DETERMINED

AN ENTREPRENEUR’S STORY OF BRAND-BUILDING AND ACTIVISM

BY Casey Kaplan

PHOTOGRAPHY: FRANCES ISAAC

This summer, on an unseasonably cool day, I stopped by Cathy Kangas’ New Canaan English Manor home to get to know the woman behind PRAI Beauty. Cathy is widely known for her seemingly magical neck cream - with a cult following for its ability to firm and tighten the appearance of an aging neck. Women really swear by it! But in addition to her phenomenal business success, Cathy is also a noted philanthropist and animal rights advocate and activist, which is a job unto itself. Cathy is warm and inviting, and answered the door on that summer day with a massive smile, and singing out a ‘hello’ in her charming English accent - as if she was greeting a lifelong friend instead of it being our first acquaintance. She was wearing an adorable outfit and had perfectly quaffed hair, so I was surprised to learn she had just finished hauling buckets of food down to the pond behind her house, in order to feed about 200 ducks and geese who live there...and that she personally luggs about fifty pounds of food down a grassy hill each and every morning, with her gaggle of dogs in tow. Cathy has two Beagles that she rescued from their former lives as testers in a lab, and two large mutts (rottweiler, pitbull and Beagle mixes) - whom she lovingly calls her ‘killers’. “They’re afraid of men, really. They had come from some kind of abusive situation. But they are just so loveable!” Cathy explained as the pups followed her around.

Cathy grew up in the countryside of Surrey, about an hour outside of London through country roads. Her father was CEO and Managing Director of Selfridges in London, and her mother was the Managing Director at Leonidas, an amazing Belgian chocolate company. Animals were always a part of Cathy’s life. “I grew up around animals. I had dogs and horses, and a rescued pet rabbit. At one point I had a ferret, and I had two rescue tortoises. My Mum had this beautiful rose bowl in our front hall and she walked into the house one day to find my horse just munching on her roses - I’d bring the horse right inside the house. My poor parents! But they really loved animals too, and taught me to feel compassion for animals,” Cathy shared. “Since I was a little girl, I’ve always wanted to protect animals. Humans have all the power - and how we use that power says a lot about exactly who we are. Showing humanity toward animals speaks to our souls.”

Cathy sits on the board of the Humane Society of the United States, Adopt-ADog in Greenwich/Armonk, and is a huge supporter of Squirrelwood Equine Sanctuary in Montgomery, NY where she has 6 rescue horses, plus 2 minis and a very noisy donkey.

“I was riding around in a rather hot taxi one day somewhere in Texas - and I saw something about the senseless seal hunting that was going on up in Canada. Extremely bothered, I called up the Humane Society and said ‘I need to speak to the CEO.’ I said ‘I want to get involved. What are we going to do to shut down the seal hunt?!’ So they invited me to come join a trip to the ice floes in Canada to try and help spotlight what’s going on there.” Cathy went on, “When you’re out there lying on your belly in survival gear on these ice floes, and almost interacting with the mums and their babies… I just remember looking one of them in the eyes and thinking: that’s it, I won’t let you down.” And the Humane Society’s efforts in this area are effective: kill levels have declined by more than 90% since Cathy first became involved. At its height, back in the mid 2000s, the commercial sealing industry killed more than 350,000 baby seals in some years — with upwards of 140,000 pups slaughtered in less than 48 hours in several years. Today, because of an effective campaign to close markets for Canadian commercial seal products, the seal kill level in Atlantic Canada is often less than 10% of that. Unfortunately, the Canadian government continues to authorize the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of baby seals each year, which is why the Humane Society works to keep demand for seal fur low, so sealers have little incentive to kill the baby seals.

So when Cathy started a beauty company of her own, a clear part of the vision was that she would not test her products on animals, that all products would be cruelty free, and that Cathy would focus a large portion of her time, attention, and company resources toward supporting the animal-related causes that are most important to her. Cathy explains, “The only way to test products intended for humans - is on humans! We do human patch tests - if it’s not safe to test on a human, it’s probably not a good product.”

PRAI supports thousands of pet adoptions a year at rescues all over the world. During the height of the Covid shutdown, PRAI funded 1,221 adoptions in just 3 months in 20 of the biggest and busiest shelters in the country. PRAI’s tagline is, “this jar saves lives.”

Prior to starting her brand, PRAI Beauty, Cathy had already had an exceptional and impressive career in luxury and beauty. After having graduated college, she came to the United States for an internship, and moved into Pound Ridge to live with some of her parent’s close friends for a while.

After starting out at Revlon in the Prestige division, Cathy was recruited over to Cartier, where she became the Director of Sales. “I loved what I was doing. I really admired the product, I had this adorable little office, in the attic of the famous Cartier boutique on 5th Avenue, and I was teaching the boutique staff how to sell their beautiful jewelry and watches, but I was travelling a ton; flying basically every day except Christmas. And I eventually felt like it was time for a break.”

