801 Tisha Thompson: Founder & CEO of LYS Beauty

0:00I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be.

0:09Kara Goldin:You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. It's honestly staggering that even in 2026, so many small business owners are still making post office runs or stuck paying for expensive postage meter leases.

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1:54Kara Goldin:I used to block out time every week just for post office runs. Now I handle everything from my desk in a fraction of the time. Stamps.com has genuinely changed how I run my business and I'm not exaggerating when I say it saved me hours every single week. Right now, you can try stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. Go to stamps.com and use code CARA to get 60 days risk-free. 60 days gives you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every shipment. That's stamps.com, code CARA. That's stamps.com, code CARA. This message is a paid partnership with Dell Technologies. Hey everyone, Kira here.

2:45Kara Goldin:Have you been waiting for the perfect time to upgrade your tech? Good news, the wait is over. Dell Tech Day's annual sales event is here and they're celebrating their best customers with fantastic deals on the latest PCs, like the Dell 14 Plus with Intel Core Ultra processors. They've also got incredible perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, premium support, price match guarantee, and more. And while you're upgrading your PC, you may as well go all out because they're also offering huge deals on their premium suite of monitors and accessories. And you know what that means. That's right.

3:24Kara Goldin:You can get a whole new setup with amazing savings. Clearly, this is a sale you don't want to miss. Visit dell.com slash deals. That's dell.com slash deals. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Daily Look. There's something about a new year that makes me want to reset, clear things out, get organized, and yes, refresh my wardrobe. But between hosting this podcast and actually living life, I don't have time to shop. I'm officially done with those I have nothing to wear mornings and that's exactly why I love Daily Look. In 2026, I'm leaning into ease, confidence, and great style without the hassle and Daily Look makes that effortless.

4:19Kara Goldin:I'm pretty particular about what I wear, so a random algorithm isn't for me. What I love about Daily Look is that you're paired with a real personal stylist who actually gets your style. And when sweater weather hits, somehow they send exactly what I want before I even realize I need it. Daily Look is the number one highest rated premium personal styling service for women. You get a dedicated stylist who curates up to 12 premium pieces based on your body type, style, and lifestyle, all to try at home, on your schedule. No shopping, no pressure. Keep what you love, send back the rest with free shipping both ways.

5:08Kara Goldin:Honestly, I'm obsessed. The quality is great, the styles are spot on, and my stylist finally broke me out of my black t-shirt routine. I open my closet now and I actually feel excited about what to wear. It's time to get your own personal stylist with Daily Look. Head to dailylook.com to take your style quiz and use code CARAGOlden for 50 % off your first order. Once again, that's dailylook.com and use code CARAgolden for 50 % off your first order. Today's episode is sponsored by Found. Ask any small business owner. Finances get messy fast. A bank account here, bookkeeping software there, invoicing and tax tools stacked on top of each other, before you know it, you're paying for too many tools and still unsure where your business really stands.

6:12Kara Goldin:That's why there's Found. Found brings your essential financial tools together in one place. Banking, bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax-related tasks, all built directly into a business checking account. No jumping between systems, no unnecessary friction. What really stands out to me as how found focuses on the areas that cause the most headaches for small business owners, expense categorization, budgeting, invoicing, and tax prep, and makes them automatic. Your expenses are tracked as you go, your finances stay organized, and you spend less time managing money and more time building your business.

6:58Kara Goldin:If I could go back to when I was starting my business, found would have been at the top of my list for sure. Take back control of your business today. Open a found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D.com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member FDIC. Join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with found. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Today, I'm so excited to be joined by Tisha Thompson, who is the founder and CEO of LYS Beauty, one of the fastest growing clean beauty brands seen at Sephora and really a true disruptor in the space.

7:51Kara Goldin:I absolutely love the products and had noticed the packaging even before Teach's team had reached out. So I was so, so excited. What I didn't know was what LYS stood for, which is love yourself, which is so awesome, especially in today's day and age. Everyone needs a little bit of that. So in 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic, with a bold mission to prove that clean beauty can be high performance, inclusive, and accessible to all, Tisha decided to launch the first Black-owned clean makeup brand to debut at Sephora. And that is no small feat, especially when you think about the timing and what was going on during that time.

8:43Kara Goldin:So going viral on TikTok with products that I'll let Tisha speak to, but more than two decades of experience, Tisha had been a makeup artist, an executive, product developer, you name it. And then she decided LYS is that it is the time to go forward with this. Five years nearly, or I guess by the time this episode airs, we'll have just crossed over the five-year mark, which is so exciting. I want to hear all about the journey, but also I heard there's a story about drunk texting somewhere along the way. I'm dying to hear all about that, if you don't mind. So Tisha, welcome to the Kara Golden Show.

