This is, to date, the single most exciting post, newsletter, email, whatever you want to call it, that I’ve ever written. Today we launched Annadea Beauty, the company I’ve been working on for the past 18 months and dreaming of far longer than that. Annadea is the combination of everything I value: joy, ease, sophistication, ambition, high-performance, and fun. I’ve been asked countless times to start a matcha brand, a protein-based brand, a supplement brand, and several other things that fall squarely in the food and beverage wellness industry. It makes sense, given my focus on creating recipes. But I knew I’d never build something just to put a product in the world that has my name on it. I wanted to make something that felt like a true extension of me and my life’s purpose, and would benefit many other people along the way.

So without further ado, here is Annadea.

We have three serum-based launch products: a blush serum, a bronzing serum, and a glow serum. You can read more about them here.

My favorite way to wear the products is to use the To Dew glow serum as the last part of my skincare routine, putting a generous amount on my entire face after my moisturizer. I like to apply the PTO Glow bronzing serum directly to the parts of my face I want to shade and contour, and I blend it with a brush. I finish with a couple of dots of Power Walk blush serum (often in the Rose Trail shade, though I love and use them all), also blended with a blush. We wanted to bottle that “wow, where did you just come back from?” vacation glow with these products, and I think we nailed it. Kyle and I haven’t traveled anywhere for over a year, but when I wear our Annadea products, people often think we’ve just arrived home from somewhere warm, rejuvenating, and revitalizing.

The thing I’ve cared about most throughout my entrepreneurial career is helping women feel like the best version of themselves. I use food to better my own life and I share my recipes in the hopes that they can help others feel better, too. The same goes for Annadea. We can’t always be jetting off to Mexico or Capri, but we can use products that help us get the same glow. And we, the Annadea brand team, can create a brand that celebrates women being healthy–the real kind of healthy, not the fad diet, trend-based health nonsense that clutters a lot of our algorithms. The kind of healthy that includes drinking tons of water, eating a balanced and colorful diet, having fun with friends on the weekend, getting outside for some sun and movement, and taking time for ourselves when we need it.

You can read more about how we brought our brand campaign to life in southern Morocco here, about the team that made it all possible here, how we funded the whole thing here, and the brands that inspired me while building Annadea here.

And of course, you can find Annadea on our website here or on Amazon here. If you’re an Amazon creator, we have an Amazon campaign live right now that you can sign up for. If you’re browsing the products, I’d be remiss not to point you in the direction of our Glow-To trio—it’s all three products, plus a scarf designed by a brilliant French artist, specially for Annadea.

If you have any questions as you dive into the brand, feel free to drop me a comment here or email support@annadeabeauty.com. Thank you all for your support along the way–we’re just getting started and I cannot wait for all that’s to come!

Today is a big day! I started dreaming about Annadea in March 2025, we committed to the idea and made our first couple of hires in April 2025, and we’ve been working on our product formulations and building our team for the past year and a few months. We announced Annadea, the company, back in January (in our defense, we thought we’d be launching sooner), and it’s been a painful six months of not being able to share the products we’re launching with you. Now that we’re exactly one week out from the big launch, I can finally tell you…

We are launching three incredible products:

To Dew Glow Serum, PTO Glow Bronzing Serum, and Power Walk Blush Serum.

Obviously I am biased, but these are truly my favorite products in my makeup bag. But don’t just believe me–our early testers have said the same thing.

Let me introduce you to each one, and to what I hope they’ll mean to you—join the email list to be the first to shop the launch.

To Dew is the entire ethos of Annadea, in an absolutely beautiful package. Annadea is all about accessing the healthiest version of you, the version that gets eight hours of sleep, drinks tons of water, eats well and lives even better. To Dew bottles that radiance and vitality. It’s sensorially rich but won’t clog your pores, it’s luminescent without being glittery. It’s versatile, working as well below makeup as it does on top of it. It’s the extra glow boost I’ve been looking for in my makeup routine

The most important thing, from a cosmetic standpoint, was that this product produces a natural looking glow. Most of the competitors on the market have some shimmer or sparkle that makes the product feel a little young or unnatural. The high-shine highlighter is great for a photoshoot or a big night out, but I wanted a product that would give a subtle glow, day or night.

Our final formula delivers! It’s a silky, hydrating serum that creates a natural glow while it works on your skin over time, layering niacinamide and licorice root to visibly brighten and even tone, a lipid and humectant complex to replenish what daily life strips away, and a four-part hyaluronic acid complex to hydrate at every level skin can absorb it. Ceramides and cholesterol reinforce the barrier underneath all of it, so the glow you see on the surface is backed by something structural happening underneath.

I wanted a product that could be the first or only step of a makeup routine, depending on the day. Worn alone, it reads as “did you just get a facial” skin. Mixed into foundation, it turns a flat base into something lit from within. Tapped onto the high points of the face, it becomes definition without a highlighter’s glitter. I’ve never loved a product that made me choose between looking done up and looking like myself. To Dew was built so I’d never have to.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I love a good bronzer. The issue I have with the existing bronzer market is that most of the products are too warm, reading orange on my face. The other thing that was important to me was performance–I have way too many products that I love the look of when I put them on but that fade within a few hours. I wanted this bronzer to stay put throughout the day and night.

The result is a weightless bronzing serum built around niacinamide and an antioxidant complex of astaxanthin, resveratrol, CoQ10, and tocopherol, so it’s doing something for your skin while it sits there, rather than simply sitting on top of it. It melts in and builds easily, so you can build your own desired level of bronze. Mixed into moisturizer, it gives you an all-over wash of warmth. Swept across the high points of your face, it sculpts without a trace of orange or shimmer.

I think blush is the new lip gloss–at least for me–because I love playing with different colors and textures. I never tire of trying new shades, and I think it’s fun to use a deep, toasted terracotta one day and a bright pink the next. The only issue is that, like my other color products, my blushes usually fade quickly. Or, they stay on all day but they clog my pores. Power Walk is the answer I’ve been looking for. It’s a blush that behaves like a serum, and has enough grip to hold color on the skin and enough slip to blend without dragging. It took us longer to get right than either of the other two because we refused to compromise on payoff, performance, or texture. I think you’ll feel that the moment you use it.

It’s built around hyaluronic acid, which plumps and hydrates while you wear it, and an antioxidant defense of bakuchiol and coffee seed extract, so the flush it gives you actually improves your skin’s texture over time rather than merely coloring it. The pigment is layerable in a way that most cream or liquid blush isn’t, which means one product can take you from a bare-faced flush to a full, considered color moment, depending on how much you build. It comes in three shades: Soft Step, a light, barely-there pink; Rose Trail, a dusty, muted rose; and Late Date, a warm terracotta.

The image I had in mind while we built this one was specific: the flush that shows up after real movement, after a laughing fit with friends, after the perfect kiss.

These aren’t three unrelated products that happened to launch on the same day. They were designed as a system, meant to be worn together, layering into a single finished look that no single one of them achieves alone. To Dew lays the foundation of hydration and light. PTO Glow adds warmth and dimension on top of it. Power Walk finishes the picture with color exactly where your body would naturally put it.

Our motto is Lived in Color, and I chose those words carefully. I am inspired by women who say yes to risky, bold, audacious opportunities. I admire women who lean fully into the lives they built for themselves, who embrace every single moment. Those are also the women who often feel pressure to do or be everything, the women who desperately want balance in one form or another but are hard-pressed to find it. I created this brand for those women–women who will take pleasure and delight in the texture and performance of our products, women who don’t have time to watch a makeup tutorial explaining how to blend and contour, women who want a little extra boost of glow. And I wanted to do the research, the diligence, and the hard work to formulate each product in a way that would perform at the level these women expect. We make ambitious products that work as hard as our Annadea women do.

None of this would mean anything to me if it came at the expense of what’s actually in the bottle. Every formula in this collection was built to the same standard I’d want for my own skin. That meant real actives at real concentrations, not just marketing ingredients. It meant antioxidant complexes that do something–astaxanthin, resveratrol, CoQ10, and tocopherol in PTO Glow; bakuchiol and coffee seed extract in Power Walk–rather than a single trendy ingredient positioned at the top of an ingredient list. It meant a full ceramide and hyaluronic acid architecture in To Dew, built the way a serious skincare serum is built.

It also meant real formulation constraints that most color cosmetics never have to solve for. A serum has to be non-comedogenic, or the entire premise collapses the first time someone breaks out from wearing it. It has to absorb rather than sit, or it reads as skincare pretending to be makeup rather than the reverse. Getting three different products–a bronzer, a blush, and a glow serum, each with its own pigment load and its own texture demands–to hold that same standard took our formulators over a year, and there were versions of each of these that never made it out of the lab because they looked beautiful in a swatch and failed the standard on skin. I’d rather ship late than ship a compromise, and more than once, we did exactly that.

