The beauty industry thrives on what’s now, what’s new, and what’s next, and innovation and disruption are concepts that get thrown around a lot. Inspiration is the springboard for creativity that leads to disrupting convention with radically new ideas, and real innovators disrupt by employing long-term thinking and imagining the impossible. They don’t peddle in quick fixes and gimmicks.
Innovator of the Year: A person who has made meaningful contributions to the business of beauty by pursuing and executing novel thinking, challenging the status quo, and/or using creative problem solving to move the industry forward.
Meet the BeautyMatter NEXT 2024 Innovator of the Year finalists:
Danielle Cohen-Shohet, CEO & Founder, GlossGenius
Danielle’s background in tech, finance, and the beauty industry inspired her to start GlossGenius in 2016—one of the largest vertical software-embedded payments companies, enabling service professionals to instantly integrate everything entrepreneurs need to run their businesses better. Her determination enables and inspires tens of thousands of underrepresented business owners.
Danielle's inspiration for GlossGenius came while working at Goldman Sachs and doing makeup artistry on the side as a passion. She experienced the pain points of managing a small business while engaging with clients and recognized this was a struggle many others go through every day. Given the passion she had for the industry and the gap she saw in vertical-focused business management in the self-care services industry, Danielle taught herself how to code and set out to change things for everyone.
Danielle is both the business and technical founder of GlossGenius and coded the first version of her product. She’s an excellent example for women, showcasing how they can be leaders in industries typically dominated by men. She leveraged her finance skills along with her self-taught programming ability to create what has now become a leading solution in this space.
In July 2023, GlossGenius announced a $28 million Series C funding round, led by the prestigious investment firm L Catterton with participation Bessemer Venture Partners and Imaginary Ventures. This latest infusion of capital has brought the company’s total funding to approximately $70 million to date and increased the company’s valuation to $510 million.
Ann Marie Simpson-Einziger, Co-Founder, Mother Science
Ann Marie is a serial entrepreneur, internationally acclaimed violinist, and co-founder of biotech skincare brand Mother Science. As a rock violinist, Simpson-Einziger has collaborated with artists including The Dave Matthews Band, Ringo Starr, Stevie Nicks, Pharrell Williams, Jethro Tull, and A.R. Rahman. She has also worked with renowned composer Hanz Zimmer on numerous film scores, including 12 Years a Slave and Sherlock Holmes. A passion for science parallels her love of music. She studied biology at The University of Virginia and was a high school physics and chemistry teacher before her music career.
In 2016, while on tour, Simpson-Einziger experienced a harmless skin condition that led her to discover the power of Malassezin, a naturally occurring molecule with dramatic dark spot reduction benefits. After six years of research and development alongside leading scientists to determine if Ann Marie’s hypothesis was correct, they together uncovered the power of Malassezin. She and her husband Mike Einziger launched Mother Science in May 2023 with a revolutionary product for hyperpigmentation, Molecular Hero Serum. It is the first and only skincare product to be formulated with the breakthrough, patented ingredient Malassezin.
Under her leadership, Mother Science became the first and only brand to introduce and commercialize the active ingredient Malassezin. Mother Science owns the exclusive worldwide patent to use Malassezin, and by owning this technology, has an innovative business model that sets it apart. The patent was granted after Mother Science completed six years of research studying Malassezin on ex vivo human skin analyzing the expression of 22,000+ genes per sample giving a deep knowledge of how Malassezin works. The brand performed two clinical trials with results published in two leading peer reviewed journals.
Prior to launching Mother Science, Ann Marie had never worked in the beauty industry. She was a highly successful Grammy-nominated musician. It was her curious nature, innovative thinking, and challenger approach that led her to the creation of the brand, all stemming from a discovery hidden in plain sight. Her entrepreneurial endeavors also include co-founding Mixhalo, an ultra-low latency networking technology company, in 2017, alongside her husband, where the two now serve as co-chairs.
David Moatazedi, President & CEO, Evolus
With decades of experience in the $3.5 billion medical aesthetics industry, David knew that he needed to rewrite the rules to take on the entrenched legacy brand in the category. In 2018, under his leadership, Evolus shipped the first vial of its flagship frown line treatment, Jeuveau, making a name for itself as an industry disruptor. Moving away from the aesthetics category to define its own Performance Beauty movement, Evolus has become a market leader.
With a deep understanding of the industry, identifying shifting consumer attitudes towards injectables, and recognizing success starts with a well-made product, he designed Jeuveau to challenge the legacy brand. It has a tight field of effect, delivering the facial movement patients want without the frown lines they don’t. As a result, Jeuveau has an extremely high patient satisfaction (94% satisfaction).
David set out to disrupt the industry from every angle—from the company’s bold, edgy branding to its corporate culture devoted to innovation. Evolus notably positioned itself as the first aesthetics-only company in the industry. While its competitors have brands also used for therapeutic conditions, Evolus has the advantage of being a cash-pay business that lets it invest in customers' growth and offer them novel loyalty programs like co-branded marketing that attracts millennial consumers to its practice.
The company invested in a digital infrastructure supporting a customer portal, app, and SMS-based loyalty programs. These digital tools reduce friction between Evolus and its customers and empower fast scaling. Today, Evolus Rewards has approximately 825,000 members.
