How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

In 2018, Sharon Chuter left her job at a legacy beauty brand to start UOMA Beauty, a cosmetics company that caters to a wide variety of skin tones. She recently launched a social media campaign called Pull Up or Shut Up, which asks beauty brands to publicize statistics on the diversity of their workforce. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hey, everyone and welcome to how I built this resilience edition. On these episodes, we're talking with entrepreneurs about how to think creatively during this really disruptive moment. And today, I'm bringing you my conversation with Sharon Shuta,

the founder of OMA Beauty. Oma Beauty is a cosmetics company that makes inclusive products for a variety of skin tones. Sharon's inspiration for the company came from her own upbringing in Nigeria, where she just couldn't find the right makeup for her own skin tone. She went on to work for Revlon, L'Oreal, and Benefit, but in 2018, Sharon left the corporate world to start OMA and make beauty products for women like her. Recently, she also started a campaign to get beauty company

to be more transparent about the diversity of their workforce. Sharon, join me from Los Angeles. Sharon, for those who don't know you or the brand, you're originally from Nigeria, which we'll talk about it in a moment. But tell us more about your brand. Yeah, so Amma Beauty is a range of color cosmetics where highly inclusive brand. I found that Oma Beauty because I was frustrated with the state of the beauty industry. I was working within beauty for the longest time and just got frustrated with how non-inclusive

if it was. And in 2017, 2018, they still were not catering to most people. You know, they were only catering to one particular audience. And that frustrated me. So I wanted to go and create a movement. I wanted to create a brand where everybody could find themselves. And Amma Beauty is a brand that has been founded on inclusion, self-love, self-expression, authenticity, and really enabling and inspiring people to show up every day as their best selves. And we were very fortunate to have launched with alter support in 203 stores and launched in the UK as well with self-ridges. And, you know, it's been an amazing year. We're only one year in the market and continue to challenge the industry,

continue to be outspoken, continue to be advocates, whilst at the same time having fun and playing with makeup and creating things that everybody can feel welcome and included with. And I was checking out the website last night, and you've got this really cool feature on the site where you basically choose your complexion, your skin tone. And there's like, I think, six kind of general. and then you narrow it down further, and that helps you pick out, right? Everybody are different, right?

And I think that's the craziness of the world. We keep pretending like we're the same. We're not the same. What your skin needs is completely different to what my skin needs. Yet every brand, even the ones who are claiming to be inclusive, will create the same product for everybody. But the needs are completely different.

So we created six different skin families and then we customized the formulas between each family to target the unique needs of your skin, to target the way your skin is structured, the common concerns of your skin. So we put that all together in the foundation. And that's why our website is built that way, where you start from what my skin family,

which sort of identifies where you are, and then you go down. We've got 51 shades, so it can be overwhelming. So we help people really consolidate because once you find your skin family, you only have to select between six to 12 shades, depending on your skin family.

We help you work out your undertone, which is all about the shade of your skin. And once you've done that, you really have only three products to select from. So it makes it super, easy, super intuitive to shop through a 51 shade foundation rate, which for women can be quite daunting. Just for the record, I got Olive. I love it.

I love it. You are honey, honey, honey. Yeah, honey. Yeah, I wish I had some this morning because I had like a little spot. But anyway, that's another story. Well, makeup is for everybody, you know. Absolutely. My ex-husband used my concealers all the time. Like when he would have dark circles, he would cover them, he would have like, you know, imperfections.

So he wore makeup, even though he was the most manly man. And I mean, a lot of his friends didn't know that because of just society is not ready for it. But he did make up even though he was like super-disciplinal on the skin. Do you know, I think a lot of men do that. Like I remember like I've on several occasions, especially when like we've done family photos. I've taken my wife's concealer and just like put it under my I've done that. I'm going to admit that. I mean, I think a lot of men do that.

Yeah, no, but they do. But they just hide it and no talk about it because society is sort of like, oh, makeup is a thing that chicks use and it's not for men. And it's like, no, it's for everybody. And anybody who's on TV, they use makeup. Like, they put it to mattify the skin, you know, to accentuate certain parts so the camera can catch it better. So every man who's on TV, it says use makeup. So, yes.

