How to Build a Beauty Brand People Believe In (ft. Tower 28, Danessa Myricks Beauty, Crown Affair)

September 8, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

How Three Beauty Founders Built Brands That Last — Without Losing Themselves

Danessa Myricks spent two decades building her makeup brand out of her basement, funding it week by week with money from her artistry gigs. Amy Liu, a 24-year beauty industry veteran, launched Tower 28 with $500,000 from friends and family — and waited until her company was already profitable to raise $28 million. Diana Cohen raised $1.7 million before Crown Affair even launched, hiring a CEO from day one so she could focus on product and vision.

Three different funding paths. Three different definitions of success. One shared conviction: the brands that survive aren't the ones with the best marketing budgets or the biggest social followings. They're the ones that know exactly who they are — and refuse to become anyone else.

The Real Barrier Isn't Launching — It's Lasting

"It's easier than ever to launch, and it is harder than ever to sustain and to stay," Liu says. She estimates that 20,000 to 30,000 brands are coming from Korea alone to sell on TikTok and Amazon. The flood means attention — not product quality — has become the scarce resource.

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What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Outline
2 (00:09) **Roundtable Introduction** - Emma Grede introduces the first-ever roundtable episode with three beauty founders at different stages
3 (04:30) **Brand Origin Stories** - Each founder explains why they started their company and the problem they were solving
4 (10:55) **Is It Harder Than Ever to Build a Lasting Brand?** - The founders debate whether today's environment makes sustainability harder than launch
5 (13:34) **The "Why" Question for Aspiring Founders** - What the founders would ask someone wanting to start a beauty brand today
6 (14:12) **Ranking What Actually Determines Success** - Product, branding, community, founder story, or retail distribution — what matters most?
7 (16:44) **What Community Actually Means** - Distinguishing real community from marketing buzzwords

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

It's easier than ever to launch a beauty brand—and harder than ever to make it last. In this first-ever Aspire founders roundtable, Danessa Myricks (Danessa Myricks Beauty), Dianna Cohen (Crown Affair), and Amy Liu (Tower 28) get honest about what it actually takes to build and scale a brand people believe in.

These aren’t early ideas—they’re Sephora-scale businesses: Tower 28, launched in 2019, now with a reported $228 million valuation; Crown Affair, launched in 2020 and scaled from roughly 55 to 600 Sephora doors, with a dry shampoo that has ranked #1 in the category; and Danessa Myricks Beauty, a profitable-since-launch business that had already grown to roughly 500 SKUs before entering Sephora.

From getting into Sephora and staying there, to raising capital vs. bootstrapping, to building community you can't reverse-engineer—this is the real playbook for 2026.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

What separates brands that last, and why launching is easy but sustaining is hard
How to build community with soul, purpose, and mission
The truth about retail and the operational and financial discipline it takes to scale in Sephora
How to fund your vision, what outside money is really for, and why finding aligned investors is key
How founders evolve with intention and decide what to control, when to delegate, and different ways to lead a brand through growth