Sometimes the best business ideas come from watching people make excuses about their makeup.
In 2015, Natalie Mackey, a former finance professional with a design degree from Parsons, found herself sitting with groups of young women as they dumped their makeup bags onto tables. She noticed something fascinating: they kept apologizing for their drugstore products.
Join Bora Celik as he chats with Natalie Mackey, the co-founder and CEO of Winky Lux.
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"They would dump out their bag and say, 'I just bought this Maybelline mascara because I ran out of my good stuff,'" Mackey recalls. But here's the thing – the products weren't bad at all. The Maybelline mascara they were embarrassed about? It was actually a fantastic formula. The issue wasn't the product inside – it was how it looked on the outside.
This observation sparked an idea that would become Winky Lux, a beauty brand that's now approaching its decade mark. But the journey there wasn't exactly straightforward.
Initially, Mackey and her co-founder weren't planning to create a beauty brand at all. They were building a marketplace with a quiz that would recommend beauty products to customers. But as they dug deeper into their research, they spotted a gap in the market: beautiful, high-quality makeup at accessible prices.
"Beauty has enough margin that you can actually do that," Mackey explains. "It was really just the retailer that was preventing the brand from making something really gorgeous because it's the way that it's sold at shelf that prevents it from being gorgeous."
When they shared their brand idea with advisors, they got a unanimous response: don't do it. "Whenever you do, just don't start a brand," they were told. The reasons were solid – it's capital intensive, highly competitive, and you're going up against some of the most profitable companies in the world.
But sometimes not knowing what you don't know can be a blessing. They jumped in anyway.
The first major challenge? Finding manufacturers. Most founders might visit three or four factories before making a decision. Mackey visited fifty. "You can never walk into a factory without learning something," she says. "You walk in, it's magic. Like they're making the magic right there."
They needed what Mackey calls the "Goldilocks Factory" – one that was innovative enough to scale but small enough to take a chance on a startup doing small runs of 1,000 to 2,000 units. Most importantly, they needed manufacturers willing to offer payment terms. "You need a factory to believe in you," Mackey emphasizes.
Their first products? A lipstick in a pill-shaped bullet (a packaging innovation at the time) and a setting powder with crushed diamonds. "Now I look back and I'm like, why would you launch with these two products?" Mackey laughs. "But they were the two that we felt the most passionate about."
One of Winky Lux's most impressive innovations isn't their products – it's their speed to market. While most beauty brands take 12-18 months to launch a product, Winky Lux can do it in 45 days. They maintain two supply chains: a short-run system for testing products via e-commerce, and a traditional supply chain for retail partners like Ulta and Target.
"We never want to completely get rid of that [speed] because it's part of our DNA," Mackey explains. This dual approach allows them to test products quickly and then scale what works.
Nine years in, Winky Lux has carved out a unique space in beauty. Their customer base spans from 13 to 80 years old, united not by age but by what Mackey calls a psychographic: "The Winky Lux customer is really someone who loves maximalism and ornate high design."
Looking ahead, Mackey sees big changes in beauty marketing. She believes the era of paid influencer marketing is waning, shifting toward commission-based models. But perhaps most importantly, she's focused on integrating AI tools to make her team more efficient and preparing for a post-election period when she believes consumers will be ready to embrace joy again.
"We need the holidays to come," she says. "We need it to be really big, really fun."
In a world obsessed with minimalism, Winky Lux stands proudly on the other side – creating beautiful, maximalist products for people who, as Mackey puts it, have been "unapologetically feminine" since they were wearing "giant bows and sparkling boots" at age ten.
And it all started because someone was embarrassed about their mascara.
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