AI’s Next Entrepreneurs Are Changing Beauty Company Operations

Among beauty’s buzziest topics, AI is getting an entrepreneurial influx.

From predictive models to generative ones, a recent crop of founders are harnessing new advancements in AI to streamline beauty companies’ operations. Ground, for example, promises a 30 percent lift in new customers in 15 minutes; MarqVision triangulates weekly sales performances of brands, categories, retailers, segments and products. Sarah Jannetti, who is phasing her venture Content Recipe out of beta testing, can cut down an hourlong process to two minutes by generating creator briefs.

Here, a look at the founders harnessing various technologies to maximize beauty companies’ productivity levels.

Philip Smolin, Melissa Munnerlyn and Justin Stewart, cofounders, Daash Intelligence

With clients including Glow Recipe, Amika and Ilia Beauty and a fresh round of funding under its belt, Daash Intelligence is gaining steam.

The company, which uses a predictive model to generate weekly insights into product, retail, segment and ingredient sales performance in near-real time, was founded in 2022 by Philip Smolin, Melissa Munnerlyn and Justin Stewart. The latter two had previously founded Cherry Pick, which sold in 2021.

“We were working as the tech team at a brand incubator, and we were doing a lot around assortment data and ingredients, but brands really wanted it grounded in sales data,” Munnerlyn said of Daash Intelligence’s genesis. “Brands didn’t want to see exact dollars and categories, they wanted to see how big the category was, who was winning, by how much and how that changed over time.”

Using machine learning, Daash Intelligence offers weekly glimpses of competitor brands across varied retailers and segments. “We work across product development, marketing, retail sales teams and finance and demand planning teams and help them make decisions around white space and which opportunities they should identify,” she said.

The upside, for brands, has been the speed with which they can make decisions, Munnerlyn said. “Brands have had zero access to this type of data before, or they’ve had really broad access, so being able to find the segments to develop in or compete against on a weekly basis helps them make faster decisions.”

Munnerlyn sees a sweet spot with smaller brands, too. “If I’ve only been in makeup, I can’t predict my new face serum’s performance,” she said. “It’s hard to understand the velocity metrics and benchmarks there, so being able to have visibility into that helps them as well.”

Mark Lee, founder and chief executive officer, MarqVision

Counterfeiting is the largest criminal enterprise globally, comprising $3 trillion in transactions annually and nearly 8 percent of all global trade.

Where brands see profits lost, though, Mark Lee sees an opportunity. The founder and chief executive officer of MarqVision harnesses AI to both help manage IP claims and get counterfeit products removed.

“We have IP brand protection products where we help companies take down infringements like counterfeits or impersonations online, and we also have an IP management product where we help companies file and manage their trademarks and copyrights globally. These two are interrelated,” Lee said. “In order to take anything down from the internet, you need to have the rights to it.”

MarqVision covers 1,500 marketplaces across 118 countries. “That includes Amazon, Alibaba and even TikTok,” Lee said, noting that the rise of the latter has fanned the counterfeit flames globally. “We thought it was an interesting problem to solve.”

Lee started the company while at Harvard Law School, and has been quick to amass clients from “companies as large as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton all the way down to smaller streetwear brands,” he said. Beauty comprises 12 percent of his clientele, while luxury is 6 percent and fashion is 30 percent.

Kat Garcia, founder and co-CEO, Ground

When Kat Garcia cofounded Ground, the AI-powered tool that predicts consumer behaviors and incentivizes them to make a purchase, her mandate was a simple one.

“The world of consumer products is one that’s always changing, because people are changing all the time,” she said. “We wanted to build something that would have an impact on business growth.”

The company can increase sales by 20 percent after a 15-minute integration process, Garcia said. Clients include RMS Beauty and Violette_FR.

Clients plug in the tool in the existing frameworks of their direct-to-consumer websites (and, where applicable, SMS or CRM tools), where Ground’s various AI models make predictions around purchasing decisions. “Then the action is taken on behalf of your existing CRM setup. It’s not just analyzing all of this information so you can take action, it takes the action for you,” Garcia said.

The tools analyze everything from where a website visitor is looking to the sales offers to product categories, and customize offers for them once they return. “The first time someone comes, it’s a digital black box and they’re one of hundreds of thousands of site visitors,” Garcia said. “We can change the welcome offer on the second instance with the exact creative, the exact product that the person is likely to make a first purchase for.

“We can also change the incentive to purchase, and we also connect to Meta accounts so we can predict which ads they’ll click through on. The chances of you being interested in that product skyrockets if I show it to you again,” she said.

Sarah Jannetti, founder, Content Recipe

Sarah Jannetti has been on both sides of the influencer marketing coin — and she’s leveraged AI to solve a key pain point.

The founder of Content Recipe is introducing a tool that allows brands to generate specific briefs for creators, based on the product being marketed and the creators’ most impactful content.

“I was working as a TikTok Shop consultant for the past year, and working with a lot of affiliates and sending generic briefs to them. Those were falling flat,” she said. “Creators didn’t want to pay attention to them a lot of the time, because they felt disconnected from their audiences. They weren’t very personalized, and they consistently needed updating.”

Content Recipe is currently moving out of its beta phase, and Jannetti said it’s premature to quantify the organic reach and revenue generated by the tool. “But I will say, the time it takes to create a brief has been cut by 95 percent,” she said. “It also helps brands scale their creative partnership program. Instead of working with 15 creators per month, they can now multiply that by 10.”

The tool continuously scrubs creators’ feeds for the posts with the most engagement and takes key learnings from those into account.

“Data, trends and user-generated content change. It pulls in updated data,” Jannetti said. “If people are speaking a certain way on social media, or there are ways people are commenting on something — that would craft what the brief says as well.”