Veteran exec Jaimee Holmes unpacks ‘eye patch gate’ and why innovation spurred Fel Beauty’s quick Sephora sell out

0:07Ashley D. Smith: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Glossy Beauty Podcast, a show about the business of beauty and wellness. I'm your host, Glossy's West Coast correspondent, Lexi Lebsack. Over the past week, the internet has been ablaze discussing the beauty industry's biggest controversy of the year. From social media to global news outlets, everyone is talking about something that's been dubbed eye patch gate. In case you missed it, in mid-September, several beauty brands, including Fenty Beauty, Glow Recipe, and Huda Beauty, began to tease the release of products that appeared to be almost identical. A dispenser that twisted to reveal a freshly sliced hydrogel eye mask.

0:52Ashley D. Smith: Super smart and meant to be a first-of-its-kind innovation until everyone launched all at once. Fenty and Glow Recipe made jokes on social media about it and continued their launches, while Huda Beauty pulled the product from production. So what should the industry learn from this? I don't say lightly that today's guest is the perfect person to talk about the role of innovation and IP ownership in the industry today. My guest is Jamie Holmes, a veteran beauty executive who got her start at Sephora, followed by Benefit, then Too Faced Cosmetics, where she was an integral part of bringing one of the top selling mascaras of all time to the market back in 2013.

1:36Ashley D. Smith: You know I'm talking about Better Than Sex Mascara. She's also held executive roles at Kendo Brands, Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, and L 'Oreal-backed Timeline Longevity. About a year ago, she struck out on her own and launched Feel Beauty with just one product called Kissy Lips, a$22 lip and cheek hybrid that's since gone on to sell out at Sephora several times. In today's episode, Jamie shares her hot takes about Eyepatchgate, shares very dynamic career lessons, and she walks us through what it took to launch a brand that, just 10 months in, has already sold tens of thousands of units at Sephora. Here's my conversation with Jamie Holmes, founder of Feel Beauty.

2:28Jaimee Holmes: Jamie, welcome to the show. Hi, Lexi. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here.

2:33Ashley D. Smith: Yeah, it is truly my pleasure. You've been such a force in the beauty industry. We're going to get into a lot of the really cool stuff that you've done and the really cool brand you're working on now with Feel Beauty. It's so funny though, that we're sitting down to have a conversation about innovation after all of the drama unfolded at the end of September. We got together for our pre-pro meeting and it was just unfolding. And yeah, it's just, it's so interesting. That same novel, Eyepatch Grinder, from all these US brands at once, in case you missed it, the brands were Fenty, Glow Recipe, Huda Beauty.

3:07Ashley D. Smith: They all came out with basically the same product all at once. Jamie, you're an expert. How does this happen?

3:12Jaimee Holmes: It happens in a few ways is the honest answer to that. And I'll say, you know, in the last role that I was in before I decided to step out into building something of my own, I got a real helicopter lens into what was starting to happen within the industry. And it was truly this. So beyond what we're seeing in real time in the moment with these eye masks, it was happening long before this. And I think it happens in a couple of different ways. You know, sometimes manufacturers create something really interesting that is an innovation and they share it and they present it to brands. Sometimes there's not always exclusivity in those conversations or in those previews.

3:51And so when something new and interesting comes to be, then brands get excited about it.

3:58Jaimee Holmes: Retailers get excited about it. And unfortunately, that can sometimes create duplicity. And unfortunately, sometimes it creates it in a moment when it's unexpected like this. But like I said, in the last role that I was in leading merchandising at Goop, I was really seeing this across every single category. So many brands presenting quite literally the same product from the same suppliers, same presentations, but sometimes there might be a price difference of up to$100 between the two. And, you know, I would get the samples from the same suppliers to my doorstep and I would review them and evaluate them.

4:38Jaimee Holmes: And it just gave me a lot of pause as someone in the industry for 20 years and a lot of question around what I myself was maybe contributing in all of that. What impact was I having at that point and supporting it in any way? And ultimately, it's what led me to step away and create something of my own called Feel Beauty, really, truly rooted in innovation and in creating products that we can say with a lot of honesty and integrity don't exist in the world. No one else is doing this.

