After an early boost from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, Sheena Zadeh’s Kosas found success by tapping into minimalist makeup trends years before they became mainstream. Now she’s set her sights on international markets—and a potential sale.
In the largest shopping mall in Dubai, a three-foot-tall glowing headshot of Sheena Zadeh greets Sephora Middle East customers as they pass by a stand dedicated to her Los Angeles-based makeup brand, Kosas. In the giant portrait, Zadeh presses her startup’s hero product, a concealer tube, to her cheek—just above the tagline: “Makeup for skincare freaks.”
“I exist to make beautiful things,” Zadeh says from her home in L.A. “That’s my purpose here.”
Zadeh, 41, founded Kosas in 2015 with a few lipstick shades and limited expectations. A decade later, the business brings in $150 million in annual sales, Forbes estimates, with some 200 products in stores that span from South Beach to Saudi Arabia. A great deal of Kosas’ success—the brand has been profitable for several years—has come from capitalizing on changing cultural tides, launching novel products at the right time and a healthy dose of social media virality. The premium-priced clean beauty company found initial traction after catching Gwyneth Paltrow’s attention, then getting shelf space in her Goop stores—just as the clean beauty movement was emerging.
An often-misunderstood phrase dating back to the 1970s, the most recent iteration of clean beauty generally refers to makeup or skincare products made without potentially harmful ingredients such as parabens and sulfates. (Sephora labels products using this definition.) Most of Kosas’ makeup products—including $24 lip oils and $40 pigmented sunscreens—are meant to double as skincare items. This means its formulas are often made with premium ingredients such as hyaluronic acid, which is often found in facial serums purporting to clear blemishes.
In the eyes of investors and buyers, skincare-focused brands are particularly attractive right now, says Dan Su, an analyst at Morningstar. “For a company looking for acquisition candidates, I would think that top priority would be given to skincare given the attractive growth opportunities, the better margins and sustainable competitive positions for successful [brands],” Su elaborates.
Many of the largest mergers and acquisitions of the last few years reveal as much: In 2023, two years before Elf purchased Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand, Rhode, for $1 billion, the conglomerate acquired another clean cosmetics brand, Natrium, for $355 million.
Those are good signs for Kosas, which began exploring a potential sale last year, although Zadeh would not comment on its prospects. Whether she sells or not, Kosas’ real staying power lies in its founder’s ability to create multiple, cult-favorite products in anticipation of the next beauty trends. In the last 18 months, the business has also accelerated global expansion, with about 30% of Kosas’ total annual revenue coming from international sales—a point of pride for Zadeh, a second-generation Iranian immigrant.
A California native, Zadeh grew up in Orange County. Her father ran a grocery store before becoming a letter carrier for the USPS while her mother worked behind a Clinique beauty counter at the local mall, frequently bringing home makeup samples from other counters. In her teens, Zadeh pored over makeup books and beauty magazines and became an expert among her friends in technique and color. When leaving for college at UC Irvine to study biology, she brought a filing cabinet-sized dresser full of makeup products to dorm room.
“We had an insane amount of makeup in our house,” Zadeh remembers. “There was one drawer of all lip liners, one drawer of all eyeshadows…I thought that’s how much makeup everyone had. I thought the bathroom was meant to be used for [storage].”
Throughout college, she worked as a lab technician researching insect taxonomy, among other creatures, but pivoted away from microbiology following graduation. After noticing the rise of indie cosmetic brands such as Stila and Hard Candy, Zadeh decided to attend business school with hopes of becoming an entrepreneur. She earned her MBA from Chapman University in 2010, and over the next few years, Zadeh got married, had a daughter and started to dream up ideas for a minimalist beauty brand made from plant-based ingredients.
Zadeh says she was “focused on creating skincare formulas that doubled as makeup” from the start. Bootstrapping Kosas with about $70,000 of her own money, Zadeh approached a small research and development lab and requested her initial products be made from things such as raspberry seed oil and green tea extracts, as opposed to cheaper and easier and alternatives like synthetic blends or beeswax. “There was quite a bit of resistance [from the chemists],” she says. “What I was creating was clean beauty, but I didn’t know that yet.”
In 2015, Zadeh launched Kosas’ first four lipsticks in shades designed for people with similar complexions to her own: “For me, one of the biggest challenges in makeup was just to find a lipstick for an olive-skin person that looked natural and would look good.”
Kosas sold exclusively on its website for the first year, bringing in a few thousand dollars a month. The business stayed small until 2017, when Zadeh developed blush and highlighting products and began driving around Los Angeles, dropping samples of her products off at the doors of celebrity makeup artists. One of these lipsticks made it into the hands of Paltrow’s glam team before the actress was going to walk a red carpet, and in 2018, Goop became one of the first retailers to carry Kosas.
That same year, Zadeh developed its signature pigmented face oil, striking a chord with consumers who had recently begun opting for more dewy, natural looks. The brand soon raised money for the first time, using its $3 million Series A round to build its own in-house formulation lab. The first product to come out of the new lab was Kosas’ “revealer concealer,” which quickly received viral praise from Hailey Bieber and Kim Kardashian, among others.
“Not long after we created a deodorant and a body wash and a lip balm, but I was very much following my instincts and intuition,” Zadeh says. “What I needed for myself was a deodorant.”
In 2019, Sephora took notice and began selling Kosas products in its stores, injecting the brand with new growth. At this time and into the pandemic, consumers began to fully embrace the barely-there, “glass skin” makeup look, Morningstar’s Su says.
“Younger generations of consumers are paying much closer attention to the ingredients and to the impact on skin health,” Su continues, “So that has led to some brands riding that trend doing well.”
“It was right place, right time,” Zadeh reflects. “The marketplace itself was really starting to change.”
The appetite overseas is just as strong. Says Zadeh: “In the case of Australia and New Zealand—our first international market—they came to us.”
And customers have remained loyal. Two months after Bieber sealed her billion-dollar deal from Elf, the 28-year-old model and entrepreneur posted a seemingly innocuous “get ready with me” video on TikTok featuring almost exclusively Rhode products. One of the rare exceptions? A familiar yellow tube of Kosas concealer.
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This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