We launch Tuesday, July 14th. All three products, and the option to buy them as a set we’re calling the Glow-To Trio, which includes To Dew, PTO Glow, and your choice of Power Walk shade–and a little extra gift, designed for our first purchasers of the set. If you sign up for our email list, you’ll be the first to know so you don’t miss out if we sell through inventory faster than we planned.

I’ve wanted to write this post since before Annadea had a name. Thank you for reading this far, and for being here before the products even existed. One more week!

Today I’m sharing something that, until now, we’ve kept between our team and the lab. When Annadea launches on July 14th, you will see that all three of our first products are serums. They are genuine color formulas built on a serum foundation, not skincare serums tinted as an afterthought or conventional makeup wearing a serum-sounding name. It is one of the most consequential product decisions we’ve made in building this brand, and the reasoning behind it is, in many ways, a reflection of the brand itself.

I really think that one of the most fun parts of being a girl is getting to indulge in a beauty routine. Sometimes it feels like a science experiment trying to figure out the right combination of skincare products, but I enjoy the trial and error. It’s also somehow soothing to watch videos of girls doing elaborate makeup routines; I’m always amazed by the creative ways people use products. But for me, personally, I like a routine that’s fun and efficient, something that feels like a “get to do” vs. “must do” but is also possible to do in a relatively short amount of time. When I reach for a snack in the kitchen, it’s something I’m excited to eat. Makeup should be the same. It serves a function or purpose, yes, but it can also bring you joy! In my opinion, texture is one of the best ways to achieve this feeling of joy in a beauty routine. When I look forward to pumping something in my hands, or smoothing it on my face, it’s because I enjoy the sensorial experience. And for me, serums are the most luxurious. They’re hydrating, nourishing, thick but not heavy. They feel like an indulgence.

In my dream world, Annadea’s color products would have the same sensory quality, so we worked closely with our product developer and lab partners to achieve exactly that.

I built Annadea to put that joy of the routine back at the center. Long before we had a name or a finished formula, the brief I kept repeating was that using our products should feel easy, forgiving, something you look forward to rather than move through thoughtlessly. The most flattering product in the world is worthless if it doesn’t feel good going on, because it will stay in the drawer while you reach for something that does.

Consider the last serum you loved, not for what it did but for how it felt: the cool, weightless drop in the palm, the way it melts the instant it meets warm skin, the faint cushion it leaves behind, that plumped, quenched, softly luminous finish.

Skincare has spent years teaching us what that sensation is worth. The entire language of glazed, freshly-facialed skin was written in serum textures, and it rewrote our expectations: we no longer want to see where the product ends and the skin begins. So our team asked the question: if the serum is the step people genuinely enjoy, why has it been confined to skincare? Why should color belong to a heavier, higher-maintenance category? What if color could feel like a serum?

“Skincare-makeup hybrid” has become a loose phrase, applied to anything with a virtuous ingredient list. We mean it literally. We didn’t want makeup that merely contains a good ingredient so the claim can go on the box; we wanted makeup whose texture is genuinely doing something kind for the skin all day–hydrating, cushioning, nourishing–so that the longer you wear it, the better your skin looks beneath it. We wanted formulas you forget you have on, until you catch your reflection and see the quality of skin we became obsessed with: glowy, active, faintly flushed, luminous in a healthy way.

When color is suspended in a serum, it doesn’t mask the skin, it joins it, so the flush appears to rise from underneath and the glow looks like your own. A serum that has truly absorbed has no hard line to break down, so it wears away softly and evenly rather than separating into patches or settling into fine lines. And because it melts in rather than sitting on top, it flatters a far wider range of skin–heavier textures behave differently on dry skin than oily, on deeper tones than fair, while a luminous veil that becomes part of the face adapts to whoever is wearing it.

As I’m quickly and repeatedly learning in entrepreneurship, the same quality that makes an idea beautiful is usually the one that makes it nearly impossible to execute. A serum feels extraordinary precisely because it is fluid, slippery, and weightless, and those are the opposite of what you need in a product that must deposit color and hold it, evenly, through a day of talking, eating, sweating, and hands against the face. A serum wants to travel; makeup has to stay. Reconciling those two qualities is one of the genuinely hard problems in this category, and it tested us most.

We moved through round after round chasing the version that had both: the melt-in slip on application and real grip once it set, the kind that survives the morning rush and is still intact when you finally sit down at night. Early formulas felt wonderful and faded by midday; later ones wore beautifully but lost the sensation that was the entire point. The answer wasn’t a single clever ingredient but the ratios between many of them; the precise relationship between what makes a formula glide and what makes it grip. I couldn’t be prouder of where we landed. The formulas launching soon are the ones that stopped forcing us to compromise.

Anything designed to feel dewy and rich is working in exactly the territory that, handled carelessly, congests pores. Much of what feels luxurious in beauty earns that feel from ingredients that clog the skin over time, and that is a trade I was never willing to make. I have fallen in love with countless products that seem wonderful immediately upon application but wreak absolute havoc on my skin in the long run.

So non-comedogenic was a fixed constraint from the first brief, and it made an already hard problem harder by an order of magnitude. We were now asking for a texture that melts in, grips all day, delivers true color, and cares for the skin, while being formulated to not clog pores. That meant scrutinizing not just the actives and pigments but every emollient and carrier that gives a serum its slip, since those are often the culprits, and then testing the result. It is much of why this took as long as it did. The first question I know people will ask is the oldest one in beauty: will this break me out? And I wanted to be able to answer “no” honestly and confidently.

We are launching with three serums because we began from a feeling rather than a category: makeup should be a joyful part of the day, not the most effortful, and no format delivers that pleasure like a serum. We wanted color that behaves like skincare–it absorbs, cares for the skin, and produces that glowy, faintly flushed look that seems to come from within, and we were stubborn enough to insist it also grip, wear, and stay clear of anything that could clog a pore.

We’ve been living with these formulas for a long time, testing them on ourselves, our team, and our most honest friends, and the response is remarkably consistent: people forget they’re wearing anything at all, until someone asks what they’ve changed about their skin.

That is exactly what we set out to make. Very soon it will become yours!

Kyle here—Olivia’s husband and co-founder / Chief Operating Officer of Annadea. I run the operating side of Annadea, so when Olivia asked me to take this week’s letter, the natural subject was the one she hasn’t written about yet: how we have paid for the company. Short answer: we bootstrapped it. We have funded every part of the business ourselves, without outside investment, and that was a deliberate decision. We could have raised money but we chose not to.

The question we get more often than any other is who is behind the company financially—which fund, which angel, which strategic partner. There isn’t one. It is the two of us, and that single fact has shaped almost every other decision we have made. I wanted to use today’s Extra Scoop post to lay out the reasoning behind it, the tradeoffs it has required, and what I would tell another founder weighing the same choice.

We started with an advantage some first-time founders don’t have: an existing business that already generates cash. Olivia’s creator business produces real revenue, and that revenue gave us the runway to fund Annadea out of our own pocket. We never had to persuade anyone to write a check before we knew whether the product worked. That changed the entire decision. Once you can finance the business yourself, outside money becomes optional, and we treated it as a decision to be justified rather than an assumption to be made.

When we examined it, the issue came down to control. Outside capital comes with conditions. Investors have a legitimate interest in how their money is spent, how quickly the company grows, and when it begins to perform, and that interest becomes influence over the decisions you make. We were not willing to accept that influence before we had proven the product on its own. Surrendering authority over the company in exchange for money we did not strictly need, at the precise moment we had the most unanswered questions, was a poor trade. We wanted to own our decisions outright, including the ones that might not work out. The right time to bring in investors, if we ever do, is after the product has demonstrated demand, when we can negotiate from evidence rather than a hopeful forecast.

Timelines are part of this as well. An investor is deploying a fund with its own horizon and obligations, and that clock does not necessarily match the pace at which a brand should be built responsibly. Capital that needs a particular return by a certain date can push a company toward growth it isn’t ready for, or toward an exit that suits the cap table more than the people who built it. We wanted the company’s pace set by the product and the customer, not by someone else’s reporting cycle.

There is also the matter of personal exposure. Olivia and I are personally responsible for every dollar that has gone into the company. Neither of us takes that lightly. It means we treat the company’s money the way you treat your own (and we have the same expectation of all of our team members), and that shows up in nearly every decision we make.