5:15Ashley D. Smith: Sure. It's so interesting. So you were at Goop, you were at a retailer, and you were seeing all of these products come in. So when we think about this component, the eye mask grinder, and these brands, they seemed surprised on social media that this was happening. So I'm curious as to, as an expert, what role do retailers play? What role do brands, manufacturers, what role does everyone play in this? Because it seems to have surprised the brands, but I can't imagine it surprised anyone else.

5:44Jaimee Holmes: Yeah, I think it really comes down to, again, a question around exclusivity, meaning these brands likely received some degree of the innovation in a very similar capacity. Now, was every single package exactly the same? Were the formulas exactly the same? I don't know, because I didn't test them myself and evaluate them. But I think, you know, it can work both ways. It can actually work threefold, quite frankly. Sometimes it can start with the manufacturer who's created something really great, who presents it to brands in their portfolio. And whether that's everyone in the portfolio or a select few that they think will be excited about it, sometimes it can start from that place.

6:28Jaimee Holmes: Sometimes it can also start from a place of on the retailer side and perspective where there might be interest or appetite in certain categories or a desire to innovate. Then those conversations sometimes happen with brands. What are you thinking about? Is there an opportunity or a white space for you? You know, sometimes it may start with the brands too, just a great idea through their own research or access that they might have to data and analytics that are showing them that maybe this is sort of the next trend or opportunity. It can happen really in every single way. In the case of these brands in particular and how surprised they might have been around it, I would say from an expert point of view, even though I don't know because I didn't see it and I didn't try it, likely it probably started on the manufacturing side.

7:17Jaimee Holmes: It was something that was really developed that was cool, that was interesting, and these brands got to have sort of a first look at it to then decide if it was of interest to them to pick up or not.

7:29Ashley D. Smith: Do you think that this will be a bit of a blip in the sort of pop culture realm for a moment? Or do you think there's going to be reverberations like like a lesson learned or a cautionary tale around this?

7:39Jaimee Holmes: I don't think it's a blip. I think it's a little bit of a cautionary tale. And I would say again, from my own perspective and seeing this happen pretty frequently a few years ago, I don't think this is the first time we've seen something like this. I think it's just become the loudest sort of moment around it because of how similar or maybe exactly the same these products actually are and timing because it was all happening at the same moment versus a month from now or six months from now. I think historically, it's not that this didn't exist, but it, you know, six months to a year could make a lot of difference in someone coming out with something else versus it happening within a matter of days, which is what we saw here.

8:24Ashley D. Smith: Yeah. Okay. I want to go back to your time at Goop, which I think is so interesting. You were there from 2019 to 2023, VP of beauty and wellness. What was your role there? What were you doing?

8:33Jaimee Holmes: My role was a really multifaceted one, I'll say. So when I started, it was to really build out all of our in-house brand development. So all the products that we created, that we sold around the world, launching us in great retailers like Sephora. But then it expanded to overseeing the categories in their entirety. So it was the first time since my Sephora days, I was back leading merchandising. So running 200 brands, 2 ,000 SKUs on any given day, every single category. And it was really a phenomenal experience because in so many ways, we were able to create new categories and shape them like sexual wellness and be the first to get behind it, to understand its importance and how relevant it was really for consumers, but also how important it was to educate around that with a lot of responsibility.

9:25Jaimee Holmes: But equally, I would say what I also saw was in the last year that I was there, so many brands starting to become very, very similar in their positioning, in their portfolios. And again, it's what really allowed me to sort of take a step back, evaluate the industry as a whole, evaluate my own impact on the industry and just think about how many opportunities there still really are to innovate. And there are, I think they still exist in every single category, but it takes work. It takes time and you have to really have a lot of conviction behind that to do it.

10:04Ashley D. Smith: What was inbound like at Goop with beauty and wellness brands submitting to potentially be sold?

