With products being dreamt up out of thin air, the beauty industry is in itself a thing of magic. As a brand incubator and private label provider for mass retailers, Maesa has been harnessing the power of said sorcery since 1997.

One of the first brands launched by the incubator was Kristin Ess in 2017, which introduced salon-quality haircare to the mass channel. Today, over 6,000 units of the brand’s The One Signature Shampoo and Conditioner are sold every hour.Being Frenshe,  a cross-category wellness brand founded by Ashley Tisdale in 2021, sold one bottle of its  Hair, Body & Linen Mist every six seconds in December 2024.

Under the leadership of Piyush Jain (CEO, appointed September 2022) and Oshiya Savur (CMO, appointed February 2023), Maesa has witnessed a new chapter in its professional legacy, defined by a more coalesced infrastructure and treading new technological ground.

Other new leadership hires under Jain’s watch included P&G alumni Carlos Lagravere as COO and Unilever alumni Erin Keating, as CCO. They joined seasoned executives like CFO Zaheer Ferguson and CGO Scott Kestenbaum, founder of packaging manufacturer Zorbit, which Maesa acquired in January 2009 shortly after its US market entry for approximately $50 million.

Under their watch, Fine’ry (launched in 2023) became the fastest-growing fragrance brand at Target. Its phygital pop-up experience, the Fine’ry-verse, hosted at LUME Studios in Tribeca, saw more than 2,000 visitors in 48 hours and grew Maesa’s social media following by 10% over the launch weekend. In October 2024, the Fine’ry-verse entered Roblox, broadening the brand out to a Gen A audience. In July 2023, to commemorate Maesa's  25th anniversary, the Maesa Magic Incubator was launched, aimed at highlighting female, BIPOC, differently abled, LGBTQIA+, and 65+-year-old founders.

All this treading of new ground has more than paid off. The company delivered high double-digit growth across its portfolio in 2024. In February 2025, Maesa made another big move, selling its Middle Eastern and European operations to KDC/ONE to double down on its core offerings while continuing to expand its global growth. Fresh off of the announcement, Jain and Savur sat down with BeautyMatter to discuss their professional partnership, bringing discipline to an entrepreneurial enterprise, and the beauty of blue sky thinking.

What it was about Maesa that compelled you to join the business?

Piyush Jain: I came to Maesa after having spent 20+ years at Unilever working in various beauty and personal care businesses. I'd worked with some of the best people, and what I had observed was how disruption and beauty were happening largely through smaller, new, entrepreneurial companies. I had admired how Maesa created the Kristin Ess brand, now almost eight years ago. [It was] the opportunity to come and lead an entrepreneurial organization that was creating brands that impact the future and pop culture.

The creativity and agility of the team, this can-do spirit, and wanting to make a difference not only through brands but also impacting the overall categories we operated in. That's what brought me here.

Oshiya Savur: For me, it was a slightly different,  journey. I grew up in India and moved here in 2010. When I arrived here, I found that the world here was very much about the swim lanes. You joined one and then stayed in it for your [whole] career. For me, it was so important to keep breaking through lanes and acquire as many new experiences as I could.

When this Maesa role came up, it felt like such an amazing culmination of everything that I had learned. It was brand marketing, innovation, masstige price points, and all different categories. There really is no end to how far we can disrupt the category. I loved the blue sky thinking, how nothing scared this company Of course, I had known Piyush for a long time. Coming back to my longtime mentor was a nice icing on the cake.

Speaking of that blue sky, what was your mandate and vision when you assumed your leadership roles?

PJ: For me, the main thing was that Maesa was successful, entrepreneurial, and expanding rapidly at the same time. Like every rapidly growing entrepreneurial organization, it didn't fully comprehend what it knew. We hadn't bottomed out on what we now call the Maesa Magic that allows us to successfully create repeatable models. My primary mandate was how do we ensure that we keep the creativity, agility,  speed, and ensure that flow while we bring in discipline.

The Maesa Magic allows us to disrupt the market continuously, and therefore, our success rate multiplies over time. The other part was how do we bring the talent of the future into the organization? A lot of the talent—I’m very proud of it—has existed with Maesa for many years. How do you dial up marketing? How do you dial up operations so that you are sustainable and can deliver products? How do we become an operational powerhouse as well? That's been the journey.

OS: Being a member of his team, my job is to then bring the CEO's vision to life. While my teams are not the only makers of magic, they are a big part of how magic comes about. We've now grown so much overnight that there needs to be science, discipline, and scale. The math that comes with the scale needs to be inserted into the organization.

What Piyush did, which was a brilliant move, was bring the two separate departments under one umbrella. What it gave me was a lot of agility once we decided to do something; it was a quick meeting among my direct reports, flushing out the disagreements, and seeing how we could get fast.

The second thing was around demand generation. We have become extremely large as an incubator, but at any given year, we are birthing a new brand, one that's exceeding $50 million dollars, and a brand that already has scale. How you go to market for those three types of brands is very different because the funding available to launch those brands is very different—how you become iconic at launch, what's the right play, what's the influencer play, paid media play, owned play, what's the founder strategy, brand ambassador? The "how" of all of it coming together  we had to think about as we brought the vision to life.

Are there  other ways as CEO and CMO that you believe your roles complement each other in driving the business forward?

PJ: Neither of us exist without the other one. The way I lead the leadership team is thinking about what is our vision? For companies and brands to be meaningful in the future, it's really important that we not only create brands and high-quality products that have meaning in consumers’ lives, but also make an impact on the world.

Defining why  Maesa exists and how we give back, what is our heritage? A large part of bringing that vision to life, particularly on the brand side, resides in Osh's camp.

