With its bold colors and kooky frames, it's already the official eyewear sponsor of hip music festival Coachella. By October she'd opened a Los Angeles office for her new brand. Last September she flew to China, where she visited 11 factories in three cities in five days.
She started cold-calling plastics manufacturers. Ko was sure she could apply her mastery of the supply chain to the sunglasses sector. "Once I studied the industry I realized it was a dinosaur," she says. She knew the eyewear sector was almost entirely controlled by Luxottica, the Italian giant that owns retailers Sunglass Hut, LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, as well as top brands Ray-Ban, Oakley and Persol. Ko had more than 100 pairs herself and had paid upwards of $300 for most of them.
She weighed her other obsessions and chose sunglasses. She'd signed a noncompete clause, meaning she couldn't work in cosmetics for at least five years. I got paid and said farewell to my baby."Īfter a brief retirement, complete with beachside margaritas, Ko decided to get back into the game. "I didn't know a single entrepreneur who stayed on and was happy. "I wasn't going to sell a company to work for somebody," she says. She was also only 41 years old and jobless, having decided not to remain at NYX. It was a $500 million deal - sales were on track to reach $120 million that year - and as the majority owner, Ko suddenly found herself richer than she'd ever imagined. It went up at auction in 2014, and L'Oréal, the world's largest beauty conglomerate, was the highest bidder. NYX ramped up its e-commerce operation to handle demand.īland's firm took a stake in 2010, setting in motion a plan to sell the company within five years. Target, perhaps the ultimate "get" for a beauty brand looking to go mainstream. NYX tested so well in 20 that by 2009, Ko had 6 feet of space in each store - unheard of, according to Michael Eckert, the consumer-products broker hired to help NYX break in. She set her sights on Ulta Beauty, then a mostly Midwestern chain of 200 or so outlets that's like a less-pricey Ko knew that to build NYX into a mass market brand, beyond the cult world of connoisseurs and teen fanatics, she'd have to get her products into mainstream stores. NYX started sending freebies to social media stars. "We realized this is the future," she says. Once, Ko watched sales of a discontinued white eyeliner skyrocket based solely on its popularity with influential vloggers.
It was the start of what is now a lucrative industry that's turned its best-known stars, such as Vietnamese-American YouTuber Michelle Phan, into multimillionaires. At the same time, nascent video platform YouTube had given rise to a growing cadre of beauty vloggers: young people conducting makeup tutorials, unpacking their purchases or reviewing cosmetics onscreen. The economic crash of 2008 forced shoppers who had happily spent hundreds on department store makeup to seek drugstore alternatives - or, fortunately for Ko, to discover NYX. A lot of them couldn't tell the difference between a lipstick and lip liner." "These other cosmetics guys, they were old men. She pushed her suppliers to create each product to her exacting specifications.