Oran Holtzman and the cost of choosing a shade

An apartment is an unusually persuasive business plan. In 2013, Oran Holtzman put his on the line to buy into IL MAKIAGE, an Israeli cosmetics business carrying roughly NIS 40 million in debt. He was an accountant looking for an investment. Part of the money came from loans, including a mortgage on his home. Before there was a shade-matching algorithm or a Nasdaq ticker, there was a purchase with consequences that would follow him through his own front door.

That beginning gives the later technology story some useful weight. Beauty can look wonderfully weightless from a distance: a bottle, a face, a promise, flattering light. The accounts are less forgiving. Holtzman entered through the accounts, then spent years building a company around the uncertainty that accompanies a very ordinary purchase. A customer can admire a foundation on somebody else. Choosing one for herself requires another kind of confidence.

An apartment on the balance sheet

IL MAKIAGE already had a history when Holtzman arrived. Makeup artist Ilana Harkavi had established the American brand in 1972. Buying into the distressed business in 2013 gave him something to rebuild, with a name and products that preceded his ambitions. It also makes the chronology worth getting right. The acquisition came first. The digital relaunch that brought the business to a wider international audience came in 2018. Five years separate those two events.

His formal education was in accounting and business management at The College of Management Academic Studies. It is tempting to turn that degree into a theory of his character. The more useful connection is practical: the purchase began with a business whose finances needed attention. The eventual plan would demand attention to something less tidy than a ledger: how people decide what to put on their faces.

He did that work with his sister, Shiran Holtzman-Erel, ODDITY’s co-founder and chief product officer. Her account of the early years describes collaboration with hundreds of makeup artists and repeated testing in stores. The siblings worked on lipsticks, foundations and mascaras before unveiling the rebuilt line. Their New York office opened in SoHo in 2017. The launch followed the next year. The glamorous part arrived after quite a lot of homework.

The customer was already online

The opportunity Holtzman described was visible in the gap between two familiar activities. People watched beauty content on social platforms, learned techniques from videos and discovered products on screens. Yet choosing a new prestige makeup product could still require a trip to a shop. The internet supplied the enthusiasm; the counter supplied the reassurance. A business could spend money creating the first and watch the second carry the sale elsewhere.

By July 2019, IL MAKIAGE was bringing creator tutorials, product recommendations and trial into the same online shopping experience. Its PowerMatch questionnaire helped customers select complexion products. A try-before-you-buy program let them test full-size products at home. These features addressed different hesitations. One concerned choosing the product. Another concerned committing money before knowing how it would look. Putting both in the shopping journey made the proposition easier to understand.

There is a pleasingly unromantic quality to this idea. The customer does not have to be converted into an enthusiast for machine learning. She needs a bottle that works for her. The algorithm has a job behind the curtain; her reflection gets the final vote. The commercial problem is therefore stricter than producing a convincing demonstration. A recommendation has to survive delivery, application and the customer's own opinion.

Holtzman’s emphasis on the whole journey also explains the creator content. A tutorial shows a product in use, rather than asking a static photograph to do all the explaining. The 2019 platform connected that discovery experience to shopping. It was an attempt to keep the thread intact from the moment of interest through the moment of purchase, with trial providing a bridge between the screen and the bathroom mirror.

Buying the missing expertise

The acquisitions that followed are a useful guide to Holtzman’s priorities. In 2019, the company acquired NeoWize, a data science startup. In 2021, it acquired Voyage81, a computer vision business. These were purchases of technical capabilities for a company whose customers were buying cosmetics. The connection lay in the information needed to understand a customer and make a useful recommendation.

The Voyage81 announcement described a search for computational imaging capabilities that could extend the company’s existing artificial intelligence work. Holtzman was looking beyond the questionnaire already in use. Bringing specialist teams inside the business gave ODDITY expertise it could apply across products and brands. The important detail is the people who came with the software: the acquisition connected a beauty business to researchers and engineers with their own work already under way.