OS: For me, what's very critical about a high-performing team or a CEO/CMO relationship is the honesty of conversations that can happen. It's about leaning on each other for insights, having real conversations. Together we are sharper because we have different points of view.

I'd love to dive a bit into the Maesa Magic. How would you define it?

PJ:  The first part of Magic is people. I take great pride in the team that we have, which is making Maesa what it is from an incubation brand creation perspective. The way we define it is we never want to launch something that already exists. We always look at unmet consumer needs and figure out ways of creatively solving them. The biggest part of it is having a team that is capable of both identifying it and bringing this vision to life in a differentiated way. That's really at the heart of Maesa Magic.

I'm being generous when I say 1 out of 10 new brands that launch make it. For Maesa, our hit rate is two out of three. We are getting better at it every day. That's Maesa Magic in action for me.

What are your growth KPIs when it comes to that success?

PJ: We launch with certain metrics in mind. Whether it is a revenue or a velocity metric—which we design in conjunction with our retailer partner and ensure that we meet or beat those metrics—those are the most important things. Then at an aggregate level for the company,  we talk about how do we become among the fastest-growing beauty companies?

OS: From a marketing standpoint specifically, we pride ourselves on the quality of our brands. They have a lot of heat and are part of the culture. The way we go to market is we almost flip it. We think about paid content less because we all know content is part of the earned piece of it. When press, influencers, and tastemakers love the brand, then the consumers want it. We have a very sophisticated infrastructure that we've now built, which unlocks press, influencers of all tiers, including UGC,  ratings, and reviews.

Our KPIs are more earned media value driven because it's a tangible. In the last year since we've really put this strategy into place, several of our brands are already in the top 40, if not top 30, in the CreatorIQ dashboards. That gives me faith and hope that the things we are doing are driving awareness for our brands.

Given your use of Generative AI and Roblox experiences, what are your predictions for the future use of technology in the beauty space?

OS: In 2023, when the hype broke through with that ChatGPT piece and Generative AI was everywhere, I remember coming in and we had just launched Fine’ry that year. When you're launching the brand, it's like a beautiful clay.  You're just having fun with it and seeing how are you going to mold it.

Fine’ry was already a TikTok sensation. We were trying to figure out how we could differentiate this fragrance brand within mass, but also in prestige. I thought, what if we could bring the Generative AI buzz and TikTok sensation together? What if we could be the first fragrance brand that brings Generative AI to the forefront?

Our amazing creative studio took on the challenge. Our first-ever digital activation with Fine’ry-verse, generated millions of views and so much excitement. 

It was all generated by a computer with our creative teams. Now how do we take this experiment further? Then we said Roblox, let's take Fine’ry to gaming. Again, not something you typically see for a fragrance brand, but it was an amazing success.

This year, we're working on some other tech phase three places like what's the next version of Gen AI or Roblox? It has opened our eyes to the possibilities. On top of that, we're starting to look at other applications of Generative AI from a brand and innovation perspective. We're very bullish on it. It's here to stay and the marketers who run with it are going to be successful with it, and others who are scared of it will be behind the game.

How do you balance the need for brand differentiation across the portfolio with the desire to stay relevant and appealing to evolving consumer preferences?

OS: We look at our brands in three fundamental ways. One is a North Star, when the North Star is clear, you know the destination. We really personify our brands. In the case of Fine-ry, we call it: I am going to be the disruptor of the fine fragrance category. Being Frenshe, we call it the curator of the wellness journey. 

Then we say, what's our purpose? We know where we want to be, but why? Why should the consumers care? What then gives us the right to play and win? That's our superpower. Increasingly, we are also writing down the belief systems of a brand. Then we are cultivating the communities around it in social media and with influencers. We've been very thoughtful about the people we work with; that’s how, from a branding and marketing standpoint, the whole ecosystem comes together.

What have been the most difficult moments you've encountered in building the company, and how did you bounce back?

PJ: In the early part of 2023,  I began to see that weren't able to meet our entire demand. Obviously, as you scale and your brands become sizable; that's an unacceptable situation, particularly when you're selling in brick-and-mortar retailers.

I consciously took a strategy of slowing down to accelerate. It translated into 2024 being our first year where we didn't launch a brand.  I needed to ensure that what we have launched, we are able to supply before we launch new things. 

It required a full study and some changes in our backend. Our full supply chain, where do we need to optimize, how do we operate a system where demand forecasting is strong. It also meant that I had to upgrade talent in some specific roles because obviously your system is as good as the people operating the system.  Six months later, we’re back to 90%+ service levels.  2025, without a doubt, will be our biggest innovation year in the last many years because now we have confidence that our systems are set up so that our customer service levels are high. 

Our retail partners are excited about what we are bringing out. Our consumers are giving us a license to launch more. We are now accelerating the innovation.

Are there any new markets, product categories, or brands being incubated?

PJ: Our Being Frenshe brand just expanded into haircare with the Hair Wellness line at Target. I’m very excited to see how we translate the consumer love for the brand into hair wellness because it's a unique space and not too many people have been able to do that. The other innovation that I would talk about is Kristin Ess. It’s our largest brand and the first brand that came from a female stylist bringing it into the masstige segment. We wanted to dial that up and really take it into the future. Kristin Ess Plus is where salon meets science; real advanced technology that's delivering best-in-class haircare products. I’m very excited to see how that performs. 

OS: On Fine’ry, we are also expanding into men's space. Those products just came out, again, off to an amazing start. Fingers crossed that we continue to see a lot of success. There are a lot of other exciting things in the pipeline we cannot wait to share.