personal-care
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Alexi Suvacioglu Learned the Business by Packing the Boxes
Before Because reached national retail shelves, its CEO answered support calls and packed orders in a garage. That close-range education still shapes how Alexi Suvacioglu builds: listen first, learn the details, then earn the right to scale.
David Simnick Learned to Sell the Shampoo Before the Mission
Soapbox began with an aid worker's observation and a batch mixed in a college kitchen. Its survival depended on a harder lesson: purpose can deepen loyalty, but the product still has to win the shelf.
Jeremy Horowitz
Jeremy Horowitz is the CEO and co-founder of Hume Supernatural, a San Diego based clean personal care brand best known for its microbiome-supporting, plant-and-probiotic deodorant. A former corporate lawyer who spent 16 years inside the San Diego Padres and later ran investments at Selby Venture Partners, he traded contracts and box seats for prebiotics and skin barriers, launching Hume digitally in March 2020. Under his lead the brand became the fastest-growing natural deodorant in the natural retail channel, landing in Whole Foods, Sprouts and CVS and drawing investors including Lupita Nyong'o and Alex Morgan.
Catherine Magee
Catherine Magee is the co-founder and CEO of Playground, a sexual wellness brand she launched in 2022 with product developer Sandy Vukovic and pop star Christina Aguilera. After more than 15 years building aspirational beauty brands at companies like bareMinerals, Buxom, Rodan + Fields and theBalm Cosmetics, Magee set out to give intimate care the same skincare-grade performance and cosmetic-level joy that the beauty aisle had long enjoyed. Under her leadership Playground reached Target, Urban Outfitters and Amazon, raised roughly $2 million in seed funding, generated billions of social impressions, and landed Magee on Inc.'s 2024 Female Founders 250 list.
David Friedeberg
David Friedeberg is the founder and CEO of OXOMIO, a wellness and supplements company that pairs Earth's purest natural ingredients with biotechnology under the banner 'The Luxury of Wellness.' Son of Mexican surrealist Pedro Friedeberg, David grew up in an artist's household where making something from nothing was a daily ritual, then carried that mindset through a career that spanned fine-art dealing, hospitality operations, and a Harvard MBA before launching OXOMIO in 2017. He splits his life between San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Austin, Texas, and runs his days by the Japanese principle of kenkou dai-ichi - health above everything else.
Brian Jeong
Brian Jeong is the CEO and cofounder of Hawthorne, a New York personalized men's personal care brand he launched in 2016 with his childhood best friend Phil Wong. Hawthorne built its business on a data-driven quiz that matches men to fragrances, skincare, hair care and grooming products tuned to their body chemistry and preferences. With no prior beauty experience, Jeong reverse-engineered the fragrance world through roughly 100 industry interviews in three weeks, growing Hawthorne from an online storefront into a Series B company stocked in thousands of retail doors, including the vast majority of Target stores.