So you want to build a multimillion dollar beauty business? Perfect timing: In 2025, a new class of gurus are hoping to meet you.
Starting with the literature: Earlier this month, Harvard Business Review Press published GOAT Wisdom: How to Build a Truly Great Business — From the Founders of Beekman 1802. In it, the brand’s founders and former “Amazing Race” contestants Dr. Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell weave the tale of scaling their goat milk-based skincare brand to over $100 million in annual sales. Mielle Organics founder Monique Rodriguez’s The Glory In Your Story published in April, about a year after Procter & Gamble purchased a majority stake in the haircare business she started in her kitchen.
Masterclass, too, dropped its first beauty-focussed series featuring experts like plastic surgeon (and brand founder) Dr. Shereene Idriss and cosmetic chemist (also brand founder) Ron Robinson in May; those seeking a more regular commitment can opt for a programme like Seedling, by Crown Affair’s Dianna Cohen, or Maker’s Mindset, by Briogeo’s Nancy Twine.
Some founders start new things, and others start the same thing over again, and some truly exit, retreating to perfect Instagram shores. Many choose, for whatever reason, to continue developing their personal brands.
Three years after selling her haircare brand Briogeo to Wella Professionals in 2022, founder Nancy Twine stepped down as chief executive in February to focus more fully on Maker’s Mindset, which has bloomed from a podcast series into a business accelerator. (Twine retains diplomatic duties for the Briogeo brand.)
This year, she retained the services of Full Picture, a public relations firm that represents clients like the Kardashian-Jenner brood and many of their associated ventures, to generate buzz for Maker’s Mindset and burnish Twine’s bossmaker image.
“After I sold the business, I had so many founders who were reaching out to me being like, ‘Hey, will you invest in my company? Will you mentor me?’” Twine told The Business of Beauty. “I actually started having to say no to some people and it really kind of made me sad. That’s when I started to kind of think more about, how can I scale me?”
Scaling the Self
That these newly-minted mentors are a mix of success stories and success stories-to-be is beside the point, or a point obscured by the industry’s overall challenges. Still, a natural question occurs when beholding beauty’s new faculty class: What, exactly, qualifies these professionals to be giving business advice?
Ridge, of Beekman 1802, explained his motivation to write a book as only a founder can: In terms of white space.
“The only representation of success you see in social media is either a tech billionaire or a unicorn or a huge exit,” Ridge said. “There are just so many great founders who are running these businesses from Main Street, who are fantastically successful and happy in their life, but you don’t get representation of that.” (In 2021, the French investment firm Eurazeo, alongside Cohesive Capital Partners and the Cherng Family Trust, purchased a majority stake in Beekman 1802 for a reported $62 million.)
At their most basic value proposition, each founder can provide the firsthand experiences they had establishing and scaling a beauty or personal care business, anecdotes from the greater industry and learnings they wish they had known back before their own struggles. As all of them understand the importance of differentiation, so do all approach the guru genre with their own unique flavour.
GOAT Wisdom blends agrarian sagacity with 21st century commerce strategy to cultivate tips like: “Make Hay While the Sun Shines: How to Seize Opportunities.” “Farmers were kind of the original entrepreneurs,” Ridge observed.
The Glory In Your Story, by Mielle Organics founder Monique Rodriguez, is a faith-laced memoir, as Rodriguez recounts the candid professional anecdotes and heartrending personal tragedy that laddered up to the climactic sale of her company.
“Every struggle, every no, every long night packaging orders in your basement may be part of God’s plan to build something greater,” she writes, in chapter 6.
There are similarities across different texts, with Rodriguez and Ridge both writing about their early stages packing orders in their homes — Rodriguez in her basement, Ridge at his dining table — but each offers highly specific insights on things like production minimums, or launching into Ulta Beauty versus Sally Beauty Supply. “If one person is inspired by my story, then I’ve done enough,” Rodriguez said.
Twine wrote out 13 “modules” that could have been chapters of a book. Instead, she turned them into Maker’s Mindset, her new mentorship venture. The Maker’s Mindset website offers free workshops, but its main offering is a $900 programme that guides aspiring entrepreneurs down the strand of Twine’s 13 pearls of wisdom. Paid entry also grants access to two hourlong group mentoring sessions with Twine; the very first such session, a Zoom room of five, concluded minutes before we spoke in June.
These transactions are becoming increasingly common in the new guru age. On the app Intro, users can book one-on-one time with a wide variety of executives, like Alex Ohanian ($2,000 per 15-minute session) or Rachel Zoe ($1000). For those interested in beauty, there’s Supergoop founder Holly Thaggard ($350) or Crown Affair founder Dianna Cohen ($150), who also devised her eight week mentoring programme called Seedling focussed on female entrepreneurs. It’s free, though an application is required.
Cohen, whose formative professional years coincided with the Girlboss area, said she hopes not only to scale Seedling into a fund for emerging brands but to model a new kind feminine leadership.
“I always joke that I’m a better mentor than I am a manager,” said Cohen. “Great managers do care about growth, but there’s a personal and intimate element, I think, around mentorship that really encompasses the mind, body and spirit of a person, not just their professional progression.”
Please Advise
When prompted, founders offered various figures of beauty business idolatry. Some mentioned Emily Weiss of Glossier, or Gwyneth Paltrow of Goop, which are compelling examples not only for their corporate acumen — though neither has made an exit — but for their crossover appeal as lifestyle influencers, whose own success is the result of subsuming themselves entirely in the companies they founded.
The goal of the budding guru, then, is an equal but opposite action: To cleave the founder from their brand, so that they can have their second, solo act.
But for many brands — especially those currently in market — a founder is still a vital component. Even for a brand like Beekman 1802, which is equally known for its animal mascots as its human ones.
“Whether we’ve liked it or not, we’ve always had a personal brand that drove sales in the company,” said Ridge, who starred in a reality series with co-founder Kilmer-Purcell, “The Fabulous Beekman Boys,” for two seasons before launching the brand.
Increasingly, founders are also seeking to partner with other brand names in business to bolster their gurudom. In advance of Beekman 1802’s first-ever Harvard case study this fall, the brand partnered with Harvard Business Review Press on the publication of its book. “If you’re a founder and entrepreneur, that is, like, your shingle that you’re holding up,” said Ridge.
Dr. Idriss cited similar reasons for her Masterclass, which came about after the physician’s “Pillowtalk Derm” interview series on Instagram Live drew the media company’s attention. Saying yes, she said, was “a no-brainer.”
While Idriss’ Masterclass is focussed on skin service rather than mentorship, she hasn’t ruled the latter out in the future — but would like more experience first. “I still need to prove myself to myself, from a business perspective … I don’t want to put the carriage before the horse,” she said.
“Hopefully I can grow into becoming that person, into helping people. I would have loved a mentor to guide me throughout this crazy journey.”