Sharon, you grew up in Nigeria, I think in Lagos, right? Is that right? Well, I grew up in a lot of parts of Nigeria. My family moved around a lot because my dad was a hotelier. So I spent a lot of time in Lagos. I spend time in Worry. I consider myself a worry girl. People don't know where worry is.

It's like, I joke about people. I'm like, you know Harlem, but like, yeah, I'm like, or, you know, come to me. Yes. Okay, make it like 30 times more extreme and you got worried. Like, it is, it is hardcore. It is really like so much culture. It is street. It is wild. And that was where I spent the longest time, but it's an unknown place on the map, but it's very, very notorious to just be in that place. I read a really great article about you. And it talked about how, like, really early on, like, you know, just right at college, you got into working with Revlon. And I guess it kind of stemmed from your childhood where you were frustrated that you couldn't get Revlon products in

Nigeria. Is that is right? Exactly. Exactly. I think, you know, for me, one of the most common themes in my life is always standing up for what I believe is right and always fighting for a better world, you know, from being expelled when I was in high school for mobilizing everybody to go on strike because it was, the conditions weren't great. And I had to, you know, mobilize them for to go on strike. So they went on strike. What we wanted, they got it, but I was the scapegoat. So I labeled the troublemaker, right? So, you know, leaving college. going, hey, why don't we have good color cosmetics in Nigeria? And I reached out to all the brands.

And Revellant was the only one who responded positively. And they've been trying to come into the country for 15 years and they couldn't. And it took like the craziness of a teenager not knowing how to take no for an answer. And that was how I got into the beauty space. Because, you know, it really showed me that I had two sides to me in terms of I'd always been very academic. I finished high school at 15. So they were like, if you have a PhD at 19, you know, you were that clever.

one of those gifted kids, but I'd also been very, very artistic. So beauty gave me your home to put those two things together in terms of the creativity and the academics of it all. And you did eventually get Revlon into Nigeria. You went on to work for L'Oreal. You worked for LVMH. I think you ran operations for benefit. And you quoted an article talking about how even now in African countries, the cosmetics available are really kind of designed for lighter skin tones, even now. Absolutely. You know, I did a whole series on my Instagram stories once where I was traveling as I was traveling, I was showing them what was available in South Africa.

In South Africa, you go into the department stores and you can't find dark shades. And that's ridiculous. You know, it's just completely ridiculous. A lot of countries that are African countries still can't find it. And what's also sad is because of the effect of colonialism, even in Africa, the standard of beauty is still very anglicentric. It's still

fiscan, it's still straight hair. The biggest skincare product in Africa is skin bleaching products. You know, out here is anti-aging. There is skin bleaching because everybody wants to be lighter, you won't have some people putting their music, some musicians putting in the music to go, oh, light skin girls and how they prefer light skin girls. You hear men talk about this quite openly that I love my girls to be light skin. So all the girls that are, you know, going to bleach.

And this was actually a big problem because you started having products with mercury, high doses of hydroquinine, for mother hide, really bad stuff that were not allowed to sell here. People were making them and sending them down there and just having people, you know, helps be at risk. So it's really sad. And I remember growing up, even in Nigeria, people had to use like white talcum powder as a face base because there was nothing, you know. And then there was like three shades of what we used to call pancake. Pancake is the original foundation made by Max Factor.

It's a big case. And everybody would rob it and look orangey and look crazy. And that was what was available. So it's crazy when you think about it. I mean, it's so cool that your experiences led you to founding this company last year. How are you guys doing? I know you're still a small company. I think you've got about 10 or 15 employees.

