How to turn a no from Ulta into a yes, even if it takes 7 years

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, co-host Sara Spruch-Feiner sits down with Kim van Haaster, founder of Bloomeffects, to discuss the brand’s seven-year journey to Ulta Beauty. Bloomeffects officially launched at the retailer in February, but the journey was years in the making — and included multiple rejections, a brand redesign and, perhaps most compellingly, a social post that transparently documented the whole process, including those rejections. On this episode, van Haaster candidly shares how Bloomeffects reworked its packaging and assortment to turn Ulta's no into a yes, what the brand changed to get into retail (including lowering some prices) and why Ulta was so worth fighting for for Bloomeffects.

Oura Health, the Finnish wearables company that has sold more than 5 million health tracker rings, is betting on women’s health with the launch of its first-ever proprietary large language model designed specifically for women.  “We know historically that women have been underrepresented when it comes to a lot of [medical and pharmaceutical] research,” Tanvi Jayaraman, MD, clinical lead of health AI at Oura, told Glossy. “We want to change that narrative when it comes to women's health.” LLMs are the brains behind AI chatbots, including Oura’s in-app Advisor chat where users can ask general wellness questions, specifics about their personal health data or in-depth medical questions.  “Women have been searching for answers [about our health and bodies on the internet] for just as long as the research has been done,” she said. “The answers that [women are] looking for are really disparate and scattered. They're on a niche Reddit forum, or they're kind of word-of-mouth, so a lot of [what we learn online is] hypothesis-driven, data-gathering one-offs.” Starting last year, Dr. Jayaraman’s team of board-certified clinicians began “training” Oura’s new LLM with only the best data and studies available. This is juxtaposed against many other LLMs, which are trained on the internet at large, which can result in hearsay and causality connections being learned as fact, Dr. Jayaraman said.   “[When we’re able to] pick and choose the right training data, the right sources, the right guidelines for women's health, then you can start to push away some of that noise [from the internet],” she said. “Of course, we have a long way to go when it comes to the actual research, but you have to start somewhere.”  Dr. Jayaraman represents a new type of physician who bridges medicine, artificial intelligence and product strategy.  After medical school at Stanford, she worked on AI strategy projects at Bain & Company, working for global diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies, then on Apple’s clinical team, where she worked on next-gen digital health tools. She joined Oura last year.  Dr. Jayaraman joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss Oura’s new women-focused LLM, the future of AI-powered wellness chatbots and more.

As influencer marketing evolves beyond one-off paid posts, brands are finding new ways to build relationships that last and go deeper than a hashtag-sponsored post. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Pop editor Sara Spruch-Feiner is joined by Kimberly Ho, founder and CEO of Evereden, to discuss why her $100 million Gen Alpha–focused skin-care brand is giving equity — not just transactional deals — to three teenage creators. The initiative, called Generation E, launches in tandem with the brand's nationwide Sephora expansion and reflects Ho’s belief that the next phase of brand-building means inviting the next generation inside the company, not just in front of the camera. Though it is not unheard of for brands to give equity to creators — for example, Alix Earle had equity in Poppi when it sold to Pepsi for nearly $2 billion — Evereden may be the first to give ownership to a 14-, 15- and 17-year-old. The discussion explores why Evereden chose to give these three creators equity, even though, as Ho said, "We can fully afford a broad paid influencer program." Ho also shares how the young girls will be brought inside the brand and how this model reflects what Gen Alpha wants from the brands it chooses to endorse.

