Glow Recipe
Sarah Lee and Christine Chang spent three years importing other people's Korean skincare into the US and pitching that catalog on Shark Tank. The product that built their roughly $300 million brand was not on any of those shelves. They had to formulate it themselves, and at peak it sold one every three minutes at Sephora.
In 2015, Sarah Lee and Christine Chang walked onto Shark Tank with a website that resold Korean skincare to American customers, asked for $425,000 in exchange for 10 percent of the company, and shook hands with Robert Herjavec on a deal at 25 percent. They never took the money, and the company they walked back to was a curation site doing roughly $550,000 in annual sales, with no original product, no retail account, and no proof anyone in the US would buy a Korean snail-mucin essence on their recommendation.
Two years later they launched a sleeping mask made with real watermelon, priced at $45, exclusive to Sephora. It accumulated a 5,000-person waitlist, sold out in under four hours, sold out again on restock, and two years after that was selling at Sephora at a rate of one unit every three minutes. By 2023, Glow Recipe was generating roughly $100 to $125 million in brand revenue and an estimated $300 million in retail sales. Lee and Chang still owned the majority of the company.
They had bootstrapped for seven years before taking a dollar of outside money. The combined estimated net worth of the two co-founders is now in the range of $85 to $90 million, on a brand they started with $50,000 of their own savings and a 200-square-foot office in Manhattan.
At a glance:
| Founded | 2014 by Sarah Lee and Christine Chang, New York |
| Founders’ background | Each spent ~10 years at L’Oréal (Kiehl’s, Lancôme, L’Oréal Paris) |
| Starting capital | $50,000 of personal savings |
| Original model | Curated e-commerce site for imported K-beauty brands |
| Pivot | First original product launched 2017 (Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask) |
| Shark Tank | 2015, Season 7. Asked $425K for 10%. Walked away from a 25% deal with Robert Herjavec |
| First retail partner | Sephora US, exclusive since 2017 |
| Estimated 2024 valuation | $500 to $600 million |
| 2023 brand revenue | ~$100 to $125M |
| 2023 retail sales | ~$300M |
| First outside check | October 2021, North Castle Partners (minority stake) |
| Hero products | Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask, Plum Plump Hyaluronic Serum, Avocado Melt Sleeping Mask, Banana Soufflé Moisture Cream, Pineapple-C Bright Serum |
| International footprint (2024) | Mexico (38 Sephora doors), Colombia, Chile, France, plus 14 additional European markets |
The Story
Two L’Oréal alums and a 200-square-foot office
Sarah Lee and Christine Chang met inside L’Oréal corporate, where they each spent roughly a decade across Kiehl’s, Lancôme, and L’Oréal Paris. Both were Korean-American, both had grown up in Seoul before moving to the United States, and both had spent years watching their own American friends ask them to bring back skincare from Korea every time they visited family. The traffic moved one direction, because American beauty shelves carried almost nothing from a country whose seven-step routines and snail mucin essences were already a national obsession at home.
In 2014 they pooled $50,000 of personal savings and opened a 200-square-foot office in New York to launch Glow Recipe as a curation site. The pitch was practical, not poetic: bring carefully selected Korean skincare brands into the US, translate the routines for American customers, and serve the small but growing audience that knew the country was producing the most innovative formulations in the world. They were importers, translators, and merchandisers, not a brand in the traditional sense.
The early customer list ran on word of mouth and a handful of editor mentions, and they sold sheet masks, essences, and ampoules from a roster of small Korean labs nobody had heard of, alongside larger names like Belif and Whamisa. Revenue in the first year was modest, and by the time they pitched Shark Tank a year later, they were doing about $550,000 in annual sales and had no original product to their name.
The Shark Tank deal they walked away from
Lee and Chang taped Season 7 of Shark Tank in 2015, asking for $425,000 in exchange for 10 percent. The Sharks tested the masks on camera, asked the founders to walk through the K-beauty market opportunity, and probed the unit economics of a curation business that bought wholesale and resold direct to consumer. Robert Herjavec offered $425,000 for 30 percent. After negotiation, the founders countered at 18 percent, then 22.5 percent, and finally shook on 25 percent.
