sephora
(9)
Summer Fridays turned a blue tube into a beauty habit
Marianna Hewitt and Lauren Ireland made skincare feel like time off. Building the business meant learning retail, reworking a hit formula and giving a $24 lip balm somewhere else to go.
Lady Gaga Burned Down Her Own Makeup Brand - Then It Grew 400%
Haus Labs failed quietly on Amazon. Then Gaga and CEO Ben Jones threw out every formula, moved to Sephora, and bet the company on fermented arnica and 51 shades.
Glossier Built the Comment Section Into a Beauty Counter. Then the Counter Moved.
Born from a beauty blog and built for Instagram, Glossier made customers part of the product team. Its second act is a harder experiment: keeping that intimacy while selling wherever beauty shoppers already are.
Briogeo Put Skincare Logic in the Shampoo Aisle
Nancy Twine turned family beauty recipes, a finance career and one stubborn consumer problem into a nine-figure haircare business. Briogeo's cleverest move was treating every scalp and strand like a specific case, not a generic hair type.
Makeup by Mario Turned the Makeup Chair Into a Global Counter
Mario Dedivanovic spent two decades teaching people how to sculpt a face. His company packages that know-how into products, instructions and an unusually tight partnership with the retailer where he got his first beauty job.
Rare Beauty
Selena Gomez built a makeup company where a blush that sells every three seconds funds therapy for teenagers. Here is how Rare Beauty turned self-acceptance into a business worth around $2 billion.
Kosas
A bug taxonomist turned four kitchen-table lipsticks into a $150 million makeup company - by insisting cosmetics do the work of skincare.
Memebox Corp (YC W14)
Memebox Corp (operating as MBX) is a global multi-brand K-beauty and personal care company founded in Seoul in 2012 by Hyungseok 'Dino' Ha. Now headquartered in Los Angeles, it builds and scales its own portfolio of Korean-made beauty brands - I Dew Care, Kaja, Pony Effect, I'm Meme and nooni - using data-driven product development and partnerships with retailers like Sephora, Ulta and Amazon. It was the first Korean company accepted into Y Combinator (W14) and has raised over $200M in venture funding.
Kohl's
Kohl's is one of the largest department store chains in the United States, operating roughly 1,100 off-mall stores across 49 states plus Kohls.com. Founded in Wisconsin, it sells moderately priced apparel, footwear, accessories, beauty, and home goods to value-conscious families, anchored by its Kohl's Cash and Kohl's Rewards loyalty programs. In recent years it has leaned on partnerships - hosting Sephora shops inside its stores and accepting Amazon returns - to drive traffic while working to reverse a multi-year sales decline.