Rose Marie Swift [00:00:25]: Hi, this is Rose Marie Swift. I am a makeup artist and the owner of RMS Beauty, the organic color cosmetic brand, and to me, it is a matter of originality.
Kelly Kovack [00:00:40]: Founders are a passionate group with diverse motivations and definitions of success. I’m Kelly Kovack, founder of Beauty Matter. While the motivations for launching a brand may vary, make no mistake: it’s hard, but incredibly rewarding work, even when things don’t go to plan. Today’s venture-backed start-up landscape has raised the bar for what it takes to not only compete but to succeed. Many brands today focus on valuations, the size of fundraising rounds, topline numbers, and their exit plans, and that’s one path; others remain self-funded and fiercely independent, defining success on their own terms. In this paradigm, success is not based on size, but the ability to execute on your purpose, your vision, and your strategy, all while being laser-focused on profitability. Makeup artist Rose Marie Swift, the founder of RMS beauty and clean beauty pioneer, is one of these fearless founders.
So, Rose Marie, thank you so much for taking us up on the invitation to chat today. We’ve never met, but I’m a huge fan, your story is so inspirational, the products are amazing, and also, we’ll dig into it, but you are sort of one of the rarities of doing this sort of completely self-funded. So, I’m so excited to have you today.
Rose Marie Swift [00:02:14]: Oh, thank you for inviting me, I’m very excited about this.
Kelly Kovack [00:02:17]: Your backstory as a professional makeup artist and the fact that a cosmetic industry-related illness set you on the path to create RMS is pretty well-known, but what stuck me out in kind of prepping for this was how you responded in an interview during that period, and you said, “I started studying what was out there, I got pissed off, and then I started my own brand,” and I was like, “I’ve never met Rose Marie, but I think we’re going to be friends.”
Rose Marie Swift [00:02:45]: Well, that’s very typical me. I’m like this mad scientist, and I’m always analyzing products, and I was always brought up with really healthy food, I was obsessed with bringing organic salads to the shoot for the models, and they’d always ask me to get an organic green juice from Juice Press at the time, and so I got kind of this reputation for being really involved with the girls’ health and telling them what they should do, and I always wanted to do something organic, because here I am, working with girls that are 16, 17, 18 years old, and they’re absolutely drop dead gorgeous, I kind of like to say “freaks of nature,” because they’re so perfect, and I used to always think, “Wow, look at after I put this makeup all on them, all they start doing is looking older. It sits on top of the skin, it starts to crease up,” and I’m like, “This is totally not cool.” I’m a lazy makeup artist; I don’t want to be retouching dried up makeup all the time, and I thought, “I’ve got to start doing my own thing,” so I started looking at brands that were, at the time, your so-called – well, actually, some of them were being labeled as “organic,” and I remember turning the product around and looking at the deck, and on it were the words “organic,” but yet there was only one organic product in the deck, and I’m like, “What the hell? This is all full of chemicals still.” Yes, some of them are natural chemicals, but some of them were downright nasty chemicals that are under scrutiny in the industry, and I’m like, how do they get away with having this organic? And, of course, they really didn’t back in those days, because this is going back quite a while. I just started analyzing what was out there and started studying it, and then I did that website, BeautyTruth.com, kind of talking about the industry a little bit, and so it was funny, it kind of hand-in-hand came with it, and one of the main inspirations, I honestly have to say, is I did so much photography that was on location. A lot of it was Victoria’s Secret – which I can say that on here, right?
Kelly Kovack [00:04:42]: Of course.
Rose Marie Swift [00:04:43]: Good.
Kelly Kovack [00:04:45]: You can say anything you want.
Rose Marie Swift [00:04:48]: I was having the time of my life, man, flying all over the place, staying in great hotels, oh my god, it was so much fun, but the one thing that used to make me really mad is I’d put makeup on them – their bodies were always gorgeous, I’d put a little bit of jojoba oil on, and then I’d look at the skin on their face, and depending on what angle they were in or the way the light hit them, there’d always be this slight little overcast and it always looked makeup-y, and I thought, “How do I get their skin on their face to look exactly like the skin on their butts?” so to speak, perfect skin, and the makeup was not doing it, so I started creating my little un-coverups, and I got it working in the way I wanted it to work, but it really did upset me, the fact that so many chemicals are added in there as flowing agents to give that slippy-slidey feel, it’s all texture and fragrance that’s hypnotizing you, and I thought, “Okay, this is pissing me off.”