How are you doing right now? You know, at the moment we're 12 people. You know, we were a much bigger team last year, and we shrunk it down strategically this year because last year we were bringing way too quickly from my liking. Like, it got frantic, you know, and I felt like we had to take a pause,

slow down and build the foundation of the brand properly. Because if you don't build a foundation, all the growth that you get, it's going to collapse at some point. So for me, it was a marathon, not a sprint. So I deliberately strong the size of my team. Most of my business actually comes from recent. We launched it 203 auto stores, me in Selfridges, you know, in Oxford Street, which is a massive

business for us. So most of our business actually came from retail. And one of the challenges we had was when we launched, the retailer's names almost overshadowed the branding. Everybody knew, Alma Beauty, Alter. That was sort of what they knew, right? So people were buying on Alter.com, not our website. So that was an issue that we had coming into this year.

Right. In a way, the pandemic has addressed for us. Because all of a sudden, people started seeing us as an entity outside altar or self-ridges or all our retail partners. And now we now have a business where right now my dot com is now over 70% almost 80% of my business. So what's happened to us in the end is it's allowed us get more intimate with our customer. And that has really driven a lot of growth.

So our dot com is making way more money than any of our retailers used to make. It's really allowed people to see us for who we are outside the shadow of the retailer. So actually go, who is on my view as a brand? What are they? They getting to know me. Whereas before I was so busy, I was always on point. I did not have time to do interviews or be on live or have the level of intimacy that I now have with my customers. That's interesting. Yeah. So Alta and Selfridge's huge distribution platforms. But now, of course, it's all through the website.

We're getting a bunch of questions. This is from Lisa Norris. Are your products SPF rated and waterproof? Well, waterproof. Yes. SPF, I make a point not to put SPF in my products for two reasons. Once you infuse SPF into a product, it becomes very hard to perform in dark skin because it's a white base. That's why they only make the light shades because, you know, once you put in SPF, it changes the base white. So when you're going to really, like, from my skin complexion, it would be okay, right, because of our formula. But when you get into the real deep shade, it starts throwing back this gray kind of flashback that I don't like. So I don't put it in there. And I also think another thing about SPF is a very personal thing. People don't realize this.

The SPF needs for, for this is really fair skin is different to the SPF need for the dark skin. SPF need also changes based on what skincare you use. Do you use red, Do you use any product that, you know, counter the sun that would change your requirements? People should always buy the SPF separately to their products. And I know people want to do it for convenience. But it's really critical because SPF is so unique to what you doing with your skin. And a lot of times it's gimmick. Like products will have 15 SPF.

Right. It's a waste of my time because I need 50 for me because I use records, right? I'd rather just use the SPF I'm going to use anyway and then use the products independently. And as we just learned on how I built this recent episode we did on SuperGoop, sunscreen brand. You can't just put it on in the morning and that's it. Like, you've got to put on every couple hours. Every two hours. Exactly. And people don't know that. You put on SPF in the morning, right? And you feel protected for the day. But that thing only lasts two hours. Thank you for that question. Lisa. Okay, I want to turn to something that kind of got you into the news

recently. You issued a call to action for corporations to publicly disclose, particularly in the beauty industry, the percentage of black employees they have, executives and board members. And you use the hashtag pull up or shut up. And you got like responses from Glacier and L'Oreal and Sephora. Tell me about this idea. Had it come about and what, yeah, tell me about it. I think it came out of frustration. I was extremely frustrated because like I said, even the reason I set up my brand was for the same reason. Companies not been inclusive. Company is not hiring black people. You know, right now in America, the black adult population is just over 13%. The black participation in corporate America is 8%. In leadership roles,

it goes to 3.2%. There are 615 billionaires in the country, only six of them are black. Every single level you look at, there is this economic isolation of black people, which is creating an economic inequality, right? And that got keeps going wider and wider. During this pandemic, the billionaires in this country, the net world went from $2.9 trillion to $3.4 trillion. The rich is getting richer, the poor is getting poorer. After the wake of this second wave of Black Lives Matter movement with the debt of George Floyd, which was so personal, you know, it was It really hurt our community and the rest of the world. And what I saw companies do was performative activism.

All of a sudden, they wanted to get into social issues. You know, oh, yes, you know, Nike dropped a commercial within 48 hours. Don't do it. Everybody was applauding. It became a competition for who can donate to the most. I'm going to give $100,000 to NWACP. I'm going to give a million dollars. And no point in time did they think about what role have they played in marginalizing people.

