When two friends go into business together, it’s not always a fruitful journey. But 10 years into co-founding Glow Recipe, Sarah Lee and Christine Chang are closer than ever and thriving as co-CEOs. Their similar backgrounds and shared passion for skin care helped cement their business, but it’s their commitment to real-time communication, total transparency, and being equally, fully invested in the work every single day that’s fueled their incredible success. 

Sarah Lee: We’re often asked, “What’s the secret to your partnership?” Starting a business is hard and has ended many friendships between well-meaning co-founders. Christine and I are not immune to difficult conversations and disagreement, but we keep each other grounded by being obsessive about communication — we talk dozens of times every hour, every day. Our philosophy is to disagree fast, resolve fast, and move on to the next problem. I feel fortunate that after 20 years — and 10 as co-founders — we remain very close friends.

Christine Chang: Our friendship began because we related so well to one another. Sarah and I both grew up with skin care entwined into our daily lives, watching our mothers and grandmothers carve out time to do their skin care routines. We saw how much they enjoyed and cherished caring for their skin, which was a pivotal experience for us both growing up.

I was born in South Korea and raised in Louisiana, then my family moved back to South Korea when I started middle school, which was a major culture shock. My first week back, my mother, grandmother, and aunts all took me to a Korean bathhouse, where we splashed spoiled milk on our skin and slathered yogurt all over our faces and bodies. I was confused but eventually came to understand that milk and yogurt contain lactic acid, and how that benefits the skin — so from an early age, I was learning the “why” behind skin care practices.

I returned to the U.S. for college and, after graduating, came back to South Korea to work in marketing at L’Oréal Korea, which is where I met Sarah.

Sarah Lee: I split my childhood between Seoul and Hong Kong. Like Christine, I grew up going to public bathhouses — a popular Korean pastime — with my mother and grandmother. As a young girl, watching my mom meticulously go through every step of her skin care ritual deeply imprinted on me and seeded my love affair with skin care. My mom and I bonded over our nightly DIY treatments, even if I didn’t fully understand what she had planned. I remember the first time she put slices of cucumber on my face, I asked her, “Why are you putting lunch on my skin?” I remember her patiently explaining that there’s always a reason for each treatment and that cucumbers help brighten and even out skin tone.

When I began my career and wanted to pursue something I was truly passionate about, beauty was a natural choice.

Christine Chang: Sarah and I met in 2005 when I joined the marketing team at L’Oréal Korea in Seoul. Sarah had already been working at L’Oréal for six months and we became fast friends, then our careers took a parallel path when we both moved to New York City a few years later — Sarah went to work at L’Oréal USA and I went to Columbia University to get my masters in East Asian literature. My dream had been to translate Korean literature, but I soon realized the idea of this was more appealing than actually doing it and my true passion was beauty. Eventually, Sarah and I ended up working at L’Oréal in New York, though never quite on the same brand. But we bonded through our shared experience of growing up in the beauty industry.

Sarah Lee: Our bond was immediate. We had so much in common, not least our shared passion for skin care — and Korean barbecue! I always believed that one day I would build my own company, provided I had the right idea and partner.

It was fate that Christine and I ended up in New York City at the same time. Our ah-ha moment came when we were catching up over wine and sheet masking one night at my apartment, excitedly showing off all the skin care innovations we’d brought back from our recent trips to Korea. We talked about how we were working for these big, global brands at L’Oréal doing product development and marketing. We’d been trained for years to find and nurture the next big thing in beauty. As we sat there looking at all these amazing Korean products laid out on my living room floor, we realized these could be the next big thing in the U.S. We thought, what if we co-created our own company to bring the best of Korean beauty to the U.S. market? It was then that we decided to kickstart our journey.

Christine Chang: We started GlowRecipe.com in 2014 with each of us putting in $25,000 of our personal savings. We knew we’d be bootstrapping for some time because our goal was to be profitable before making any big decisions that could alter the company. Amazingly, we broke even within three months of launching. We knew that eventually, we’d need a strategic partner, but wanted someone who could provide real strategic advice and a macro perspective. We took on one investment seven years into the company, which is a bit later than most beauty brands do, and that’s the only round of fundraising we’ve ever done.

Sarah Lee: We were able to bootstrap for as long as we did thanks to our years of training at L’Oréal on how to run a healthy and disciplined P&L. Also, between the two of us, we covered the major skill sets we needed like product development, global marketing, and branding, which allowed us to hold off on making early hires. We spent very little on marketing, which may surprise people. Our early PR strategy was cold calling editors and taking the subway all over Manhattan to pitch our products via dozens of desksides.

At that time, social media was relatively inexpensive, so we leaned into it early on, and it’s proven to be one of our most effective channels. From day one of Glow Recipe, we’ve strived to engage directly with our community and maintain an open and ongoing dialogue with them. Today, we engage with millions of customers across every major social platform — our “Glow Gang” is one of our most valuable assets.

