Member Spotlight: Kelly St. John
Meet Kelly St. John, Founder and CEO of KSJ Collective, a strategic growth partner for beauty and wellness brands navigating the path from potential to sustainable retail success. With more than three decades of experience spanning brand leadership, luxury retail, and entrepreneurship, Kelly began her beauty career at The Estée Lauder Cos. before joining Neiman Marcus, where she ultimately became Vice President and Divisional Merchandise Manager of Beauty. Across those chapters, she built a reputation for identifying emerging brands and consumer shifts early, developing meaningful industry relationships, and combining instinct with commercial discipline. In 2018, she founded KSJ Collective to bring that experience directly to founders, helping high-potential brands make smarter decisions around positioning, retail readiness, distribution, and long-term growth.
Career Milestone: One of the most meaningful milestones in Kelly’s career has been seeing an early conviction come full circle through Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Baccarat Rouge 540. While leading beauty at Neiman Marcus, Kelly reviewed the fragrance when it was presented as an extremely limited creation and recognized its potential, encouraging Francis Kurkdjian to bring the special collaboration with Baccarat into the Maison for the world to experience. She committed to launching it exclusively at Neiman Marcus with a compelling launch strategy that would expose it to a larger audience. Years later, Baccarat Rouge 540 has become a global fragrance phenomenon, and Kelly’s early role in its commercial journey has been revisited in industry coverage and the ICON(S): Maison Francis Kurkdjian documentary. For Kelly, the recognition represents something larger than being right about one fragrance: it validates an instinct that has guided her throughout her career—the ability to identify exceptional products, founders, and ideas early, understand where they can resonate with the consumer, and create the partnerships that allow them to grow.
Key Advice: The career lesson Kelly returns to most is to understand yourself deeply enough to recognize what you are uniquely equipped to do—and then have the confidence to build around it. Her own transition from a successful corporate career into entrepreneurship required asking very different questions: What truly energizes me? What do I uniquely offer? And where is there white space for me to create value? That self-awareness ultimately led her back to what had always excited her most: discovering emerging brands and helping them realize their potential. She pairs that philosophy with a longtime Kelly St. John mantra: “Always show up with your lipstick.” It is less about the lipstick itself than about showing up prepared, confident, and fully yourself.
Mentors: Kelly believes careers are rarely shaped by one mentor alone. At every stage of her own career, she has benefited from people who were willing to invest their time, perspective, and belief in her. Hazel Wyatt and John Demsey were important mentors whose influence began during Kelly’s years at The Estée Lauder Companies and continued as her career evolved. At Neiman Marcus, Karen Katz became one of the most influential mentors in her career, while Carol Hamilton and Janet Gurwitch have been enduring sources of counsel, friendship, and perspective across the broader beauty industry and throughout her entrepreneurial journey.
That experience has shaped Kelly’s own commitment to mentorship. Today, she personally mentors a select group of emerging industry leaders, investing the same kind of time, candor, and perspective that proved so meaningful in her own career. That commitment also extends to KSJ Collective, where one of the initiatives she is most proud of is the KSJ Collective Merchandising Internship. The program has grown significantly over the years, giving young talent meaningful exposure to the business of beauty, retail, and brand building. For Kelly, creating opportunities for the next generation is a natural extension of what others did for her: opening doors, sharing hard-earned knowledge, and taking the time to invest in someone’s potential. She believes relationships built on generosity, candor, and trust can influence a career far beyond any single role or transaction.
Five-Year Career Goal: Over the next five years, Kelly wants to continue building KSJ Collective into one of the beauty and wellness industry’s most trusted strategic growth partners for high-potential brands—helping founders make thoughtful decisions about positioning, retail readiness, distribution, and scale while protecting the long-term value of what they are building. As KSJ Collective grows, maintaining its selectivity, high-touch approach, and relationship-first philosophy will remain essential. Kelly also hopes to expand her impact beyond individual client engagements through mentorship, advisory work, and industry thought leadership that helps prepare the next generation of founders and executives. The ambition is not simply to build the biggest consultancy; it is to build one known for creating enduring value—for brands, retailers, founders, and the industry as a whole.
Best Networking Convo Starter: “What are you seeing that you think the rest of us should be paying attention to?” Kelly loves questions that reveal how someone thinks rather than simply what they do. It immediately moves the conversation beyond titles and resumes and into ideas—an emerging brand, a changing consumer behavior, a retail shift, or an opportunity others may not have recognized yet. For someone who has spent a career staying relentlessly curious about the beauty industry and what is coming next, it is also a natural way to find the conversations—and people—worth remembering.
