known for — as well as advocacy, certifications, PR and community.Dahl joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss her career trajectory, the ins and outs of running a mission-driven company, and her hopes for the future at Beautycounter. She also speaks about the biggest issues plaguing the supplement space today, such as contamination, purity and unsubstantiated claims. And she shares the changes taking place at Ritual, including a recent shift from its DTC subscription model to an omnichannel strategy that includes retailers like Target and Whole Foods.

Nathalie Gerschtein, L'Oréal's first female president of the North American Consumer Products Division, has spent over two decades shaping beauty markets globally. She shares insights on the transformative power of beauty in boosting self-esteem and self-expression. Nathalie emphasizes the blend of data analytics and intuition in decision-making, discusses the importance of understanding diverse consumer needs, and highlights innovations like ColorSonic that merge technology with personalization, ensuring beauty remains accessible to all.

When Javon Ford (@javonford16, 455,400 TikTok followers) graduated college, he knew he wanted to be a chemist and wanted to work in the cosmetics industry. What he didn’t anticipate was becoming wildly popular on TikTok with nearly half a million followers.Ford’s background in chemistry, working on making new formulations for cosmetics companies, has given him an in-depth knowledge of what goes into beauty and skin-care products. His videos involve him busting some of the most widespread myths in beauty and skin care, pointing out which ingredients are harmful or, more commonly, useless. In a recent video, he helped diagnose what ingredient in a lip product was making Olympian athlete Simone Biles’ swell.According to Ford, his newfound popularity has led to multiple brand collaboration offers, but he’s steadfast about refusing to do work with companies whose products he doesn’t trust or who don’t provide the scientific data to back up their claims.Ford joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss his career development and where he’s going next. 

When it comes to influential families in the beauty industry, Jami Morse Heidegger and daughter Hannah Heidegger are in a class all their own. They represent the third and fourth generations of skin-care brand owners in the U.S. dating back to the late 1800s. After immigrating to the U.S. as a child, Jami’s grandfather Irving Morse apprenticed for John Kiehl, the founder of Kiehl’s Apothecary in New York City. In 1921, when Kiehl retired, he allowed Morse to buy the brand and, for the next eight decades, it was Morse’s family business. For Jami, Kiehl’s Apothecary was a second home. “I would go there after school and just play,” Jami told Glossy. “My father was wonderful. … He would let me take different ingredients and experiment with them … and I had control of a whole bathroom. That was my laboratory, and I used to mix things in the sink.”Years later, Jami turned bathroom mixing into innovative formula development when she joined the business. Jami created more than 100 formulas for Kiehl’s, many of which still anchor the brand’s top franchises like Ultra Facial Cream and Calendula Toner. Other bestsellers, like the Blue Astringent, were created by her father, who ran the business after her grandfather passed away. Jami and her family sold Kiehl’s to L’Oréal in 2000, a bittersweet decision that ultimately allowed the brand to scale to what it is today. At the time, Jami was in her 40s and signed a 10-year non-compete with L’Oréal. With three small children at home and a payout that was estimated to be over $100 million, she thought it was her retirement from beauty, but the passion didn’t fade. In 2015, Jami and her husband, Klaus Heidigger, ended their retirement from the beauty industry and launched Retrouvé, a line of luxury skin care formulated by Jami and her favorite longtime chemist collaborators. Inspired by Jami’s “boosted” visions of products she would have made just for herself back at Kiehl's, the brand is based on clinically proven actives and a patented triple airless pump system to safeguard each formula’s efficacy. Today, Jami and her daughter Hannah are working hand-in-hand to build Retrouvé into a luxury skin-care leader. The formulas, which top out at $215, sell direct-to-consumer and at Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Revolve, Shopbop and Bergdorf Goodman. A decade in, Jami and Hannah are looking for a strategic partner to scale. Today, the family is challenged with stock issues: At the time of publication, three of eight of the brand’s skin-care products were running a waitlist.Jami Morse Heidegger and Hannah Heidegger join the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss the early days at Kiehl’s, the decision behind selling to L’Oréal, the ins and outs of product formulation, the ways the beauty industry has changed through the years, and the future of Retrouvé. 

Three tween girls from New York City discuss their interest in beauty, sharing their skincare routines, favorite products, and beauty influencers. They talk about shopping at stores like Sephora, discuss skincare tools, and share how their moms are involved in their beauty routines.

Founders Nicole Collins and Corey Weiss discuss launching 213Deli, a text-commerce beauty platform inspired by China's shopping trends. They focus on personalized beauty offers via text messages, disrupting traditional e-commerce with single product drops from top brands.

Jess Hunt, now 27, has been creating content for over a decade. She has 1.7 million followers on Instagram, where she got started, and another 184,000 on TikTok. Through her career as a content creator, she met Jenna Meek, formerly the founder of a beauty brand called Shrine, who eventually became her co-founder. Today, the duo runs Refy Beauty. Refy launched in 2020 and hit shelves at Sephora by 2021.Hunt's bold, bushy brows provided the impetus for Refy. On set for a photoshoot, Meek watched Hunt doing her brow makeup and asked her for details. Hunt spilled that it took a multitude of products and varying brushes to get her signature look. Together, they dreamed up an alternative, which became Refy's first product, its $24 Brow Sculpt.On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Hunt discusses her road to "influencer" in the early days of the role being a career, the founders' journey to creating Brow Sculpt and the brand's recent foray into the complexion category with its first concealer.