The Jamie Kern Lima Story | IT Cosmetics
Before I get into Jamie's story, I share something personal... a season in my life I don't talk about much. A relationship that slowly took everything from me, and the moment someone laughed in my face when I said I wanted to get into real estate. I left. Got my license. Became rookie of the year. And I think about that laugh every time I come across a founder who had their own version of it.
Jamie Kern Lima is the co-founder of IT Cosmetics, the brand she started in her living room, built into the number one prestige cosmetics brand in America, and sold to L'Oréal for $1.2 billion. She became the first female CEO in L'Oréal's 108-year history. But this episode isn't about the billion dollars. It's about a rental car in a parking lot outside Philadelphia, a woman with under a thousand dollars to her name, and a decision she made before she ever walked through that door. A male investor told her nobody would buy makeup from someone who looked like her. QVC said no for two years. Sephora said no for six. And when she finally got her shot, ten minutes on live television, she wiped her makeup off on camera and showed the world exactly who she was. Everything sold out before the segment ended. This one is about what it means to stop covering up the thing you think disqualifies you and let it be the very thing that builds everything.
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Welcome back to Fifteenish. This is Leah. Hey friends.
Okay, so I wanna share something a little personal before we get into today's episode. I haven't talked about this much or really at all here, I don't think.
There was this season in my life where I was in a relationship that quite honestly took everything from me. And I really do mean everything. I had no confidence.
My sense of self was completely shattered. I no longer had a belief that I was capable of doing something bigger in my life. I was constantly told that I was not worth anything.
And to be completely transparent, it was emotional abuse. But at the time, I couldn't see it clearly. When you're in it, you just feel small, you feel stuck, you start to believe the story being told about you.
And in the midst of this relationship, I had mentioned I wanted to get into real estate. I'd already been in the leasing agent world, and I was starting to see that I was really good at it. And as soon as that dream left my mouth, I was shut down.
And in one particular moment, I remember his dad actually laughed in my face. Yes, he laughed. And he said, you'll never be successful at that.
The message was so clear. Leah, who do you think you are? Now I know I'm glossing over a lot, and maybe someday I'll tell you the whole story, but the short version is that I did end up leaving him.
And one of the first things I did was go get my real estate license. I was just 22 years old. I was a newly single mom.
My daughter was just two and a half years old. I had zero savings and no backup plan. Only this stubborn gut feeling that I had something to prove.
Mostly to myself, of course, but by the end of that first year, I ended up being rookie of the year. Yes, I did it. I proved that I could do it.
That was the moment that that original belief of me not being able to amount to anything or not being able to go after my dreams. Well, it started to feel less believable. I actually started to feel like I was worth something.
And I do sometimes go back and think about that laugh from his dad. If I had let his laugh and his lack of belief in me dictate the future that I went on to actually create, well, I wouldn't be where I'm at today.
And today's founder had her own version of this, except hers came from an investor who looked her straight in the eye and told her that nobody would buy makeup from someone who looked like her. But she went on and built a $1.2 billion company anyway.
This is the Jamie Kern Lima Story.
2:36
Jamieʼs Early Life
Jamie grew up in Washington state as a first-generation college student.
She waitressed at Denny's, she begged groceries at Safeway, she worked multiple jobs just to put herself through Washington State University, and she ended up graduating as the valedictorian.
She earned her MBA from Columbia Business School, where she ended up meeting her husband in a stats class, and she landed her dream job as a television news anchor in Portland, Oregon. She was just living the plan.
But then she noticed her skin started changing. She had rosacea. Rosacea, if you didn't know, is an incurable condition that causes redness and visible blood vessels, rough texture, and just bumps across the face.
For most people, it is manageable, but for someone whose job it is to appear on camera every single day, it was a whole other thing she had to tackle.
She said her cheeks, her forehead, and her nose, really everything would just get really, really red and bumpy. Then she would hear about it in her earpiece.
She'd be mid-broadcast and her producer's voice would say, Jamie, can we do something about your skin during the next commercial break? Jamie, there's something on your face. Can you wipe it off?
She knew there was nothing to wipe off. It was just her face. Hearing that must have been something else, right?
She's in the middle of doing her job, a job that she's worked incredibly hard to get, a job that she loved, and in her ear, someone is telling her that her face is a problem.
This didn't just happen once, it was constant, like it was part of the routine. There's nothing she can do about it because it's not something she could just fix. It's just who she is.
Now, that kind of repeated messaging does something to a person.
Even when you know intellectually that it's not fair, even when you know your skin condition isn't a flaw, when someone keeps pointing at your face and calling it a problem, well, eventually some parts of you start to believe it.
