Korean Skincare Expert Sarah Lee on How She Created a Cult Beauty Brand

Welcome to Second Life, a podcast spotlighting successful women who've made major career changes—and fearlessly mastered the pivot. Hosted by Hillary Kerr, co-founder and chief content officer at Who What Wear, each episode will give you a direct line to women who are game changers in their fields. Subscribe to Second Life on iTunes, and stay tuned. We'll be releasing new episodes on Mondays.
Korean skincare expert and Glow Recipe co-founder Sarah Lee spent years in the corporate beauty world at L'Oreal Paris before making the leap to start her own company, which has created cult products that have sold out numerous times on Sephora. Glow Recipe's first popular product, the Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask, had a "waiting list of 5000 people within a few hours after launch," Lee tells Second Life host Hillary Kerr. How impressive is that?
"There was a sense of desire that everybody wanted on Instagram," Lee says. "And I think that we organically built micro-influencers with our customers because the first ones that tried our formula really were excited to share their experience on their Instagram, whether they had 200 followers or 500,000 followers. And that just became a viral community of sharing the results and the first reviews. I think that really trickled to a wider audience." Learn about her fascinating career journey on the newest episode of Second Life on iTunes, and scroll down to shop her brand.
Shop Glow Recipe
Next, I used to live and die by Sephora reviews until I found these 11 products.

Erin got her start as a Who What Wear intern in 2011—back when the site only published a single story per day. (We have since increased that number twentyfold.) She graduated magna cum laude from USC and lives in Los Angeles. In college, she also interned at Refinery29, where she was promoted to editorial assistant and then assistant editor. After nearly three years at R29, she came back to WWW in 2015, where she is now the Associate Director of Fashion News. From the Oscars to the Met Gala, she leads the site's entire red carpet coverage strategy. She specializes in celebrity and fashion news but also enjoys writing travel features and runway reports. She frequently contributes to WWW's social accounts and has a sizable following on her personal TikTok.
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