So the same companies that you go through their social feed you cannot see a black face. They do not have black employees. They do not have black executives. And they're the same people telling their followers that you have to do something. You cannot stay silent. So I thought this was a really good opportunity because they came out and spoke, right? Okay, you're speaking.

Your money where your mouth is. And actually, effect change. Your companies are racists. Your companies are riddled with unconscious bias. Your companies have so much microaggressions against black people. That's why I left corporate world. When I left, I had a nervous tick. I was so scarred.

Everybody says to me, well, you thrive to corporate. You became an executive. I'm like, I didn't thrive. I survived. And that was what this campaign was for. It was, we have to stand for change. And change has to start somewhere. And it starts with transparency and accountability.

Because guess what? Only consumers can affect change because companies only listen to dollars. That's what pull up a shut up was. It was a direct action movement. They said, you know what, let's take this conversation public. Let's put the vote back to the consumer. Let the consumer make the decision. Do you want to see black people within organizations or do you not want to see black people within organizations?

And the key message from this is saying it's not saying companies just go out and hire people because they're black. It's saying, stop not hiring us because we're black. So this was such an important and critical moment for us to finally hold brands accountable, for us to get past this performative activism and, you know, social media, justice league kind of thing and get into real action. When we come back in just a moment, we'll hear more from sharing about how corporate America can do better and what actions they can take beyond just performative activism. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Resilience Edition, and we're talking with Sharon Shuta, the founder of Oma Beauty.

Sharon's also been getting a lot of attention for pull up or shut up, her social media campaign that asks beauty companies to disclose how many black employees, executives, and board members work there. I read a quote of yours. You said, I haven't slept in days. I haven't been able to manage my business because you've been working on this initiative. But you said it's all, it's all been worth it. It's worth it. It's completely worth it. This is a human rights issue. Everybody who sympathized by St. George Floyd, right, and see somebody snuck the life out of him with their hand casualty in the pocket. Everybody sees that part and everybody's talking about police brutality. What I'm talking about here is the cause. Police brutality is the effect. This is the cause. The cause is marginalization. So what has this country done since the, um, since the, the emancipation declaration, they have put enormous amount of money into law enforcement. An enormous amount of money. Ridiculous. Some people who say into law enforcement, right? So you take people, you don't give them opportunity to participate in the economy. Companies are not giving you jobs.

When you go and set up a business, 0.006% of funding dollars goes to black women. Yet black women are the fastest group of entrepreneurs in this country. They said are businesses faster than any racial group in this country. yet there was no funding. So it's starving out. If you look at all the black successful brands right now, most of them bootstrapped. It was, I started with $5,000. I started with $2,000. Meanwhile, the average white male gets $2.2 million to set up a business. The average amount of money giving to a black woman is $42,000. That is moralization. Sharon, you know, as you know, like our, I think our instinct as humans is to see a problem

and then find a solution, right? Like, as an entrepreneur, that's what you do. Like, you saw a problem in the marketplace and you want it to solve it. Similarly with like this incredibly important profound renewed and new conversation around racial justice, that's really been inspired by the mass demonstrations. I mean, there's no question about it. Demonstrations work. Like they really do work. People, they can change history.

They've always changed history. Exactly. When it comes to some of these big questions you're talking about, especially with respect to corporate America, you know, this performative activism versus. action. Is any part of you encouraged about the possibility of real change, or are you still like kind of skeptical and kind of standing back and saying wait and see? Well, I'm not because this time we're taking it into our own hands. You know, that's why I started this movement. We're not going to just sit and wait and see. You know, I'm a dreamer. I'm a crazy one.