10:10Jaimee Holmes: You know, we got requests in any and every possible way. We would have people email us directly. We would have, you know, brands say, this is a friend of mine. Could you please entertain or have a discussion with them? We'd have people go into our boutiques and beg for an opportunity to just be seen or be heard and get their products in front of someone. Really, any and always, you could imagine. Sometimes we would have people just come through the network of people that they knew somewhere in some department at Coop. And so, any and always. We tried to have a really structured process where people could submit to us through a special portal.

10:53Jaimee Holmes: Well, but I would say, look, people found their ways to us in all unique ways. And I really thought it was such a privilege also to be in a position like that, to talk to people who are building things and sometimes really inventive, innovative, imaginary things and allow them access to a platform that so many times would be the start of their journeys and where they would go next.

11:19Ashley D. Smith: Oh, yeah. Such a buzz builder. I mean, I don't know if I got a brand builder, but like, I mean, you want to be, who doesn't want to be in Goop and get their brand splashed over all of those hot spots? So interesting. Okay, so let's go back for one more second. You're working at Goop. You see all of this come in. What was the volume like? Like what percentage was innovation? What percentage was like copycats that you were getting?

11:41Jaimee Holmes: You know, I would say in the early years, percentage of innovation would be probably 60 to 70 percent really new, really different, really interesting things. I would say at the time I started to really observe what was changing and happening very differently, less of that, I would say maybe 30 percent became real, true innovation that didn't exist in other categories or other retailers. So it changed. It was impacted for sure in the time that I was there.

12:15Ashley D. Smith: Why do you think that shift happened at that moment? Like just more brands, more demand, more? I mean, how did that happen?

12:22Jaimee Holmes: All of the above. But I would also say that COVID and the impact of that changed the landscape in many ways that were unexpected, meaning it could create new and interesting category behaviors overnight because of that, because we were stuck at home and thinking about everything, our lives and how to take care of ourselves, but the importance of taking care of ourselves very differently than maybe we had before. But I think after the impact of that, when people started to go back to some sense of normalcy and back into offices, then different behaviors started to emerge. But I think, you know, for brands and categories that had experienced a really profound impact through that, meaning maybe their business exploded like 2 ,000 % overnight, and then how did that become sustainable or did it over time in the years that followed just forced everybody to start to think differently about opportunities and about business in general.

13:32Jaimee Holmes: Sometimes that meant tough decisions. Sometimes I think that meant being safer and taking less risks because of that, if you'd been impacted in any way. All of those things, I think, really started to create some of what we're seeing now, certainly.

13:51Ashley D. Smith: Okay, so you're at Goop Beauty. You are seeing this lack of innovation come in and you get this light bulb moment. Can I call it that? You absolutely can.

14:01Jaimee Holmes: Okay, great. Perfect. I think that's a nice way of describing it too. So I love that. Perfect.

14:06Ashley D. Smith: So how did, yeah, tell me what's your elevator pitch on, on feel beauty? How did it come about?

14:11Jaimee Holmes: You know, it came about in a few different ways and in the ways that I've described already with really a deep desire to have a different type of impact, to innovate and do something completely differently with a lot of integrity behind it. That was sort of like the business perspective, but there was a really deep emotional perspective and connection that started to take shape for me too. Personally, I'd gone through some loss in my own life. I lost four family members over the course of two years and my dad was the last one of those. Thank you. When that happens to you as a human being, you really are forced to take a step back and just think about everything in your life.

14:53Jaimee Holmes: First of all, you have to reconcile that. You have to find ways to heal, but you also really start to evaluate your values system, your beliefs, and just what matters to you as a person first and foremost. And so the light bulb moment came from really all of those things. And Feel Beauty was born out of this deep desire to reconnect you to unforgettable people, moments, and experiences in your life, translate those into product form. And so our first hero collection, which is called Kissy Lips, is shaped like lips because we wanted to recreate the unforgettable experience of a kiss. So to innovate and to do something differently rooted in emotion is also really, really hard.