Niv Price, a Voyage81 co-founder who became ODDITY’s chief technology officer, later recalled an unusually specific promise. When the businesses joined forces, Holtzman told him they would ring the Nasdaq bell together. Price retold the exchange when they did so in July 2023. The anecdote offers a small view of how Holtzman recruited people into his plans: a future event, a shared platform and a place beside him when it happened.

A reason to visit London

The business also had to travel. IL MAKIAGE expanded into the United Kingdom in 2020, taking its online approach into another market. Asked about that move, Holtzman discussed the appeal of British ecommerce. He also allowed himself a less corporate explanation: “Personally, I love London”. A market-entry strategy can accommodate an affection for the destination. It is a more enjoyable answer than another paragraph about addressable demand.

The distinction between Oran’s role and Shiran’s matters throughout this story. He was the chief executive; she led product. Their partnership connected the rebuilding of the brand to the business developing around it. Describing everything as a single founder’s intuition would flatten the work. The products, the technology teams and the customer experience all had to meet in the same transaction, however straightforward the finished website appeared.

A bell, and a second set of decisions

On July 19, 2023, Holtzman rang Nasdaq’s Opening Bell for ODDITY. The listing supplied a public marker for a project that had begun a decade earlier. By then, the company included IL MAKIAGE and its second brand, SpoiledChild, launched in 2022. It had also acquired Revela, extending the research capabilities inside the group. The public company represented a broader undertaking than the cosmetics business he had originally bought into.

The bell makes an excellent photograph. It explains rather less about how a founder intends to run several businesses at once. Later in 2023, Holtzman described an organizational choice with more everyday consequences: separate leadership teams for the brands, supported by a shared technology backbone. Brand operations were divided; technical capabilities could serve more than one business. His ambition depended on making that arrangement work beyond the first success.

There is a management tension inside that structure. A shared capability becomes more valuable when several teams can use it. A brand still needs people accountable for the particular customer it serves. The model Holtzman described tried to preserve both. It gave each brand its own executives and functions while retaining the data science and technology that helped explain why they belonged in the same company.

“Nothing against stores or retail, but we don’t need it yet.”

Oran Holtzman, November 2023

His view of distribution was similarly specific. In 2023 he laid out circumstances in which a direct-to-consumer business might need stores, including limits on growth, difficult acquisition economics or challenging shipping. He believed ODDITY’s digital model still had room. The qualification at the end of his remark now deserves attention. Commercial strategies exist in time. The word “yet” leaves the door open for the circumstances to change.

When somebody else changes the algorithm

In 2026, a different kind of algorithm occupied Holtzman’s attention. ODDITY said an advertising account problem at its largest advertising partner was impairing IL MAKIAGE’s ability to reach the right audience. The distinction is consequential. A company can build its own recommendation technology and still depend on another company’s machinery to bring people to the front door. Owning the shop does not mean owning the road.

Holtzman discussed technical testing, audience adjustments and work with the advertising partner. In June, he also said the company was considering diversifying its channels. The question had become more complicated than whether consumers would buy beauty online. It concerned the price and reliability of finding them there. A model built around direct customer relationships still needs an affordable opportunity to begin the relationship.

The latest reported quarter gives that difficulty a scale. ODDITY recorded $181 million in net revenue for the second quarter of 2026, down 25% year over year. In September, management said work on the advertising issue continued. Holtzman identified a return to growth at IL MAKIAGE in 2027 as a goal. That remains an ambition, with the repair still being tested, rather than a result to celebrate in advance.

He also put more of his own money into the company. A regulatory disclosure records purchases of 857,084 Class A shares on March 3 and 4, 2026. Buying shares is a different transaction from borrowing against an apartment to acquire a struggling business. It nevertheless adds a concrete action to his stated confidence. The founder who started with personal financial exposure was again increasing his ownership during an uncomfortable period.

Holtzman’s career keeps returning to the distance between a promise and a decision. The first purchase required his own commitment. The online business asked customers to trust a recommendation. Acquisitions asked technical founders to join a larger plan. The present task asks whether he can adjust the means of reaching buyers while preserving the economics that made the model attractive. Foundation is sold in shades. Building the business has required decisions with rather less forgiving boundaries.