How Anisa International Leverages Vertical Integration To Bring Transparency And Innovation To Makeup Brush Manufacturing

For over three decades, Anisa Telwar Kaicker has built Anisa International into a leading manufacturer of makeup brushes and tools. Today, it’s served more than 400 established and upstart brands. 

Kaicker credits much of Anisa International’s success to its vertically integrated supply chain. In 2002, it added a facility in China to be hands-on and transparent with clients about their products’ development. Another big move for Anisa International was moving away from animal hair toward man-made fibers, which allowed it to be at the forefront of innovation in the makeup brush and tool category. It has over 78 patented and patent-pending designs. 

“I don’t want to be a commodity. I want the brush to be highly valued, not considered a side project,” says Kaicker. “The brush can make a real difference whether the product works.” 

Anisa International has 400-plus employees and can help brands get from idea to shelf within a few months. Its minimum order quantities typically run from 2,500 to 5,000 units per piece. Anisa Beauty, the company’s direct-to-consumer makeup brush brand launched in 2019, enables Kaicker to learn about the e-commerce business and use those learnings to better partner, not compete, with the brands Anisa International caters to. 

Ahead, Kaicker talks about the challenges of in-house manufacturing, white spaces in category adjacencies, one of the most compelling makeup brushes Anisa International has ever created and what the future holds for it. 

What are the challenges of bringing manufacturing in-house when operating a business?

Owning a manufacturing facility versus subcontracting production is more complex than many realize. Building the facility was out of a need to maintain my business, but I didn’t know what I was getting into. It was self-funded, and I’m a woman who did not finish her college education and just stepped my way through it.

Understanding the needs of our customers helps me build something that we’ll align on, and what I realized was that if we owned our own manufacturing, I could be transparent. I could own the design and the intellectual property and we would become better. With China sometimes being in question when it comes to good manufacturing ethics, I wanted us to show that it was the right place to manufacture due to the skill set and that we could do it in a way that would be meaningfully different by owning the full process.

What are examples of materials you use that are sustainable, efficient and innovative?

Our brush fibers. Animal hair is like a crop, you get what you get. You can’t really innovate or control it. We use man-made fibers and we’re able to extrude them differently so they emulate animal hair, better meeting the needs of the newer formulas that are coming out and doing this in a cruelty-free way.

That opened us up to skincare brushes and skincare tools. Skincare is everything to me. It’s the first step to a good complexion and good makeup. It inspired me to think about a skincare brush. The fibers we use for skincare brushes, the glues, the handles are all different. Then, that opened up fiber-free types of tools, silicone-based tools, which are nonporous and easy to clean. Then, we looked at different ways to care for a brush and how to store a brush.

Those adjacencies help us think about what’s next. Of course, our customers, who are the top brands in the world, are also thinking about those things and they help us. They bring us on the journey: Styrene-free, PCRs, FSCs. How do we start to look at biotype fibers? This is something we are committed to. We’re the stewards when it comes to brushes. We want to do it better than anybody, and we want to show everybody how to do it better.

Anisa Beauty's Complete Eye Brush Collection
Anisa Beauty’s Complete Eye Brush Collection

Innovation and sustainability are often more expensive. Is your customer willing to absorb higher prices for them?

When I started my own facility and I wanted to get out of animal hair, no. The customer didn’t want to pay for it. So, I had to think about a solution. One of the solutions was launching my own brand because, by launching my own brand, I could get market intelligence. I could get feedback and then feed it back to my B2B customers.

Then, the margin would be just a little better so that I could feed my R&D and benefit my strategic partners because they have to deal with a lot more such as where to put their marketing dollars, what they have to pay the retailers and what they have to pay to acquire a customer. It is more competitive for them every day. This data and innovation becomes invaluable for our partner brands.

When service providers launch their own brands, their focus can change. How do you navigate running both of these businesses? 

We launched the brand right before COVID-19. When COVID happened, the B2B business started to contract, but I launched the skincare brushes so that gave us a bit of a lift and gave me the ability to understand e-commerce.

These last four years of learning to understand DTC marketing has made me a better strategic partner because I understand now that I shouldn’t just come in and say, “Here’s a brush, buy a brush.” I am asking them very specific questions to make sure we give them exactly what they need. It’s so competitive. I want to make sure we’re able to differentiate what we give them so it serves their brand.

Wearing the operational, B2B hat is a very different business model, so expanding to D2C has made me a more effective leader. I can bring all this information together and bundle it and share it. We’re learning so much and learning how to best share it with my current customers. They are true partners to us and there’s been trust built. We’re symbiotic in a lot of ways, and if I’m just sitting here waiting for them to tell me what to do, what good is that? I need to be very proactive in understanding what’s next for them.

What’s the most common thing that brands don’t quite understand when they come to you?

I don’t think people always understand how complex a brush is to make, the options that they have and that it really needs to work with their products. So many hands touch the brush, and it needs to be precise.

It needs to be consistent so that it falls within a certain tolerance and it doesn’t have hair fallout. How it feels, the sensorial aspect, how it picks product up, how it pays it off are all important considerations. There’s a science to it that, once people understand, the light bulb goes off. It’s cool because they get how we are able to help them really make a difference in this category.

Is there an example of a particularly interesting or challenging project you’ve worked on?

I’m really proud of our partnership with Bare Escentuals and its liquid foundation. They had always been about mineral makeup, and I partnered with their product development lead who had tried, I think for five years, to bring liquid formulas into the brand.

They launched a brush with us, and she was so smart about how these products worked together. We put a hole into the brush because you had to shake the bottle and pump the foundation into the brush. That was the most perfect product pairing that we’ve done. They actually sold more brushes than they did foundations. That brush was so smart, and it woke people up that a brush could make a real difference.

Private equity has been buying up beauty companies. Do you think that’s positive?

It has been interesting when it comes to private equity absorption because it can mislead founders in understanding how hard it is to build a business. When you take somebody’s money and you don’t know how to grow your business, let it start to pay for itself and then build upon it.

When they have so much right in front of them, I’ve seen it destroy some brands that would exist if they had to bootstrap it a little more because there wasn’t enough restraint. I think some brands have gone to the wayside and weren’t given enough time because they pushed too fast, too soon.

Where do you see your business going in the next three to five years?

We want to create more transparency around the idea that not all brushes are made the same. I feel very proud about the way we manufacture. I feel more responsible and want to give people better quality. 

Not everybody’s aware of us globally. Recently, there were a few companies that were like, we didn’t even know you existed. I’m wondering how that is possible. It’s about education and options. How can we make people aware of what we offer and what their choices are?

I love the idea of adjacencies. Brush care is exciting to me. I want people to be able to take care of their brushes in a way that’s really manageable and fun. I was thinking this morning, I have to clean my brushes this weekend, but it’s a chore, it’s a hassle. How can I make it easier for people?

And what’s next when it comes to materials? I really want to be there for new brands or new ways of doing things. I want people to know that we are there to be cutting edge. When they’re ready, we’re right there with them.