How was Beautiful Rights conceived?
“This brand, Beautiful Rights, happened extremely quickly. It’s unheard of to launch a brand in three weeks in the beauty industry—but I’ve been doing product development for a while now, and I pulled in a lot [of] favors!
“I’ve always wanted to have a brand, but there was just never anything that moved me enough to go out there and just do it. Then the election happened. And I got real fired up. And, if I’m being honest, I had a couple glasses of wine one night, and I had made a donation to Planned Parenthood. And I started thinking, ‘One donation, what is that going to do?’
“So literally in one night I—again, really fired up—decided ‘I am going to sell makeup and I am going to give money to Planned Parenthood.’ In one night I came up with the colors, I thought about the design of the packaging, I named everything. I called my packaging guy and the chemist that I work with and I told them, ‘Okay, I want to do this and I want to do this fast.’
“The next day, I signed up for shopify, I built a site, and we’re doing it.”
What inspires and motivates you to keep growing this product?
“There are a lot of people like me who were never into politics, and didn’t really think about it. I really feel like everything that happened has made people like me wake up and realize we need to get involved. We need to get involved in decision-making. And I truly believe now that the politicians are not making the decisions for us, they need to hear us and make decisions based on that. I never felt like that before. I know now I can do something. It’s small, but if more people did things like this, it adds up.
“That’s why there were lots and lots of women marching after the inauguration. The election spurred this—but it’s making a lot of people wake up and realize they need to get involved.”