Entrance Interview: Personal Day’s new CEO on the skin care brand’s move from social commerce success to brick-and-mortar retail

After serving in sales roles in the early days at brands like Tula and Drybar, Amanda Domaleczny’s first CEO role, at just over 1-year-old acne skin care brand Personal Day, is the earliest stage yet.

The brand, co-founded by actor Lili Reinhart, launched direct-to-consumer in October 2024 with five products for acne-prone skin, getting a jumpstart thanks to Reinhart’s loyal community of 30+ million social media followers. Newer launches like its Hypochlorous Acid Spray and Blackhead-Melting Nose Strips have helped it gain traction on TikTok Shop, where it’s sold over 62,000 units, a solid proof of concept that led to its brick-and-mortar debut at Ulta Beauty in August.

The brand’s previous CEO, Shelagh Wong, departed last fall to serve as COO and CMO at skin care brand Sincerely Yours, per LinkedIn. Domaleczny said Personal Day co-founders Dan Reich and Ken Landis, also co-founders of Tula, asked her to take the reins as the brand enters its next phase of growth.

“It has so much momentum, more than any other brand I’ve ever been with at this stage of the journey, which is really exciting, especially in this category—that is another reason I joined. [It’s] really prime for disruption,” Domaleczny said.

Just five weeks into her new gig, Domaleczny shared with Retail Brew how her nearly 20-year retail career has informed her strategy to grow the nascent skin care brand.

Skin in the game: Domaleczny has had an extensive career in the beauty industry (though her career actually began in aerospace and supply chain management before she made the leap to fragrance product development).

Many of her roles across beauty centered on supporting growth of newer brands into “household name,” she said. She worked in the beginnings of the retail journeys for Too Faced and Drybar as they made their Sephora debuts, followed by nearly five years as VP of global sales at Tula before its sale to P&G. She then joined makeup brand Live Tinted in 2023 as chief commercial officer and, most recently, president, leading its chainwide expansion at Ulta last year.

“I didn’t want to be a salesperson because I felt like there was this stigma and untrustworthiness and sharkiness around it,” she said. “I wanted to ultimately reimagine what customer service was so that I could feel like it was meaningful and thoughtful, and something that I could hang my hat on. That really defined my career in a way that at the time I didn’t know.”

A new day: In her first few weeks as CEO of Personal Day, Domaleczny said she’s organized her time into three categories: retail, brand, and product.

Within retail, she’s focused on strengthening the brand’s presence at Ulta with in-store merchandising and “building out a retail team that can engage with the customer in a way that is thoughtful, authentic, [and] experienced,” she said. That includes growing out its field sales team, she said. Online, she hopes to diversify its social commerce presence beyond TikTok.

And that goes hand in hand with a focus on brand—emphasizing the mission of helping consumers “refresh and reset” their “stressed skin,” she said. That mission, along with Reinhart's loyal following, has established strong repeat rates for the brand, so it will refine how Personal Day brings “that sentiment and that feeling to life at these different touch points across retail or social commerce,” Domaleczny said. The brand had just shot new visuals featuring Reinhart in Malibu, California, the weekend before we spoke.

And those visuals center on a new product, coming in about five weeks—the first it’s launching with Ulta “in a growing category that’s really white space for both us and for Ulta to gain market share,” she said. As Personal Day refines its product roadmap for the next two years, Domaleczny said she’ll focus on customer segmentation and making the brand’s products approachable for the different types of consumers that might use them.

Up close and personal: From her career in beauty, Domaleczny said she’s learned the importance of “defining a clear mission and set of values” from the outset.

“It can be a little bit chaotic on back and forth decision-making and not knowing what to do, and that slows you down,” she said. “And I like to move fast. I don’t need to be right, but I like to win. Having some parameters for decision-making makes it really easy.”

And her top value, she said, is “growth mindset.”

“I just love to think about how to reimagine a category or a strategy and be the leader in what the future should look like, rather than just doing what has worked before,” she said.