9:31Kara Goldin:So excited to meet you. Nice to meet you and thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. This message is a paid partnership with Dell Technologies. Hey, everyone. Kara here. Have you been waiting for the perfect time to upgrade your tech? Good news. The wait is over. Dell Tech Day's annual sales event is here, and they're celebrating their best customers with fantastic deals on the latest PCs, like the Dell 14 Plus with Intel Core Ultra processors. They've also got incredible perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, premium support, price match guarantee, and more. And while you're upgrading your PC, you may as well go all out because they're also offering huge deals on their premium suite of monitors and accessories.

10:20Kara Goldin:And you know what that means. That's right. You can get a whole new setup with amazing savings. Clearly, this is a sale you don't want to miss. Visit dell.com slash deals. That's dell.com slash deals.

10:37Kara Goldin:Today's episode is sponsored by Found. Ask any small business owner. Finances get messy fast. A bank account here, bookkeeping software there, invoicing and tax tools stacked on top of each other. Before you know it, you're paying for too many tools and still unsure where your business really stands. That's why there's Found. Found brings your essential financial tools together in one place. Banking, bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax-related tasks, all built directly into a business checking account. No jumping between systems, no unnecessary friction. What really stands out to me is how Found focuses on the areas that cause the most headaches for small business owners.

11:29Kara Goldin:expense categorization, budgeting, invoicing, and tax prep, and makes them automatic. Your expenses are tracked as you go, your finances stay organized, and you spend less time managing money and more time building your business. If I could go back to when I was starting my business, found would have been at the top of my list for sure. Take back control of your business today, open a Found account for free at found.com. That's F-O-U-N-D.com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member FDIC. Join the hundreds of thousands who have already streamlined their finances with Found.

12:20Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Daily Look. There's something about a new year that makes me want to reset, clear things out, get organized, and yes, refresh my wardrobe. But between hosting this podcast and actually living life, I don't have time to shop. I'm officially done with those I-have-nothing-to-wear mornings, and that's exactly why I love Daily Look. In 2026, I'm leaning into ease, confidence, and great style without the hassle, and Daily Look makes that effortless. I'm pretty particular about what I wear, so a random algorithm isn't for me. What I love about Daily Look is that you're paired with a real personal stylist who actually gets your style.

13:14Kara Goldin:and when sweater weather hits, somehow they send exactly what I want before I even realize I need it. Daily Look is the number one highest rated premium personal styling service for women. You get a dedicated stylist who curates up to 12 premium pieces based on your body type, style, and lifestyle, all to try at home, on your schedule. No shopping, no pressure, keep what you love, send back the rest with free shipping both ways. Honestly, I'm obsessed. The quality is great. The styles are spot on. And my stylist finally broke me out of my black t-shirt routine. I open my closet now and I actually feel excited about what to wear.

14:06Kara Goldin:It's time to get your own personal stylist with Daily Look. Head to dailylook.com to take your style quiz and use code CARAGOLDEN for 50 % off your first order. Once again, that's dailylook.com and use code CARAGOLDEN for 50 % off your first order. Absolutely. So for listeners just discovering and hearing about LYS Beauty, how do you describe the brand? I describe the brand as a place that has created products for anyone who's looking for a community that celebrates you being authentically you. I think after spending nearly two decades in the beauty space, both as a makeup artist and a beauty executive, I saw how beauty and the category itself could make people feel inferior, feel like they couldn't belong, maybe not necessarily feel like it was okay to be themselves, but really using makeup.

15:11And I've seen it. People have asked me firsthand as a makeup artist to make them look like someone else versus embracing makeup to love themselves and to be their most, you know, authentic self and to use it as a form of self-expression or therapy. And so love yourself means just that. And so we really prioritize clean, high-performance makeup. All of our products do more than one thing. I, you know, am a mother, you know, a CEO, you know, and for me, like I wanted to create a brand that works as hard as we all do. And so Everything does more than one thing. They're all hybrid products. So they're both makeup and skincare all in one.

15:52And they're easy to use, right? Like so many of us want the look that a makeup artist could give us, but we don't have the ability to have a makeup artist at home with us every day. So how do we achieve that? You know, there's a lot of people who say, I don't know how to do my makeup. And so how do we simplify it? How do we create products that are so easy to do at home, but give you the same results that you would get with the makeup art. So we kind of cut out some of the steps and we do things that are multitasking and routine based to really get you that, you know, that look at home in the comfort of your own home.

