About a year ago, Stacey Tank gave herself a homework assignment: Watch 30 minutes of TikTok content each day. The former C-Suiter at brand-name corporates was up to speed on Facebook and Instagram, but if she was going to run a burgeoning beauty products company, she needed to understand her young customers’ platform of choice. After a couple of months of study, the 43-year-old Bespoke Beauty Brands CEO pushed herself a step further; it was time to hit record.
Becoming a TikTok content creator has resulted in a library of videos—with viewership peaking at nearly 500,000—in which Tank advises watchers on what shoes are the best to wear in the airport, how to apply lip gloss using the “two-dot method,” and behind-the-scenes content from New York Fashion Week. She also shares career tips and business strategies, everything from the art of influencing key stakeholders to embarrassing stories from the corporate world.
Tank launched her career at General Electric. In her decade with the $68 billion conglomerate, she traveled the world and gained experience across key operations, working in groups ranging from marketing and communications to finance and audit. Next, she joined Heineken USA, where, as the only woman chief corporate relations officer at a major U.S. beer brand, she streamlined the company’s PR strategy and increased its overall media impressions by 278 percent within one year.
After that, she became the chief commercial officer and president of The Home Depot Foundation, followed by a role as CEO of the multibillion-dollar Home Depot Installation Services and Home Depot Measurement Services, where she oversaw the closure of four unprofitable business lines and led those that were left to double-digit growth.
In June 2020, Tank boomeranged to Heineken to become its chief transformation officer—and just the second woman in the company’s history to be on the executive committee.
Tank is “one of those people who can do it all,” says Maggie Timoney, CEO of Heineken USA. “In order to operate at the level that she does, you must be able to handle a lot, process quickly, move on, compartmentalize, focus, and deliver. And the pace of change, as we know, in the world and society is only accelerating. It’s not decelerating. So, the ability to do what she does is really a core skill.”
Throughout her career, Tank’s corporate adventures have taken her to Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Brazil, and the U.K., but with two sons—one of whom was keen on returning to America—she began to look in the States for her next opportunity.
Around the same time, she sent a birthday card to NYX Cosmetics Founder Toni Ko—the two women are Henry Crown Fellows through the Aspen Institute. Ko heard that Tank was returning to the U.S. and asked her where she planned to work. By that point, in early 2023, Tank was weighing offers and asked Ko for advice. “We traded a dozen emails that night,” Tank says. “She wrote back saying, ‘Those are all really boring. You shouldn’t do any of them. You should come be the CEO of my company.’”
Behind Jason Wu Beauty
Building on his reputation as a couture designer, Jason Wu’s beauty brand blends high fashion with accessible luxury. The concept is that beauty should be effortless, chic, and echo, Wu says, the “empeccably refined femininity” that’s the hallmark of his fashion. New Jason Wu beauty products are launched each month, building on award-winning offerings such as the Good Night Mr. Wu lip mask and the Wu Brow 24/7 laminate. The brand uses clean ingredients, says Bespoke Beauty CEO Tank. “It’s skin-loving,” she says, “meaning we have things like hyaluronic acid and jojoba and vitamin E, and it’s going to make your skin barrier healthier because you’re using it.”
A Primer in Los Angeles
Toni Ko grew up with an inside look at the beauty industry, working at her family’s perfume and cosmetics store after school. At 26 years old, she formed her first company, NYX Cosmetics. Fifteen years later, after hitting $93 million in annual revenue, she sold it to L’Oreal. Ko had more to pursue, but due to a non-compete agreement, she had to wait five years before launching another beauty enterprise.
Liberated in 2019, Ko founded Bespoke Beauty Brands. Having worked with artist, drag queen, and entrepreneur Kim Chi throughout the years, Ko scored Chi’s KimChiChic Beauty as the first brand under Ko’s new portfolio company. Bespoke runs all the operations tasks—sales, marketing, social media, design, product development, accounting, operations, e-commerce, supply chain, and customer care—for the brands under its umbrella.
