My first guest is Stephan Kanlian, Chairperson of The Beauty Center at FIT and one of the people responsible for making beauty management a field of academic study. Before I began building Choulie, I spent fourteen years in two food businesses. I understood product development, manufacturing, margins, retail, brand building, and the multitude of decisions involved in turning an idea into a company. But even though Choulie is a CPG product, beauty has its own history, economics, distribution channels, power structures, and assumptions about how brands grow. Stephan has spent his career inside that industry, working across education, business, and industry and watching beauty evolve from a category that was often dismissed as frivolous into a sophisticated global business. In this first conversation of Start to Scale, Stephan gives us the larger context. We talk about how he found his way into beauty, and how working inside a cosmetics company—spending time with chemists, manufacturing, marketing, and customers—gave him an education in the business from the ground up. That experience eventually led him to FIT, where he was hired in 1999 to create its graduate program in Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management. The idea was unusual at the time: instead of bringing traditional MBAs into beauty and teaching them the industry, why not develop leaders who already understood and cared about beauty and teach them to run the business? More than 25 years later, the industry has changed enormously, but the fundamental mission of the program has not. He is trying to create leaders, not specialists—people who know enough about finance, marketing, operations, culture, technology, and the consumer to ask the right questions, understand the implications of their decisions, and lead across disciplines. And we talk about where beauty goes from here. Changing demographics and channels (marketing and sales) are altering how brands understand and reach consumers. Technology is forcing companies to move faster. And the boundaries between beauty, wellness, medicine, and science are becoming increasingly difficult to separate—bringing new opportunities, but also much greater responsibility. Above all, Stephan sees beauty as an expression of the culture around it. Consumers have access to more information, cultures and identities overlap in different ways, and beauty has become one of the most important ways people express who they are. In this episode, we discuss: * Why FIT created its graduate beauty program * What Stephan has learned about identifying and developing strong leaders * How FIT’s capstone approaches complex, long-term industry problems * Why culture and consumer understanding are fundamental to beauty * How technology and changing demographics are reshaping the industry * The growing convergence of beauty, wellness, science, and medicine * What beauty tells us about culture and self-expression Listen to Episode 1 of Start to Scale From The Beauty Center at FIT, with Stephan Kanlian. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chouliebody.substack.com
