“It’s all about the question of how you make it happen. 'The cool thing about being an entrepreneur is there are no rules,” she says. It’s cult-favorite family of Naked palettes has sparked its own sub-industry of spinoffs.Įven with her industry-changing success, Zomnir is still a little nostalgic for her scrappy beginnings. Last year, Urban Decay was named among the top three makeup brands in digital by digital market research company L2. In 2012 Urban Decay was acquired by L’Oreal for an estimated $300 to $400 million. Zomnir has come a long way from her days of cold calling and peddling homemade press kits. “That was kind of how we tried to seed the cool factor of the brand,” she says.

She also implemented a pre-Instagram influencer strategy, reaching out to New York’s “It” girls and sending them Urban Decay products to pass out to their friends. I would cold call and say, ‘I have a new cosmetics line, can I come meet with you?’ I made press kits out of hardware store supplies and ran around New York trying to pitch people my brand,” she says. Zomnir did not wait for Urban Decay’s next break to fall in her lap-she hustled. She got in touch with a buyer at Nordstrom and within 24 hours had her first major order. So in the days before LinkedIn, she copied down a list of buyer contacts when a friend of her then boyfriend’s-a retail sales rep-left it lying on her kitchen table. “We didn't know anyone, no-one knew who we were,” says Zomnir. Take for example the story behind Urban Decay’s very first corporate order. With zero experience in retail, Zomnir did have one major leg up from her time spent in a demanding advertising job: “I knew how to figure things out,” she laughs.

“This is a story about being resourceful,” she says. Urban Decay has the kind of socio-cultural clout most brands only dream of with 9.4 million Instagram followers and community of influencers as expressive and diverse as the company’s products.īut Zomnir’s start as a powerhouse entrepreneur was a lot less glamourous. “That was where we started to discover how to bridge the gap between being a niche brand and being a brand with a broader appeal.”

“It appealed to that kind of edgy girl, but it also had a broader appeal to the woman who just wanted to dip her toe into the water of being edgy,” says Zomnir. The result was an entirely new expression for the beauty industry. Zomnir's bold beauty aesthetic has helped Urban Decay develop a brand known for it's cult-favorite.

Urban decay