From BB creams and sheet masks to snail mucin serums, Korean beauty products have created a global following over the years. What was once a niche area of beauty gradually popped up in seemingly every TikTok and YouTube beauty tutorial.

While influencers are definitely key to bringing K-beauty to global prominence, some beauty brands, including Glow Recipe, also played a significant role in making it both more accessible and, well, more fun.

What started out as a curation site for K-beauty products in 2014, soon became a skin care brand with several viral beauty products—namely Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops and moisturizer—with 4 million followers globally.

Korean-American co-founders ​Sarah Lee and Christine Chang say that while rooted in Korean heritage, they always wanted Glow Recipe to be a global brand created through hundreds of iterations to suit both Western preferences (non-sticky, lightweight formulations) and Korean inspiration (hydrated, dewy finish).

“By introducing really high-quality, clean formulations, we were able to really engage with our customers and community on the how-tos, all the tips and tricks that we’ve learned from a young age from our mothers and grandmothers, including stories that led to who we were as individuals, but also the passion that we both mutually shared,” Lee told Retail Brew, recalling her decades-long friendship with Chang that ultimately led to the duo going into business together.

Lee and Chang spoke with Retail Brew about how they stay ahead of the competition and their biggest lessons.

Keep reading here.—JS

Alexa, do you have time for an elevator pitch?

The Alexa Fund, which began in 2015 as a way to seed new startups in Amazon’s then-burgeoning voice ecosystem, is widening its net beyond its namesake platform. The tech giant’s venture arm recently announced several new hardware- and AI-centric investment areas, along with four startups it’s backing as part of that expanded scope.

The announcement follows Amazon’s long-awaited overhaul of its Alexa platform with a slew of new generative AI features. It also comes after Amazon pushed into the foundation model game for the first time with the new family of Nova models it announced last December.

Alexa Fund Director Paul Bernard said Alexa’s expanded capabilities offer more avenues for startups to engage in the platform, although that’s not the fund’s sole focus anymore.

Keep reading here.—PK

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Tad Phelps is CEO of Fintech, a business solutions provider used by retailers like CVS, Dollar General, and Food Lion.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? Fintech is in the business of enhancing operational efficiencies for retail, hospitality, and alcohol distributors. We have been around for more than 30 years and work with leading retail brands across the nation in a few different facets: providing technology solutions to support their accounts payable process (or how they pay their vendors) and to help manage their inventory—processes that can be extremely complicated and convoluted for multi-location stores. I spend the majority of my job working to understand ongoing pain points for these operations, and how our suite of technology offerings can best remedy those issues. The retail industry continues to quickly evolve, and my role is to identify how we can evolve alongside our customers to best serve them.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? I am still involved heavily in all our new products, from inception to features and functions. Our products, along with our people, are our lifeblood and I like to stay closely involved with both. I hate taking credit for our success. I know it sounds cliché, but all our success goes to our employees (our Fintechers); they really drive the company forward, are constantly innovating, and are a great group of people first and foremost.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? I really do not have a favorite, but the favorite part of my job is M&A. Each deal, win or lose, is its own project that has its own nuances and challenges.

Keep reading here.—EC