She spent years trying every product on the market, and nothing covered it well enough or nothing lasted. Everything either looked cakey or dried out on her skin or made it worse.
And she kept thinking, if I'm a professional who can't find something that works, how many other women are out there feeling the same way? Not just women with rosacea, maybe it's women with dark circles or hyperpigmentation, acne or age spots.
Women whose skin didn't match that airbrushed, filtered and Photoshopped ideal that every beauty ad had been selling for decades. She couldn't stop thinking about it, and neither could her husband.
4:54
IT Cosmetics Beginnings
So in 2007, on their flight to South Africa for their honeymoon, they pulled out a notepad and started writing. By the time they landed, they had a business plan.
They came home from their honeymoon and started IT Cosmetics from their living room in Studio City, California. Jamie didn't end up paying herself for the first three years. They bootstrapped everything.
And then came rejection. From every major retailer, QVC said no for three years, Sephora said no for six, department stores said no, investors said no.
One male investor even looked her in the eye and told her he didn't believe women would buy makeup from someone who looked like her, with her body and her weight. She said that one really hurt. She went to her car and cried.
And I think it's easy to hear a line like that and just let it slide past as another rejection story, but really sit with what that man said to her. He didn't say the product wasn't good. He didn't say the market wasn't there.
He said nobody would buy it because of the way she looked, because of her body, because of her weight. He looked at this woman, this valedictorian, this Columbia MBA, this television anchor who had been building something real for three years.
And he reduced her to her appearance and told her it wasn't good enough. And then she went to her car and cried. And then she went home and wrote them all a thank you note.
Yes, a genuine note thanking them for their time and telling them that she couldn't wait for the day her products were in their stores. She already believed the yes was coming, like she already knew how it ended.
And then six months later, when IT Cosmetics got a piece of press or launched something new, she'd email every single one of them again. She'd say something like, hey, just wanted to share this, can't wait for when we're in your stores.
She did that every time after every no for years. That's honestly a really long time to keep hearing no.
It's just a relentless period of being told over and over again that the thing that you believe in isn't good enough and then going home and coming back and doing it anyway.
Remember that she wasn't paying herself and they were burning through their savings and every door that she knocked on stayed closed. Most people would have stopped in this moment.
Most people would have found a reason to call it a day and just go back to something that actually made sense. But Jamie didn't. She said in her gut, she knew that she had a good product and that gut was the only thing that kept her going.
By the time QVC finally gave her a shot, just one 10 minute segment after three years of them saying no, they were down to their last thousand dollars combined.
7:24
QVC Live Authenticity
She ended up having to take out a loan to manufacture the minimum order of 6,000 units of her buy-buy under eye concealer. The deal with QVC was simple. Sell all 6,000 in 10 minutes or don't come back.
And if she didn't sell them, she'd have to take them back with no money to do it. She flew to QVC headquarters outside of Philadelphia. She got the cheapest car rental she could find and she sat in the parking lot.
Here's what I want you to understand about what happened next, because it would have been very easy and very reasonable for Jamie to walk into that studio and do what every other beauty brand had always done in QVC.
Put on a full face of makeup, stand next to a perfectly lit model, show the after, be professional and take the safe route. That was the playbook. That was what worked.
That was what QVC expected. But Jamie walked in and did something completely different.
She had decided in that parking lot, even though she was shaking, even though she was only down to her last thousand dollars, and all of that was on the line, she decided that she was going to take her makeup off, live, on camera, on national
television. She was going to show her rosacea, her actual face, the face her producer had been asking her to fix for years, and then apply the concealer in real time and let people see what it actually did.
She said the QVC team thought she was insane. They gave her that safe plan. They gave her the best advice they knew, but she didn't want that.
She understood that they were trying to help, but she said, I didn't have the luxury of trying it both ways. I only had one shot. Everything was on the line.
She went on air, her arms were shaking, her face was red. The QVC hosts squeezed her arm and said, take a deep breath, you're doing great. Jamie wiped off her makeup, live, on camera, in front of millions of people.
And then she applied the concealer and showed what it did. And guess what? All 6,000 units sold out before the segment ended.
She said she started sobbing on national television. That one airing turned into five that year, then a hundred the next year.
9:38
Power of Authenticity
And eventually they built the biggest beauty brand in QVC's history. And then it turned into a snowball effect. Sephora, who had rejected her for six years straight, came back.
The huge retailers who hadn't returned her calls came back. The QVC buyer who originally rejected her, that eventually retired, Jamie hired him on to her advisory board.