The break didn’t last long… Cathy had intended to take at least a six month sabbatical after marrying her husband, Ed Kangas, who was the Global CEO and Chairman of Deloitte for over twenty years, and is the current Chairman of Deutsche Bank USA, (he also currently sits on the boards of Deutsche Bank, Hovnanian, and IntelSat). But, as should now be evident, she’s not one to sit idly, and so that sabbatical barely even lasted a week before she was offered a role as an interim leader at a company called Tova Corporation. The role was meant to be a six month position, which turned into over a yearand-a-half working at the beauty company - focused in the fragrance and skincare world. The products were being sold primarily on TV by the namesake of the company, Tova. Cathy grinned and said, “One morning Tova said to me ‘I’ve got a headache’ and I proclaimed that I’d get her some Tylenol and get her in tip top shape… but she said ‘oh no darling, you’ll do it!’ I was terrified and so nervous. She went into her bag, pulled out a miniature brandy shot, pushed me on set, and it went great!” At Tova, Cathy not only delved into the world of beauty, but maybe even more importantly, mastered the art of TV sales. I loved working in the beauty industry - but after my time at Tova, I really felt like the entire industry was geared around young women. You can’t “ just talk to perfect 18 year olds all the time. The over 50 demographic -the ones with income to spend- were totally under-served. And all of the major companies were being run by male management and boards. I thought to myself: ‘Why is it that perhaps they don’t consider that a woman might know more about what other women want.’ “

At the same time that Cathy began to have this sort of revelation, her dad was working with a group of guys that were involved in health and well being, and they were talking about Prai extract, which comes from Thailand. Prai is a resin of the ginger family, and oozes like a pale amber liquid when you slice open the plant. Cathy was told that women outside of Phuket were applying this to their stretch marks, and that it was magically eliminating them. It had this incredible elastin and smoothing property. “So I went to Thailand!” Cathy exclaimed, “The women were in the jungle harvesting the prai plant, and there were these saunas in the jungle where people would go in and just inhale this stuff. I realized just how powerful this plant was.”

Taking everything she’d learned from the beauty and luxury industries, combining that with high quality product, and the most cutting edge technology… PRAI Beauty was born. Cathy’s mission was to make these products affordable, accessible, and of course, cruelty free. “Then I started putting together this amazing team… To this day, we’re almost entirely women,” Cathy said with a big smile.

“I knew the path would be not to fight the big boys. No matter what you’ve got, you just can’t compete with the L’Oreals right out of the gate. So I thought… why don’t I take it to TV where I can speak directly to women about why my product is great and why it works. I already had learned about this direct to consumer method from Tova, and I had the connections to make it work. So I tried to get to the guy that was running shopNBC - but I just couldn’t get his time. So I got on a plane and went to his office, and sat in the parking lot until he got out of his car. I gave him my pitch, and he decided to give me a chance. He was standing on the studio floor when we wrapped an hour-long, prime time spot about a week later… We absolutely killed it and got a regular spot on the network.” PRAI Beauty started with 7-8 products, one of which was a neck cream. From the beginning, Cathy has always been very involved in product development. She says she’s most creative coming up with new ideas when she’s stuck on a long flight with nothing else to do… which is a good thing - since she does a lot of flying around for work (she’s a million mile flyer on more than one airline). On a flight to London, Cathy was trying to figure out what was missing from the beauty industry in order to fill that void... “I remember thinking to myself: isn’t it crazy… the neck is really an afterthought for most brands. Most have a neck cream, but it’s not a focus. It’s the hardest thing to fix, the neck has no oil glands, takes a lot of beating from the sun and other elements, and shows aging first. Why wouldn’t there be something to address that?”

And Cathy’s intuition was right on! Women around the world do want affordable, yet luxurious products, that are actually aimed at the demographic that’s using them. PRAI is the #1 skincare brand in Marks and Spencer’s in the UK - within a year of partnering with the chain. After becoming a top selling product on NBC, Mindy Grossman, the then-CEO of Home Shopping Network (now the CEO of Weight Watchers), heard about the brand and loved Cathy’s story of building this from the ground up... She told Cathy, “TV shopping is about having a great product, at a great price, and the right story teller to sell it!” Sales skyrocketed, and PRAI became the number one selling skincare brand on HSN... and then on QVC too. To this day, TV sales are still the primary source of all revenues, and Cathy has been appearing on primetime spots from her house even though the pandemic. A team of ‘Neck-Xperts’ go around doing neck treatments in stores all over the U.K.. The team is newly branching out into retail in the U.S. and is working with selective partners that make sense for the brand. As of recent, PRAI Beauty products can be found nearby at the Lanphier Day Spa in Darien and New Canaan Pharmacy in New Canaan. And Online sales all over the world are booming.

The brand is launching a new line in the U.K. called Meno-Glow, which is geared around products for women going through menopause. PRAI is launching a similar line in the U.S. this year as well. “Let’s stop talking around what’s actually happening in womens’ lives and get fabulous fixes into their hands!” Cathy exclaims.

Through it all - over the past three decades, despite loads and loads of travel, New Canaan has been home. “I met my husband, Ed, at Gates, over 25 years ago, through a friend. Our offices are right here in town, across from the train station. It reminds me of being in a small village in England. My Mum lives here as well. It’s so special here! I wouldn’t think of being anywhere else!” Cathy says.