The capital we have put in has gone strictly where it needed to go in order to build a real product, and most of it will be invisible to our customers. It has gone to custom formula development and several lab rounds with our contract manufacturers, stability and formula testing, a first inventory run, and then already a second. We’re funding influencer and affiliate programs, web development, a handful of outside contractors. Of course we have to pay for day-to-day operations, legal fees, intellectual-property protection, and entity formation. Inventory in particular consumes more cash than anything else, because you pay for it in full long before you sell through it. Formulation, too, is rarely a single attempt; reaching the standard we wanted meant repeating lab rounds and retesting until the result held up, and every iteration carried real cost.

We have kept the team small by design. Every hire is a fixed cost that must be covered in a weak month as well as a strong one, and fixed costs are the fastest way to shorten a runway, so we have added people slowly and only when the work clearly demanded it.

The same logic shaped smaller choices. Custom packaging is one of the first places founders spend money to feel like a serious brand, and we declined. We used stock packaging and put the money into the decoration instead: the printing, the finish, the tactile details that determine whether something reads as premium when a customer picks it up. The component is an off-the-shelf part, but the execution we applied to it is what makes the product feel considered in hand.

Our PR boxes follow the same reasoning. The category has trained everyone to expect an elaborate unboxing, and we ship our product in a plain brown corrugate box. It is less photogenic and considerably cheaper, and at the volume we send, that difference funds the product itself rather than the packaging around it. That is the priority we would rather spend against.

The principle is consistent across all of it: we invest in what the customer sees and touches, and we economize on everything they never will. Our influencer and affiliate programs are built on the same idea, weighted toward performance rather than flat fees, so that the spending tracks results instead of running ahead of them. It is a slower way to build awareness than buying it outright, but every dollar in it is accountable to something.

Funding the company ourselves made us better operators, which I did not anticipate at the start.

When the money is yours, every dollar has to justify itself. You scrutinize spending in a way that well-capitalized companies often do not. A funded team can tell itself it will sort out the economics later, or raise again, or that any single line item is too small to matter. We never had that cushion, and its absence turned out to be an advantage.

It also forced a degree of deliberateness into decisions that many founders make on autopilot: vendor payment terms, influencer rates, the size of a second production run. We negotiate harder than we likely would with someone else’s money because it is ours. The same attention applies to the money coming in as much as the money going out, from payment terms to the structure of every contract we sign. It is demanding work, and it has built a discipline into how we operate that I expect we would keep now regardless of how the company were funded in the future.

It changed how we think about time as much as money. With a small team and no outside cushion, we cannot pursue every opportunity that presents itself, so we have had to get disciplined about what we decline. A funded company can chase several directions at once and absorb the ones that fail. We have to choose, and choosing well, repeatedly, has probably done more for the business than any individual decision about where to spend.

Every founder lives with the tension between profitability and growth, funded or not. What changes when you are self-funded is that the tension resolves toward profitability whether you want it to or not. We cannot pursue growth at any cost, because there is no reserve of outside capital to fund the pursuit. Every marketing dollar has to produce a measurable return; we cannot run negative unit economics for months on the assumption that we will eventually grow into them. The business has to work now, on its current economics, not on a projection that depends on the next round closing.

In practice that means holding every channel to a standard. We look at what it costs to acquire a customer and how long it takes to earn that back, and we move the budget toward what pays and away from what doesn’t. Impressions, follower counts, and gross top-line figures detached from margin do not survive long in a company spending its own money. None of that is glamorous, and it is precisely what keeps us clear about which efforts are contributing and which only appear to be.

The discipline that imposes is, in my view, undervalued. Funding the company ourselves obligated us to build something that stands on its own economics from the beginning. A meaningful number of brands that appear to be winning are well-capitalized experiments operating on borrowed time, and because we never had that capital, we had no choice but to build a business that works without it. It also pushed us to identify our efficient acquisition channels earlier than we otherwise might have, because we could not afford to subsidize the inefficient ones while we waited for the picture to clarify.

The cost of that discipline is real. We will, at times, grow more slowly than a competitor who has raised a large round and decided to buy market share outright. In beauty, attention moves quickly, and capital can buy attention. Watching a funded competitor saturate a channel at a scale we cannot match is genuinely uncomfortable, and it is a real and recurring consideration.

It is tempting to assume the funded version of Annadea would be the same company with more money behind it, simply moving faster, but that is not how outside financing works.

We would have more capital, and we would also be sitting across the table from investors whose role, in that negotiation, is to question every assumption beneath our valuation. Early-stage investors are trying to acquire as much of the company as they can for as little capital as possible; that is how the incentive is structured. The result is that your valuation gets taken apart, and you frequently give up a significant share of what you have built for money that does not go as far as you had hoped. And dilution compounds. The share you give away in a first round is followed by more in the next, and more in the one after that, so the percentage of the company you ultimately retain can shrink considerably across a financing history that felt reasonable at each individual step. Founders consistently underestimate how quickly that accumulates.

Dilutive financing also changes whose timeline you operate on. Once you have taken it, the schedule is partly theirs, and decisions that used to take an afternoon become matters for the quarterly board meeting. What was a quick judgment call becomes a scheduled discussion with people who were not in the room when the problem arose–appropriate governance, and also a genuine change in how quickly a company can move. The speed and autonomy that make early-stage building productive give way to process. Some founders want that structure, and first-time founders in particular can benefit from the oversight. We did not want it at this stage.

In fairness, the right investor adds real value: relationships, credibility, operating experience the founders do not yet have. At the right moment, a strong investor can change a company’s trajectory. But that caliber of investor is uncommon at the earliest stage, and the odds of securing one are low. More often, early financing comes down to selling equity cheaply for capital alone. We decided that if we were going to sell a part of the company, we would do it later, from a position of strength, with a proven product and a real financial record standing behind the number.

For anyone facing the same decision, there are a few things to consider, with the caveat that our circumstances are specific and no one should draw a universal rule on financing from a single company.

Establish your real capital requirements before anything else, using actual numbers rather than an optimistic estimate. I will readily admit that this business required considerably more capital than I expected at the outset, and I came to it with a finance background and a fair amount of confidence. Understand what the company genuinely costs to build before you decide how to fund it.

Then determine, honestly, whether your channel can reach cash-flow positive without outside money. For some businesses it cannot, and raising is the right call. But a well-positioned Amazon or DTC business, with the right product and a genuine distribution advantage, often can get there on its own. The question is whether your contribution margin and your channel can compound without external fuel, and for a sound product with a distribution edge, frequently they can. Do not assume a round is necessary simply because the founders you follow have raised one.

If you already have a revenue stream, use it before you consider diluting. This is the point I would emphasize most. Do not raise because the option is available, and do not raise because a term sheet feels like outside validation. A term sheet is a financing offer, not a judgment on the quality of your idea, and it deserves the same scrutiny as any other financial decision.

Finally, keep the team lean for as long as you can. The moment you take on fixed overhead, your runway contracts faster than your projections suggest. Headcount can feel like progress, but it is fixed cost committed ahead of the revenue meant to cover it, and it shortens your runway accordingly.

The reality of funding your business yourself is that it’s extremely stressful. The amount of times per day I look at a literal daily cashflow should not be overlooked. It’s a constant game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Going from my left pocket to my right. All while trying to make sure everyone gets paid, and paid on time.

None of this reflects an ideological position. If the right capital became available at the right time, on terms that respected what we have built, I would take the meeting. We did not bootstrap out of principle. We did it because we had the means to fund the company ourselves and concluded that keeping control was worth more to us than the capital we would have traded it for.

What the decision has given us is straightforward. We own the company and we own its decisions, the sound ones and the mistakes alike. And we have been required to build a business that works on its own terms, with no reserve of outside money beneath it. It is a more demanding way to operate. For a company at our stage, I am convinced it is the right one.

I’m the type of person who is endlessly inspired by others. I love looking up to women who have built impressive businesses or dreamed up imaginative brands. I turn to my trusted advisors when I have big questions that I don’t want to make in a vacuum. I love to collaborate and learn from people who push me in every way. That’s also why I looked to so many brands for inspiration when I started building Annadea. We’re surrounded by incredibly capable, brilliant creative women who have built multi-million or even billion dollar businesses and I have a lot to learn from them. People often ask me which brands in particular stand out to me, who I admire most, so I wanted to share some of the companies and founders who have been endless sources of inspiration and motivation.

When I looked at these brands, I asked myself: what were they getting right? What had they learned the hard way? And what was the unglamorous decision underneath the beautiful result?

Something I only noticed once the list was finished: nearly every brand on it was built by a woman who saw a gap and simply refused to let it exist.

Here are the brands that taught me the most, and the lessons I carried straight into Annadea.