The handshake on television and the wire transfer afterward are not the same thing. By the time the episode aired and due diligence began in earnest, Lee and Chang had decided the deal was the wrong shape for the business they wanted to build, and they walked away from the offer entirely. Both sides described the parting as amicable, and the founders kept the equity that would compound through every product launch and every retail door for the next decade.
The walk-away looks obvious in retrospect, but at the time it meant choosing to keep running a sub-$1 million curation business with no outside capital, no Shark on the cap table, and no clear path to original product. They were betting that their reading of the K-beauty market in the US was the asset, not the warehouse.
A watermelon rind, a 5,000-person waitlist
The first original product came from a memory both co-founders shared. Growing up in Korea, both had spent summers with grandmothers who would rub a fresh watermelon rind over a sunburn to cool the skin. The fruit was a fixture of Korean summer, and watermelon-derived ingredients were already showing up in newer K-beauty formulations. Lee and Chang spent more than a year working with a Korean lab to translate the memory into a formula that combined watermelon extract, hyaluronic acid, and AHAs into an overnight mask.
The Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask launched in 2017 at $45, exclusive to Sephora, with a pre-launch waitlist of more than 5,000 people. It sold out in under four hours, sold out again when restocked, and became the product that defined the brand. Two years after launch, Sephora was moving one unit every three minutes. The product introduced a Korean ingredient story to a US prestige skincare audience that had been trained on French and Japanese provenance, and it did so through a jar that looked like dessert and felt edible going on.
Glow Recipe stopped being a curation site in any meaningful sense over the next two years. The original product line built around the Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask, the Avocado Melt Sleeping Mask, the Banana Soufflé Moisture Cream, the Pineapple-C Bright Serum, and the Plum Plump Hyaluronic Serum became the entire business, and the other brands they had been reselling were sunset. The brand the founders had spent three years setting up shelves for was their own.
The Strategy
From shelf to formula
The pivot from curator to original brand was a deliberate sequencing decision, not a course correction. The years of running a curation site gave Lee and Chang two things almost no first-time skincare founder has: a clear read on which Korean ingredient stories an American audience would actually buy, and direct working relationships with the Korean labs that could co-develop formulations. By the time they launched their own product, they had already vetted a category, a price point, and a manufacturing partner.
The result is that almost every Glow Recipe hero product leads with a fruit. Watermelon, avocado, banana, pineapple, plum, blueberry, papaya, strawberry. The naming makes the K-beauty roots easy to read for an audience that does not know the difference between snail mucin and centella asiatica, and the formulations stay technical enough to deliver the clinical results an active skincare buyer expects.
Sephora as the only retailer that mattered
Glow Recipe has been Sephora-exclusive in the US since 2017 and has stayed that way for almost a decade. The brand passed on Ulta, on Target, on the wholesale channels that most prestige skincare brands chase as soon as they hit scale. Sephora gave the brand a category-defining merchandising story, the only US retail account that knew how to talk to a K-beauty audience, and an endcap in the indie skincare section that converted at a rate that made it the number one indie brand on the floor.
By 2024, the brand was using its Sephora relationship to push internationally rather than expand to a second US retailer. Glow Recipe entered Mexico with 38 Sephora doors, Colombia and Chile through Blushbar, France through Sephora’s domestic chain, and 14 additional European markets. Sales are projected to land at roughly 54 percent North America and 46 percent international by 2025, with international growth coming entirely from Sephora and its regional equivalents. The exclusivity is the moat, and the international footprint is the lever the brand is pulling instead of widening US distribution.
Bootstrapping seven years before the first check
Lee and Chang ran Glow Recipe on internal cash flow from the 2014 launch through October 2021, a stretch that covered the Shark Tank walkaway, the curation-to-brand pivot, the Watermelon Glow launch, the Sephora rollout, and the climb to nine figures of retail sales. Most prestige skincare brands raise a seed round before they have a finished formula. Glow Recipe took its first outside money the year revenue passed $100 million.
