Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Start to Scale from The Beauty Center at FIT

Jean Godfrey-June has spent more than three decades writing about beauty, including at Vogue, Glamour, ELLE, Lucky, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and, most recently, as Executive Beauty Director at goop. Today she writes Godfrey’s Guide, her Substack about beauty and everything that inevitably surrounds it—style, aging, wellness, travel, food, culture, and life.

Jean has tested an extraordinary number of products and watched the beauty industry change from magazines and department stores to e-commerce, social media, affiliate commerce, and an almost overwhelming amount of choice.

We talk about her career, from writing about the very early days of Bobbi Brown to helping launch Lucky and later joining goop as it was building its beauty business. We get into what makes Jean notice a product after decades of seeing almost everything, why names and packaging matter so much, and why some beautiful products simply never sell.

We also talk about how much easier it has become to make and launch a beauty product—and how much harder it has become to get anyone’s attention. Jean talks about the danger of trying to make something for everyone, moving on from products too quickly, listening too closely to retailers, and why founders who stay deeply involved in the details tend to build better brands.

And we get into trust: what happens when editorial and commerce become intertwined, why Jean only writes about products she actually likes, and whether expertise and real human judgment become more valuable as there is more and more content, product, and noise.

In this episode, we discuss:

* Jean’s career advice

* What makes a beauty product get noticed

* Why names and packaging matter

* Products editors love that consumers don’t necessarily buy

* Building for a specific person rather than “everyone”

* Why founders should resist the pressure to constantly launch something new

* Editorial trust, affiliate commerce, and recommendations

* Scale, margins, and building a smaller, very good beauty business

* Why founder vision matters more than ever

Listen to Jean Godfrey-June on Start to Scale From The Beauty Center at FIT.

My first guest is Stephan Kanlian, Chairperson of The Beauty Center at FIT and one of the people responsible for making beauty management a field of academic study.

Before I began building Choulie, I spent fourteen years in two food businesses. I understood product development, manufacturing, margins, retail, brand building, and the multitude of decisions involved in turning an idea into a company.

But even though Choulie is a CPG product, beauty has its own history, economics, distribution channels, power structures, and assumptions about how brands grow.

Stephan has spent his career inside that industry, working across education, business, and industry and watching beauty evolve from a category that was often dismissed as frivolous into a sophisticated global business.

In this first conversation of Start to Scale, Stephan gives us the larger context.

We talk about how he found his way into beauty, and how working inside a cosmetics company—spending time with chemists, manufacturing, marketing, and customers—gave him an education in the business from the ground up.

That experience eventually led him to FIT, where he was hired in 1999 to create its graduate program in Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management. The idea was unusual at the time: instead of bringing traditional MBAs into beauty and teaching them the industry, why not develop leaders who already understood and cared about beauty and teach them to run the business?

More than 25 years later, the industry has changed enormously, but the fundamental mission of the program has not. He is trying to create leaders, not specialists—people who know enough about finance, marketing, operations, culture, technology, and the consumer to ask the right questions, understand the implications of their decisions, and lead across disciplines.

And we talk about where beauty goes from here.

Changing demographics and channels (marketing and sales) are altering how brands understand and reach consumers. Technology is forcing companies to move faster. And the boundaries between beauty, wellness, medicine, and science are becoming increasingly difficult to separate—bringing new opportunities, but also much greater responsibility.

Above all, Stephan sees beauty as an expression of the culture around it. Consumers have access to more information, cultures and identities overlap in different ways, and beauty has become one of the most important ways people express who they are.

In this episode, we discuss:

* Why FIT created its graduate beauty program

* What Stephan has learned about identifying and developing strong leaders

* How FIT’s capstone approaches complex, long-term industry problems

* Why culture and consumer understanding are fundamental to beauty

* How technology and changing demographics are reshaping the industry

* The growing convergence of beauty, wellness, science, and medicine

* What beauty tells us about culture and self-expression

Listen to Episode 1 of Start to Scale From The Beauty Center at FIT, with Stephan Kanlian.

This fall, I’m launching Choulie, a fine fragrance body care company.

It’s my second time building a consumer brand, but my first time in beauty. And while plenty of what I learned building Haven’s Kitchen applies, the beauty industry has its own language, economics, gatekeepers, rituals, and history.

So when The Beauty Center at FIT asked me to create and host a podcast about how beauty companies are actually built, I jumped at the opportunity.

The Beauty Center is home to FIT’s Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management graduate program, the first and longest-running program of its kind. For more than 25 years, it has educated executives who have gone on to lead some of the biggest companies in beauty.

Start to Scale comes out of that world, but it’s made for anyone interested in the work of building a beauty business.

I spent fourteen years building Haven’s Kitchen, first as a cooking school in New York and then as a national food brand. For the past eight years, I’ve hosted In the Sauce, where I’ve had hundreds of conversations with founders, investors, retailers and operators about what happens between having a good idea and building a company that lasts.

Now I’m doing it again with Choulie, in a different industry, with a whole new set of questions.

How do you know when a product is actually good enough? What makes a brand distinctive in a category already full of beautiful things? When should you go into retail, and what are retailers looking for now? How much does cultural relevance matter? How does beauty shape culture, and how does culture change what we want from beauty? How do you grow without losing the thing that made people care in the first place?

Those are the conversations I’m having with some of the most interesting people in and adjacent to the industry.

This season I’m talking with founders including April Gargiulo of Vintner’s Daughter and Sofie Pavitt; longtime beauty editor Jean Godfrey-June; fragrance expert Pierre Vouard; strategists Jasmine Bina and Chris Danton; and executives from e.l.f., L’Oréal, TikTok, and others.

Some have built companies. Some have helped brands find an audience. Some decide what gets stocked, funded, talked about, or remembered.

I’m new to beauty, but I’m not new to building a consumer business. And building Choulie means I’m making many of these decisions in real time: formulation, fragrance, packaging, positioning, pricing, retail, distribution—and what kind of company I actually want to build.

That tension is part of the show.

Start to Scale from The Beauty Center at FIT launches September 14, with new episodes every Monday.

You’ll be able to listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And everything will live here too—full episodes, show notes and some of what I’m learning along the way.

For now, here’s the trailer.