The first thing I’ll say about building a beauty brand is that you cannot charm your way out of a formula that doesn’t work. If a formula isn’t good, there isn’t any campaign or founder story that will prop it up. A few brands understood this with a rigor that genuinely raised my standards.

Tower 28 is the clearest example I know of a brand built backward from a real, specific need. Amy Liu spent more than two decades as a beauty executive—Smashbox, Kate Somerville, Josie Maran—and the whole time, she couldn’t actually use most of what she was helping to sell, because she’d lived with severe eczema her entire adult life. So in 2019, at around forty, she built the brand she’d needed the whole time. Tower 28 is, to this day, the only makeup brand fully compliant with the National Eczema Association’s ingredient guidelines, and what I find so smart is that Amy refused the usual trap of “clean equals safe.” As she likes to point out, poison ivy is natural too. The hero product, the SOS Daily Rescue Facial Spray, went viral during the mask-wearing years not because of a clever campaign but because it actually calmed people’s skin, and the community had the before-and-afters to prove it. The brand is named after a lifeguard tower in Santa Monica, a symbol of safety, and that idea sits underneath everything: products that are safe for the most sensitive skin, but made for all, kept deliberately under thirty-something dollars so the door stays open to everyone. That phrase—made for sensitive skin, but made for all—reorganized how I think about inclusivity in a formula. It’s a positioning we hold ourselves to at Annadea.

Westman Atelier taught me the opposite end of the same lesson: that “clean,” “luxury,” and “high-performance” don’t have to be a contradiction. Gucci Westman spent twenty-five years as one of the most sought-after editorial makeup artists in the world, and her whole thesis is that makeup should behave like skincare. Her Vital Skin Foundation Stick—the product that started the brand—reportedly took around fifty trials to get right, built without silicones, engineered to melt into skin like a liquid while quietly doing the work of an antioxidant-rich treatment underneath. Fifty trials for one stick. That number stayed with me every time we were frustrated that the lab didn’t get it right on the second or third try.

Sofie Pavitt Face is the brand I point to when I want to talk about texture and efficacy as a feeling, not just a claim. Sofie is a New York facialist with the kind of waitlist that has a waitlist. She’s been nicknamed “the acne whisperer,” and her expertise is the brand. Her Mandelic Clearing Serum is built around an 8% large-molecule acid that works slowly and gently precisely because it doesn’t barge into the skin the way harsher acids do. What I love is how honest the experience is: it’s lightweight, almost watery, there’s no sting, and the results arrive gradually and then, one morning, all at once. In a category addicted to the promise of instant, here’s a brand confident enough to sell gradual and real because the expertise underneath it has earned that patience. That’s a kind of confidence you can’t fake, and it’s the energy our developer and lab partners brought to our own custom formulas, where the skincare benefit has to be as real as the color payoff.

A formula gets someone to repurchase. A world gets them to belong. Two brands here are masterclasses in how differently that can be done.

Rhode is the world-building case study of our generation. Hailey Bieber launched it in 2022 with just three products and one extremely specific aesthetic: the “glazed” look she’d already made her own. What’s brilliant isn’t the minimalism, it’s the cohesion: every drop is a full sensory rollout. When the Cinnamon Roll lip treatment launched around her birthday, the campaign went warm and brown, cinnamon-roll recipes circulated, there was even a coffee collaboration, and the logo itself got dusted in sugar. The brand built a universe so consistent that buying a single lip treatment felt like buying into an entire way of living—right down to the viral phone case made to hold the tube, which did millions in revenue on its own. The discipline paid off in the most literal way possible: e.l.f. Beauty acquired Rhode in a deal worth roughly a billion dollars, and it went on to become one of the biggest launches in Sephora’s North American history. The lesson I took wasn’t “be minimal.” It was be consistent—decide what world you’re building and then let every email, every shade name, every photograph live inside it. It’s exactly why we shot our launch campaign in southern Morocco. The world had to feel like somewhere specific, not anywhere.

MERIT taught me that branding can be a discipline of subtraction. Katherine Power—who also built Who What Wear, Versed, and Avaline—launched MERIT in 2021 into a market drowning in newness, and did the unthinkable: she made less the entire point. Seven multifunctional products, a calm, editorial, almost quiet aesthetic that reads as understated luxury rather than another candy-colored Gen Z drop. The brand has actually wiped its own Instagram before a launch—I still don’t know if I would have the confidence to do that! They once positioned their complexion stick alongside the Bic pen, the Mason Pearson brush, and Levi’s 501s—objects whose design never needed to change. That’s not a product post; that’s a worldview. MERIT proved you can be both cross-generational and razor-sharp, that restraint photographs as expensive, and that a brand with a truly distinct point of view doesn’t have to shout to be heard.

Not every brand that shaped Annadea is a beauty brand. Some of the most important lessons came from women building in entirely different categories.

FORM is my answer whenever someone asks what real community looks like. Sami Clarke and Sami Spalter built their fitness and wellness platform out of the free Instagram Live workouts Sami was running during the pandemic, and the thing that makes it work isn’t the workouts, it’s that the community genuinely steers the ship. Members asked for mat pilates, so they launched mat pilates. They asked for nutrition, so a whole new vertical launched. There are local WhatsApp groups and monthly community walks in LA, and people refer to themselves, unironically, as the “FORM fam.” What I took from it is that community can’t be a marketing layer you apply at the end. It has to be the center of gravity, and you have to actually let it change what you make.

Popflex is the brand I think about when I think about innovation that comes straight from listening. Cassey Ho—the founder behind Blogilates—designs activewear, in her words, “with a why,” and her customers are part of the design loop in a way that’s rare. Her Pirouette Skort became so iconic (it went stratospheric after Taylor Swift wore it) that she patented the design to fight off the inevitable dupes—but my favorite detail is smaller than that: she made the back hem of the skort a touch longer in a later version specifically because customers said they wanted more coverage. Pockets in everything. Sizing from XXS to 3X. That’s a founder treating feedback as the raw material of the next product, not as noise to manage. We try to build that same listening posture into how we develop–we are actively thinking about the best way to solicit and incorporate community feedback into our future product pipeline.

Siete is the one that’s a little further afield, and maybe the most personal to me as someone whose whole platform is built around food. Veronica Garza was diagnosed with autoimmune conditions as a young woman and found herself cut off from the foods that connected her to her heritage, so she reverse-engineered a grain-free, almond-flour tortilla so she could eat tacos and enchiladas again. From a single tortilla sold out of a CrossFit gym, the Garza family—all seven of them, which is where siete comes from—built a brand that PepsiCo acquired for $1.2 billion. But the number isn’t the lesson. The lesson is that they made better-for-you food feel like joy rather than restriction—vibrant, nostalgic, rooted in culture, something you’d want at the table whether or not you “needed” it. That refusal to let healthy mean joyless is something I think about constantly, in food and in beauty alike.

Looking at the list now, the common thread is obvious: every one of these brands was built by someone who started with a genuine problem and an unreasonable amount of conviction, and who refused to choose between rigor and beauty, between efficacy and delight, between substance and a world worth belonging to. That’s the standard I hold us to. It’s why we obsess over formulas that perform and feel like a treat, why we built a brand world we’d actually want to live inside, why we aim to keep the people who buy from us close enough to shape what comes next.

None of this is built alone, and none of it is built without studying the people who came before. I’m endlessly grateful to the founders above for the lessons (most of whom have no idea they were giving me a class) and I’m even more excited for all of you to take part in what we’re about to launch.

More soon.

Hi everyone! Amy here. Olivia introduced me in last week’s post and interviewed me the week before that, but now I’m here to tell you about the most epic photoshoot I’ve ever been part of. Four months ago, we flew two team members (me + Olivia Eckerson), three models, two photographers, one makeup artist, and one surf coach/producer to Dakhla, a city in Western Sahara (which is technically part of Morocco) to shoot the Annadea launch campaign.

Morocco is undeniably having a moment right now. Sirat–one of the best movies I’ve watched this year–and The Odyssey, which is coming out soon, were both filmed in remote parts of Morocco. I saw that Madonna was just there, plus a handful of other celebrities. I’ve seen Morocco featured in fashion campaigns, and I’ve seen more and more Moroccan designers teaming up with American and European designers on new collections. I didn’t choose Morocco because of the recent attention, mind you, I’ve been enamored with the country for the last six years. In fact, I almost bought a riad and moved to Marrakesh instead of Lisbon back in 2022. Morocco is sensorially indulgent, fantastically whimsical, and unquestionably romantic. The colors are bold, moody, and passionate; the design is rich and textured, the food is full of spices and flavors.

