After meeting as students at Columbia Business School, Jamie Kern Lima '04 and Paulo Lima '04 started IT Cosmetics from the living room of their California apartment. Since their launch in 2008, they have expanded their line to include 300 beauty products, and earlier this year, they were acquired by L’Oreal for $1.2 billion — its largest acquisition in nearly a decade. We interviewed Jamie Kern Lima to learn more about their exciting journey.
You’ve had an amazing journey prior to starting your business — how did your early experiences lead you to beauty and cosmetics?
While at CBS, I found I gained the most out of hearing other people’s stories, from classmates, to professors to alumni. So I started writing for the school paper. I started an article series called Uncovered, where I would do sit down interviews in hopes of extracting value for all my fellow classmates (and myself) to learn from. That’s how I fell in love with journalism.
After CBS, while most of my classmates were landing high paying, amazing jobs, I probably hurt the curve back then because I took a job as a journalist in the middle of Washington state for $24k a year. I wrote stories, edited video, shot footage, and told other people’s stories and loved it. When I moved up to anchoring the news in Portland, Oregon I started getting rosacea (a hereditary skin condition that causes redness) and sparse eyebrows and became obsessed with finding beauty products that would solve my issues, and quickly learned they weren’t out there. We saw a huge white space in the market for makeup and skincare products that truly worked, especially if you’re someone who wants coverage but doesn’t want thick makeup that can crease and crack and make you look older. We partnered with plastic surgeons and dermatologists to create makeup differently. And our authentic mission and belief is that every woman is beautiful and deserves to look and feel her most beautiful. We create hero products that are super innovative and game-changing, but our true mission is that they’re life-changing for real women everywhere!
Did you and Paulo meet at CBS?
Yes, Paulo and I met in statistics class. We always knew we had complementary skill sets and always talked about the idea of starting a business together one day. We dated for five years and got married in 2007 and actually wrote the business plan for IT Cosmetics on our honeymoon flight to South Africa (so romantic!).
What is an important leadership strategy you have learned from operating a startup?
One of the most powerful key leadership strategies I learned from CBS — specifically from Professor Mike Feiner: You have to have an authentic mission, and lead with that authenticity. Everyone in your company has to live it, breath it, feel it, and believe it in their hearts too. You can’t fake authenticity. When leaders or companies start to get distracted — whether it’s by trends, or what the competition is doing — and it causes them to lose authenticity of their brand DNA and mission, that’s when they start to head in the wrong direction.
What is one of your proudest work accomplishments?
I am really grateful to have many proud work accomplishments with IT Cosmetics so far, including becoming the first woman to hold the title of CEO at L’Oreal, being able to deliver for and prove everyone right who has believed in IT Cosmetics including our retail partners and our investors, and of course, building a startup with my co-founder and our first employee from our living room into the amazing company we have today. Our partnership with L’Oreal has been a dream come true. But I think the one thing I am most proud of is watching employees at IT spread their wings and fly. And be fearless. And take risks. And believe all things are possible…for them, for this company, and for their careers. I believe when you are excellent, people will notice and one of my favorite things is to make a priority out of noticing when an employee is excellent. I believe in merit and I believe in being fearless and I hope I inspire everyone at IT to know that they can excel in their careers and accomplish anything they believe in if they dare to dream and back it up with hard work and with being all-in! I want everyone’s light to shine as bright as it can. That brings me the most joy!
How has the acquisition broadened IT Cosmetics’s opportunities and what’s next?
Right now, IT Cosmetics is sold primarily in the U.S. at Sephora, ULTA, and QVC and we recently launched into Sephora in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Australia. Our U.S. team executed every detail of our launch strategies and complexities in these markets, which was extremely challenging. This experience is in big part what makes being part of the L’Oreal family exciting. Our hope and dream is to get IT Cosmetics into every woman’s hands globally and we are excited to leverage the massive global infrastructure that is already in place at L’Oreal to help us scale in this way. Paulo and I will stay on as co-CEOs of IT Cosmetics and are really excited for this next chapter of growth at IT!