And on the day the L'Oréal deal closed, that investor we talked about earlier, who had told her that nobody would buy makeup from someone who looked like her, well, he called to apologize.
He said that he had been wrong and that had he invested, it would have been the most successful investment in his firm's history. I mean, come on. Good for him for apologizing, but what do the kids say nowadays?
That's a holy airball, my friend, a $410 million airball. But honestly, the investor, their retailers, all of it, none of that is the part of the story that I can't stop thinking about.
It's what happened before any of them got to see how wrong they were. It's what happened to that parking lot before she went live on QVC. Jamie had spent years being told that her face was a problem.
Her producer said it in her earpiece, that investor said it to her face, and at some point she made a decision, not a business decision, but a deeply personal one, that she wasn't going to keep pretending.
The most powerful thing that she could do was show up exactly who she was and let people decide for themselves. And yes, that decision terrified her. She sat in that parking lot shaking.
She had every reason to play it safe because one wrong move and everything was gone, but she still chose to be real. I can only imagine what it actually took to walk back in from that parking lot.
Because sitting in the car and deciding to be brave is one thing, but actually walking into a live set in front of a hundred million homes and wiping your makeup off is something else entirely.
That's the moment where most of us probably would have chickened out, where that fear would have probably won. Where we would have maybe told ourselves, okay, I'll be authentic next time, but not today, not with this much at stake.
Jamie didn't do that. She walked in anyway.
Now, I think about all the moments in our own lives where we're sitting in that quote unquote parking lot, where we've been told directly or indirectly that the way we look or sound or show up isn't quite right, isn't quite enough.
Maybe we need to be adjusted or fixed before we're ready to walk back in that room, and we have a choice in that moment. We can either play it safe and be what they're expecting, or walk in as exactly who you are and let that be the thing.
Jamie chose that second thing in the scariest possible moment with the most possible at stake, and it turns out that that exact thing that she told was her liability, her face, her rosacea, her refusal to be airbrushed, was actually the thing that
made everything work because it was real, and people could feel that it was real, and then they bought it, not just a concealer, the whole story, the honesty. She wrote in her book later that our setbacks are almost always setups for what we're
called to do next. called to do next.
12:48
Embrace Your Setbacks
And gosh, does that not hit differently when you look at her story? Let me say that again, our setbacks are almost always setups for what we're called to do next.
The rosacea that she was trying to hide on camera every single day, that was the whole reason IT Cosmetics existed. The thing that she was most embarrassed about became the thing that created everything. I don't think that's a coincidence.
I think there's something real in that pattern, that the thing we want most to hide, the thing that we think disqualifies us or the thing that we've spent the most energy trying to fix or cover up or work around.
It's often exactly the thing that gives us the most clarity about what we're supposed to actually go on to create. Because a lot of the time we know that problem deeply from the inside. We've lived it, we've felt what it costs to not have a solution.
And that knowledge, that personal visceral, it happened to me knowledge is something that no market research can replicate. It's the whole dang thing. So I want to ask you, what's the thing that you've been covering up?
What's the problem that you have that you've been trying to hide rather than solve? What if the thing that you think disqualifies you is actually the thing that makes you the most qualified person in the room?
I started this episode talking about being laughed at. A grown ass man who looked at me and made me feel like the idea of becoming something was completely ridiculous.
Jamie and I both had someone tell us, in their own way, that we weren't the right person for the thing that we wanted most.
And I would bet money that somewhere in your life, someone has laughed, or dismissed you, or looked at the thing that you want and made you feel small or stupid for wanting it. So let me clear this up for you in case you need it.
That laugh doesn't get to be the last word. Your thing, whatever it is, is still waiting for you to stop covering it up. Thanks for being here.
I'll see you next week.
Sources & Disclaimer
Jamie Kern Lima — Believe IT: How to Go from Underestimated to Unstoppable (Harper Collins, 2021)
Jamie Kern Lima — Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life (2024)
Columbia Business School — The IT Factor (August 2025)
Boca Raton Observer — Making It Big (August 2021)
Foundr — Jamie Kern Lima Used 10 Minutes to Create a Billion-Dollar Business
CNBC — IT Cosmetics Jamie Kern Lima: I Lived Completely Burnt Out for Almost a Decade (March 2021)
Femfounded — IT Cosmetics: Rejected Everywhere, Sold for $1.2B
Wikipedia — Jamie Kern Lima entry
All facts shared in this episode are based on information available at the time of recording. Any personal reflections, interpretations, or opinions are my own. If anything is found to be inaccurate, I'm happy to issue a correction.