What drew me to Morocco, though, was the people. Moroccans are some of the most generous people I’ve met, always sharing whatever is in front of them: tea, food, soda, anything. They’ll drive six hours one way to pick you up at the airport, they’ll stop to give a ride to an older person who’s having trouble walking in the heat of the harsh sun. They’ll welcome you into their homes and they’ll prepare massive amounts of food for you.

I had been to Marrakech and the Atlas many times, but in October of last year I visited the coast for the first time. I was participating in a women’s surf retreat and spent a week in Imsouane, a tiny surf village two hours south of Essaouira. During those seven days, I met Aymen, a very talented photographer and videographer who took a cinematic approach to filming surf content. I met Ikram, one of the managers at the local surf camp. I met Bamboo, a surf coach who is also the most helpful and resourceful person on this planet. Through these people, I was exposed to gorgeous women, women who I thought would be perfect models to introduce Annadea for the first time. They were surfers from different parts of the world, they were entrepreneurs who had started their own businesses, and they were women who were, frankly, unstoppable. They were pursuing life paths different to those that were more traditionally laid out for them, and I thought: that’s the essence of our Annadea girl. She’s bold, audacious, and spirited. She’s active but she’s a girl’s girl. She can dress up or dress down, she’s as comfortable at a trendy restaurant as she is in the ocean.

Then, Bamboo sent me the Instagram profile of White Dune Canyon in Dakhla. Within a week I was on the phone with the owner and developer, Nawfal, and a month after that I went on a location scout. The place was perfect–turquoise water that you can rarely find in the Atlantic, long stretches of uninterrupted coastline, a beautiful resort with a very nice pool, restaurant, garden, and bungalows, great waves, and a driver who would take us to every remote spot that would be good for shooting. I spent five days surfing, riding horses, going on a jetski, sailing a boat, exploring a deserted island–all in the name of finding the right locations for Annadea.

I shared the photos and videos with Olivia and Kyle, and they approved. We all liked that there was something unique about the environment–it’s not somewhere like the Amalfi coast, or Tulum, or Miami that would be easily recognizable from a million other photoshoots–but it wasn’t so exotic that it was off-putting. It could be somewhere in Mexico or California with the dry desert landscape and the cliffs up against the ocean, but not quite.

Over the next couple of months, Olivia Eckerson worked on the world’s most comprehensive shot list; we must have had thousands of shots on there. She created a very detailed schedule for each day, which we planned in accordance with the tides, the wind, and the sunlight. We pulled together a wardrobe–a combination of gifted products, our own closets, and a few purchased items–and we even created custom Annadea longboards with a Moroccan surfboard shaper.

We took a chance with almost every single part of this shoot. Aymen was not an established photographer, with decades of beauty campaigns under his belt. Two of our three models were not professional models, though they had experience with local brands. Olivia Eckerson had never been on a photoshoot like this before, much less produced one. I had never been the creative director on a campaign. Olivia and Kyle had never been to Morocco, and they weren’t on set during the shoot. But to be honest, I like it this way. I like working with unproven people who want to prove themselves. I like the adaptability, curiosity, and down-for-anything attitude that accompanies professionals who haven’t been worn down by the cut-and-paste approach to their industries. I really do believe that if you want to stand out, if you want to be different, you have to do different things. If we wanted to look like every other beauty brand out there, we’d hire a beauty photographer who shoots for Glossier and Rhode, we’d bring in an art director who has worked for the same brands, and we’d shoot in LA, New York, Ibiza, or some other recognizable location. There’s a time and a place for that, and I’m sure we’ll do it at some point in the future.

But to make a splash–surf/water pun intended–we wanted to embrace the Annadea ethos we penned months before. We wanted to live in color, to take the risk, to embrace the unknown, and to go 10000% all in on the hunch that we could create something incredibly special.

We can’t wait for you to see the full campaign in a few weeks!

One of the most valuable lessons you’ll learn in life—both personally and professionally—is that it takes a village. You can’t do everything on your own; even if you technically could, it likely wouldn’t yield the best results. I see a lot of founder-led brands, even content creators, who make everything seem so easy, like they’re seamlessly running businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars all on their own. They’re not. They have a lot of help. I’ve never been overly precious with my own work, I often have the instinct to hire people to do things that I know I’m not good at or don’t want to spend my time on. Hiring a team to build a beauty brand, however, was a new level of trust, delegation, and getting intentional on what we really needed. Especially considering we’re bootstrapped—meaning Kyle and I are funding this on our own—so we couldn’t afford to hire the wrong people.

Fortunately we assembled an all-star team, and I want to introduce you to each of them because Annadea would not be the company it has become without every single one of them. I wouldn’t be able to continue producing recipes for my Instagram platform, or finish my cookbook if I didn’t have the full support and expertise of the team. They’re also all quite interesting people with varied backgrounds and I learn something new from them every day! Without further ado, here are the people building Annadea.

My husband and I have been business partners for a while now. About a year into my content creation career, once I started earning real money and we both saw the potential, he joined to help me with all of the operational, behind-the-scenes things: HR, finance, operations, ads, etc. I genuinely don’t think I could run a business without him. I know a lot of people raise their eyebrows when they hear about a married couple working together, but it works so well for us. We have totally different–and complementary–skillsets. Where I’m creative, Kyle is extremely detail-oriented. I like to think about product vision, and Kyle is the one who works with the vendors to ensure that the products I’m dreaming about are 1) realistic from a budget perspective, 2) produced to the highest standards of quality, and 3) are delivered on time. He’s also meticulous with our budget, and brings a level of financial rigor to the business that ensures we’re able to grow responsibly. He has such a business-oriented mindset: he thinks in terms of cash flow principles, measured growth, platform strategy, and operational timelines. And we’re both equally ambitious so it feels nice to share this exciting new business together.

I just interviewed Amy here, but she’s helped me with my content business and my cookbook; now, she’s leading brand and creative for Annadea. Her creative perspective is informed by her many world travels and her years of leading brand and marketing for some of the most beloved consumer brands, including Glossier. It was her idea to shoot our launch campaign in southern Morocco, inspired by her time spent surfing in Imsouane. She found and hired our creative agency who she and I worked closely with to develop the entire Annadea brand world. She oversees all copy, creative direction, art direction, messaging, and brand channels. Alongside her creative skills, she has a sharp business acumen which enables her to be extra strategic about her brand and creative ideas. Plus, she has invaluable beauty industry experience and has helped us bring on most of our team members.

Ken has been mine and Kyle’s best friend for years–he was the first person to welcome us to Austin with open arms and we would not have our current community without him–but he also has incredible career experience: he spent over a decade at Tesla, where he established the company’s environmental commodities trading desk and supported both government affairs and financial planning and analysis. He left as Tesla’s Vice President of Sales Finance. He’s wildly smart but equally kind, which is so important to us. He’s put together numerous financial models for us, helping us decide things like whether or not we should bring on outside funding, how to think about payment terms with vendors, understanding contribution margin and consequently figuring out how much to spend on marketing for each platform. He brings the standards of excellence that he learned from his impressive tenure at Tesla to our business, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have him on the team because it’s rare for a brand new startup to have such a strong CFO from the get go.

Olivia Eckerson was our first non-executive hire and we found her through the FeedMe job board. I still remember her application–she included illustrations on her resume and cover letter, she was so professional, and she was a great writer. In the first interview, we learned that she started her career in wine. She had completed two sommelier levels, lived and worked on several vineyards across the world, and had even worked in wine education at one of the most prestigious wineries in Napa Valley. When we found her, she was working for an influencer marketing agency running campaigns for consumer brands. She was equal parts creative and organized, essential for someone in this role. Since joining the team in October of last year she has contributed so much to our overall brand vision, she’s running our influencer and affiliate program entirely on her own, and she’s responsible for most of the content you see on Instagram!

Umaimah has almost two decades of experience in beauty and consumer goods. She worked with Amy at Glossier (that’s how we found her) but she has been on the back end of many beloved brands, most recently Savannah James’ Reframe Beauty. She is a true operational wizard–she lives and breathes timelines, she’s excellent at vendor communication, she’s a great partner to us because she is realistic about what’s feasible but she also pushes our partners to always deliver their absolute best. She manages all of our packaging vendors–once you see our products you’ll understand why we’re so proud of this–and she chose our DTC warehouse and shipping partner, she manages the cost of goods calculations for our products, and she has helped a lot with our website design and customer service experience. She is one of the most reliable, helpful, and refreshingly direct people I’ve ever worked with.