15:41Jaimee Holmes: And so I learned that too. This was a two-year development cycle to create, it was 56 trials, which means we failed about 55 times before we succeeded to create this at all. And we didn't give up. And that requires a lot of strength of character and a lot of conviction for sure. But also, you have to believe in it emotionally, you have to love it with every fiber of your being. And so I absolutely went on that journey. But that's how Feel was born. And here we are less than a year later of introducing it out into the world. And I just feel a lot of joy and a lot of gratitude for that.

16:23Ashley D. Smith: Well, I believe it's doing very, very well in Sephora right now. How have the sales been?

16:29Jaimee Holmes: Sales have been great. So we've been beating our plan as a brand by over 200 % at this point. We have sold out of shades. Some of them repeatedly are number one shade, which is Cutie Pie. We've sold out of four times already. We sold out of three to four shades, I recall, pretty early on in our first 90 days. And so we are now on our fourth round of production, playing a little bit of catch up still because the demand has just been incredible in every way. Some of it expected, some of it not. You know, there's always surprises anytime you're building and launching something new. But the demand and the appetite and certainly just the connections we've been able to create along the way and the feedback have been wonderful.

17:13Ashley D. Smith: Can you share how many you've sold? How many units?

17:16Jaimee Holmes: So I think last time we tracked and pulled this number, it was around 35 ,000, if I recall. So that's across the entire collection. It was probably about a month ago last I checked it, but 35 ,000 was the number we're rolling to. That's amazing.

17:31Ashley D. Smith: with basically launching one SKU, eight shades, 35 ,000 units. That's insane. So you must have gone through these 56 trials and really, really made it amazing. What did those trials look like? What did you learn? What were you changing when you were going through those iterations?

17:47Jaimee Holmes: We changed everything. So I think with anything, when you start from a place of ideation, and we absolutely did. For me, it was starting with some sketches and some ideas of how I wanted this to look visually how I want it to feel aesthetically, how I want it to be applied onto the lips and cheeks directly. And so when we started, we actually envisioned a different type of texture in the experience. And what we learned through sort of the first phases of science experiments was that absolutely did not work. Not only was it a little bit unstable, it also just didn't apply beautifully. And so we were like, this is not the experience anyone is going to love.

18:31And that kind of forced the hand on packaging changes that we needed to make in terms of

18:37Jaimee Holmes: getting to this very specific shape of the lips as well, a shape that could actually work for thinner lips, fuller, more voluptuous lips. And then we had to bring in some real users and sort of testers to try this along the way as well. So I would say, you know, both sides really informed to each other in terms of formulation, but packaging, application method, delivery, all of that to perfect it, to get it to something that would still be enjoyable to use as well, something you want to use, even though it's different. We want to make sure people love it and are obsessed with it too. And so it was really the combination of all of those things combined.

19:19Ashley D. Smith: Wow. How big is your team now? Where did you make the products? What did the sort of operation side of things look like as it was coming about?

19:26Jaimee Holmes: It's a pretty baby team still from where we started in development to where we are today. There's about five of us in total. So outside of myself, we have a really brilliant packaging designer engineer. His name is Eric Frey. He's been sort of the quiet force behind the scenes of incredible packaging innovation for brands like Rode, Tatcha, Alex Earl, MPH. And he just has this really incredible gift of great product passion combined with an engineer's brain to understand and know how to solve some of these complexities that we really aspired to. We've got an incredible innovation formulator in-house that we work with.

20:09Jaimee Holmes: We have someone running media and PR for us who's been a close friend for many years. We've worked great brands together. And then we have genuinely a couple of interns helping us on the social media side, community building side. So it's a lean but mighty team. Very cool.

20:26Ashley D. Smith: And where are you making the products? And I'm assuming everything's custom, everything's sort of your IP. Is that right?

20:31Jaimee Holmes: Correct. Yeah. So it's all custom development. It's trademarked. The packaging tooling we invested in, everything is custom development. We manufacture in Canada, actually.

20:44Ashley D. Smith: Who's the customer?