In just five short years, Evolus has gained 12% market share from the legacy brand. In 2023, Evolus achieved revenues of $202 million, representing 36% growth over the prior year and has been the fastest-growing brand in the category for three consecutive years, catapulting it to the number two position in the category. Today, 13,000 clinics nationwide now carry Jeuveau.
Harry Rein, Co-Founder & CEO, ShopMy
In 2020, Harry seized the opportunity to embark on an entrepreneurial venture, co-founding ShopMy alongside Chris Tinsley, a fellow MIT alum, and Tiffany Lopinsky, a former colleague. Fueled by a shared vision to revolutionize the creator industry and streamline content monetization, ShopMy swiftly evolved into a dynamic affiliate platform, bridging the gap between over 1,000 brands and 50,000 creators.
As the driving force behind ShopMy, Harry leads with unwavering determination. ShopMy’s commitment to excellence and innovation has positioned it at the forefront of the creator economy. In under two years, its creator network quintupled while achieving a sevenfold increase in revenue. The platform has been embraced by beauty industry leaders and recognized as a catalyst for driving exponential growth for both brands and creators alike. Most recently, closing a Series A at $26 million with leading investors including creators themselves.
ShopMy has provided a streamlined platform that enables gifting initiatives, commission codes, and communication management, all in one place. On average, ShopMy brand partners earn a monthly sales volume of $40,000 and achieve an impressive 20x return on investment. With these cutting-edge features, ShopMy redefines the landscape of creator-brand collaborations, empowering brands to foster meaningful connections and drive tangible results.
Since ShopMy’s inception in 2020, Harry has worn many hats—engineer, entrepreneur, fundraiser, and leader. His commitment to problem solving has remained unwavering in all of these roles. He constantly challenges the status quo, leads with trust and empathy, and refuses to settle for outdated practices. Instead, he redefines the creator economy and sets the bar for other platforms that want to operate in this space.
Joshua Britton, Founder, Debut
Joshua founded Debut in 2019 as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine department of chemistry. While working in his professor’s lab, Joshua developed an efficient and green method of synthesizing molecules found only in trace quantities in plants. Specifically, he invented a way to accelerate enzymes, the machines that make life possible by catalyzing chemical transformations.
He knew he had reached a breakthrough when he began creating novel bioactive ingredients that could only be created with his platform. Additionally, when he tested these ingredients, he found that in some cases they had a 1,000% improvement in critical functions for beauty such as skin barrier protection, antioxidant activity, and even senescence.
This research inspired Joshua to build a biotech beauty company. Joshua’s vision was to manufacture rare—but highly useful—molecules found in nature through a much more sustainable approach than current technologies allow. The approach sidesteps the need for cultivating plants, leading to decreased carbon emissions, requiring infinitely less land and less water, and preserving the earth’s precious natural resources.
Four years later, in June 2023, Debut announced its groundbreaking partnership with L’Oréal. Like Tesla and Apple, Debut’s vertical integration is the key to making impactful, tangible products with biology, ensuring the company’s technology enters and transforms global supply chains. Its proprietary Bio2Consumer platform is an end-to-end process for discovering, validating, testing, creating, and producing novel, proprietary bioactive ingredients for commercialization, leaving the R&D phase firmly behind. With its vertical structure, Debut is innovating bioactive ingredients in a way that is built for globalization, impact, and longevity.
Today, Debut holds over 70 patents in ingredients and formulations, and Joshua leads a rapidly growing multidisciplinary team of 100 people executing an aggressive commercialization strategy and delivering on the promise of biomanufacturing by vertically integrating into product.
Sophie Bai, Founder & CEO, B.A.I. Biosciences
Raised in a province of China where high-quality education and healthcare were inaccessible to all, Sophie learned from an early age that competing to win in science was her best shot at broadening her horizons and making an impact on the world. She started competing in math and science at the age of seven, was recruited to the national science team, and discovered an anti-aging compound at the age of 16. After recieving her bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from MIT, she went on to earn her master of business administration degree from Harvard Business School where she was elected as the Blavatnik Fellow in Life Science Entrepreneurship to commercialize science with the support of the Harvard ecosystem.
Sophie founded B.A.I. Biosciences in 2020 and has patented over 20 proprietary molecules to treat, prevent, or cure atopic dermatitis, skin cancer, and skin aging. She embodies the spirit of an innovator through her approach to scientific discovery, molecule synthesis, problem solving, creating real value for consumers, and determination to make skincare healthcare.
Sophie and her team are bringing pharmaceutical drug discovery processes and R&D into the mix, setting the stage to invent new, efficacious molecules to prevent photoaging and treat common skin conditions. By only inventing new molecules, Sophie and B.A.I Biosciences are providing solutions to problems that no one has been able to solve in the past.
As beauty industry outsiders and without a marketer in the company, Sophie’s team created a skincare brand that allows science to do the storytelling. Pavise, its first brand, was able to achieve a profitable direct-to-consumer (DTC) business within 12 months, eschewing the traditional growth playbook, which heavily relies on marketing spend.
As an R&D company, B.A.I. Biosciences isn’t stopping at its first brand, Pavise. B.A.I. is developing molecules to treat other skin diseases and conditions. They believe medicalizing skincare by creating new treatment molecules is the best way to create efficacious treatments for skin problems.
Join us in Los Angeles, CA, for the NEXT Award and Summit on October 24, 2024 to find out who wins. Secure your space.
