Don’t Miss Next Week’s BeautyX Capital Summit

Next week marks two important milestones for our team here at Beauty Independent.  

The first milestone is the one-year anniversary of BI. Our baby will be turning one and we are bursting with pride. While there have been many sleepless nights, excruciating rewrites and deadline-driven panics, we are so grateful for the opportunity and privilege to serve as the eyes, ears and voice of so many incredible and inspiring people in the beauty and wellness community.  We are committed to the beauty entrepreneur and cannot wait to announce the great stuff we are launching as part of Beauty Independent 2.0 next week at the BeautyX Capital Summit.  Below is a sneak peek of one the things your can expect to hear about.

That brings me to our second big milestone: The completion of our 2018 BeautyX Summit series. The series concludes in New York with the BeautyX Capital Summit, Aug. 20 to 21. This BeautyX deftly builds on the two that came before it; we have pulled the very best aspects of our LA and Dallas Summits and applied them to the world of capital. 

At the heart of the BeautyX difference is our steadfast commitment to creating our own content. At BeautyX Capital, that original content will be featured in classes and satellite symposia on a wide range of funding-related topics: The Capital Landscape (where can you get capital), Fundamentals of Valuation (what’s your company worth), Building a Pitch Deck (invaluable knowledge whether you’re pitching investors, buyers or press) and Understanding Deal Structures (a breakdown of the most common ways investment deals are built), just to name a few.  

Then, we go deeper. Inspired by stories we first broke in Beauty Independent, our team has developed in-depth case studies that provide the story behind the headlines. These include our editors — myself and the inimitable Rachel Brown — sitting across from the founders of Schmidt’s Naturals, Vital Proteins and Kosås Cosmetics — three indie brands that arguably had the biggest funding stories of the past 12 months — and having candid conversations on how they pulled it all off.  Even better, their investors, Bader Alam of Cavu Venture Partners and Alison Ryu of CircleUp Growth Partners, will be sitting right next to them to provide their perspective, too.

Brand and retailer case study with Beauty Heroes and Honua Skincare at BeautyX Retail Summit, May 2018.

Next — and I am personally very proud of this as I recruited them all — we have a (female-heavy) roster of no less than 25 industry professionals on our various Expert Dialogue panels. These include the key M&A professionals from L’Oreal (Nicole Fourgoux) and Estée Lauder (Shana Randhava), the top two strategic investors in beauty; some of the most active private equity houses focused on beauty such as Tengram Capital (Rich Gersten) and L. Catterton (Tehmina Haider); highly respected boutique venture firms, such as Lerer Hippeau (Andrea Hippeau) and Imaginary Ventures (Kelly Dill); large organizations with global perspectives, such as Credit Suisse (Nini Zhang) and Citigroup (Deepti Chauhan) and entities focused on crowdfunding and early stage investing, such as BankRoll (Kendall Almerico) Golden Seeds (Julia French) among many others.

For the finale, the fun begins. We have hand-picked three brands from the 250 who’ll be exhibiting at Indie Beauty Expo (IBE) New York next week to participate in our live learning exercise, “Deal Appeal”.  The brands, Cannabliss OrganicJoséphine Cosmetics and O’o Hawaii, with a bit of prior coaching from advisory experts such as Nicole Massimi, Ashleigh Barker of Michel Dyens and Luc-Henry Rousselle of LSH Partners, will present their businesses to an Investment Committee comprised of three veteran and highly-respected beauty investors: the afore-mentioned Rich Gersten, industry legend and L’Oréal executive Carol Hamilton and Gail Zauder — the woman behind the sale of both of Marcia Kilgore’s companies, Bliss and Soap & Glory, among many other high-profile beauty deals.

Next week’s BeautyX Capital Summit will be two days of carefully-crafted learning and networking that will be beneficial to anyone working in beauty today: retailers, executives, investors and, of course, our forever-core audience, brand founders and beauty entrepreneurs at large.

If you’ve already purchased your ticket, we look forward to hosting you at the beautiful Convene event space at 117 West 46th Street. If you’re interested in attending but have not yet signed up, please hurry as the event is almost sold out. You can register and purchase your pass here. Since you’ve done us the honor of reading this entire article, feel free to use the code BIREADER10 to get 10% off your ticket. Just a small gesture of our gratitude.