16:26So LYS really is designed to work for, you know, everyone looking for something that or someone who wants to be seen and represented. So I'm really excited to have the brand. It's been an exciting movement. As people say, we're not just a makeup brand, we are a movement And we're definitely being a little bit disruptive out here to try to change that narrative that, you know, we have to unlearn with the old standards of beauty.

16:54Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. Everyone who has started a company, maybe they have this idea, but then you have to name the company, right? And some people use naming agencies. Other people dream up the brand. And how did the name LYS come to you? For me, I think it was really kind of a personal love letter to myself, a self-reflection. I grew up as a military child. Both my mom and dad served in the Army. And I moved all around since I was born, every three or four years to a new city and having to make new friends and go to a new school. And I think that naturally came with this chameleon effect that I had growing up as a child and constantly, you know, trying to fit into different scenarios and never fully understanding and learning who I was.

17:52and so it was something that it wasn't until I was well into my 20s before I really started to embrace this ideation of you know what is it like to embrace and love who you are whether it be my natural hair or you know being accepting of you know me being a plus-size woman like all of these things that I had to really learn because you know the industry itself didn't really fuel or you know, foster that. And so it became this originally this aspirational conversation of, you know, you know, what would be great to do this, you know, this, you know, philosophical approach. But I think after five years in this journey, it's now more of an instructional approach.

18:40It's less about either like try to love yourself and it's like, okay, this is what you're going to do to love yourself. It's really more of a mandate. And I think I've personally learned on the front end of this, and I'm still on this learning journey. I'm still a student of loving yourself every single day. But it just has definitely elevated my confidence and allowed me to walk with my head held high, feeling like I deserve to be in these rooms as I scale and grow, feeling worthy of the success that I'm having, feeling like I belong in rooms that maybe have beauty founders that aren't traditionally like look like me and it's not as common.

19:21And you're more of, you know, the, you know, rare approach versus like the majority. And so how do you feel like you belong? How do you feel like you fit in and knowing that you belong there? And so I think loving yourself for me is this instructional approach. And it's something that I'm so excited to have other people on this journey with me that have interacted and become a part of our community. And we're kind of all lockstep holding hands together as we all grow to just be more confident humans.

19:52Kara Goldin:You've done a lot of different things prior to starting LYS. Did you always have this dream that you were going to found a company? No, I can't say. I mean, I think it was later in life that it was something that I started to be like, man, I got the itch for this. But you know, I was a makeup artist and that's what I wanted to do. But, you know, my parents being military and they were just like, we're going to go to college. We're going to get a real job. And, you know, because I think, you know, almost 25, 30 years ago, that was not as romanticized as being a makeup artist is today. And I think it was kind of deemed as you got to live in California or New York.

20:34And, you know, the era that my family grew up, my parents grew up in, And they really just didn't, you know, see that as a way to fully like have the ability to sustain yourself. It's like they don't want they didn't want me to be like a starving artist, if you will. It was just like, OK, like, let's go. Let's get a job. You know, work your nine to five. You can do that on the side. And that's, you know, kind of what I did. And so I went to school and then I did makeup and fostered it on the side. And so makeup became my side hustle. And I did finance and accounting as my full time job, oddly enough.

21:04But I think it really laid a foundation and established a lot of business acumen for me. And I learned a lot of things about sales and operations. And it really helped me understand business. And then being able to then marry that with my professional side, you know, artistry side, it allowed me to see things from a different lens. And so I ended up doing finance for beauty brands. And that's how I got into the beauty side. And then eventually I shifted over into the marketing and product development side. And that was really fostering my artistry skills and taking, you know, product performance and being able to use that from a lab perspective to then develop the products.

21:44And having that 360 view now, right, as an artist and, you know, obviously as a consumer already, but then as a developer and the business leader, it gave me a full purview. And I always say it was like my boot camp. For about 15 years, I did that. and you know it's really expensive it's easy to start a beauty brand I tell people it's it's it's easy to the barrier to entry is extremely low but the cost to scale is very expensive and it's very challenging to do and it's a highly competitive market and so for me it was one of those things where I didn't come for money and I didn't have those resources and so it was never something that I felt was truly attainable.

22:28And I, you know, I just, you know, I was really good at leading and owning, even though it wasn't my own brand, just really good at being a really great executive. And, you know, it wasn't until 2019 that I lost my dad. And unfortunately, that just kind of shifted my whole perspective of what was important in the right way to proceed in life and And understanding that, you know, if you have a dream, if you have a passion, if you have a vision, if you have something that you think that you can really give a shot, like, you know, shame on me, you know, if I don't take that chance to like see if I can make this happen.

