When people ask me why Cosnova Beauty is still family-run, I say, “Because it’s fun!” If my husband and I sold the business, we’d maybe travel for a bit, but then what? We are still full of motivation and love what we do. We can’t imagine selling a company that we built from the ground up. It’s our baby.

I grew up an only child in a small village in Germany, at a time when using makeup and beauty products was considered superficial in a lot of Northern European countries. Back then, everyone believed in being all-natural, so there was little interest in beauty and fashion. But I was very into both from a young age, and my parents couldn’t understand where this came from. I’d spend any money I earned buying beauty and fashion products.

I originally wanted to study medicine and wanted to become a doctor, but my father encouraged me to try economics instead. So, I did an internship and found, to my surprise, that I loved economics. After graduation, I took a job at the Nestle corporation, where I discovered my passion for marketing. Eventually I moved on to a marketing job at a large beauty company, and that’s where I found my true calling.

Creating a New Concept for Cosmetics

It was while working for this beauty company in Germany that I came up with the idea for Cosnova and created a blueprint for a cosmetics brand that offers the best quality formulas and innovation at the most affordable prices in the industry. The company ultimately decided not to move forward with my concept, because they believed makeup should be a luxury and that women are willing to pay for it.

Our mantra at Cosnova is, “Make everyone feel more beautiful.” From day one, it has been about offering the best value, so we invest everything into our products, because we believe the best marketing tool is the product.

People say we were ahead of our time – this was before social media, when beauty marketing and advertising typically centered on big, glossy campaigns with celebrities. I think my experience of working at Nestle, where it was all about affordability and giving customers the best food at grocery store prices, grounded my perspective. Food marketing was inclusive of everyone, so I thought, Why can’t we do this for beauty, too?

Leveraging Connections to Build a Brand

When I got the final “no” from my former employer on my brand concept, I quit. A little over a year later, in February 2002, I launched Cosnova in Germany. My husband, who also came from the beauty industry, joined the business very early on. That was 22 years ago, and our partnership — both as husband and wife and as business partners — is still going strong.

We were able to launch Cosnova fairly quickly because, having both been in the beauty industry, we had the knowledge and contacts to get our concept off the ground. We knew where to find suppliers who could help design the products, and so forth. The largest drug store chain in Germany, dm Drogerie, agreed to carry our line before it even launched. With this written commitment from a major retailer, I was able to convince our suppliers we would have capital. That meant, luckily, we didn’t need any financing to start the business.

To this day, we’ve never taken outside funding — Cosnova is entirely self-financed. For the first year or two, the company consisted of just my husband and me. We ran the business out of our dining room, so we had little to no overhead.

Achieving Organic Success

Cosnova was successful right out of the gate. We started with about 60 SKUs, whereas today we have hundreds under each of our cosmetics brands, Catrice and Essence. The initial consumer response was great, which helped us roll out the line to other retailers.

Word of mouth fueled our success. When a cosmetic not only looks great and is innovative, but is also highly affordable, the barrier to trying it is much lower. This was our business model from the beginning: put all the money into the products and do no advertising. We relied on the customers and the beauty press, who were very supportive of our line, to be our advertisers, and it paid off. We started using social media very early on and today, we do some paid social media and advertising, but still far less than our competitors.

By October 2007, just over five years in business, we were the number one color cosmetics brand by volume in Germany, and by 2017, we were the biggest color cosmetics brand in Europe. According to third-party data, we are the number six color cosmetics company in the world in value. Our prices are lower than those of our main competitors, so if you were to put us at the same average price points as those of our main competitors and compare sales volumes, we are already the number two color cosmetics brand worldwide in volume. We are confident that we can become the number one color cosmetics company worldwide in volume by the end of this decade.

Cracking the U.S. Mass Market

In 2008, we launched Cosnova Beauty in the U.S. and found it was a much more challenging market to crack than we had anticipated. We assumed American consumer habits were similar to those in Europe, but soon realized that we needed to adapt our product assortment and how we communicate our brands.

For instance, our Essence brand positioning is “Make beauty fun,” because in Europe and Asia, makeup correlates well with fun and playfulness. But in the U.S., “fun” connotated childlike and not high quality, so we had to shift some of our brand attributes. We also needed wider shade ranges across our product assortment to speak to all U.S. consumers.

Initially, we tried even lower price points in the U.S. than we have in Germany but quickly discovered that wasn’t necessarily a selling point, as many consumers thought cheap prices meant cheap quality.

On top of this, the U.S. moves much faster on trends than most other countries. The American consumer is much more adaptive and really likes new things. At Cosnova, we like to think we’re fast: each year, we develop 1,000 new SKUs and replace 50% of our product assortment. We are agile and in tune with our target groups’ wants and needs. But in the U.S., you need to be way ahead of the curve, more so than anywhere else.

We navigated a lot of learnings for the U.S. market, and in the last six to seven years, we’ve made strong progress here, because we pay very close attention to what that the U.S. consumer wants, and we act on it very quickly. Now I’m personally helping to reintroduce our brands in the U.S., because another lesson we learned is that in America, consumers want to know who is behind a brand. This is very different from Germany, where founders mostly don’t publicly promote their companies. There are family-run companies that have been in business for generations and the public has no idea or interest in who’s behind them. But now that we’ve gained traction in the U.S., it’s important for me to be out in front talking about our company, because we believe the U.S. has the potential to become our largest market. Currently, it’s our number two market — Germany is still number one, but we’re making great strides in the U.S.

Adopting a Global Mindset

Cosnova is now a billion-dollar company. We have almost 900 employees worldwide, 70% of whom are women, because that’s who we mainly serve. We’re in our third decade of business and in the process of transitioning from a German-European company to a global company. We’re not there yet, but we are thinking globally. We want to launch in new areas like central Africa and India and grow our presence in Asia and Latin America. We are also still only color cosmetics, so we are exploring expanding into skin care and other beauty categories.

In the U.S., we just launched both Essence and Catrice on TikTok Shop, so social shopping is a big focus for us going forward.

After 22 years in business, my husband and I are no longer the age of Cosnova’s target audience, so we have a lot of young interns and employees who tell us what’s important to them. What made a brand successful yesterday won’t necessarily work today or tomorrow, so be bold and curious and surround yourself with people who take this same approach, because the best ideas are usually the most unconventional.

Essence Cosmetics is sold at Target, Ulta Beauty, and select CVS stores; online on Amazon and essencemakeup.com; and on TikTok Shop. Catrice Cosmetics is sold online on Amazon and catricecosmetics.com, and on TikTok Shop.