How Emilie Heathe Is Evolving From An Upscale Clean Nail Polish Line To A Lifestyle Brand

Most kids just want to fit in. That proved to be hard for Emily Heath Rudman, who was adopted from Korea at four months old by white parents.

“As an Asian kid growing up, it was wonderful, but, at the same time, I think that they wanted me to feel as much a part of them and their family as possible, so they never really educated me or encouraged me to find out more about my actual ethnic background or heritage,” she says. “Being adopted, it’s not like I belonged to the Asian community fully, and I also didn’t fit the American standard of beauty.”

Rudman buried herself in comic books as an escape valve and weaved her own stories with characters she invented. When it came to beauty, Rudman cherished frequent visits to nail salons to get manicures with her mother. “That was my introduction to beauty as a kid,” she says. “But another personal reason why I liked going there is because all of the women there were Korean, and it was nice to be around women who looked like me.”

As she got older, Rudman put down her pencils and picked up makeup brushes to work as a makeup artist for brands like MAC, Avon, and Bobbi Brown. One of Rudman’s projects for Avon involved reformulating the brand’s nail product range. “From an art perspective, I love that the nail has become a tiny canvas where people can express themselves,” she says. “You can have the most conservative look on, but then have the most insane, awesome nail art.”

In 2017, Rudman turned her love of the nail into a business by establishing her brand Emilie Heathe. It entered the market as a rarefied luxury entrant in the clean nail segment. Emilie Heathe’s tent poles are standout packaging, long-wearing and nourishing formulas, and conscientious ingredients. “We really wanted to be best in class as a brand,” says Rudman.

“We really wanted to be best in class as a brand.”

Priced at $28 each, Emilie Heathe’s nail polishes are classified as 10-free. They avoid 10 ingredients such as toluene, camphor, xylene, formaldehyde, parabens and synthetic fragrances. The brand’s formula contains Asian-inspired ingredients like bamboo extract, sea buckthorn and rice bran oil as well as vitamin e and biotin to strengthen nails. Its polishes are housed in up to 50% post-consumer recycled glass, and it uses recycled paper and board in its boxes.

In December last year, Emilie Heathe expanded its offerings to include an exfoliating lip balm and jewelry. Rudman explains the expansion is part of her plan to build a beauty-centric brand that spans multiple categories. “Like you’ve seen fashion brands go into beauty, I wanted to do the reverse,” she says. “I wanted to start with beauty and go into accessories, home goods, maybe clothing someday.” She points to Byredo as inspiration, saying, “They’re literally doing everything that we want to do and aspire to do.”

Rudman isn’t interested in churning out products unnecessarily, though. Emilie Heathe was supposed to release a lipstick along with its polishes three years ago, but Rudman ran into issues with the formula and decided to hold back on the lipstick. “I’m pressured all the time by PR, sales and potential retailers for newness, but I take my time because I don’t really believe in putting out stuff just to put out stuff so people talk about you,” she says. “I really want people to have something that they feel is unique and different, and is an object of significance and feels special.”

This year has been a rollercoaster ride for Emilie Heathe. In March, sales were low. A month later, they picked up due to salon closures and amplified online shopping. The summer was relatively quiet, but the holidays look promising, according to Rudman. She projects that Emilie Heathe’s 2020 sales will be comparable to last year’s sales. Pivots have helped the brand steady the ship.

“Like you’ve seen fashion brands go into beauty, I wanted to do the reverse.”

“We’ve been ramping up our email campaign, which has been converting more than we expected,” says Rudman, noting her brand is running Google and Facebook advertising for the holiday shopping season. After restraining from retail early on in the pandemic, Emilie Heathe has made retail inroads with launches at Shen Beauty and C.O. Bigelow. In November, it debuted on Neiman Marcus’s website.

Emilie Heathe has made giving back a priority amid the pandemic. It’s donated 20% of its sales during it to the organization Glam4Good and has become a partner of environmental initiative 1% for the Planet. “I don’t want to just be a brand that sells products,” says Rudman. “I find that incredibly boring and way too self-serving.”

New products and partnerships are in development. A hand lotion, cuticle oil, nail tools and the aforementioned lipstick are on the docket. And Emilie Heathe is unveiling a special product line with a magazine next year and expects to team up with a movie on merchandise.

While Byredo serves as inspiration to mold Emilie Heathe into a lifestyle player, Rudman says Kerby Jean-Raymond, the fashion designer behind Pyer Moss, which Emilie Heathe has collaborated with on runway shows in the past, is a role model for creating a brand that pierces the zeitgeist. “His company is really like a social, cultural movement in a lot of ways, and we want the same thing,” she says. “I want ours to become a cultural brand in some respects.”