Kelly Kovack [00:05:47]: Well, also, you know, because you started the brand 11 years ago. So, what was even possible – you know, because I remember those kind of early kind of natural color cosmetics that lived primarily in crunchy granola Whole Food stores, and the formulations were so clunky, they just drug and they were drying, and people were like, “Well, but it’s organic,” and I’m like, “Yeah, but it doesn’t work, so what’s the point? It doesn’t matter.”
Rose Marie Swift [00:06:22]: 100%, and a lot of them, at the time too, were minerals, like when I was going around to the labs, they just said, “Well, organic is minerals,” and I said, “No, it’s not.” Minerals, for one thing, aren’t even organic, take that right out of your vocabulary. Things that are organic are your oils, your seeds, nuts, butters, herbs, all that stuff, you know? It’s basically agriculture and livestock is what is certified organic here in America, and it was funny, because I had a friend in Canada – I’m Canadian, by the way, just so you know, but I had a friend in Canada, and she worked for a paint factory, and I had this idea of what to put in it, so she started mixing it for me, we’re going back and forth. The more I got into organic, the more I realized organic was just not organic – there were varying degrees of organic, just like there are varying degrees of diamonds. Just because you’re buying one diamond, one that’s $30,000 and one that’s $1,000 at some little store, that’s the same thing that happens in the cosmetic industry and the organic industry. So, you’re getting good quality and bad quality of organic, and so we would do these mixtures where she would get some organic stuff in Canada, and I’d be like, “I don’t know, man.” Having come from a raw food background, I thought there’s better things, better ingredients, the way they’ve been harvested, the way they’ve been processed and whether heat has been added, and I just…I ended up getting this coconut oil that was so unbelievable that the chemist herself said to me she could not believe the difference in the product, from one organic product, which she just bought normal stuff in the store, compared to the stuff I was searching out the purity and for the quality, and you could smell the difference, the texture was different, it just had a completely different – even the energy of the product was different.
Kelly Kovack [00:08:12]: Well, I know you have sort of a thing about coconut oil.
Rose Marie Swift [00:08:17]: Yes.
Kelly Kovack [00:08:19]: I was going to talk about that later, but let’s…what is your thing about coconut oil?
Rose Marie Swift [00:08:23]: Well, just so you know, and I let my dyed hair that I used to have, I let it grow out, and just before I came on, I thought I’ll put a little bit of coconut oil on my hands and I pushed it through my hair, and I thought, “I do have to tell them I’ve got coconut oil in my hair.”
Kelly Kovack [00:08:39]: I love the gray hair; it suits you so much. It’s beautiful.
Rose Marie Swift [00:08:44]: Well, thank you. It was kind of a shock at first, you know, but it’s like, “Whoa, I’m gray.” Well, I hope to be at my age. Everybody always says, “Oh, coconut clogs the pores.” Here’s what I say to people, which freaks people out. I go, “You are 100% correct,” and they kind of look dumbfounded at me and they go, “Well, what do you mean? Why are you using it then?” because I don’t use that kind of coconut oil. Coconut oil…it’s such a long story, I’ll make it very, very short though so we don’t drag on about this, because a lot of people probably have heard this ten million times. There’s different qualities of coconut oil, as you know, but mine is not cold-pressed coconut oil. Cold-pressing still involves heat, and people don’t realize. The reason I use coconut oil is because coconut oil in nature has the highest levels of lauric and caprylic acid. Now, lauric and caprylic acid are anti-fungal, antibacterial, antimicrobial, antiviral; obviously, the rest of the healing nutrients in it. Now, what’s interesting is in nature, it has the highest levels of those two ingredients: lauric and caprylic acid. Do you guys know at all where the other highest ingredients are in the whole wide world?
Kelly Kovack [00:09:52]: I have no idea.
Rose Marie Swift [00:09:53]: Human breast milk.
Kelly Kovack [00:09:56]: Really?
Rose Marie Swift [00:09:57]: Yes! Lauric and caprylic acid. After breast milk is coconut oil. But, here’s the problem: the cosmetic industry loves to cosmetize things, that’s a name that I made up guys, sorry about that, but I love to make up names, and what happens is, they like to heat things up to sterilize everything to make sure that woo, nothing’s going to happen, they’ve got to fractionate it, they’ve got to hydrogenate it, there’s all of these things that they put all of these poor healing ingredients into, and therefore, in my world, you’re creating a dead product. Once you add that kind of heat to a product, it’s dead.