Our first three launch products are a direct result of mine and Melissa’s early days of ideating which categories would truly best represent the Annadea brand ethos. Melissa also worked at Glossier, with Amy and Umaimah, and is the developer behind some of their bestselling products. She moved on to Luxury Brand Partners and worked on ONE/SIZE, then led all of product development and marketing for Curology. She created the lab briefs for our first products, ensuring they were all custom formulas designed with equal importance on cosmetic effect (color payoff, long-wear) and skincare benefits (hydrating, nourishing, etc.). Now, we are working with Andrea Rodriguez of Marcha House, to continue our product development pipeline. You guys don’t know the launch products yet but we’re already thinking about what we’ll be launching throughout 2027! Custom formulas work on long lead times.

We have other agency partners (shoutout to Orchidea and Haley Withers for creative and website development, respectively) and consultants (Cam and Madison who help with Amazon strategy and copywriting, respectively), and a wonderful summer intern, Ava. Chelsea, mine and Kyle’s assistant, also works on some Annadea projects and we recently brought on an email marketing agency to help build our email flows.

I couldn’t be prouder of the team, and I know you’ll be hearing much more from and about them in the coming weeks and months!

The beauty world can be tricky to navigate as a consumer. So many brands and products advertise themselves as “clean,” “healthy,” and “good for your skin,” but it’s hard to make sense of what that really means on the surface, since different brands have different standards for their products, and different ways of presenting those standards to the public.

A few years ago, I started to educate myself on what was in my beauty products after cleaning up household products containing toxins. I learned a lot by looking closely at ingredient labels, and even tried switching to fully natural skincare and hair care products. But with a fully natural regimen, I found that my skin was quite dull and lifeless, leading me to appreciate a middle ground where natural and synthetic ingredients combine for the best results. After diving in deeper as a beauty founder, I’ve gained even more knowledge that wouldn’t have been as accessible as a consumer.

After learning more about what goes into makeup product development and reflecting on my own struggles with cystic acne, I knew I wanted Annadea Beauty products to be European clean and non-comedogenic, to ensure they meet the highest quality standards. But what do these standards really mean?

“Clean” and “non-comedogenic” are two words that get used frequently in beauty marketing, but they meet completely different consumer needs.

A “clean” product is made without certain ingredients that a brand or retailer considers undesirable. “Clean” is not a regulated term, different brands and retailers have different standards for what they consider acceptable in “clean” beauty. “Sephora Clean” means something different than “Ulta Clean,” which is different than “Credo Clean.” But some common ingredients that are excluded in “clean” beauty products are:

• Parabens

• Phthalates

• Sulfates

• Synthetic fragrance

• Certain silicones

• PEGs

• Mineral oil, sometimes

On the other hand, when a product is labeled “non-comedogenic,” that means it was formulated to be less likely to clog pores and cause acne. Similar to the “clean” label, “non-comedogenic” is also an unregulated term, meaning different brands can apply it to their product marketing while having completely different standards for comedogenicity. There are many pore-clogging ingredient checkers online, and if you’ve used them before, you will notice that each checker has a different standard for what ingredients they will flag.

Something else important to note is that a product can be “clean,” but highly comedogenic and acne-triggering. For example, coconut oil and cocoa butter are considered “clean” ingredients by many brands and retailers, but they are highly comedogenic and have a high likelihood of clogging pores. This is something I didn’t realize as an early beauty consumer, as I assumed that clean ingredients that were “natural” were healthier for your skin and wouldn’t lead to breakouts. Turns out that’s not actually the case.

The United States and the European Union have very different standards for what they consider “clean” in beauty products. The EU has much stricter cosmetic regulations than the U.S. in several ways.

Generally, the EU has:

• More proactive ingredient restrictions

• Stronger pre-market safety frameworks

• More transparency requirements

• Earlier bans/reviews of certain chemicals

The EU actually bans and restricts many ingredients in cosmetics that are still technically allowed in the U.S. So when brands advertise themselves as being “European clean,” it means they’re likely adhering to a stricter level of ingredient safety and regulation than brands that are just clean by American standards.

Since “clean” isn’t a regulated term, every brand has to decide for themselves what is truly important to include and exclude in their products. At Annadea, we’re not just prioritizing “clean” ingredients for the sake of checking off boxes on a marketing checklist, or promoting fear-based ingredient claims. Instead, our brand is focused on creating products that are safe, thoughtfully formulated, and compatible with sensitive and acne-prone skin.

For this reason, Annadea not only follows European clean standards but also has an even more extensive ingredient exclusion list, in addition to the exclusions listed above. Our products are free of potential skin irritants and endocrine disruptors like parabens, phthalates, sulfates, and synthetic fragrances, so they’re safe for all skin types, including those with sensitive skin. We’ve also infused our products with skincare actives that enhance skin health over time. So not only are they non-irritating and non-inflammatory, but they’ll actually protect and improve your skin barrier and texture with each wear. We believe beauty products should do more than just avoid certain ingredients, they should actively support skin health while delivering exceptional performance.

At Annadea, we work with chemists specially trained in formulating non-comedogenic products, as well as third-party comedogenicity testing to ensure our products meet our standards of non-comedogenicity. I dove deeper into this on social media, but comedogenicity is an incredibly nuanced topic. Many fear-based marketing messages communicate that comedogenicity is a black-and-white issue. Some brands will suggest that comedogenic ingredients should be avoided at all costs. But as with most hot topics, the truth lies somewhere in between the extreme takes.

In our products, you will find some ingredients with a comedogenic ranking above zero, meaning that in isolation and when not properly formulated, they may clog pores. As a brand, we have chosen to take the more rigorous path of comprehensive product formulation and thorough testing to ensure our products are non-comedogenic as a whole, rather than simply avoiding all comedogenic ingredients, as some are essential to ensure the performance of the product.

Grounded in evidence rather than trends, Annadea products contain the skin health benefits of skincare and the long-lasting cosmetic payoff of makeup, all while adhering to an incredibly high standard. As a customer, I’ve been searching for products like these for years, and I’m excited for them to finally be yours next month.

I’ve been working with Amy for several years now–she started coaching Kyle and me on our content business, and quickly became a go-to for many projects: she helped with my cookbook proposal (she has experience in publishing), my Substack strategy and content, and now she’s the Chief Brand Officer of Annadea, my forthcoming beauty company. She has held a number of impressive roles across different companies—Communications Director at SeatGeek, Head of Comms and Brand at Glossier, Chief of Staff to Emily Weiss at Glossier, Chief Operating Officer at Haus to name a few—and she also coaches a number of successful entrepreneurs and content creators. When I think about Annadea’s slogan, lived in color, I think of Amy. She loves to travel to remote corners of the world, she embraces risks that other people would not (she bungee jumped in Zimbabwe in December!), she is the biggest cheerleader of the people she works with, and she has packed a lot of life into her thirty six years. I wanted to ask her some questions about how she thought about developing Annadea’s brand because I think her approach is unique—it’s informed by her worldly perspective and people-first life philosophy—and I hope she inspires you, too!

Let’s dive in.

What initially sparked your interest in working on Annadea?

So many things! I had already been working with you, Olivia, for a year or so as your business coach, so I knew what kind of founder and entrepreneur you were. You’re one of the rarest types of leaders–both deeply empathetic and ambitious, compassionate and uncompromising. You have incredibly high standards for what you put into the world but you take a human-first approach to everything and treat your team with the utmost respect. From a leadership perspective I knew it would be a treat to work with you. And then of course there’s the beauty industry–one I truthfully didn’t think I’d get back into (after being at Glossier for four years) but found myself really excited about when the opportunity presented itself. I am personally in a stage of life where I am fully leaning into my “girl” energy—planning girls’ trips, seeking out new female friendships, exchanging dozens of voice notes back and forth daily with my closest girl friends—and Annadea really brings this “girl’s girl” spirit to life. I knew I wanted to have a role in shaping the brand and to help bring it into the world.

How did you land on the visual aesthetic of the Annadea brand? What are you hoping to communicate through the branding?

We wanted the Annadea brand to be elegant but not pretentious, sophisticated but not soulless. We wanted it to be playful, bold, and ambitious. We also wanted it to be clear to our customers that we want the best for them–we want them to feel energized, healthy, nourished, rested. We want to make our girl feel like she’s the best version of herself. In order to do that, we needed to toe the line between aspirational and attainable; a brand that motivates and pushes her but also encourages and supports her. We didn’t have a specific color palette in mind, but both Olivia and I gravitated towards bold, punchy colors. Our early mood boards had lots of tropical fruit, girls playing in the ocean, travel, and movement.