Ko says the goal for Bespoke was to go into business with influencers, celebrities, and fashion designers and help them fuel their beauty startups. For a second portfolio brand, she teamed up with award-winning New York-based fashion designer Jason Wu, whom she met through mutual friends, and floated the idea of launching a beauty brand and pitching it to Target. They saw that upscale department and beauty stores like Sephora and Neiman Marcus had designer beauty brands, but mass category businesses did not. “So, we went to Minnesota and went to Target,” Ko says. “We presented the idea, and they loved it. And that was the beginning of the inception of Jason Wu Beauty.”
Both Bespoke brands have seen surges in shelf space at CVS, JCPenney, Shoppers Drug Mart, Kroger, and London Drugs, as well as a deeper presence on Amazon, Flip, TikTok Shop, and more.
As Ko sent emails across nine time zones to Tank in 2023, it was clear that a friendship had the chance to expand into a collaboration. For Ko, the decision to bring Tank on board was simple. “Stacey is a people person,” she says. “She loves being with her team. She touches on every issue and every subject with high energy and intelligence. But it’s not just that. It’s her compassion, her ethics, and the love in her heart that inspires me the most.”
Tank flew to Ko’s home in Los Angeles for a weekend. There, Ko outlined the story of her business and her vision for marrying artists’ creativity with her passion for beauty and entrepreneurship. “I knew that Toni was obsessed with product and product quality, and she’s clever,” Tank says. “She’s very in the zeitgeist. She’s really good with trends.”
The weekend debrief included a primer on product flow, from R&D and design to a consumer’s shopping cart. Then, Ko provided Tank with her company’s financial data. “I had a preconceived notion around startups,” Tank recalls, “You always hear, ‘They’re on year 15, and they still haven’t become profitable.’ And I thought, ‘This sounds hard to grow into something that eventually becomes profitable.’”
Tank, a former auditor, sat in bed that night and pulled the data into spreadsheets. “I made pivot tables, ran analytics, and made charts, and I got confused—the P&L was beautiful,” she says.
By the following day, Tank had heard and seen enough. “Beauty is an unbelievable category,” she says. “I didn’t know that this was a category where you could start a brand and in three years make it profitable—let alone on a trajectory for incredible profitability and financial health. What an incredible combination. That’s where I started to [see] the pieces coming together.”
The final puzzle piece was looking through the products in Ko’s garage. SKU by SKU, Tank got a taste for the fun of working in the beauty industry. “I’ve worked in nuclear power, I’ve worked in banks, I’ve worked in beer, I’ve worked in all these interesting categories,” Tank says. “I worked in healthcare equipment. You can get excited about MRI machines because we sell them to save people’s lives. But there was something about these [beauty] products where you couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.”
When she found herself dreaming about how to grow the portfolio’s brands, Tank knew it was time to make a move. “I was waking up in the morning with a hundred ideas about how we could reach new consumers and delight consumers, and how we could make this company growth-oriented and fun while growing the brands into $100 million companies and then into brands that can be billion-dollar operations,” she says. “And that’s when I told Toni, ‘Let’s dance. Let’s do this.’”
Social Selling
Tank officially became CEO of Bespoke Beauty Brands in September 2023. The company’s headquarters is within an industrial building in Irving, where the walls of the front office are painted a funky pink and feature a sprinkled donuts theme. Behind that, a wall signed by Kim Chi is adorned with lighted shelves and a symphony of beauty products. The shelving units reflect displays found at CVS, Target, and London Drugs and are used to experiment with how new product displays look.
In the back of the building, warehouse space is crammed with rows and rows of boxes full of products. The space comprises 55,000 square feet of pick, pack, and ship space for e-commerce, direct-to-consumer, and wholesale retail delivery.
The headquarters belongs to Bespoke, which moved to North Texas a couple of years after launching in Los Angeles. The relocation was motivated by several key factors, including the fact that the region has a thriving beauty business base. “Irving became a darling on the list by being very well located close to Dallas, close to where the talent is, and an easier commute,” Tank says.
