Tom Ford Beauty and Augustinus Bader. Now she is applying that experience to the less glamorous challenge of turning a creator-powered launch into an enduring business. That ambition is about to face a major test. A year and a half after launching direct-to-consumer, POV Beauty will make its Sephora debut in September, taking the brand beyond its digital roots and putting its products in front of a much broader audience. Here, Hadjinian talks to Inside Retail about building beyond influencer hype, scaling at speed and making the leap into Sephora. Inside Retail: Prior to launching POV Beauty, can you delve into your career background and how your path led you to becoming a brand founder? Ani Hadjinian: Beauty was always the industry I wanted to end up in, but I started in investment banking because I wanted that financial and analytical foundation first. I knew those skills would be useful no matter where I went. From there, I moved into The Estée Lauder Companies through internal M&A, which was really my entry point into beauty. Over the years, I had the chance to work across brands including Bobbi Brown, Tom Ford Beauty and Augustinus Bader, so I saw very different sides of the business, ranging from large global organizations to founder-led brands to businesses in major growth periods. At a certain point, I realized I wanted to take everything I had learned and build something myself. I wanted to be closer to the decisions, the product, the consumer, all of it. POV Beauty became that opportunity. IR: You co-founded POV Beauty with makeup influencer Mikayla Nogueira. In today’s hypersaturated retail landscape filled with influencer- and celebrity-founded brands, how does POV Beauty avoid the negative pitfalls often associated with these types of companies? AH: For us, it comes down to building a real business. Mikayla has this incredible relationship with her audience and a very strong instinct for what beauty consumers care about. That gives us an advantage, of course, but attention only gets you so far. The product has to hold up, the operations have to hold up, the team has to be able to execute and you have to make decisions that still make sense when the initial excitement fades. Mikayla and I are very different in the best way. She is incredibly close to the consumer and has this almost immediate read on what will resonate. My background is much more on the operating side – taking that insight and building it into something that can actually scale. We’ve always been very aligned that we’re building POV for the long term. Mikayla is a huge part of the brand, but the ambition is much bigger than a moment around one person. IR: How did you decide on the name of the brand? AH: We wanted the name to feel inclusive of different perspectives. “Point of View” made sense because beauty is so personal. Mikayla has her point of view, I have mine, our team has theirs and then every person using the products brings their own experience to it. IR: In a hypercompetitive market such as the beauty industry, how does POV Beauty distinguish itself from its competitors? AH: The first thing is having a clear reason to exist. For POV, that is the space between skincare and makeup. We’re very focused on what happens before makeup goes on and how that prep affects the end result. That shows up in the formulas, the textures, the way products layer and even the order in which you use them. We want each product to perform on its own, but there is a lot of thought put into how the full routine works together. The other piece is how close we are to the consumer. Because of Mikayla’s community, we’re hearing feedback constantly. We can see what people understand immediately, where they have questions, what they’re asking for next, which is incredibly useful. IR: What were the toughest challenges you faced in the initial stages of launching and running the brand? What strategies did you incorporate to overcome these issues? AH: The pace was probably the hardest part. There is really no dress rehearsal when you launch a brand like this. You put something into the world and immediately get a very clear signal back. Sometimes that signal is amazing. Sometimes it tells you there is something you need to fix. We saw demand very quickly, which was exciting, but it also forced us to scale faster than we initially expected in areas like inventory, production and operations. Strategically, we viewed every market signal as essential information rather than an emotional event. By establishing more immediate communication channels between our sales and supply chain teams, we shifted our ability to address consumer interest from a monthly timeline down to mere days. We also prioritized bringing in seasoned operators with the experience to construct the necessary business infrastructure while we focused on the creative evolution of the brand. IR: What have been the biggest highlight moments of running the business thus far? AH: There are the obvious ones. Doing roughly $1 million in sales within the first several minutes of launch was completely surreal. The response to our launches, seeing products sell through, and now going into Sephora are all huge milestones. But I also really love the smaller moments. Seeing someone pick up the product in real life and react to something we spent months debating, like a texture, a package detail, the way something feels on skin, is still very special to me. IR: POV Beauty originally launched onto the market with a DTC site in March 2025. A year and a half later, POV Beauty is marking a major milestone with its official debut in Sephora this September. How did this retail partnership come about? What does this step indicate for the brand’s expansion strategy moving forward? AH: We always knew wholesale would eventually be part of the business. We were just very thoughtful about when to do it and who to do it with. Sephora felt right because they understand how to work with emerging brands and help them grow. We weren’t looking for shelf space for the sake of shelf space. We wanted a partner that understood what we were trying to build and could help us reach a much broader beauty consumer. Retail also gives people a different way into the brand. Someone may have seen POV online for a year, but being able to walk into Sephora, touch the products, feel the textures and ask questions creates another level of trust. IR: What can we expect to see from the brand over the course of the next year? (i.e. product category expansion, pop-up shops, etc.) AH: The biggest priority is making Sephora successful. There is a lot that goes into that beyond simply getting product into stores. We’re thinking about education, field support, inventory, marketing, how the brand shows up physically and how we introduce POV to people who may not already know us through Mikayla. On the product side, we’ll keep building around that relationship between skincare and makeup. Skin prep is the foundation of the brand, and we will continue to innovate in that space and also expand what that means in the consumer’s mind. IR: What goals do you hope to achieve with POV Beauty over the next year and over the next five years? AH: Long term, I’d love for POV to have a real role in changing how people think about skin prep and the relationship between skincare and makeup. And I want us to be one of the examples people point to when they talk about creator-led brands that became enduring companies. That, to me, is much more interesting than being the brand everyone is talking about for one year. Further reading: How Alissa Miky harnessed red algae to create functional beverage brand Oomee