Kelly Kovack [00:10:36]: So, Rose Marie, let’s take a moment to look back at the beauty industry sort of a decade ago. You know, the concept of D-to-C brands, influencers, and the clean beauty category didn’t even exist. How would you describe the beauty landscape when you decided to launch RMS? And also, what were the biggest obstacles in bringing the vision to life? Because formulations and the whole sort of realm of possibilities in what you could achieve in formulation was not what it is today.
Rose Marie Swift [00:11:11]: Oh, wow, yeah, that’s a very good question, actually. It’s so funny, because I remember when I was going to start this, and I was telling some of my big makeup friends, and they’d go, “Who the hell is going to buy organic makeup?” and I’d just kind of put my head down and go, “Well, somebody will, you wait and see, I’ll prove it.” Anyway, so long story short, you know, I just started working on it on my own, and I was very lucky to have that chemist from Canada that helped me do the formulas, because I’m obviously not a chemist, but I knew what I wanted in the product, and I couldn’t get a lab. I had my starting formulas from her, and as I went around to labs, everybody, again, just wanted to push the mineral makeup, that was their version of organic, and then they say, “Well, it’s too hard, it’s too time consuming,” that was a big issue, was the time, it definitely does take longer to make then traditional cosmetics, and you know, it just was a pain, and I finally did find one lab that would take on the project with the starting formulas, because one of the big pet peeves that the lab had was working with someone else’s formula, mostly one that they didn’t really know what it was, you know, “What the hell is this? It’s got coconut oil in it, it’s got shea butter and color,” and it almost seemed hippy-ish, it’s like, “Well, this isn’t really a product,” but again, back to the ingredients; ingredients are number one. So, what happened was I did find that lab, I created the product, I slowly was getting it out there, and the original lab, just a funny story here – the original lab actually got closed down and had a big, huge law case put against them, and so I had to find another lab, and again, big difficulties. But, it’s funny, through all these years, the labs now are really starting to embrace the green industry and not laughing at it so much, because there’s a lot of brands out there now that are channeling clean, healthy makeup. It seems to be working, it’s going in the right direction, and you know, I’m glad I was kind of one of the ones that kind of motivated a lot of brands that wanted to start doing that. I feel that I was a little bit of an influencer on a lot of people, because I was kind of the first one, and I was really the first one mouthing off about the industry with the website I did, so that kind of, you know, I had moments where people didn’t like me, I had moments where people did like me, because of my stance on the purity of products, and I don’t know, I’m happy, I’m doing my thing, I’m being creative, it’s working.
Kelly Kovack [00:13:53]: Well, I would say that you more than influenced it. I mean, I would argue that you’re one of the pioneers that sort of defined this kind of clean beauty space, and definitely the concept of clean makeup, and also, you know, 11 years into it, you’re still innovating the category. But, you know, I think one of the challenges, at least from the outside looking in, or the inside looking in, I guess, I’m not so outside, but the clean product category has no designation. I mean, it really doesn’t have any meaning, at the end of the day, it’s completely open to interpretation. So, how do you define clean beauty?
Rose Marie Swift [00:14:34]: Oh my god, I don’t know. You know what, I’m going to honestly say I don’t have a clue about how I’m going to define it. What I can say is you know, when I started my brand, I regarded my brand as being very, very clean, and people started doing brands also similar to mine, but now I’ve noticed that more and more unnecessary things are getting added into, and a lot of it is – I hate to say this, but to save grace for the rest of the industry a little bit, because you know, we’re having this whole section, let’s say for Sephora, for example, there’s a whole section of green and clean cosmetics, and then you’ve got this other section, and people are going to think, “Oh, what’s wrong with those then?” So, they’re slowly incorporating more and more chemicals that are allowed, and there’s no defining and no definitive line down the middle, what makes clean and what makes something “dirty” or whatever the words that people like to throw around, like the word “toxic,” which I don’t like, I think it’s kind of a silly word to use, because it’s not really toxic, per se. I think that – I like to call my stuff “green,” and I find myself saying that a lot and I don’t know why. I never really ever say clean, I always say green, I have a green brand, and green is more coming from mother earth, in my opinion, so I kind of put it in that category. Yeah, it’s a tricky one to maneuver, mostly if you don’t know much about cosmetics and you’re going out there as a newbie, and you’re trying to think, “Well, I want to go into a little store and I want to buy a nice product,” and people are saying, “Well, this is all organic,” because what’s happened is a lot of brands say it’s all organic, but it’s not at all, so the consumer now is actually kind of being duped in some cases with marketing and advertising and it’s kind of sad, you know?