20:46Jaimee Holmes: The customer, honestly, is really any and everyone who's looking for everyday, joyful, effortless, essential products. I think what we've seen in sort of the sweet spot of our consumer base, I would say 18 to 38 tends to be age demographic, predominantly female for the most part today. But we've also seen, you know, girls as young as 14 years old who might be just trying or curious about color for the very first time love and adopt into the product. We've seen women, you know, Gen X in their 50s as well say this reminds me of something familiar that I loved and used when I was a teenager or in my 20s.

21:29Jaimee Holmes: And so we've really seen broad adoption, but I would say so far today, that sweet spot has been sort of 18 to 38 and predominantly female.

21:40Ashley D. Smith: Launched into Sephora. That's very, very exciting. Where are you in store and how did that sort of come about of just launching one product and just going to Sephora straight off the bat?

21:49Jaimee Holmes: There are a lot of conversation, is the truth. Like it might look easy from the outside, but Sephora really felt like the right partner in so many ways for me, certainly from building brands with them over the course of an entire career. So they got first look into what we were building pretty early stages. I also knew for me, it was going to be really, really important when you are creating something different, that there's an in-store presence behind it, that there is discovery that can happen so that people are exposed to it, can touch and feel it very differently than just bringing something to life online.

22:25Jaimee Holmes: So it took us, you know, probably close to a year of conversations together. And they saw every stage of development along the way. My big request for them was to launch in the Beauty on the Fly section of the store, which I think is just the best place for discovery. You have to go through that section when you're going to check out. And it's just great to sort of see and be exposed to new things that you might not even be aware of or know existed. And I would say in our case, that has absolutely been a component of discovery and our success for sure.

23:02Ashley D. Smith: I mean, I'm right there with you. If anyone unfamiliar, Beauty on the Fly is the candy aisle. It is the section right by the register that you walk through. It is the part, it is the section where you want to grab something else on the way out. And the stuff that's there is always the best.

23:18Jaimee Holmes: Love it. Well said.

23:19Ashley D. Smith: Speaking of innovation, Jamie, you were at Too Faced for many, many years from 2012 to 2015. And I know you had a lot to do with Better Than Sex Mascara, which was so big, still is so big. What role did you play in that product? And what did you take away from that time there?

23:35Jaimee Holmes: I call that my special project because it was my baby in every single way. And I had the great privilege of being able to work really closely with Jared on the development of that and bringing it to life. truthfully you know we knew that we had something really exciting from an innovation point of view inspiration even onto how we decided to create a pink metallic chrome component came from a really authentic place it was me looking at jared saying this is how you dress and what you embody every single day you're wearing pink sequin jackets to work and i love that like how can we find a way to bring that to life and express who you are in some ways through the product itself.

24:20Jaimee Holmes: So we did that. And we decided on a really provocative name because we happened to be in the office one day. Jared was trying the formula and he was like, this is so amazing. It's better than sex. And like, that was it. There was no going back from that. You know, it was this, this is the name. So then I had to take it to retailers and sort of present the concept. And pretty early on, there was a lot of resistance to it just because as a brand, we didn't have any credibility in the category. We've tried once or twice before to launch things that were not great. But also, it was a category that had been dominated for more than 10 years by probably two players only.

25:04Jaimee Holmes: And so retailers saw a lot of risk in that, and they were very cautious about any desire to test it at all. We certainly got a lot of feedback on changing the name. Many, many requests for that. I thought it was way too provocative, way too provocative. And also requests even to change that beautiful pink component, which became iconic and had a life of its own. The feedback we got was make it black, make it gold, make it things that feel familiar that people can understand. And so that was really my first taste pretty young in my career of learning about conviction and perseverance and understanding when you have something that is so special and deserves to be shared with others and you have to stand behind it.

25:53So we launched it.