Our slogan is “lived in color” and I hope our branding truly does encourage our customers to live their lives in color. To us, that means daring to take some risk, to ask for things that feel uncomfortable, to set lofty goals and enjoy the pursuit, to soak up new experiences and make the most of the more quotidian moments as well. You know when you have that nagging thought in your head, like maybe I should just do xyz…well, I hope Annadea can inspire you to DO the thing!

How has your experience working on Annadea differed from your past brand-building experiences? What’s been particularly exciting or interesting about this experience?

When I was working on brand at Glossier, it was in the very early days of selling beauty on the internet. We were writing the playbook, so there were no brands to copy or people to look to. Everything was completely original. Now, the online beauty market is far more saturated. There are countless brands and products, and truthfully many of them are good. Some people would look at this and think, ok the challenge now is to stand out. I don’t agree–beauty isn’t a zero sum game, you don’t win only through innovation. I think the challenge now is to create something that engenders a true sense of belonging for our future community. We are not solving the problem of “how does someone create product pages that accurately show the color of a blush or lipstick on a vast range of skin tones so that someone feels comfortable purchasing a product they’ve never seen in person”—there are best practices for this that come from all of the existing beauty brands. What we are solving for is creating a sense of emotional knowing and resonance that tells our Annadea girl: I see you, I understand you, and I support you.

What do you hope customers take away after using Annadea products for the first time?

I hope they fall in love with the texture as much as we did when we were creating the products. The sensorial experience of our products was an important part of the product development process—we wanted them to feel luxurious, and we wanted our customers to genuinely look forward to using them. Olivia has such beautiful, glowing skin (she never uses a filter on IG!) and I really think the texture of these launch products capture and recreate that glow for everyone.

Travel is a big part of your life—every time we are on Zoom, I have to ask you where in the world you are! How does that impact the way you think about brand, and Annadea specifically?

I travel for my own personal pleasure, but it inevitably impacts the brand work that I do. I’m constantly exposed to different beauty standards, different cultures, different perspectives, and different ways of living and expressing. That exposure helps reduce my bias (I hope!) because when you’re in one place for too long, especially with our algorithmically-driven lives, you do end up in an echo chamber. You get used to seeing the same facial features, same ways of applying beauty products, same style, same way of talking. When you are always refreshing where you are physically, you don’t get used to anything because everything is in-flux. On the other hand, the more I travel the more I realize how similar we all are. Girls are girls in the U.S., in Morocco, in Spain, in Mexico, in Botswana, in New Zealand, everywhere. We are all struggling with the same things: pressure to do or be “enough”, imposter syndrome, feeling like we’re crazy for thinking or feeling certain things, trying to find balance. We also all take pleasure in the same things: connection with others, meaningful relationships, a purpose-driven life, and life-changing experiences.

I try to harness both things when I’m thinking about Annadea’s brand: what are core feelings or experiences that are inherently human, and how can I bring some of the outside influence that I’m constantly exposed to into the brand in a way that inspires women and feels a little different from every other piece of content you see in your feed? This is why I wanted to shoot our launch campaign in Morocco, with models from all over the world. Sometimes the setting looks vaguely familiar–sand, ocean, a nice pool–but you also have a vintage red Land Rover driving through the Sahara Desert with the models hiking in the dunes. Hopefully those images will make you stop and actually notice the details, and inspire you in some way.

You have beauty experience through your years at Glossier, but you’ve also worked in a lot of other industries–live experiences, publishing, consumer tech, and food and beverage to name a few. Do you think working in other industries helps you?

100% yes! My ability to be successful in building a beauty brand is not contingent on years of beauty industry experience—it’s contingent on deeply understanding human behavior and understanding how to communicate effectively both visually and with language. Knowing how people make decisions about all sorts of things in their lives—what they drink, their price sensitivity for certain experiences, what they’re willing to order online and wait a few days for vs. what they want to buy immediately in person, how different phases of their lives impact what they’re looking for from the brands they love and trust, all of that comes from having a diverse set of work experiences.

If you want to read Amy’s Substack about creativity, entrepreneurship, and travel, you can find it here, and if you want to follow along on her adventures, follower her on Instagram!

Like all career journeys, my path to becoming a beauty founder is a twisting, non-linear route. Believe it or not, I wasn’t even that interested in makeup in high school and college, a time when many begin heavily experimenting with it. How, then, did I get to the place I’m at today, launching Annadea Beauty in just a couple of months?

My makeup journey began at age fifteen, when I started wearing minimal products in high school. At this point, I was about five years into battling intense acne and was in constant search for ways to clear up my face. My mom wasn’t a big makeup wearer, and I technically wasn’t “allowed” to wear much makeup at that age, but that didn’t bother me, given I wasn’t so interested in it yet.

In college, I began dabbling in makeup a bit more. I can remember buying a Laura Mercier tinted moisturizer, Lancôme Définicils mascara, and the iconic Urban Decay Naked palette (which I probably used for five years straight). At this point, I had learned that I prefer to wear a natural, minimal makeup look. But, due to my acne, I still tried to wear makeup as sparingly as possible, concerned that it would clog my pores and break me out even more. But that was before I became a content creator.

When I began my job as a content creator, I quickly became really interested in makeup. I figured out that getting good at applying it was a necessary part of my job since I was on camera every day. I also started to receive PR from brands, which allowed me to experiment with a wide range of products. Receiving new products to try is a major perk of being a content creator, and part of why I look to other influencers for product recommendations, knowing how many products we try before forming an opinion about the ones we like.

Around this time, I also began looking a bit closer at the ingredient labels in household, skincare, and bodycare products to remove the ones containing toxins. This prompted me to take a closer look at my makeup products too, inspiring me to switch to “clean” beauty products. I tried out a few products from “clean” brands and, to my surprise, they broke me out. I had assumed that products with “natural” ingredients would be better for my skin. I was wrong.

It turns out that not all “natural” or “clean” ingredients are necessarily good for your skin. For example, coconut oil is comedogenic, which can lead to clogged pores, and essential oils are highly irritating. Learning this completely changed the way I view and shop for makeup products.

One time, after getting a facial, the facialist asked me if I used a tinted moisturizer. I told her which one, and she suggested I switch because the one I was currently using was clogging my pores. So, I did as she suggested and switched to a non-comedogenic product, and, well, it was like my pores shrank before my eyes. It was like I had a new set of skin.

I had always thought that I just had naturally large pores that would forever get clogged with makeup. I thought the problem was exclusively with my skin, but it turns out that the makeup products I was using played a bigger part than I thought.

However, after making this discovery, I tried out different clean and non-comedogenic products, and found that many of them didn’t perform as well as the makeup products I was using previously. I found that many clean products, in particular, had little color payoff and melted off my face by the end of the day.

This is where the seed for Annadea Beauty was planted. I realized no one should have to decide between clean, non-comedogenic products and high-performing products. Why shouldn’t makeup boost skin health and last throughout the day? After making this discovery, there was no turning back. I was inspired to create a beauty brand that produces high-quality products that are clean, non-comedogenic, sensorially-rich, and high-performing, all in one.

When I set off to create Annadea, I knew I wanted to create products that are net positive for my skin, that don’t undo the good work of my skincare, but actually amplify it. I want every product that touches my skin to have an immediate cosmetic benefit and a long-term skin benefit. There’s no reason why we should trade long-term skin health for the immediate reward of color payoff.

After years of struggling with heavy acne, learning about what works for my skin has been one of the most important things I’ve ever done for myself. But it was a long road to get here, full of trial and error with many, many products.

That’s why my team at Annadea and I made the intentional decision to prioritize research with our product developer. I know what it’s like to be on the consumer side of things, and I want to relieve women of the burden of endlessly analyzing ingredient labels. I want customers to feel confident knowing they don’t have to look up a single ingredient because Annadea products have gone through countless rounds of testing and iteration to get the formulations perfect.

I hope that Annadea can fast-track the search for the right products for women who want high-performing, non-comedogenic beauty that meets European clean standards. It may have been a long road for me, but it shouldn’t have to be for everyone else.

I recently announced the creation of Annadea, the new beauty company that Kyle and I are co-founding. We’ve been working on it since March 2025, and as each day goes by it starts to feel more and more real. I remember getting our first formula samples from the lab and more recently, the final packaging from our packaging vendor. As the products started to come together, our brand and creative team were hard at work on the launch campaign. For those of you who are unfamiliar, a campaign refers to the images, videos, and text that bring a product or brand to life across social media platforms, e-commerce websites, advertising, billboards, and all other marketing channels. Every brand has a different approach to campaigns, largely determined by how important it is for them to build a world around what they’re doing; i.e. how important it is for the brand to make people feel something. In the beauty industry, having exceptional formulas isn’t enough to succeed, the winners are the companies that build worlds their customers are excited to be part of.