You know what I mean? Like if I thought this was all the waste and this was just PR for the sake of PR, I'll be running my business and making money, right? I would not be, you know, spending my whole time doing this, right? So I think for me, it's like, I do believe that we can effect change. I do believe that the consumers have the power. I believe that if they keep up on this, companies will change within three years, we'll be having a different conversation. It would change, right? So I see a pathway to change because right now I'm seeing what's happening behind the scenes. These companies are in shambles right now. They're running around like head as chickens because they have no answers. You know, most of the leadership teams are not

diverse. So all of a sudden, they're not looking to their employees who they haven't even promoted to management level, say, come and fix it. You know, come and fix it. And this is what they've been doing, pulling these employees into new diversity teams. And this has also been a frustration of me as well. And I've spoken about this. Don't take somebody who has a full-time job just because they're black and tell them, come and fix my diversity issue whilst doing a full-time job. That's not fair. And that's what these companies have done because what they've seen is that the entire ecosystem is broken. The HR manuals have to be rewritten, you know, companies still have HR manuals that discriminate against

black hair because all black hair styles are considered unprofessional. I got told to my face by my MD when I was in my corporate life that I couldn't wear brakes to work. It was unprofessional. It looked to get home. And that I had too much potential to be presenting myself like that. So I went 14 years where I could not wear braids. I live in Beverly Hills. People see me walking my dog and they walk up and they go like, oh, you're the dog Walker. Who's the owner of this dog? You know? So one of these things in isolation is not a big deal. But when this is your reality every day, come on. Like, give us a break. And this is a break. And this is. what we call unconscious bias. It's just things that people just do instinctively without thinking about

it. And that's why we have to have this conversation because the only way to break anything you do in your unconscious is by consciously counteracting it. And that's why we need this to be, to be talked about. Thank you for having that conversation. I mean, you're raising incredibly important and profound issues and questions and something you shouldn't have to do. you know, what's been really interesting and proves my point about unconscious bias, right? When we went out with this campaign, we had a lot of white America who just felt really attacked. They felt like, oh, so are you telling companies now that white people shouldn't have job? I'm like, this is a problem that we have.

It almost seems like you can't have a pro-black conversation without people feeling like it's an anti-white conversation. I'm having a pro-black conversation. I'm talking about a human rights issue and your response to it is, oh, my job is now at risk. But no, your job is not at risk. Like, it's mind-boggling. If people don't understand it. It's like, oh, but you're talking about race. You're dividing people. We are divided. We are divided. People are getting killed on the street. That's the country we live in. And you're telling me that me saying, hey, stop not hiring us because we're black. Is me dividing the country. I'm now the bad person. And that just shows you the level of unconscious bias that the people who are publicly commenting about this, can't even see there's anything wrong with what they're saying. They're so uncomfortable with this. All they're saying is another black person complaining, another black person. saying the word black, which is super toxic, and missing the whole damn point. Sharon, when you think about this moment in history and everything that's happening,

in five years' time, when we look back at this moment, what do you want to be able to say about how you change as a leader and how you took ideas from this moment and applied them to everything you do? Yeah, I hope in five years' time that we are seeing will change, right? I hope in five years' time, it's going to be, yes, we all came together as a community, because the irony of this, this is actually a unification moment. It's time for us to unite. And it's time for us to unite against one common enemy.

And that common enemy is systemic oppression, right, in systemic racism. That's why I want us to remember this time as the time that the world finally came together and made a change for the better. Because guess what? Diversity is good for business. Diversity is absolutely blinking good for business. And I won't in five years time for even the businesses who went through the pain right now, but did step up and do the right things to be the ones who are leading and going, wow, diversity was actually good for business.

I can't believe it took us so long to do it. And that's where I want us to be in five years. And that's why I want to sit back and reminisce about this moment with a lot of positivity and want going when things were difficult. We all chose to not do what was popular, not do what was comfortable. We all chose to do what was right and see how much better the world is for it because we did what was right. Sharon Chuda, founder of Oma Beauty, thank you so much. Thank you for having me, guys. It's been such a pleasure. That's an excerpt for my conversation with Sharon Chuda, the founder of OMA Beauty.

To see our full interview, you can go to facebook.com slash how I built this. And if you want to see all of our past live interviews, you can find them there or at YouTube.com slash NPR. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to NPR presenters. This episode was produced by Candace Lim with help from John Isabella, Julia Carney, Gianna Capadona, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, and I'll see you in a few days. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.