This disciplined approach paid off, as Glow Recipe has only ever been profitable. This allowed us to be very selective around when and from whom we raised money. When we did raise our round with North Castle Partners, it was to take our growth into hyperdrive. It allowed us to take the business to the next level by investing heavily in international expansion, elevating our executive leadership team, and making operational improvements like implementing an ERP [enterprise resource planning] system. And, of course, we doubled down on product development. While we’ve had great success in building an effective marketing engine, the core of our success lies in our ability to create wonderfully efficacious products that are fun and approachable.

Christine Chang: We’ve always stayed true to Glow Recipe’s north star values, which also helped us scale the brand. Our goals are to make skin care more fun, approachable, and accessible while being clinically effective, and to champion real skin acceptance. This mission is why we’ve always focused on educational content across all our platforms, to make the skin journey as easy as possible for everyone. Inclusivity also includes our social channels: we wanted to create a safe space online where people know that we don’t retouch model photos and where the imagery reflects the wonderful breadth of our diverse community, showing skin of all different textures, tones, and concerns.

Sarah Lee: We’re fortunate to have great relationships with our retailers. Since our early days, Sephora has been a fantastic Glow Recipe partner — I cannot emphasize enough how integral they have been to our growth. They know exactly how to nurture and incubate a brand, and I think part of why they’re so supportive of Glow Recipe is because we treat our relationship with them as a true partnership. The relationship is not simply us pushing the next product in the pipeline to them — we collaborate on ideas for content, education, and how to make the skin care world a more fun, entertaining, and inclusive space.

What also sets us apart is our product development process. We begin thinking about how a product will go to market from day one: what will this look like on a retail shelf or website, and how will a customer feel when they see it for the first time? We start by presenting the question, “How is this product going to be scroll-stopping?”

Christine Chang: This is how we conceptualized skintertainment, by thinking about how to make skin care more accessible and fun. We began making these very lively, upbeat skin care education videos, and that kicked off a conversation on social media. When we launched Glow Recipe Skincare in 2017, we focused on creating textures and packaging that are very social media friendly while also being highly efficacious formulas, which fed into a larger movement to make skin care feel more accessible. Now on TikTok and Instagram, you see many different approaches to skin care, which creates more excitement for the category.

Sarah Lee:  When we started Glow Recipe, makeup was the big beauty draw on social media. The most popular video content was related to makeup application, while skin care was perceived as serious, tedious, and boring. Our goal was to disrupt that consumer perception and make skin care applications just as, if not more, fun. Just like how my mother showed me her nightly skin care routine was a brief self-care moment, we wanted to show you can have a beautiful, luxurious experience and transformative results at home.

Christine Chang: Sarah and I are certainly not the only ones coming up with ideas. We have an amazing team of almost 70 people at Glow Recipe, and we aim to foster a workplace culture of ideation and collaboration. We have open brainstorming forums at the company so that everyone can contribute ideas and be part of the discussion, and people come up with the most creative concepts. The whole premise of blind casting the models in our “Dew You” campaign came from the team, and it was such a brave yet incredible idea.

Sarah Lee: Christine and I have similar leadership styles, which helps encourage open discussion and a sense of unity across the team. In other aspects of the business, we will divide and conquer to be efficient with our time, such as with all the channels and accounts we manage. This allows us to be very present in each of our accounts, which would be harder to do if we both stretched ourselves across all of them. Our best advice to people who want to start a business together is to be on the same page in four key areas:

1. Be completely aligned in your vision and approach to the business. These are two different things, but if you’re aligned on both, you’re off to an amazing start.
2. Be equally, wholeheartedly passionate about the company, its growth, and the team you want to build.
3. Commit to being completely honest and transparent with each other. The value of this cannot be overstated, especially as a company grows.
4. Communicate, communicate, communicate with each other in real time as things are happening and keep each other in the loop on everything. Otherwise, things will fall through the cracks.

Today, our focus is on growing the business not only in the U.S., but also expanding Glow Recipe globally. Recently, I traveled to Mexico City for the launch of Glow Recipe in Sephora Mexico. We’ve been waiting for the right time in our business to expand into LATAM and European markets and feel 2024 is the year of Glow Recipe’s international growth into new territories. Our business in existing foreign markets, which we first entered in 2020, grew by 99% in 2023. With the addition of Hue Drops, the brand’s first tinted product, we believe we are poised to attract not only skin care customers, but makeup lovers, too.

In our first month of launch with Sephora Mexico, we were the number-one brand in stores the first week and are now the number-one skin care brand in all channels! We’re so excited to continue the momentum with our launch of Blush-bar in Columbia and Chile this year.

Christine Chang: After the success of our Sephora France launch in Q3 2023, we launched in 14 new European markets this year. Hue Drops is currently our number-one SKU in the EU and we’re currently the number one skin care brand in most countries. It has been amazing to see the brand resonate with the communities in France, Spain, and Italy where we expected Glow Recipe would resonate, as well as in countries like Turkey and Poland where the brand is seeing tremendous success.

Today, Glow Recipe operates multiple programs to offer mentorship and support to female founded brands. We encourage anyone about to embark on their own entrepreneurship journey to reach out to cofounders@glowrecipe.com