From BB creams and sheet masks to snail mucin serums, Korean beauty products have created a global following over the years. What was once a niche area of beauty gradually popped up in seemingly every TikTok and YouTube beauty tutorial.
While influencers are definitely key to bringing K-beauty to global prominence, some beauty brands, including Glow Recipe, also played a significant role in making it both more accessible and, well, more fun.
What started out as a curation site for K-beauty products in 2014, soon became a skin care brand with several viral beauty products—namely Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops and moisturizer—with 4 million followers globally.
Korean-American co-founders Sarah Lee and Christine Chang say that while rooted in Korean heritage, they always wanted Glow Recipe to be a global brand created through hundreds of iterations to suit both Western preferences (non-sticky, lightweight formulations) and Korean inspiration (hydrated, dewy finish).
“By introducing really high-quality, clean formulations, we were able to really engage with our customers and community on the how-tos, all the tips and tricks that we’ve learned from a young age from our mothers and grandmothers, including stories that led to who we were as individuals, but also the passion that we both mutually shared,” Lee told Retail Brew, recalling her decades-long friendship with Chang that ultimately led to the duo going into business together.
Lee and Chang spoke with Retail Brew about how they stay ahead of the competition and their biggest lessons.
What are the biggest lessons you have learned as beauty brand founders?
Chang: We try to showcase diverse faces and skin tones and textures on all of our imagery. We don’t retouch, and we have a very stringent real skin acceptance pledge that is for our community, because we know social media can be a very tough place, and we want not only our ecosystem, but also the influencers we work with and the partners we have to not use certain language that not necessarily sets people up for success, like using language like perfect, flawless, poreless, which aren’t realistic. We’ve really, as a team, been thoughtful about all of our touch points and our packaging and our language on our socials.
How did you overcome your biggest initial challenges as two women of color in beauty?
Lee: The benefit of living in the current time is that diversity is very much celebrated. I do feel like it’s a very different time than 10 years ago, when we were first starting out. One really important aspect that helped us is finding connections through mentorship and community, and finding your tribe is really important.
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Let’s forget about the female factor and ethnicity—being an entrepreneur is very lonely to begin with. Then, to your point, these are some of the other layers of being a female founder. There are so many stats and challenges that are very clear to us; even funding is much harder for women in general. It gets even harder with women of color. So having a good network of like-minded entrepreneurs or executives in the beauty space that have similar backgrounds is really important.
There are connections and real, meaningful relationships and friendships that we were able to foster throughout the last decade. They truly helped us find new opportunities, just mentally uplift each other, and know that you’re not alone as you’re navigating this journey that can actually be really lonely. It is the No. 1 secret that will keep you motivated and excited to be part of this journey.
On that note, what other advice would you give to young WoC aspiring for a career in beauty?
Lee: The other aspect is never losing sight of the vision and the North Star of why you’re doing this. Sometimes as founders, but especially as women of color, you get advice and so many insights and opinions, and sometimes you might want to say “yes” to all of the suggestions that are on the table because they might seem like great opportunities in the beginning, but one of the biggest lessons that we’ve learned throughout our past experiences, is that “yes” is not always the right answer…We’ve really gone through a lot of those moments of having to make some hard decisions. But it all comes down to, is this going to help the vision that I set out when I started the company? Is this going to really help bring me a little closer to the vision that I had established; keep me on track with a brand DNA that I truly believe in and am passionate about; and just staying true to that and staying in that lane? It’s much harder to actually execute on that.