Kelly Kovack [00:16:17]: I agree. I mean, you know, really, retailers like Credo and Sephora and recently Ulta have stepped in to fill the void, and let’s be fair, they did it to help consumers navigate their assortments and look for these hot, clean brands, but even those standards are inconsistent, and the category sort of consists of brands like RMS that walk the walk, at one end of the spectrum, and at the other end of the spectrum, you have opportunists that see a high-growth category and they want to tap into it, and they play a little free and easy with the language and claims, it’s the cost of doing business if they get caught. What do you think the future of the category is going to look like? Because at the end of the day, consumers are the ones that lose with all of this confusion, and it’s really not…I mean, it’s strange to say “fair,” but it isn’t. There are brands that really put in the hard work, and I feel like there has to be a way to differentiate them, but I certainly don’t have the answer, but I think that there’s technology coming out there that’s going to provide sort of transparency in the supply chain, and maybe that’s going to be the unlock.
Rose Marie Swift [00:17:44]: You’ve got it. You know, to be honest, it’s really hard to say what’s going to happen, but in my case with RMS Beauty, all I’m trying to do is do my creative thing. I’m coming from a creative avenue, I was a makeup artist, I’ve got a raw food background that I was very heavily into years ago, and I really follow that clean purity, and yes, it is being kind of bastardized a bit, so to speak, but that’s okay, because I’m just going to keep doing my thing, I’m going to keep creating what I do, I’m going to make myself tried and true, so to speak. If you want to get a product that is more pop culture, you know, and more glitz and glam, go for it, but I just want to keep RMS beauty as RMS, right mental state, that’s how I put it.
Kelly Kovack [00:18:35]: You know, and this sort of taps into the fact that – I mean, you should be very proud of it, you’ve scaled this business when competitors have tapped into mounds of VC funding. Why have you decided to keep RMS 100% self-funded, which seems to be a rarity these days? I mean, I’m sure you’re inundated with inbound investment and acquisition requests, so I’m sure it would be very easy to take that path, but you’ve chosen not to.
Rose Marie Swift [00:19:13]: Well, you know, this is kind of a tricky one, because we kind of did this with less focus on a huge, rapid scaling effort, and more on solid growth, and I wanted to be…like, I’m a creative, again, back to the creative thing. My vision does not include all of this money being thrown at me to sort of fly through this by the seat of our pants where things go wrong, and it’s just too fast, too many Excel sheets thrown at me, you know what I mean? It’s got to calm down. I can’t function doing something creative with that kind of momentum that’s really gang busters, because we all know, these guys, they can really take a brand to gang buster territory. But, at the same time, I feel like a part of me would be lost because I’m really trying to do something creative, something new, that people have faith in, that stands the test of time, and I want my brand to be a classic brand. I’m not in a hurry, and I tend to throw this in every once in a while, it’s kind of sad to say, but it’s true what I’m saying here – I don’t have kids. I don’t have anybody to give my money to, so I’m not in a hurry for anything. I don’t want a private jet. It’s just not my thing. So, for me to take on big, huge investors – and believe me, they’ve come to us and we’ve talked to them and got to know some. I really need to know that somebody is into what I’m doing and is not going to say, “Oh, get rid of the coconut oil and put in…” I don’t know, some other cheap oil. And, I just want it focused on where I want to leave when I leave this lifetime. I want to make sure that my brand has a reputation of being what I wanted it to be, not what some flash in the pan source of income for everybody else but myself.
Kelly Kovack [00:21:11]: Well no, you know, it’s how businesses used to be built, and I think that building brands organically, you know, nothing happens quickly, and I think one of the things that has been a big takeaway for me, kind of through the past ten months, is that brands that were kind of a little old school in their approach, the heritage brands, are weathering the storm almost intuitively better than some of these venture-backed, high flying brands, because at the end of the day, you know who you are, you don’t have to sort of second guess your decision making because it’s so ingrained with what you do every day.
Rose Marie Swift [00:21:57]: Exactly. Very, very, very true. You know, and it’s funny because we’ve taken the time and the energy to just slow down, we’re into quality. We’re also spending the time getting the right people working for us, whether it’s on a part-time basis or on a full-time basis, really good marketing people, getting really good photographers to help out with things, and we’re just not, like I said, flying by the seat of our pants, we want just to establish this, you know, strength, and being respected, and you’re right, I do find that some of these older brands that have all of the sudden appeared out of the blue, and I’m not going to name names, they’ve got a really good standing power.
