How Huda, Mona, and Alya Kattan built Huda Beauty out of Dubai

The Kattan sisters on building the Huda Beauty megabrand out of Dubai (and no, they aren’t done with their ambitions just yet)

In person, Huda Kattan, the driving force behind one of today’s fastest-growing beauty brands, Huda Beauty, radiates steely self-assurance. Not that I have expected anything different from a woman who is currently ranked 36 on Forbes’ list of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women.” Sitting beside me at the brand’s headquarters in Dubai, she looks as striking as seen on the front cover of this issue- the abundant curls of black hair frame her flawless face, complete with immaculate makeup, and she is dressed for not just any but exactly the type of success she wants in a sequined power suit. And, during the interview, she wants to broach the topic I least expect. “When you hit a certain level of success, you realize that it can cause some really serious issues to come up,” Huda says. “And if you don’t find the right way to deal with it, it could make you very depressed, very purposeless. It’s scary.”

Up until now, Huda has used a makeup brush as an empowerment tool to guide women on how to paint their own stories of betterment on their own faces. Over almost a decade, her brainchild Huda Beauty has grown from a blog to a beauty brand that now offers 213 products across five categories (complexion, lips, eyes, body, and tools), the newly-launched sub-brand Kayali, a fragrance line developed by her sister Mona Kattan, while an arsenal of the brand’s skincare products is also in the works. However, what makes the story of Huda Beauty extraordinary is that Huda is now willing to take all those layers of makeup off, confront her insecurities, and learn how to feel truly confident inside- while sharing it all with her 40 million and more followers, of course. “A lot of issues from my childhood were driving me, and I had no idea,” she says, adding that she has been working with a life coach over the last couple of years. “I never felt like I belonged in society, I never felt really comfortable in my own skin, and there are literally billions of people who feel like that. However, I never understood that it was the thing that gave me my drive, that I always wanted to prove that I was good enough.”

A turning point for Huda (and Huda Beauty) happened in 2017 when the Kattan family agreed to sell a small stake in the business to TSG Consumer Partners, a San Francisco headquartered private equity firm focused exclusively on the branded consumer sector.

It was a positive change that hard work and perseverance had brought to Huda Kattan, but surprisingly, it also uncovered that, in her mind, she was partially still a person she used to be: an American-born daughter of Iraqi immigrants exposed to daily bullying due to her ethnicity. “Getting our investment meant that we were now good enough, and it made me question to whom I was trying to prove it.

I actually went through a lot of getting to know myself after that happened. It’s crazy, because you think it’s the best thing that could ever happen, but I’ve heard it from so many of our friends, and it is that after they get these crazy valuations and crazy investments, they hit rock bottom, because all of a sudden, they realize that they have been doing everything for society, and never for themselves. And then, they have to question themselves, like, ‘Why do I actually care?,’ and that is such a hard conversation to have with yourself.”How Huda, Mona, and Alya Kattan built Huda Beauty out of Dubai

Read more: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/338195