Glow Journal

In episode 160 of the Glow Journal podcast, host Gemma Dimond talks to founder and CEO of Tower 28, Amy Liu.

Amy Liu says it’s never been easier to start a beauty brand, but it’s never been harder to stay.

Since its launch in 2019, Tower 28 has become one of the industry’s biggest modern success stories, however Amy tried launching three businesses prior to creating something that stuck.

Amy’s background is in growing beauty brands from the inside, and while we all know the industry has changed over the last couple of decades, she explains that the fundamentals have remained largely unchanged. The sales funnel is the same- it’s just the levers that have evolved. When we look at the influence having shifted from print editors to digital creators, for example, it certainly feels like the barrier to success has never been lower, but it’s a question of how a brand captures virality. Sure, a brand might go viral today, but how do you capture that moment and sustain it?

The answer is understanding the difference between brand awareness and conversion, and it’s something Amy could teach a masterclass in, having grown Tower 28 from a 3 SKU startup built for sensitive skin to a global brand carried by Sephora across multiple markets and MECCA in Australia and New Zealand.

In this conversation, Amy shares how she landed on Tower 28’s visual identity, the slightly unconventional way she reached out to her first round of investors, and why she feels the key to launching a successful brand is to understand your own "unfair advantage.”

Read more at glowjournal.com
Follow Tower 28 on Instagram @tower28beauty

Stay up to date with Gemma on Instagram at @gemdimond and @glow.journal, or get in touch at hello@gemkwatts.com
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In episode 159 of the Glow Journal podcast, host Gemma Dimond talks to the founders of AKT, Ed Currie and Andy Coxon.

Ed and Andy are West End performers. They’ve spent years under the brightest of lights, dancing, sweating, wearing costumes shared across casts for, in the case of a show like Les Mis, years upon years, that are so delicate they can’t be deep cleaned. We know how inextricably linked scent is to our confidence- they needed something that worked, that was formulated with performance at the fore, and that made people smell (and, probably more importantly, FEEL), amazing.

AKT has done what I had, as someone who’s worked in beauty for over 12 years, thought impossible, and that is create an effective, sexy deodorant. There are sexy deodorants on the market and I hate them, there are clinical protection formulas out there that I don’t feel in any way inspired by, but there’s nothing like this. Every element in a little wink to their shared history, which really tickles me from a branding perspective. They brief their fragrances in like a script, the typography is inspired by the letters on theatre marquees, and each fragrance is named as if it were a scene.

In this conversation, recorded at Soho’s Laughing Around Studios, Ed and Andy share what happens when you set out to create one product and somehow end up building an entire brand, how they physically raised the money to develop AKT, and how they learned the importance of using their own voice instead of trying to play the role of professional,

Read more at glowjournal.com
Follow AKT on Instagram @akt_ldn.

Stay up to date with Gemma on Instagram at @gemdimond and @glow.journal, or get in touch at hello@gemkwatts.com
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In episode 158 of the Glow Journal podcast, host Gemma Dimond talks to the founder of RAESO, Katey Mandy.

Katey Mandy knows beauty.

Before launching her own brand, Katey spent 15 years working in brand strategy across major global beauty brands. Her insights on the way the industry has changed over that time are really, really valuable, particularly around how beauty now approaches this idea of “luxury”- she tells me that where it used to be about closed doors and velvet ropes, it’s now more about meeting the customer where they’re at.

RAESO is, put simply, an incredible brand doing something I’ve personally not seen any other brands doing- focusing on the impact our circadian rhythm has on the skin. This goes so, so far beyond traditional day and night creams. Chronobiology studies exactly how a 24 hour cycle impacts what our skin needs, when it’s most receptive to certain ingredients, and when it’s working hardest to protect and repair itself. RAESO is the only skincare brand I’ve seen that is taking that science and harnessing it into skincare that optimises that 24 hour cycle.

In this conversation, recorded at Soho’s Laughing Around Studios, Katey shares the intricacies of rebranding from RAAIE to RAESO 4 years into the brand’s life, how she knew version 148 of her award winning Morning Dew serum was the one, and the surprisingly scrappy story behind the original packaging we all assumed was custom.

Read more at glowjournal.com
Follow RAESO on Instagram @raesoskin.

Stay up to date with Gemma on Instagram at @gemdimond and @glow.journal, or get in touch at hello@gemkwatts.com
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In episode 157 of the Glow Journal podcast, host Gemma Dimond talks to the founder of Sarah Chapman Skinesis, Sarah Chapman.

Having worked in skin for over 25 years and having sat at the helm of her namesake brand since its launch in 2008, Sarah Chapman has been dubbed “skincare’s quiet high priestess.” Sarah was one of the first, globally, to actually combine clinically effective skincare with a luxurious experience of use, she’s the go-to facialist for London’s biggest names, and the entire reason she opened her own clinic 12 years ago was because she had a waiting list of over 250 people.

What I really wanted to chat to Sarah about was how much the industry has changed over that time, particularly from a brand building perspective. Sarah’s approach to business has always been credibility over visibility- she favours a considered build over being everywhere, and everything to everyone, all at once. I wondered if she felt that approach would even be possible for a new brand in 2026, or if the saturation of the market today demands a louder strategy.

In this conversation, recorded at Soho’s Laughing Around Studios, Sarah shares if there are skin conditions and concerns that her clients are presenting with today that they weren’t a decade ago, if she feels our understanding of what “healthy skin” really means has changed with the rise of social media, and why she, perhaps controversially, doesn’t really believe in skin types.

Read more at glowjournal.com
Follow Sarah Chapman on Instagram @sarahchapmanlondon

Stay up to date with Gemma on Instagram at @gemdimond and @glow.journal, or get in touch at hello@gemkwatts.com
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In episode 156 of the Glow Journal podcast, host Gemma Dimond talks to the founder of Vyrao, Yasmin Sewell.

Very few people have had the impact on the fashion industry, and subsequently beauty, that Yasmin Sewell has had.

A 25 year long career in fashion saw Yasmin hold some of the industry’s most influential roles, globally, across the likes of Farfetch, Style.com, Browns, and Liberty, making her present for some of the largest historical shifts we’ve seen in the ways people discover, consume, and access fashion.

In 2021 Yasmin launched Vyrao, an energy-led fine fragrance house, the first globally to fuse energetic healing with master perfumery and neuroscience.

What fascinates me most about Yasmin’s career is that she’s always worked right at the intersection of taste and commerce. There are, sincerely, few people on earth as revered for their taste as Yasmin is (she’s built her career on it), and her strength really lies in creating worlds that consumers want to buy into, rather than simply moving product. In her words, “the fashion came second to the feeling.” That in mind, my big question for her today was how has she managed to preserve intuition when working at that scale?

In this conversation, recorded at Soho’s Laughing Around Studios, Yasmin shares why she feels joy is the ultimate luxury in 2026, how she’s infused sexual energy into Vyrao’s two most recent perfume launches, and what she thinks people are actually searching for when they buy a fragrance.

Read more at glowjournal.com
Follow Vyrao on Instagram @vyraoworld

Stay up to date with Gemma on Instagram at @gemdimond and @glow.journal, or get in touch at hello@gemkwatts.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.