In the largest shopping center in Dubai, a brilliant portrait of Sheena Zadeh, almost a meter high, receives the customers of Sephora East Medium when passing through a stand dedicated to her Kosas makeup brand, based in Los Angeles. In the giant portrait, Zadeh presses the star product of its startup, a concealer tube, against the cheek, just above the slogan: “Makeup for skin care fans.”
“I exist to do beautiful things,” says Zadeh from his home in Los Angeles. “That is my purpose here.”
Zadeh, 41, founded Kosas in 2015 with a few tones of lipstick and limited expectations. A decade later, the company generates 150 million dollars in annual sales, according to Forbes estimates, with about 200 products in stores that extend from South Beach to Saudi Arabia. Much of the success of Kosas – the brand has been profitable for several years – is due to the ability to capitalize on cultural changes, the launch of innovative products at the right time and a good dose of virality in social networks. The Premium price cleaning company charged initial impulse after capturing Gwyneth Paltrow’s attention and getting space in its GOOP stores, just when the clean beauty movement was emerging.
A often misunderstood phrase dating from the 1970s, the most recent version of clean beauty generally refers to makeup products or skin care elaborated without potentially harmful ingredients such as parabens and sulfates. (Sephora tag your products with this definition). Most kosas makeup products, including 24 dollars and pigmented solar lip oils of 40 dollars, are also designed as skin care products. This means that their formulas are usually made with top quality ingredients such as hyaluronic acid, which is usually found in facial serums that supposedly eliminate imperfections.
For investors and buyers, brands centered on skin care are particularly attractive at this time, says Dan his, Morningstar analyst. “For a company that seeks candidates for an acquisition, I think it would be given a higher priority to skin care, given the attractive growth opportunities, the best margins and sustainable competitive positions for successful brands,” explains its.
Many of the greatest mergers and acquisitions of recent years reveal it: in 2023, two years before ELF bought the skin care brand of Hailey Bieber, Rhode, for one billion dollars, the conglomerate acquired another brand of clean cosmetics, natrium, for 355 million dollars.
These are good signs for Kosas, which began to explore a possible sale last year, although Zadeh did not want to comment on his prospects. Regardless of whether it sells or not, the true force of permanence of Kosas lies in the ability of its founder to create multiple cult products, anticipating the next beauty trends. In the last 18 months, the company has also accelerated its global expansion, with approximately 30% of the total annual income of Kosas from international sales, a reason for pride for Zadeh, second generation Iranian immigrant.
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How Sheena Zadeh created a beauty brand of 150 million dollars
Originally from California, Zadeh grew up in Orange County. His father had a grocery store before becoming a maid of the United States postal service (USPS), while his mother worked at a Clinique beauty counter in the local shopping center, frequently bringing makeup samples from other counters. In his adolescence, Zadeh studied with careful books and makeup magazines and became an expert among her friends in technique and color. When he went to university in UC Irvine to study biology, he brought a dresser the size of a filler full of makeup products to his bedroom.
“We had an incredible amount of makeup at home,” Zadeh recalls. “There was a drawer full of lip eyeliners, another full of eye shadows … I thought that this was the amount of makeup that each had. I thought the bathroom was destined to be used as (storage).”
During his university studies, he worked as a laboratory technique investigating insect taxonomy, among other creatures, but moved away from microbiology after graduating. After observing the rise of independent cosmetics brands such as Stila and Hard Candy, Zadeh decided to study businesses in the hope of becoming a businesswoman. He obtained his MBA at Chapman University in 2010 and, during the following years, married, had a daughter and began to devise ideas for a minimalist beauty brand elaborated with vegetable ingredients.
Zadeh states that from the beginning he focused on creating formulas for skin care that would also work as makeup. After financing Kosas with about $ 70,000 of their own pocket, Zadeh contacted a small research and development laboratory and requested that its initial products be made with ingredients such as raspberry seed oil and green tea extracts, instead of cheaper and simple alternatives such as synthetic mixtures or bee wax. “There was enough resistance (by chemicals),” he says. “What I was creating was clean beauty, but I still didn’t know.”
In 2015, Zadeh launched the first four kosas lipsticks in tones designed for people with complexions similar to his: “For me, one of the biggest challenges in makeup was simply finding a lipstick for an olive leather person who wore natural and looks good.”
Kosas sold exclusively on his website during the first year, generating a few thousand dollars a month. The business remained small until 2017, when Zadeh developed Rubores and Illuminators and began touring Los Angeles, leaving signs of their products at the doors of celebrity makeup artists. One of these lipsticks arrived at the Paltow glamor team before the actress paraded through the red carpet, and in 2018, Goop became one of the first stores to sell kosas.
That same year, Zadeh developed its emblematic pigmented facial oil, which conquered consumers who had recently begun to opt for more hydrated and natural looks. The brand soon raised funds for the first time, using its series A financing round of 3 million dollars to build its own formulation laboratory. The first product to leave the new laboratory was the “revealing concealer” of Kosas, which quickly received viral praise from Hailey Bieber and Kim Kardashian, among others.
“Shortly after we created a deodorant, a shower gel and a lip balm, but my instinct and my intuition followed a lot,” says Zadeh. “What I needed was a deodorant.”
In 2019, Sephora realized and began selling kosas products in its stores, promoting brand growth. At that time and during the pandemic, the consumers began to adopt the almost imperceptible makeup look, as if it were a crystal, according to their Morningstar.
“Younger consumer generations pay much more attention to ingredients and their impact on skin health,” continues their. “That has led some brands to join that trend and get good results.”
“It was the right place and moment,” Zadeh reflects. “The market itself was starting to change your truth.”
Interest abroad is equally strong. Zadeh states: “In the case of Australia and New Zealand, our first international market, they went to us.”
And customers have remained faithful. Two months after Bieber closed her billionaire contract with ELF, the 28 -year -old model and businesswoman posted on Tiktok a seemingly harmless video of “prepare with me” that showed almost exclusively Rhode products. One of the rare exceptions? A well -yellow Kosas corrector yellow tube.
This article was originally published by Forbes Us.
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