There’s a new chapter in President Donald Trump's ongoing tariff rollercoaster.   In April of 2025, President Trump unveiled his reciprocal tariff plan, which stacked new tariffs onto existing duties to raise overall import taxes as high as 145% for certain countries. The “Liberation Day” announcement left the beauty, fashion and wellness industries struggling to properly plan for 2025 and beyond.  These tariffs have been a major source of revenue for the Federal government. In January, the U.S. collected more than $30 billion in duties, more than double the amount generated in January of 2025.  Last week, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court struck down these tariffs on the grounds that they were ordered under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The SCOTUS ruling doesn’t say that Trump cannot enact tariffs, just that IEEPA doesn't explicitly give the president that power.  This rollback has caused ripples throughout our focus industries, with brand leaders wondering what happens next and whether businesses can expect refunds on the tariffs struck down by SCOTUS. On Tuesday, House Democrats announced plans to unveil a bill on March 2 outlining how businesses can recoup these illegal tariffs. The Senate Committee on Finance estimates that the government collected about $175 billion in tariffs under IEEPA since April 2025.  Immediately after the SCOTUS ruling, President Trump signed an executive order imposing a blanket 10% percent tariff on imported goods. On Saturday, he said he would raise it to 15%, but as of Wednesday, at the time this podcast was recorded, U.S. Custom and Border Protection had replaced Trump’s IEEPA tariffs with a 10% global import charge. It’s unclear if it will be changed to 15% soon.  On Tuesday, during the State of the Union address, President Trump called the SCOTUS ruling “unfortunate” and said that the “type of money we’re taking in is saving our country.” He said the U.S. would soon have to “make a new deal that could be far worse” for companies and countries as the administration is “testing alternative legal statutes” which are “a little more complex but probably a little bit better” than IEEPA. He added that “congressional action would not be necessary” to reinstate similar tariffs.  In the meantime, brands have been left to navigate a quickly changing landscape. In today’s episode, Glossy Beauty Podcast host Lexy Lebsack is joined by senior fashion reporter Danny Parisi and senior beauty reporter Emily Jensen to unpack the latest tariff news and share how brands are responding. Both Parisi and Jensen covered the tariff rollback earlier this week for Glossy’s beauty and fashion verticals.

On this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Pop editor Sara Spruch-Feiner is joined by Catherine D’Aragon, CEO of First Aid Beauty, to discuss the brand’s recent rebrand — its first in its near-20-year lifespan — and its decision to partner with Team USA ahead of the Winter Olympics. The conversation comes at a time when beauty brands are increasingly showing up at the Olympics — from athlete partnerships and product seeding (First Aid gifted all Team USA members) to behind-the-scenes content and performance-focused skin care. Brands including Fenty Beauty, L'Oréal Paris and Glossier have previously activated around the Olympics, as has First Aid Beauty's parent company, Procter & Gamble. Procter & Gamble also owns Gillette Venus, which is sponsoring U.S. Figure Skating athletes Alysa Liu,  Isabeau Levito, and Starr Andrews. The discussion also explores why beauty brands are increasingly turning to athletes, how First Aid Beauty is positioning itself around simplicity and skin "support" in a crowded skin-care market, and how the brand plans to translate a global sporting moment into long-term relevance.

Injectable peptide therapy, a controversial wellness trend that caught fire online in 2025, shows no signs of slowing down in 2026 despite an overwhelming lack of safety data. Peptides, especially “research peptides” like BPC-157 and TB-500, have been hailed by famous podcasters, biohackers, and longevity gurus as a miracle cure for just about anything that ails you, from torn ligaments and gut issues to curbing wrinkles and dull skin. There are several well-studied, FDA-approved peptides available today, such as insulin and GLP-1s like Ozempic and Wegovy, but that’s just a sliver of the peptide pie. There are thousands more with glowing online reviews, but scant scientific data, that can be procured online or through longevity clinics. Mixes of various peptides, called “peptide stacks,” often come with clever names like the ‘'wolverine stack’ or ‘glow protocol’, while others have earned names like ‘Barbie peptide’ for their ability to tan the skin without the sun. These popular stacks are not FDA-approved, so they’re distributed online as 'research peptides' that are meant for in-lab research, not human use — a workaround for their gray market status. To find out more, host Lexy Lebsack sat down with two experts on the topic. First up was NYT’s David Dodge (8:42), who walked us through the rise of peptide therapy online. He published an article for NYT in November titled “The internet loves peptide therapy. Is it really a miracle cure?” Lebsack also interviews McGill’s Jonathan Jarry (29:35), who wrote an article in late 2023 — well ahead of a rush of online articles — called “The human lab rats injecting themselves with peptides.” Jarry walks us through the hard science, and lack thereof, of many popular stacks, ahead.

With the new year, changes are afoot at TikTok. On January 22, the U.S. version of the app sold for approximately $14 billion to an investor group that includes Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and investment firm MGX. It's yet to be seen how these changes will impact TikTok Shop, which has become an e-commerce behemoth. In December 2025, Wired reported that the social commerce platform had grown to rival eBay in scale, estimating that it sold $19 billion worth of products globally between July and September of last year. Even before these most recent changes, as TikTok Shop has matured, brands have been rethinking how they work with creators. In this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, hosted by Pop editor Sara Spruch-Feiner, Glossy reporter Zofia Zwieglinska unpacks her recent story exploring what’s currently driving sales on TikTok Shop — from replicable video formats to product bundles to AI — and how those shifts are redefining influencer marketing.

