The Glossy Beauty Podcast

Cindy Gustafson has checked off a laundry list of accomplishments during her first 18 months as CEO of Nutrafol. 

This includes an app launch designed to improve retention and a product release tailored to reach one of its smallest customer demographics in men over 50. These rollouts happened while she led the team toward double-digit growth during 2025, her first full year as CEO, on a path to soon reach $1 billion in annual sales. 

“You need a real commitment to delivering on something someone actually needs [in order to win this category],” Gustafson told host Lexy Lebsack. “We actually have quite a small portfolio of products, [unlike our competitor] brands that have hundreds and hundreds of SKUs. We are not that kind of a brand. We are not that kind of a business.”

Instead, Gustafson has stayed hyper-focused on delivering on its main promise of improved hair growth. “We have been so fixated on really delivering against what a customer needs and what a customer is looking for, and staying very, very grounded in that,” she said. 

Gustafson is a veteran exec whose CV includes Weight Watchers, Bark, Mindshare and Unilever. She spent 18 months as chief marketing officer of Nutrafol before taking over the CEO role from Nutrafol’s co-founder Giorgos Tsetis after its Unilever acquisition.

In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Gustafson unpacks her secret sauce for growth, how the supplement consumer has evolved and much more.

How are beauty and wellness business leaders actually using AI today? 

That was the question posed to three longtime industry executives on stage during Glossy’s annual E-Commerce Summit in Miami Beach earlier this month — and the answers may surprise you. 

For example, Jenna Manula Linares, vp of digital marketing and TikTok Shop at Tarte Cosmetics, has recently added 15-minute team check-ins at the end of each weekly meeting that require staffers to share how they used AI that week and whether or not it was successful. 

“We're creating a culture of experimentation,” she said. “So, what I challenge my teams to do each week is to use AI in a new or different way.” The team then tracks these challenges and results using Tarte’s internal AI program. 

Meanwhile, David Baker, chief revenue officer of the skin-care brand Beekman 1802, has found success in identifying early AI adopters within the brand and empowering them to learn new skills and own tentpole projects. “First and foremost, it's finding the people who have an interest in it, and giving them the room and space to play,” he said. 

Baker is teaching his team to think of AI as a colleague that works while the rest of the team is off the clock. “Finding and sourcing creators gets really hard, so we've built an agentic staffer. Her name is Zoe, and Zoe is designed to source [creators] and draft personalized outreach, so that we can find people who fit our ethos and fit our brand voice really, really well at scale, while we sleep,” he said. 

“AI has permeated every team and workflow we have at Tarte,” Linares said. “I'm constantly telling my team, if it takes you longer than 15 minutes to do something, there's a faster way, and you should learn and try to figure it out via AI.”

Then there is Ulta Beauty, which rolled out one of the largest AI partnerships within beauty retail last month, with Google Gemini. The team has spent the past few weeks learning how its consumers actually use the new AI-powered features, which include an on-site and in-app chatbot. 

“We continue to find new data sets that we need to put into [the chatbot’s knowledge base, like] store locations, store hours — a lot of those things where customers are just asking generic questions,” said Josh Friedman, svp of digital and e-commerce at Ulta Beauty. “They're asking lots of questions about the brand, and we're seeing some really good use cases with our customer care agent, as well.” 

In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, host Lexy Lebsack takes listeners live on stage with Ulta Beauty’s Josh Friedman, Tarte’s Jenna Manula Linares and Beekman1802’s David Baker to learn about the actual impact of AI today.

Daniel Landver is the head of UTA's creators product group — a role most people may not even realize exists. While his job keeps him behind the scenes, Landver is behind some of the buzziest brand launches of the past decade. Think: Patrick Starrr's One/Size, Alex Cooper's Unwell (beverages), Mikayla Nogueira's POV Beauty and Alix Earle's recently launched Reale Actives, to name a few.

Much has changed in the 10 years since Landver began working in the creator economy. During his conversation with co-host Sara Spruch-Feiner for the Glossy Beauty Podcast, he discusses how the creator-brand landscape has evolved since he first entered the space in 2015, what separates successful founder-creators from those who struggle and why, in an increasingly crowded market, product quality matters more than follower count.

Artificial intelligence is the undisputed main character of 2026, showing up everywhere from the wedding industry to perfume creation. But even while AI’s place in society remains contentious — in the buzzy “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” AI is a bigger antagonist than Miranda Priestly — beauty brands and retailers are rushing to adopt AI into their platforms. That includes two of beauty’s major players, Sephora and Ulta. 

In March, Sephora announced an integration of its app within ChatGPT, while Ulta Beauty announced its own artificial intelligence integration via a partnership with Google Gemini just a month later. 

On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, hosts Lexy Lebsack and Sara Spruch-Feiner are joined by senior beauty reporter Emily Jensen to discuss Sephora's and Ulta’s recent investments into AI, and how agentic shopping is poised to evolve in the beauty industry.

How exactly AI will shape the consumer pipeline and influencer beauty shopping in the months and years to come remains to be seen. But with Amazon (and its proprietary AI capabilities) on Sephora's and Ulta’s heels as a major beauty retailer, the beauty retailers are diving right in rather than risking getting left behind.