Before Kimberly Hairston-Hicks learned to read a market, she learned to frame a story. Her undergraduate degree was in broadcast journalism, and her ambition was precise: she wanted to become the next Oprah Winfrey. The route looked plausible. She was working at a local television station in Indianapolis on a program called Small Business Forum, meeting people whose lives could fill a segment and perhaps alter a viewer's afternoon. Then one of those guests altered hers. The woman urged Hairston-Hicks to go to business school. She listened.
At Clark Atlanta University, where she earned her MBA, she encountered a profession she had never heard of: brand management. It carried the elements that had pulled her toward journalism in the first place. There were people to understand, clues to assemble, and stories to tell. There was also a ledger. A brand story had to move through a company, onto a shelf, and into a customer's decision. At The Coca-Cola Company, her first marketing employer, she worked on Diet Coke and marveled to her parents that someone was paying her to combine creativity, discovery, and storytelling.
The room and the assignment
Coca-Cola supplied glamour as well as spreadsheets. The company sponsored the Essence Festival, All-Star Weekend, and a three-day cruise where a young Hairston-Hicks was assigned to sample a new Diet Coke flavor. She stayed out too late and missed the 7 a.m. call time for setup. Her manager responded with grace and stern feedback. Hairston-Hicks understood the distinction she had blurred: she had access to the event because she had a job to do.
The embarrassment became an operating system. Before later activations, she met with the team lead to clarify roles and expectations. When new brand associates arrived, she gave them the advice she had earned. This is a recurring feature of her career. A moment of discomfort becomes a reusable rule. She does not polish the mistake out of the story because the correction is the valuable part.
“Don't say no before you show up. Don't tell yourself no. Show up. Let someone else tell you. You are capable and you are enough.”Kimberly Hairston-Hicks
A later lesson at Coty carried higher stakes. Charged with launching a celebrity fragrance, she disagreed with the creative direction proposed above her. The concept felt unaspirational and potentially offensive to women. She shared the concern with peers, but she was junior and lacked research to prove her instinct, so she did not push it upward. Global testing eventually rejected the idea with both men and women. Her vice president asked why she had not voiced what she saw.
From then on, she decided not to stay silent. She would later compress the lesson into five words: “Leadership requires courage, not conformity.” The line is useful because it puts courage inside the work. It is the willingness to offer judgment before the room has made agreement comfortable.
The need that would not get funded
Across leadership roles at L'Oréal, Coty, and other beauty businesses, Hairston-Hicks kept encountering the same gap. Black women spent money in the category, but meaningful product research and development did not reliably follow. She made the case inside companies. People agreed with the opportunity, she has recalled, but investment did not arrive. Agreement without a budget began to look like another form of delay.
So in October 2018 she launched Good Beauté, a company developed with melanin-rich skin in mind. The founder label changed the weight of every decision. An internal presentation could identify a consumer need; a company had to turn that need into formulations, packaging, a storefront, and enough trust for a customer to try it. On a 2019 television appearance, a host observed that the business had started in her brain and was now sitting on the table. “I birthed it,” Hairston-Hicks replied.
The phrase is funny because it is also an operator's summary. Founders must move an idea across the uncomfortable distance between obvious and real. Good Beauté gave Hairston-Hicks a new vantage point on the corporations where she had learned her craft. She now knew the discipline of scale and the pressure of scarcity. She could see why a global business needed systems, and why a customer did not care how complicated those systems were.
Build repeatable systems, align specialists, earn distribution, and make the economics visible.
Move before certainty arrives, spend with intent, and keep the ignored customer in the room.
Her path back into a global company did not erase the founder. Before Sanofi, she worked at Combs Enterprises on a new approach to beauty centered on underrepresented multicultural consumers. At Gold Bond, where she is now Chief Marketing Officer, she describes her work in both creative and general-management terms. The CMO, in her view, cannot stop at big ideas. The brand must be run as a business, close to finance and accountable for results.
A soul with a spreadsheet
Hairston-Hicks likes data, but she is suspicious of mistaking a dashboard for an idea. The useful question is what universal truth can be uncovered from the numbers. For Gold Bond, she has spoken about touch and connection as the emotional territory beneath a functional product. Function explains what an item does. A human truth gives the brand somewhere to live in memory.
“It's not necessarily the data. It's how you uncover the universal truths that come out of that data.”Kimberly Hairston-Hicks
That framework shaped a partnership with comedian Chelsea Handler. Rather than begin with the largest available celebrity, the team looked for shared values and genuine product affinity. The resulting Base Layer Swimsuit Ski Run put hundreds of swimsuit-clad participants on the slopes at Palisades Tahoe. Blizzard conditions did not cancel the oddity. Hairston-Hicks said 700 people took part and the event produced more than three billion impressions.
The spectacle mattered because the partnership had a reason to exist. Hairston-Hicks has argued that cultural moments, memory, and longevity can matter alongside raw reach. She applies the same selectivity to products. In 2025, her team developed an innovation framework that favored fewer, larger launches rooted in clear consumer needs. The goal was to replace a diluted portfolio with choices that the organization and its retail partners could support properly.
Plan for the idea you have not met
Her planning philosophy is equally unsentimental. Five-year marketing strategies, she says, are a poor match for consumers and technology that change daily. She separates vision from itinerary: hold a durable purpose, then operate with a rolling plan for the next 12 to 18 months. She also keeps roughly 10 to 12 percent of funding ring-fenced for a new idea that can be tested and, if it works, scaled.
The orange slice is not indecision. It is a deliberate reserve for an idea the annual planning cycle could not have predicted.
This approach asks a team to be steady about purpose and flexible about execution. It also demands candor. One of her stated marketing principles is radical transparency: useful feedback should be precise, courageous, and aimed at progress. The former junior marketer who once kept a concern from her vice president now wants truth to travel across levels.
Her recent public conversations return to mentorship and access. Hairston-Hicks's own career pivot began because a woman noticed a possibility and named it. Her advice to younger women carries the same action: do not reject yourself before entering the room. Show up, understand what you are there to do, and trust that your judgment is part of your qualification.
The question beneath the category
The biography can be read as a sequence of industries and titles: journalism, soda, fragrance, hair care, founder, CMO. The more revealing sequence is a set of questions. What story is the audience living? What does the organization know but fail to fund? Which concern is the junior person withholding? What part of the plan should remain open because the world will change?
Hairston-Hicks has described an aspiration to move beyond a campaign toward a larger sense of connection and belonging. It fits the route. The journalist wanted to understand people. The brand manager learned to translate that understanding into choice. The founder acted when the existing system moved too slowly. The executive now has the budget, team, and accountability to make those perspectives work together.
A human truth is not decoration added after the business plan. In Hairston-Hicks's career, it is where the plan begins. Find the person being flattened into a segment. Listen for the need that survives every presentation. Then build the product, partnership, and operating model outward from there.