Glow Recipe

two former L'Oréal career executives started a retail site for Korean skincare brands in 2014. Within six years they had exited the retail business, pivoted to their own brand and built it around a single hero fruit. Sarah Lee and Christine Chang met at L'Oréal career's corporate office and left together to launch Glow Recipe as an e-commerce curator of Korean skincare for Western markets. The retail model struggled on margin so the founders used two years of distribution data to identify which ingredients their customers most loved and chose Watermelon as the anchor for a new private brand, the Watermelon. Glow Sleeping Mask launched in 2017, priced at $45, sold through Sephora and became the brand's hero within 18 months.