The new facility allows everything to be done under one roof. “Dallas—and Texas in general—is open for business,” says Tank. “We’ve felt welcomed here. And in addition to that, Dallas is very well located in the United States. So we have one distribution hub, and that’s here.”
It allows the company to distribute to brick-and-mortar storefronts—grocery chains, CVS, JCPenney, London Drugs, and Canada-based Shoppers Drug Mart, to name a few—and serve social e-commerce customers. Last year, TikTok invited KimChiChic Beauty to be the beauty launch partner for its live shopping and TikTok Shop platforms. (See sidebar.) The KimChiChic brand grew by 170 percent last year.
When Tank joined Home Depot more than 10 years ago, the big question on the minds of retailers was the explosive growth of e-commerce and how online sales could coexist with—or challenge—brick-and-mortar retail. In the last year, she says, a third leg of the stool has emerged and is here to stay—social selling. “I heard a lot of people talk about the ‘creator’ and the ‘influencer’—that’s been around for a while,” Tank says. “But the ability for people to shop with one click turns individuals into retailers.”
The social selling avenue allows consumers to hear directly from other users about what products work best for their lives. Tank believes the three different sales platforms all work together rather than compete. “I don’t think they’re at odds,” Tank says. She uses the example of Opal Powder, a new Jason Wu product that debuted in August. “They may see a friend or an influencer swatch it, put the highlighter on, and think, ‘That’s interesting, but maybe I don’t know if I could wear something with that much glow.’ But then they’re getting their groceries, and they’re in Kroger, and they walk by it and they’re influenced to get it.”
KimChiChic’s TikTok has more than 420,000 followers and 7 million likes. Post views climb as high as 3.7 million—one video showcases an article on popstar Chappell Roan using the product.
“These channels work together in different ways,” Tank says. “When KimChi went viral on TikTok last year, all the channels did better.”
Big Sister, Little Brother
The state of play has morphed since Bespoke Beauty Brands’ founding. The company has no plans to add to its portfolio—for now. “We used to identify ourselves as an incubator,” Ko says, “but we are very happy with the two brands that we currently have, and we decided just to nurture these two brands to a huge success.”
After a massive year last year, KimChiChic is staring down ongoing double-digit growth. “It’s a very special brand, like lightning in a bottle,” Tank says. “And then Jason is a younger brand, so it’s continuing on its growth trajectory, just a little bit on a delayed cycle behind its big sister, KimChi.”
Tank is still a student of TikTok. “I have to live at the end of my comfort zone if I’m going to help this young company swim in this new space where no one knows the exact playbook,” she says. “And we just have to come with a ‘Yes, let’s try it’ energy.”
It’s an attitude that landed the company partnerships with Sephora and YouTube Shorts—the platform’s short-form feature. “They welcomed us, I think, because we’re fast,” Tank says. “And we have to leverage that to continue to grow.”
The CEO has embraced the speed and more daring vibe that comes with leading a high-growth enterprise versus some of the larger companies on her resume. “One of the biggest differences to me, coming from a company with 500,000 people, is that although you’re trying to win every day, you’re really playing to lose less—or playing not to lose,” Tank says.
But Bespoke Beauty Brands is playing to win, Ko and Tank say, and it has the luxury of leveraging its early-stage status as a strength. With that comes the ability to lean into creativity and risk. It’s a mindset that trickles down into the company culture, Tank says. “‘We try to keep it light. We try to keep it fun,” she says. “This category is fun. If we’re not having fun with lipstick and highlighter, we’re doing it wrong.”
How KimChiChic Beauty Found Its Niche
For artist, performer, and entrepreneur Kim Chi, landing a finalist spot in Season 8 of RuPaul’s Drag Race was just the beginning. KimChiChic Beauty launched in 2019 as a Bespoke Beauty Brand. It features bright colors and cheeky product names like “Almost Catfished” and “Rice Rice Baby” to combine a playful tone with a mission of releasing affordable beauty products. Last year, the brand was the beauty launch partner for TikTok live shopping and TikTok Shop. By the summer of 2023, the brand was viral. KimChiChic Beauty landed in the top 2 percent of all TikTok Shop sales in the U.S.
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