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WOMEN-LED BRANDS ROUNDTABLE
Women Lead in Beauty DSN assembles women at the helm of beauty brands for a virtual roundtable on the state of the industry and diverse leadership
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ecently, women have ascended to top-level roles in the mass market industry. On the retail side, the roster of female leaders includes Heyward Donigan (Rite Aid), Roz Brewer (Walgreens), Karen Lynch (CVS Health), Christina Hennington (Target), Michelle Gass (Kohl’s) and recently Maly Bernstein (Bluemercury). More beauty brands are also piloted by women in top roles, such as Debra Perelman at Revlon, Coty’s Sue Nabi and Alex Keith of Procter & Gamble. Many emerging indie brands have women founders as well. Here, DSN questioned several female beauty industry leaders in the mass beauty world to discuss how their businesses have adapted over the past year, what’s ahead and how being a woman has been beneficial to understanding their primary consumer. The virtual panel included: • Nancy Duitch, chief strategy officer at CURE Pharmaceutical and founder and CEO of Sera Labs; • Psyche Terry, founder of Urban Hydration; • Yamit Sadok, senior director of marketing at Twinlab, maker of Reserveage; • Donda Mullis, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Raw Sugar Living; • Rochelle Graham-Campbell, founder of Alikay Naturals, HER by Alikay Naturals; • Shannon Curtin, CEO of New World Natural Brands; • Alicia Yoon, founder and CEO of Peach & Lily; and • Sonia Summers, founder and CEO of Beauty Barrage and founder and CEO of Shielded Beauty. DSN: What were the challenges you had to overcome over the past year for your business? Nancy Duitch: Everything took longer and was more complicated to deal with at almost every business touchpoint because everyone was working remotely, and it did not allow for the creative collaboration that we were used to executing on. We
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of course used Zoom, but nothing replaces being in a room with your team brainstorming ideas and coming up with solutions for our customers.
Donda Mullis: As an essentials provider, we felt personally responsible to provide as many people as possible with our personal care products. We are honored to work with such an incredible team of talented individuals who rallied around our mission to help people. Each employee put in the time, effort and commitment to support all our retail partners in shipping our hand sanitizers, liquid soaps and other personal cleansing products to millions of people in a timely way. We were reminded how important it is to not only build a strong supply chain, but to also diversify it so that we can quickly address resource shortages and quickly pivot accordingly. We also learned that with fast business growth, companies can often lose sight of who they are and the core values they represent. Therefore, we doubled down on making sure our employees felt safe and appreciated, and that our values of always leading with love, purpose and by example are reflected in everything we do — from our product innovation and packaging to our corporate culture and community giveback. There have also been serious supply chain issues on packaging, raw ingredients and bottles, which everyone is experiencing and, while we are working through these issues, there are no simple fixes. Our direct-to-consumer business has flourished and grown exponentially while our retail business did not do as well because the products we had on the store shelves at the time are not considered essential commoditized products. We pivoted during this time and now have products shipping to retailers that will be considered essential. DSN: Pre-purchasing and longer lead times are something we are hearing frequently with nagging supply chain issues. Yamit, can you comment?
October 2021 DRUGSTORENEWS.COM
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