25:55Jaimee Holmes: And I remember saying to my friends at Sephora, this is going to be your number one mascara. I just know it. Watch, it will be. And it became that in less than two months of launching it. It became that around the world. It ultimately was the catalyst for developing innovation in every other category that followed. So it gave us a lot of credibility and a lot of freedom to do that, ultimately allowing the brand to be a great success and acquired by Estee Lauder. So it was a phenomenal time and journey. And I'm not going to say it was easy to do all of those things either, but an incredible learning for me and really a great success and something I'm so proud of.

26:36Ashley D. Smith: How do you look across the table in those meetings and say, no, we're not changing the name. No, we're not putting it in a black package.

26:44Jaimee Holmes: You just have to, is the truth. And I think there's always a way to deliver that. And there's always a way to really ensure that there's partnership. At the end of the day, when you are the brand, you bear the responsibility of that conviction to know when it's right, to know when it's worth fighting for. And when you do that and you show real partnership, like for me in those conversations, it was give me the opportunity and let me show you. If this happens, here's how we'll address it. I think you always have to be ready in the spirit of partnership to understand every scenario, to also have some understanding and some empathy from the position that they're in and be able to see it from their side.

27:32Jaimee Holmes: But more than anything, it's your brand and you have to fight for it and you have to just be prepared to really go all the way and see it through. Yeah.

27:41Ashley D. Smith: I have one more question about your CV. And I could have asked you a thousand questions because you've been so many great places, but Timeline Longevity, the L 'Oreal-backed longevity skincare company, it feels a little like you took a flyer on that one. Did you leave that job with a changed opinion about this emerging world of wellness, longevity, biotech skincare? care? I did.

28:06Jaimee Holmes: I absolutely did. And I would say, again, because of what I had experienced in my own life, really personally through losing family members, understanding and thinking about how precious life actually truly is. The convergence of what I learned through Timeline was, first of all, a brand that had something really incredible that was addressing longevity at the cellular level. Doctors, brilliant minds behind it, they'd been at it for more than 15 years by the time that I met them. And there was a really deep desire to take all of this incredible technology that they had and put it into the space of topical products.

28:49Jaimee Holmes: And so all of that I was able to do there during my time with them. But it absolutely did make me think about how important it is to incorporate ingredients and technologies that do more for you than just surface level benefits. So for Timeline, it was really about longevity and health of the skin and how we could test and show that over time to make sure that you are getting treatments right for you at every age and stage of your life for the best skin health possible. What it allowed me also, though, to realize and understand in the journey of creating my own brand with feel was if I was talking so much about emotional impact and that being at the root of everything that we do, finding ingredients that could actually really support that.

29:40Jaimee Holmes: And so we did. We found an ingredient actually that started in the supplement ingestible space, studied and proven to help boost production of endorphins and really just provide emotional impact and well-being extremely positively. So we decided to trademark that to bring it into our proprietary ingredient. There's a complex behind it that's really, really exciting. And it allows us to just have a lot of conviction and integrity behind that, that we are giving you something at an active and functional level that's emotionally going to help you feel better too, when you're using our products.

30:20Ashley D. Smith: You really did pull all of these different learnings and put them all into Feel Beauty, which is so fascinating to see how you sort of learned here, learned there, put it in there. Yeah, big congrats on Feel. What's coming next for Feel Beauty?

30:33Jaimee Holmes: We've got more to do, lots more to do. So I would say we, if you haven't seen it yet, we just launched some new additions to the Kissy Lips collection. One is a really beautiful mask format. So it's our first non-tinted version of Kissy Lips that's great for day or overnight usage. Outside of that, we've got some really exciting development in two categories upcoming. One is the highlighter category, one in the eye category. Beyond that, we've got some interesting aspirations and ideas and other categories. Body is of great interest to us. And so we're not rushing to do any and everything, but we certainly have no shortage of ideas to really, truly innovate in every single category that we aspire to be in.

31:19Ashley D. Smith: Wow. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing those new products. Jamie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Lexi. Thanks for having me. Such a privilege.

31:25Jaimee Holmes: Thank you.

31:31Ashley D. Smith: And thank you for listening to this episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. And for even more coverage on the beauty industry and more, please visit glossy.co slash beauty.