How Kylie Jenner and other self-made beauty billionaires are refashioning the cosmetics world
- Instagram and Snapchat are the word of mouth for super rich millennial cosmetic queens like Kylie Jenner and Emily Weiss
Social media has minted a new type of moneymaker: the “selfie-made billionaire”.
That’s what Natalie Robehmed of Forbes dubbed Kylie Jenner, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire ever.
Jenner’s US$1 billion net worth comes largely from her eponymous cosmetics line, Kylie Cosmetics, which launched in 2015. Three years later, revenue was an estimated US$360 million, the company worth US$900 million, Robehmed reported.
While Jenner may be one of the more extreme examples, she isn’t an anomaly – a long history of women have accrued wealth by building beauty empires. The first female self-made millionaire, Madam CJ Walker, built her fortune off a line of hair care products she developed in 1905, according to Isis Madrid of Broadly. Beauty mavens Estée Lauder and Bobbi Brown started their brands decades before the millennium.
In 2018, Jenner was a newcomer to Forbes’ richest self-made women list, along with Forbes’ other “Instagram-savvy make-up moguls” – Anastasia Soare, Huda Kattan, and Kim Kardashian West, who all also have their own beauty lines.
Then there’s Emily Weiss, founder and CEO of cult beauty brand Glossier. On March 19, the direct-to-consumer beauty brand hit unicorn status with new funding that put its value at US$1.2 billion, reported Katie Roof and Yuliya Chernova of The Wall Street Journal.
“Getting a brand known has from the beginning involved word of mouth and getting attention from an influential journalist,” said Geoffrey Jones, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the book Beauty Imagined.
Consider Estée Lauder: “She gave away 80 of her lipsticks as table gifts for a charity luncheon in the Waldorf-Astoria,” Jones said. “The rich guests then walked over to the nearby Saks Fifth Avenue to ask for it.”
In 1947, Lauder received her first major order for US$800 worth of products from Saks. She grew her business with traditional print advertising and word of mouth campaigns, believing that women who liked her products would spread the word. In 2018, the company reported US$13.68 billion in net sales and Bloomberg estimated the Lauder family to be worth US$24.3 billion.