Subscribe now

We’ve built our brand very intentionally, being clear that we aren’t creating elite, exclusive luxury products but bargain pricing would also not be our selling point. We are for the women who are establishing themselves in their careers and have a little extra disposable income, the women who have a lot of demands on them and want products that work as hard as they do. We’re for the girls’ girls, the women who cheer their friends on and believe that happiness and joy are things to chase and embrace. We’re also for the women who actively invest in themselves and their health. The women who book an adventurous girls’ trip, or spontaneously sign up for a 10k, or decide to learn a new sport like surfing, or take a chance on themselves to build a business. Our launch campaign needed to reflect all of this, and every decision we made—who we cast as our models, who photographed the campaign, where it was located, the wardrobe and prop styling—would contribute meaningfully to our ability to successfully execute our vision.

Amy, our Chief Brand Officer, had been spending a lot of time surfing in Morocco and was inspired by the landscape, the surf, and the community-oriented culture. She heard about a place in southern Morocco, White Dune Canyon in Dakhla, and felt it might be right for the campaign. She also knew a photographer in Morocco who would be great for the shoot, and soon enough the rest of the pieces fell into place. Admittedly, this was slightly challenging for me—I’ve never been to Morocco, I’m not very into the surf community, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to travel for the shoot. This meant I had to put all of my trust in her vision and knowledge of the location and crew, but it was also a great forcing function for me to let go of complete creative control—something I’ve never done on the recipe creation side of my business. I took the leap of faith and we sent Amy and the photographer to White Dune Canyon to do a location scout and assess if it would be the right fit for us.

Simultaneously we had to create a campaign budget that Kyle and I would feel comfortable with since we are self-funded. Campaign budgets can vary drastically and can get super expensive quickly. Many campaigns cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. We didn’t have that kind of money so we set a target of $30,000. This was for three products shot on three models, all done in Morocco (including studio photography from another photographer Amy knows and flew in from Lisbon). This was ambitious, but being in Morocco actually worked to our advantage. The market rates for everything from photography to modeling day rates to hotel costs were far less than they would be in the US or Europe and we liked the fact that our campaign wouldn’t look like everyone else’s.

When Amy came back from the location scout in December filled with confidence and enthusiasm about the place, we committed to shooting in February. We wanted images and videos in plenty of time to build our website and start teasing some things on social channels, plus we had to get to the spot before the crazy winds started blowing all of the sand from the Sahara Desert. I’m thrilled to say that the shoot wrapped last week and I couldn’t be more excited for how the images and videos turned out. Our three models—Helen, Julinda, and Ikram—had fantastic chemistry together, our makeup artist, Fini, achieved exactly the look we were going for, our photographer, Aymen, captured so many incredible shots and videos (including aerial footage of girls on Annadea branded surfboards!), our creative and marketing lead Olivia was a superhero with her exceptionally detailed shot list, and Amy even broke her hand and powered through the rest of the shoot.

Based on the updates and debriefs, my biggest learning is that the team you assemble for an undertaking like this is everything. We asked a lot of everyone there—6am start times, 11pm bedtimes, shooting in bathing suits in the Atlantic in February, walking through the desert in cowboy boots in extreme wind—and two of our team members’ luggage was lost the entire time. Not only did no one complain, they were all so adaptable and solutions-oriented. They helped each other out when needed and were quick to volunteer for any task. They weren’t rattled when the vintage Land Rover convertible they were meant to be driving broke down in the middle of the desert, or when the cars transporting them to the surf shoot refused to take surfboards, or when the electricity at the hotel kept tripping because they were using a hairdryer (resulting in them using hand dryers for a blowout).

I can’t wait to share all of the final results with you, but for now here’s a little sneak peek. If you have specific questions about any aspect of the shoot—budgets, moodboards, model casting, anything—leave them in the comments and I’ll go into more detail in future posts! And be sure to follow @annadeabeauty on Instagram for more BTS content.

Let me preface this post by saying that if you think I’m just a little nuts by the end of this newsletter, you’re probably right–I decided to build a brand new company in a new-to-me industry while 6 months pregnant and in the thick of creating my first real cookbook. I remember the Friday night that Kyle and I dreamed up this crazy idea–we were on our weekly date night, talking excitedly about everything that 2025 would bring, and I threw the suggestion out there. He loved it. We’d talked about so many ideas in the past and none of them really stuck, so I half expected this would be the same. This was an industry that neither of us had any experience in, and one that Kyle doesn’t even really participate in as a consumer. Buoyed by his positive response, I texted my business coach who happened to be in town for SXSW and asked for an urgent meeting on her last day in Austin.

I distinctly remember wearing my favorite pink summer dress, rushing from an influencer event at SunLife Organics (still carrying my rainbow colored smoothie), and taking the elevator up to the rooftop restaurant of my coach’s downtown hotel. I was sure she’d tell me this was a bad idea. She had often cautioned me against getting too excited about distracting projects that didn’t make sense and I figured this was no different. We sat down, I steeled myself for her pushback and doubled down on my pitch.

“Amy,” I said, “I want to start a beauty company.”

She smiled, leaned forward, and said “I think that’s a great idea!”

Pleasantly surprised, I asked her why–she was on the early team at Glossier and had experience building billion dollar beauty brands. Why me? I’m a food content creator and my only corporate experience was at PwC working in consulting. She explained that my journey into beauty simply made sense–as someone who found their way into recipe creation as a means to heal their skin, creating beauty products that would similarly keep my skin happy and glowing was a natural evolution. She also shed light on how rewarding and fun the beauty industry can be–if done well, you get to make a positive impact in a woman’s life, every single day. I was heartened to hear her confidence in my leadership abilities and my creative vision and I became more and more excited to talk about product ideas. She jumped straight into helping us think through the right team we’d have to assemble, ideal launch timing, and some go to market strategies.

So now we’re here–five months out from launching our beauty company, Annadea. I’ve been working on this in secret for the past ten months and it has provided some of the highest highs and lowest lows. As always, in this newsletter I will be transparent with you about what it’s actually like to build a new company from scratch. There have been many moments where I’ve wanted to simply give up because the challenges seemed insurmountable, where I’ve questioned myself and felt immense imposter syndrome, and where I’ve found myself realizing just how little I know about the beauty industry. At the same time, I’ve never felt so creatively stimulated, energized, and inspired.

You still might be wondering, why me? Haven’t we seen enough influencer brands? Do we need another beauty brand? There are plenty of skincare and makeup products out there, many of which are really good. But I do believe there’s room for something better, both from a product and a brand perspective. Beauty has come a long way, but it’s still an industry driven by expert marketing and occasional fear-mongering tactics. I’ve learned that many of the formulas we see on shelves are just slight iterations of each other, but sold as totally different products. I’ve learned that a lot of companies buy stock formulas and slap a brand on them, not being intentional about how they’re crafting their products and more importantly, who they’re crafting them for. I still feel like I have to make compromises about what I use–either I’m optimizing for skin-safe ingredients or I’m optimizing for performance. If I’ve got a big event or photoshoot that I want to look camera-ready for, I brace myself for the inevitable skin flare-ups that will crop up in the subsequent days. If I’m trying to treat my skin well, I know I’ll have to touch up my makeup at least a couple of times throughout the day.

The journey of going from an avid consumer to an informed founder will be one that continues for years into this venture, but the most important thing I’ve done to ready myself for our upcoming launch is to hire a small but mighty team of people who have expertise that complements my own. We have a leader of product development, a supply chain and ops consultant, a Chief Brand Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, a creative and marketing operations lead, and Kyle and myself. We all have our areas of expertise, but we collaborate on almost every decision we make.

I’ve also spent hundreds if not thousands of hours burying myself in research and testing. I had ChatGPT put together an educational training program for me, I’ve read and listened to every beauty article and podcast I can find, I’ve called friends and professional contacts who work in or around the beauty industry, and I’ve tested all the products I can find in our competitive set. I know I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of everything there is to know and understand about product development but I’ve never been more excited to learn something.

My entire entrepreneurial career has revolved around figuring out how to heal my skin and treat my body right from the inside out. It’s why I started cooking, why I started experimenting with different diets, and why I started filming and sharing the recipes I loved. It’s also why I have been buying and trying skincare and makeup products for years, desperate to find a brand that would fulfill my high standards and expectations around the stuff I put on my face. As we send our first three formulas into final production, I can confidently say that these are the best three beauty products in my makeup bag right now. I can’t wait to share them with the rest of the world, soon.

Follow @annadeabeauty for the BTS of building the brand (including our team introduction video)!

Share