23:09And so, yeah, my dad left me a little bit of money and not a lot, but just enough that I was just like, I think I'm going to try this. I think I really, I have something to say and people need to hear it. And yeah, I decided to start LYS and haven't looked back since.

23:27Kara Goldin:I love that story and investing in yourself, too. So and loving yourself. So it's it all kind of goes full circle there. But there's also another story where you cocktail texted, drunk texted, whatever it was, some Sephora, I don't know if it was executives or the company. I'd love to hear that story. Oh, my gosh. I always tell the story. So, you know, I had this concept of LYS and this big dream of this amazing brand that I really felt needed to come to life. And it was during a really difficult time in the country during the pandemic. And there was a lot of challenges, a lot of civil unrest, and there was just a lot going on.

24:22And I remember having my brand and seeing this massive support around Black ownership in general across the country and in all verticals and people championing it and really getting behind, hey, how do we really positively quantify equity and be inclusive and really help right some of these wrongs and challenges and be on the right side of history? and I think I had had a glass of wine. I'd seen something very frustrating online and I was like, really had a lot of imposter syndrome at the time, not feeling like this brand would be worthy or that I could do it or that anyone would even answer me to even to allow me to have space on a shelf and shame on me for feeling that way then, but it's transparent in how I felt.

25:16And I had had a glass of wine And I remember thinking like, why can't I have my brand? And I saw something very frustrating, probably on social and online at the time. And I said, I'm just going to reach out to Sephora and I'm going to just tell them about my really great idea. And I remember going on LinkedIn, I'll never forget it, and just guessing all of the handles and the naming extensions and like picked all the people that I think could be a decision maker. And I just shot my shot. And I just sent it was like over 10 or 11 executives on that email at Sephora. And I was just like a beautifully written cover letter with my deck attached and just pitching the brand and just shot my shot and said, hey, like, you don't have anything like this in your stores.

26:04And I think there's a huge opportunity for a brand like LYS at Sephora. And I didn't expect a call back at all. And 10 days later, I got an email. and I was just like jaw dropped like you gotta be kidding me and they're like let's take a meeting and then we had a couple meetings and then you know um just kind of it snowballed and I presented the brand formally and and they made the decision to bring LYS into Sephora and it it was just a mind-blowing experience because I had been in this industry at that time over 15 years. So I had pitched, you know, my former life where I used to be retailers.

26:49And that was, I mean, it's a very challenging process. And typically it's always done in person. And it's usually several meetings before you kind of get thing over the goal. And so by having to do it during the pandemic, you know, everything was done virtually. I had launched Sephora, had my brand live with them. And, you know, before I formally met any of them was probably almost two years because the world was so different. We did everything virtually because we were in lockdown, essentially. So it was just a different time, but it was really an exciting time. And I always joke and say I'd rather be lucky than smart.

27:28But I think in that instance, I was both lucky and smart. I was smart for reaching out and shooting my shot. And I was lucky that, you know, I reached out at the right time. And, you know, I filled a void that they were looking for in a white space at Sephora. And it's been well, well received. I mean, we launched the brand with four months, what we thought was four months of inventory, and we sold out in 10 days. So it was very well received at the onset, which was great for all of us to see.

28:00Kara Goldin:That's incredible. Do you think that they were looking for a brand like yours or do you think that your email, DM, whatever, ended up kind of igniting this conversation internally? You know what I mean? Like where it's like, Like, she's right. I mean, do you think you sold it to them? Or do you think that they were like, oh, we've been talking about this. What do you think was going on there? I mean, I think the executives and the merchandising team at Sephora are so brilliant in that they're always looking for the next best thing. And so I think that when they saw a spark in what I wrote, I think was just definitely like, it's worth a meeting.

28:51I wouldn't say that, you know, that was like, okay, this is for sure a brand that we're going to take. I think it just was enough to spark a meeting. And listen, I think they probably don't take a lot of meetings so that I should give myself more credit and that that's still an accomplishment in itself. But I would say, and having had conversations with them post then and, you know, knowing them personally now, that I think what sold it was meeting me after, right? Like knowing that, okay, yeah, this is a great brand and Sephora are really great at brand building. But I think that, okay, knowing her leadership, her executive acumen, her experience, both as a makeup artist and as a business executive already, I think I, and they have expressed, felt like a more sure bet in that, hey, this brand can work really well in our ecosystem.