Forbes_USA_June_13_2017

JAMIE KERN LIMA
Bobbi Brown, a makeup artist
turned entrepreneur, sold
her company for about $70
million, roughly $115 million
today. There are now
at least 40 prominent beauty
businesses founded by
women. In part, that’s because
the barriers are quite
low, says Kern Lima. “I feel
like what I’ve done, any
woman can do.”
The makeup mogul
began honing her drive at
an early age. Given up at
birth and adopted as a newborn,
she grew up in Seattle
and at 15 started doing odd
jobs such as bagging groceries
and coaching gymnastics.
The first in her family
to go to college, she worked
as a waitress at Denny’s to
pay her way through Washington
State. She graduated
as valedictorian.
In 1999, she won a competition
to appear on a Baywatch
episode and was
crowned Miss Washington
USA, which led to a stint
on the first season of the reality
show Big Brother. She
changed gears and headed
to Columbia University
in 2002 to earn an M.B.A. Kern Lima
met her husband, Paulo, in statistics
class and began writing for the student
newspaper. After graduation she
took a job back in Washington at a TV
station for $23,000 a year and quickly
moved to a Fox affiliate in Portland,
Oregon.
Having to start work at midnight
most days stressed out her skin, and
her hereditary rosacea flared up. (The
disease, which affects at least 16 million
Americans, typically begins after
age 30.) Foundation made her condition
look worse. Fed up, she started
thinking about new formulations
and technologies to help people with
flawed, sensitive skin. In Paulo’s native
Brazil, the couple met with family
friends who were plastic surgeons.
They set up an advisory board that included
plastic surgeons and dermatologists.
The newlyweds wrote the business
plan on a flight to South Africa
for their 2007 honeymoon.
Kern Lima left the TV station in
2008, and the couple began bootstrapping
in their Los Angeles living room.
“If you want something, you figure out
how to make it happen,” she recalls
from her glassy office in Jersey City,
which looks across the Hudson River
at Manhattan. Putting her reporting
skills to use, she cold-called beauty
companies to find manufacturers. An
actress who lived in their spare bedroom
rent-free spent 20 hours a week
putting products in boxes and getting
them ready to ship. A graphic designer
from her former news station worked
Mirror, mirror: Kern Lima
seated at her reflecting desk,
in her glass office.
with her remotely on packaging.
IT’s first products were
contouring kits that included
concealers, highlighting
creams and bronzers. QVC
told her it wasn’t interested.
Just a few months later,
shopping channel HSN
agreed to feature her darkcircle
concealer, which uses
a proprietary “3D Skin Flex”
technology to allow the foundation
to move with facial expressions
without creasing.
With ample on-air experience,
Kern Lima thought
pitching her wares on TV
would be fun. But the products
didn’t sell, and she wasn’t
asked back at the end of her
contract. Shopping Channel
Canada did see her segment,
though, and gave her another
chance a year later.
All the while, she was
hounding QVC, nearly four
times the size of HSN in
2010, to give her another
shot at the American market.
Allen Burke had been building
QVC Beauty since 1997,
when the channel started featuring
high-end brands like Bobbi Brown and
Clin ique. After saying no several times,
he gave her a chance in the fall of 2010.
“Did she go call me after every Canada
visit and tell me how she did? Yes,”
Burke says, who retired in late 2011
and was hired by IT as a paid consultant
in January 2012. To prepare, Kern
Lima watched her competitors’ past
segments and started figuring out how
to connect better with her customers.
She wiped the concealer off her cheek
(yes, she used under-eye concealer on
her face) on TV for the first time. She
also hired a 66-year-old woman to appear
with her. The products sold out in
ten minutes.
QVC brought her back another four
times before the end of 2010, and sales
JUNE 13, 2017 FORBES | 83