Kite Beauty Takes Flight with Skin-Caring Makeup Collection

Tell me about your own lifestyle and how the brand came about. I’ve been working on it a little over three years at this point. As a woman living in New York City, I came from the world of consulting, so I was on the road Monday through Thursday and working 80º hours a week, never stopping home to take a break, and that life of always on the road and wanting to look my best, but being in situations where I wasn’t stopping home and I didn’t have my full makeup with me or time to really put that together, became a really big pain point for me. So that’s how the idea started. In the beginning of my second year at Wharton Business School, I was doing a lot more entrepreneurship, interned at a venture capital fund, and was inspired to action on finding a better way to bring makeup on the go.

Did you always want to start up a beauty brand? I’ve always loved beauty. From a very young age, I was watching all the YouTube videos, experimenting with my makeup, so I’d always had a really personal passion in beauty. Having gone to Wharton, I studied entrepreneurship and then having been briefly on the investing side, I realized that there was a niche for me to play. I was very inspired by meeting a bunch of other founders and entrepreneurs as part of that journey, and felt like, “I feel like I can do this. I’m going to try it.” I think having my own thing has been the best learning opportunity I’ve ever had.

What has been the most challenging aspect of starting the brand in the past three years? In prelaunch, I had started this in 2019, and obviously the biggest challenge was I thought I was going to launch in 2020—and then the world had a different idea in March 2020. I had already been working on this on-the-go makeup idea for months and then suddenly no one was leaving their house or wearing makeup for about a year or two so that was a huge unforeseen roadblock for us, a makeup company. During that time, I had already picked a supplier to create the makeup and they actually shutdown during Covid and so there was a lot of supply chain issues, trials and tribulations associated with it. Now, I’m glad we’re passed the pandemic and people are back on the road, back doing things. It was really tough to put together a makeup brand from scratch in the face of all the global supply chain issues and the uncertainty around demand, and all of the stuff that was associated with the years 2020 to 2021.

Can you speak about the actives in the formula, which is dermatologist-tested. Did any derms help with development? The blessing of Covid was we got to spend a lot more time on our formula. We’re entirely made in the US. I was cognizant of that, especially in the time that we were creating stuff, I could be there in person, fly over and make sure I could monitor everything and make sure it was a really high-quality makeup. We’re really proud of that. Something that puts our formula apart from a lot of the other brands out there is that over 20% of the formula is a good, nourishing, hydrating skincare-type ingredients like squalene, glycerin, hyaluronic acid—all these things that are moisturizing, hydrating, refreshing, and I think that the feedback we’ve already gotten from our customers is it’s just a fantastic formula that, on top of On the Glow being a very easy-to-use form factor, the formula is also great as well. In terms of a dermatologist, we did work with one of my dearest mentors. Her name is Dawn French. She was the former global head of R&D for P&G Beauty. Even though I didn’t come from the beauty industry, she was really my shining guide in making sure that everything was tested properly. I feel like she deserves a shout-out because she oversaw that whole development process.