Over the last week, the beauty industry has seen the closure of three major makeup brands: CoverFX and Mally Beauty are shuttering, while Pat McGrath Labs, once valued at $1 billion, is headed to bankruptcy. This comes on the heels of unexpected 2025 closures that included Ami Colé, Drew Barrymore’s Flower Beauty, REN Clean Skincare, Apostrophe telehealth skincare and Gwyneth Paltrow’s mass line Good.clean.goop. At the helm of two of these brands, CoverFX and Mally Beauty, is AS Beauty CEO Joey Shamah, the founder and former CEO of E.l.f. Cosmetics. “We’ve been coined as a purchaser of distressed assets [at AS Beauty], but we’re not only buying [brands in] distress,” Shamah told Glossy. “We look at them in three buckets. Distressed or challenged is definitely one of them, a second one is divestitures, … and then the third way is similar, but different, where private equity funds have invested in a company, and their funds are sunsetting, so they’re looking to exit.” AS Beauty was founded in 2019 by Shamah and three co-founders. It is the parent company of CoverFX and Mally Beauty, as well as Laura Geller, Julep and Bliss. While the latter two were sunset this past week, Laura Geller has grown more than 10x to over $300 million in sales, Julep has been the No. 1 selling eyeshadow brand on Amazon for several consecutive years, and Bliss has evolved into a multi-category lifestyle brand, according to AS Beauty. In total, AS Beauty’s annual revenue is around $500 million, Shamah told Glossy. Shamah is also the founder and operator of Fit for Life, a fitness equipment licensing company behind brands like GAIAM, New Balance and Fila. AS Beauty purchased Mally Beauty and CoverFX in 2021 and 2022 from investment firms Beauty Visions and L Catterton Partners, respectively. In today’s episode, Shamah joins the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss the decision to shutter CoverFX and Mally Beauty — at least for now, we learned — and the economic pressure that led to the decision. He also discussed the challenges of running an underperforming brand, the warning signs that a brand is in distress, and the way an operator comes to the decision to sell, shutter or file bankruptcy.

Ulta Beauty is doubling down on the wellness category. “We’ve been on the journey with wellness since 2021 when we launched the wellness shop at Ulta Beauty, and we’ve learned so much about the category,” Laura Beres, vp of wellness at Ulta Beauty, told Glossy. “Wellness continues to grow in the market, and importantly, our guests just continue to demand more of it. … This is really an evolution of the Wellness Shop.” Launching next week, the retailer is rolling out a pilot program called “Wellness by Ulta Beauty,” a shop-in-shop boutique concept piloted in four U.S. stores. It will include an education-focused wall, gondolas, end caps and a sampling table, all staffed by specially trained wellness advisors. “This is much larger [than our existing Wellness Shop]: It’ll be about 475 square feet in the store, which is a significant experience [for Ulta]. And it will have some space for guests to be able to really explore and navigate in a way that gives them that sense of calm and peace throughout the store,” Beres said. The boutiques will be located in Columbus, Ohio; Short Pump, Virginia; Peabody, Massachusetts; and Naperville, Illinois. Beres joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to discuss the launch, how brands can participate, and what’s coming next for Ulta Beauty’s continued wellness expansion. Listen in now, then learn more in Glossy’s latest Ulta Strategies story on the launch.

After a few sleepy years, beauty M&A had a gangbuster 2025, including three deals worth more than a billion each, leading many insiders to speculate on whether the momentum can continue in 2026. “We were excited to see what we saw last year; M&A had become so dormant for a while, we were getting a little concerned,” said Kimber Maderazzo, professor of marketing at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School and former Proactiv and L’Oréal Group executive. “But I think we’ll see something different [this year].” In 2025, E.l.f. Beauty purchased Hailey Bieber’s Rhode for $1 billion in May. Then in June, men’s care brand Dr. Squatch was acquired by Unilever for $1.5 billion, and L’Oréal Group bought clinical skin-care brand Medik-8 for approximately $1.1 billion. “When you see big deals like that, it sends a message out to private equity that strategics are looking for big, big brands that will last over time,” Maderazzo said. “And when we look at the history [of beauty M&A], a lot of those brands [acquired in the past] didn’t.” In this week’s episode of The Glossy Beauty Podcast, host Lexy Lebsack sits down with Maderazzo to discuss the new acquisition rulebook, as she sees it, what strategics are looking for today and what we can expect in 2026.  Lebsack also taps Maderazzo to share her “2026 in and out” prediction list and an insider glimpse into the trends and topics most important to the beauty-industry-focused graduate students she teaches today.