Founder index · Rare Beauty · 2020s–present
Scott Friedman
The lesson that travels
“The celebrity brands that last tend to have an operator who has already scaled one beauty brand and sold it. The fame is the launch; the operator is the second act.”
Friedman is Rare Beauty's chief executive and the least visible person in the story, which is how celebrity beauty usually works when it works. His record before Rare is in mass-market beauty. He was president of Allegro Manufacturing, a cosmetic-bag maker, when it sold to Conair; he then ran NYX Cosmetics alongside its founder, Toni Ko, through the 2014 sale to L'Oréal for a reported $500 million; and he later became chief executive of Bellami, a hair-extension company built on social media. The pattern across all three is the same: work beside a founder, scale a brand that grew through its own customers' posts, and prepare it for a buyer.
That background explains Rare Beauty's operating choices better than the founder's does. A wholesale-led model through a single prestige retailer, a tight hero-product focus, and a sale process run through bankers in 2024 are the decisions of someone who has done this before. It also explains the brand's restraint about direct retail and capital: a NYX veteran knows how much value is created by staying light.
The parts I cannot verify should be said plainly. Rare Beauty has not published when Friedman joined, what stake he holds, or how decisions are split between him and Gomez. Public reporting credits him with recruiting a team of experienced beauty executives, and the company's most important commercial calls since 2020 fit his history, but attributing any single one of them to him rather than to the founder would be a guess.
§01 — The hard calls
- 2014
At NYX, guide a founder-led mass beauty brand to a sale to L'Oréal.
A reported $500 million deal, and the template — scale through social media, then sell to a strategic — that his later companies resemble.
- 2024
Run a sale process for Rare Beauty at about $2 billion through Goldman Sachs and Raymond James, as reported by Bloomberg.
Paused by September 2024 when buyers would not meet the price. The company stayed independent.
- 2026
Take the brand into Ulta Beauty nationwide after five and a half years as a Sephora exclusive.
Ulta's biggest launch day on the brand's own account. Whether it adds customers or moves them is the open question.
One of these is set up as a tutorial — you make the call before you find out what Scott did.
Face the decision§02 — Around this founder