Mona Kattan on Finding the Courage to Go It Alone
About this episode
Mona Kattan discusses her journey of building the fragrance brand Kayali independently after separating it from Huda Beauty.
Mona Kattan has been collecting fragrances for most of her life. That obsession eventually became Kayali — a fragrance brand she built inside Huda Beauty, the global cosmetics company she co-founded with her sister Huda Kattan. In 2020, something shifted. Mona entered therapy and uncovered a pattern that ran through her entire entrepreneurial journey: she had never built anything entirely on her own. She began to ask herself what it would mean to do something, fully, by herself. “I am a very collaborative person, but I don’t want to sacrifice my vision,” she says. “Sometimes, in a partnership … having to move both feet in the same direction doesn’t really work if you’re not able to decide on your own. That’s where I realised that if I want Kayali to survive and thrive, I need to create my own path.” That path was made possible through a complex corporate carve-out that separated Kayali from the Huda Beauty group and brought in General Atlantic in as Kayali's new backer. Mona joined BoF founder and CEO Imran Amed on stage at The Business of Beauty Global Forum in Napa Valley, California, to pull back the curtain on that corporate split and dive deeper into the…
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