Hello, and welcome back to Full Coverage. I’m in LA this week loving the California “fall” weather. Apparently, everyone else is too.
I’ve had a time — meetings, drinks, hours in El Segundo — and you’ll be reading about all of that in the coming weeks here in Full Coverage. I am hosting a community dinner tonight at the Living Room with Amazon for some of my favourite beauty people. I’m also stopping by a bash hosted by Mona Kattan for Kayali, her red-hot fragrance label. I sat down with her last week and she gave me all the details on buying back her brand, and what’s next.
But there is a lot of other stuff to talk about this week, including the Kenvue and Kimberly-Clark deal and Skims tapping Ami Colé’s Diarrha N’Diaye as its first proper beauty hire. Both of these mergers, if you will, are positive.
A Win-Win: First up, N’Diaye is getting a surprise happy ending, after having to abruptly close her Black-founded beauty label in July. Skims, meanwhile, will get to incorporate her beautiful formulation and community-building skills into a celebrity-fronted brand. Skims is an incredible line, no question, but I haven’t found it to feature regular people as well as Rhode or Rare and that’s so much more important in beauty than in fashion.
A Distressed Asset Goes Quick: As for Kenvue and Kimberly-Clark, this is the best possible outcome for Kenvue, which has struggled since its spinoff from Johnson & Johnson, with one activist investor identifying its beauty unit as a particular sore spot. But Kimberly-Clark knows nothing about beauty, and probably didn’t buy Kenvue because it was excited to figure out how to fix Neutrogena or Ogx. Either it focuses on optimising Kenvue’s core brands like Tylenol and Band-Aid and leaves its beauty business to its experts, or another spinoff is likely, this time to private equity.
I am hoping for the former. Private equity firms without beauty knowledge typically kill brands, unless they let real makeup, skincare and haircare teams run them. (Kenvue just got its new team in place.)
Consolidation in beauty is happening fast — see Kering and L’Oréal. As big companies become enormous, middle of the road companies – and in beauty, even Kimberly-Clark falls in that category – lose their power.
A Christmas boycott?: Has anyone else been following these Sephora/Mariah Carey boycott videos on TikTok? One of my chronically online friends texted me about it, and then I fell down a rabbit hole.
season with Sephora,” said Carey in a statement. (Sephora)
For those who haven’t, let me recap: In Carey’s annual “It’s Time” video, which Sephora is a part of this year for its holiday campaign, an elf, (Billy Eichner), complains of being overworked and says he needs to sell Sephora loot to pay for therapy, adding finitely, “Christmas is cancelled.” Carey is having none of it and begins singing the classic “All I Want for Christmas Is You” while flying off on a sleigh. End scene.
TikTokers are pissed, believing Carey and Sephora represent the worst part of capitalism. To me this isn’t about Sephora or the Queen of Christmas. Young people are feeling left behind, can’t find jobs and are worried about balancing holiday spending with rent. They just found the video to be insensitive.
Now onto the main event: a conversation with Kayali’s Mona Kattan.
Mona Kattan Is Feeling Free
Almost every other week, I joke to my team that The Business of Beauty is looking more and more like The Business of Fragrance.
Given the amount of brand launches and extensions, executives crediting their earnings success to scents and incessant talk of the “fragrance index,” it’s hard to ignore how enraptured the industry is with the category.
On the luxury side, the usual suspects come up: Parfums de Marly, Amouage, Santa Maria Novella, and yes, Creed; same with designer names, i.e. Dior, Dior, Dior. But not every founder can come up with hundreds of years of history and its own supply chain in the span of the typical two-year idea-to-launch timeline. The real magic is happening at the masstige price point, with brands like Phlur and of course Kayali, one of the trend’s originators.
Kayali has a pretty nuanced origin story. Founded by Mona Kattan in 2018, the line was first under the larger umbrella of her sister’s makeup line, Huda Beauty. Kayali was spun off just this year when the Kattans bought back both businesses with General Atlantic from TSG. Through the deal, Kayali finally got some well-deserved resources. It may have looked easy, but Kattan assures me it wasn’t; she said the brand looked “dead” a year after launch.
“Kayali was really set up for failure,” she said recently over Zoom. Kattan was in full glam, having just finished shooting an episode of the reality show “Dubai Bling.” Jessica Hanson, who joined Huda Beauty to run the Americas business in 2023 and transitioned to global president of Kayali a year later, said that 2021 was an inflection point. Really it was.
According to YipitData, Kayali hit over $100 million in sales in the US across Sephora and its Kohl’s locations from January to September. Sources close to the company told me it expects it to reach roughly $150 million in revenue globally by the end of the year. I’ve heard from insiders that the valuation at the time of the deal was around $600 million. Kayali declined to comment on financial data.
