Emily Weiss, Jamie Kern Lima and Jen Atkin built three different roads from DTC into the same retailers
Three founders reached the same retail shelves from three different starting points. The differences between how they got there are more useful than the fact that they did.
Emily Weiss launched Glossier in 2014 as a direct-to-consumer beauty brand and, for years, held the position publicly that it would stay DTC-only. Jamie Kern Lima co-founded IT Cosmetics with her husband in 2008 and bootstrapped it from their apartment for three years before it ever had a retail presence at all. Jen Atkin, a celebrity hairstylist, launched Ouai in 2016 and put it into Sephora that same year. Three brands, three different relationships with the shelf from day one.
Emily Weiss and Glossier: the DTC-only belief that eventually had to bend
Weiss built Glossier into a beauty unicorn on the conviction that a DTC-first, community-driven brand did not need retail to matter. That conviction held for the better part of a decade. A post-pandemic slowdown and persistent customer demand eventually pushed the brand to reconsider, and in 2022 Weiss stepped down as CEO, handing the omnichannel transition to Kyle Leahy. Glossier entered Sephora in early 2023, and the launch reportedly exceeded the company’s own sales expectations.
A belief that a brand does not need retail is not the same as proof that it never will. Weiss held the line for years and was right to, until the evidence changed and she was willing to change with it.
Jamie Kern Lima and IT Cosmetics: retail was the only unlock available
Kern Lima’s path ran the opposite direction. IT Cosmetics was built to solve her own problem, makeup that could cover rosacea, and the breakthrough did not come from ecommerce at all. It came in 2010 on QVC, where she removed her own makeup live on air to show the product working on her actual skin. That kind of demonstrated, in-the-moment trust is difficult to manufacture on a product page, and QVC gave her a format built for exactly that. L’Oreal acquired IT Cosmetics in 2016 for $1.2 billion, and Kern Lima became the first female CEO of a L’Oreal brand in the company’s history.
The lesson here is not "use QVC." It is that Kern Lima matched her product’s trust problem, an unusual claim about covering a real skin condition, to the one retail format built specifically to prove a claim like that live, in real time, to a skeptical audience. She picked the channel that solved her specific problem rather than the channel that was fashionable.
Jen Atkin and Ouai: retail from month one, because the audience was already there
Atkin took the fastest route to a shelf. As a celebrity hairstylist with an enormous existing following, she deliberately kept her own name off the Ouai label to keep the focus on the community rather than her personal brand, then launched into Sephora the same year the brand started, in 2016, before expanding to Ulta in 2020. Ouai is now distributed across more than 4,000 locations, including Sephora, Ulta and Target, and has scaled past $100 million in annual revenue, built in part by crowdsourcing product and packaging decisions directly from her audience on social media.
Atkin’s advantage was not that retail is always the right first move. It is that she already had the trust and reach a typical brand spends years building in DTC before a retailer will take the meeting, so the retail-readiness clock for her started at zero instead of at year three.
The comparison, side by side
| Founder | Brand | What decided the retail timing |
|---|---|---|
| Emily Weiss | Glossier | A DTC-first conviction, revised only once customer demand and a growth slowdown made the case |
| Jamie Kern Lima | IT Cosmetics | A trust problem that only a live, demonstrated retail format like QVC could solve |
| Jen Atkin | Ouai | An existing audience large enough to skip the years most brands spend earning retail trust |
Questions founders ask
Did Glossier start as a DTC-only brand?
Yes. Emily Weiss launched Glossier in 2014 as direct-to-consumer only and held that position for years before the brand entered Sephora in early 2023, following a leadership transition to CEO Kyle Leahy.
Who founded IT Cosmetics and how much did L'Oreal pay for it?
Jamie Kern Lima co-founded IT Cosmetics with her husband, Paulo Lima, in 2008. L'Oreal acquired the brand in 2016 for a reported $1.2 billion, and Kern Lima became the first female CEO of a L'Oreal brand.
Who founded Ouai and where is it sold?
Celebrity hairstylist Jen Atkin founded Ouai in 2016 and put it into Sephora the same year, later expanding to Ulta in 2020. It is now sold in more than 4,000 locations including Sephora, Ulta and Target.
Is there one correct time for a beauty brand to enter retail?
No. Each of these three founders timed retail differently based on a different real constraint, a DTC conviction, a trust problem, or an existing audience, which is a stronger signal to copy than any single timeline.