Belsito, mid-stride.
She joins brands right before they get famous, then makes them impossible to ignore. Razors, hummus, feminine care - and now a bottle of shampoo built just for you.
Ask Function of Beauty's machines for a bottle and they ask back: how does your hair behave? Limp? Frizzy? Color-treated and bargaining for its life? An online quiz feeds an algorithm, the algorithm feeds in-house filling equipment built by MIT engineers, and out comes a formula mixed for one person. As of July 2025, the person deciding where all of that goes next is Monica Belsito.
Belsito took the CEO seat at the New York custom-beauty company after a decade of doing one thing very well: taking a brand people already liked and making it a brand people couldn't shop without. She did it at consumer-goods companies across nearly every aisle of the store, and the throughline is unmissable - the businesses she touched tended to get bought.
Her mandate now is blunt and big. Function of Beauty grew up as a direct-to-consumer darling, a quiz-and-ship operation. Belsito's job is to keep that engine humming while pushing the made-to-order model onto crowded retail shelves at Target, Sephora, Walmart, and Amazon - a place where "personalized" is easy to promise and hard to manufacture. She replaced L'Oreal veteran Alexandra Papazian and inherited a company that had already acquired its way into skincare. The question she's paid to answer: can custom beauty be both intimate and everywhere?
She is, by trade, a marketer who learned the building from the shelf up. That combination - brand romance plus retail plumbing - is exactly the bet Function of Beauty made when it hired her.
Function of Beauty is truly one-of-a-kind. - Monica Belsito, on taking the job
As senior brand manager she launched new sub-brands and products. Then Unilever bought the company for roughly a billion dollars. Razors, it turns out, were just the warm-up.
Founding CMO for six-plus years. She took a feminine-care startup born online and stretched it into a scaled, omnichannel brand. LOLA was later acquired by Amazon aggregator Forum Brands.
CMO at the hummus giant, where her retail growth strategies helped tee up PepsiCo's acquisition in late 2024. Yes - she made the leap from chickpeas to custom conditioner.
Before the exits, before the corner office, there was a phone ringing at a PR firm. Belsito began her career at Burson-Marsteller working crisis management and media relations - the unglamorous craft of standing between a company and a very bad day. It is not where most beauty CEOs say they started, and that is precisely the point. She learned how brands break before she learned how they grow.
From there she went to Colgate-Palmolive through the Global Management Development Program, the kind of rotational gauntlet that turns MBAs into operators. Her rotations were not glamorous either: a stint on the Walmart sales team, time in Global Homecare, slices of the US Oral Care and Personal Care businesses. She learned retail the way it actually works - from the shelf, the planogram, the buyer who decides whether your product gets a spot or gets cut.
The credentials behind all this are tidy: a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, then an MBA from Harvard Business School, Section J, finishing in 2011. But the resume's real signature is not the schools. It is the sequencing. PR taught her the story. Colgate taught her the shelf. Everything since has been the two skills colliding.
At Dollar Shave Club she got to play offense, building sub-brands and launching products at a company that had already rewired how men bought razors. The Unilever acquisition validated the thesis: a sharp DTC brand could be worth a fortune to a legacy giant hungry for relevance. She had a front-row seat to the playbook that would define the next decade of consumer goods.
Then came LOLA, and the founding-CMO chapter that most defines her. For more than six years she built the marketing function from scratch and scaled the feminine-care brand out of its online-only cradle into an omnichannel leader. Founding a function is different from inheriting one - you write the rules, set the voice, and own the mistakes. It is the closest a marketer gets to being a founder without the title.
Sabra was the curveball that wasn't. Hummus seems a world away from feminine care, but the assignment was identical: take a brand people loved and accelerate it through retail. Belsito's strategies helped drive the growth that ended with PepsiCo buying the company in late 2024. Three companies, three acquisitions, one operator who kept showing up right before the check cleared.
By the time Function of Beauty came calling, the fit was almost too clean. Here was a company with genuine technical heritage - founded in 2015 by MIT engineers and a cosmetic scientist, running proprietary manufacturing out of Pennsylvania, building its own filling machines to produce made-to-order bottles at scale. What it needed was someone who could turn that engineering into a brand people reached for in a store. Someone who knew the shelf and the story. Someone who had done the DTC-to-retail crossing three times already.
That is the role she stepped into. Function of Beauty had spent years proving the quiz worked and the chemistry held. The Atolla acquisition pushed it into personalized skincare. The next chapter is distribution - getting a deeply personal product into the most impersonal place there is, the retail aisle, without losing what made it personal. It is a marketer's problem and an operator's problem at once. Belsito is, conveniently, both.
Begins in crisis management and media relations. Learns how brands break.
Joins the Global Management Development Program. Rotations on the Walmart sales team and in Global Homecare; manages parts of US Oral and Personal Care.
Senior brand manager launching new sub-brands and products ahead of the ~$1B Unilever acquisition.
Founding CMO. Scales the feminine-care brand from DTC into omnichannel over six-plus years.
Named CMO. Retail growth strategies help set up PepsiCo's 2024 acquisition.
Takes the top job in July, succeeding Alexandra Papazian, to lead DTC and retail expansion.
I want to redefine what's possible in personal care. - Monica Belsito
Dollar Shave Club, LOLA, Sabra - every company she worked at before Function of Beauty got acquired. Founders should probably take her calls.
Razors, hummus, feminine care, custom shampoo. Her career is a slow walk through nearly every section of the store.
She didn't start in beauty. She started in crisis communications - the art of talking a brand off a ledge.
A Colgate rotation put her on the Walmart sales team. She learned retail from the buyer's side before she ever ran a brand.
Function of Beauty's engineers built their own filling equipment to bottle custom formulas at scale. She inherited a lab, not just a logo.
She succeeded a L'Oreal veteran and stepped into a company that had already bought its way into skincare via Atolla.
The original model - answer questions, get a formula mixed for you, ship it - is the soul of the brand. Belsito's task is to grow it without diluting the personalization that made anyone care in the first place.
Target, Sephora, Walmart, Amazon. A made-to-order product is hard to put on a static shelf. Solving that contradiction is the whole job, and it's the part of the playbook she's run three times before.