As part of the buyback Mona Kattan got her freedom. She continues to act as chief executive, and now has about 130 employees, with the hope of hiring 40 more by the end of the year. This week, Kayali launched four new scents, under the name Freedom, a triple-entendre referencing not only the founder’s buyback but also Kattan’s worldview and creative autonomy. Unlike the sweet, saccharine gourmand perfumes that have taken hold, the Freedom scents are oud-forward and a nod to the sophisticated perfumes and colognes of the Middle East.
“I got really bored with all the vanillas out there,” Kattan said. “I don’t like doing what everybody else is doing.”
Ahead, a full conversation with Mona Kattan on everything from family dynamics to her crush’s first scent and taking business risks.
PR: How did moving back to the Middle East change your approach to perfume?
MK: Moving here [from the US] in 2002, I saw how the behavior of how people used fragrances was so different. They also didn’t apply a gender to fragrance. The guy that I had a crush on at the time would wear Chanel Coco Mademoiselle, but mixed it with oud oil. It smelled insane. It was masculine, it was unique and just blew my mind. Finding new, interesting ways to use fragrance was all very inspired by the people in Dubai.
PR: The Huda Beauty origin story is well documented, but did you always want to be a founder?
MK: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I got into self development when I was 13. I’m a big lover of Tony Robbins, and always read about rags-to-riches stories. I got my bachelor’s in finance and was working in banking for a short time and then started doing PR for a fragrance brand. One of the first clients that approached me was something I was already obsessed with, a brand called M. Micallef. This was back in 2010 and I approached them about a collaboration; it didn’t work out, and then I started Huda Beauty with my sisters [Huda and Alya] in 2012.
PR: What did you think you could offer the fragrance customer?
MK: I was frustrated by the experience. I was a content creator and I would work with all these big houses like Coty [who] would educate me about their fragrances and ask me to talk about them, and when they would do it, it was snobby and very hard to understand. I was like, “They’re giving me French words to talk to my English-speaking audience.” I wanted to make [fragrance] easy to understand. I want to make people know what’s in the bottle without having to go online [for research]. People at that time were only sharing three ingredients, sometimes five. I felt there was a lack of education, so with Kayali it was like, “Let’s share everything.” Every ingredient that’s in the bottle that our perfumer shares with us, we share with everyone, all our bottle designs, we share with everyone, and we still make it affordable.
PR: Tell me a bit about separating Kayali from Huda Beauty. Why did you think it was a standalone brand?
MK: From the very beginning, I was like, “I want to carve out Kayali.” And [my sisters] were like, “You are insane.” The carve out was extremely important for our future. I started my therapy journey in 2020. I was 35 years old at that time and I realized I’m very codependent. All the challenges I had in my life, I was holding myself back because of my codependency. I wanted to do everything with my family, and I think this is very common in Middle Eastern families. We do things as a tribe. Being the youngest and from a family of immigrants who lived in America, my parents were not around their extended family members, so they always pushed me to be with Huda 24/7. I was like, wherever [we] are going, I have to be with Huda. It made them and me feel safe. I had all of my [own] goals and my dreams, but we always had to do everything together. I found this awareness in 2020 and realised it was actually holding me back. To be honest, Kayali was really struggling because of it.
PR: Did Huda want to do everything with you?
MK: I wanted her to be a part of Kayali. She didn’t want to be a part of it. I wanted to be a part of Huda Beauty and everything she did, and she also didn’t want me to be a part of that either. I was trying to force us to do things together, which in retrospect was a huge limitation rather than serving both of us. It was probably just creating messiness and also taking away from having a real vision for Kayali.
PR: Tell me about the Freedom collection. It’s a stark contrast from what you’ve done before.
MK: I’m gonna try my best to get people to love oud. As a fragrance lover and connoisseur, I believe that oud makes fragrances so much richer, decadent, and powerful. I relate it to truffle oil. For people who have a very simple palate when it comes to food, you have to do it in small doses. If you introduce it gently, then people will widen their palate and get really interested in making it more complex.
PR: You’re making a big bet on oud, but Is the gourmand trend dead?
MK: I’m a big lover of it, but I’m bored of creating them because I’m bored of seeing these launches. If you’re going to launch something, at least make it new, at least make it a bit different and interesting. I’ve been inspired by my sister in that way. She was extremely anal about not creating something that’s already out there. You have to innovate. You have to push yourself. You have to push your manufacturers. You have to push your retailers to take those risks with you, and even your community. You might not get it right every time, but that one time you get it right, it’s hopefully big enough to make up for all the other times.
What I’m Reading
“I was the original [expletive] tradwife,” Martha Stewart said in an interview with The New York Times. Her original [expletive] cookbook “Entertaining” was reissued this week. (The New York Times)
The new US surgeon general is not a regular mom, she’s a MAHA mom. (The Wall Street Journal)
In her new book “The Look,” Michelle Obama unpacks the level of scrutiny she was under to “look the part” of the first Black First Lady. (The New York Times)
Daniela Morosini dives deep into how Mexican fragrance brands are making the “Made in Mexico” label a hot commodity. (The Business of Beauty)
That’s it, friends. See you back in New York.
Priya