The investor was North Castle Partners, the same private equity firm that had previously backed Drybar and other prestige beauty operators, and the deal was a minority stake on undisclosed terms. The founders kept majority ownership, kept their co-CEO seats, and used the capital to fund international expansion and category extensions. Seven years of bootstrapping into a profitable, category-leading brand is a different cap-table conversation than seven years of burn into nine figures of revenue.
The Marketing
Edible-looking products that survive on TikTok
Every Glow Recipe SKU is engineered to photograph and film well before it is engineered to sit on a shelf. The Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask is the color of watermelon flesh, the Banana Soufflé Moisture Cream is whipped to look like the dessert, and the Avocado Melt sits in a green jar with a pit-shaped scoop. The packaging itself functions as the brand’s primary earned media campaign, because a jar that looks like fruit on a phone screen sells itself on a feed where context disappears in three seconds.
The brand was an early winner on Instagram and a category-defining winner on TikTok, where Glow Recipe sits among the most-tagged skincare brands on the platform. The combination of edible-looking products, fruit-forward marketing, and the K-beauty halo means the brand pulls user-generated content at a rate that paid acquisition cannot replicate.
Founder visibility as a brand asset
Lee and Chang remain the public face of the brand a decade in, sitting for press at Fortune, CNBC, Glamour, BoF, and almost every major beauty trade outlet, and showing up consistently on the brand’s own social channels. The K-beauty story is theirs, not a stylist’s, and the Korean-American immigrant founder narrative gives the brand a positioning that is not licensable to a competitor with a bigger ad budget. Most prestige skincare founders go silent the moment a private equity firm shows up. Glow Recipe’s continue to do the press.
The Numbers
| Year | Brand revenue | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | ~$550K | Pre-Shark Tank, curation business |
| 2021 | ~$100M | First outside investment closed (North Castle Partners) |
| 2023 | $100 to $125M | Brand revenue; ~$300M in retail sales |
The 2023 brand revenue figure represents wholesale and direct-to-consumer revenue accruing to Glow Recipe, while the $300 million figure is retail sales at consumer prices across all Sephora doors and the brand’s own DTC channel. The valuation gap between most reporting estimates puts the company in the $500 to $600 million range as of 2024, and the founders’ combined estimated net worth is in the $85 to $90 million range. The company has not announced an IPO or a sale process.
What You Can Learn
Sometimes the best market research is running someone else’s business first. Lee and Chang spent three years selling other Korean skincare brands to American customers before launching their own line. By the time the Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask shipped, they already knew which fruit ingredients would convert, which price points the audience would pay, and which Korean labs could deliver clinical results at retail margins. Most first-time skincare founders learn those answers after a failed product launch. The curation site was the fastest, cheapest market test the category has produced.
Walking away from the right Shark is the same skill as taking the right round. A 25 percent stake to Robert Herjavec on a sub-$1 million curation business would have meant giving up a quarter of every dollar of compound value the brand has generated since 2017. Lee and Chang chose seven more years of bootstrapping over a televised handshake. The discipline that produces the right “no” on outside money is the discipline that eventually produces the right “yes,” which in their case was a minority private equity check at a nine-figure revenue run rate.
Retail exclusivity is a moat, not a bottleneck. Most prestige skincare brands stop being interesting to Sephora the moment they get into Ulta, and they get into Ulta because growth in a single retailer eventually plateaus. Glow Recipe held the line for almost a decade, used the relationship to push internationally instead of widening domestically, and let the exclusivity become part of the brand identity. Building inside one retailer is the harder strategic choice and the one most founders abandon too early.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Glow Recipe?
Sarah Lee and Christine Chang founded Glow Recipe in New York in 2014 with $50,000 of their own savings. Both are Korean-American, both grew up partly in Seoul before moving to the United States, and both had spent roughly a decade at L’Oréal across Kiehl’s, Lancôme, and L’Oréal Paris before launching the company.
Did Glow Recipe take the Shark Tank deal?
No. Lee and Chang shook hands with Robert Herjavec on $425,000 for 25 percent equity during their 2015 Shark Tank appearance, but the deal was never closed. Both sides parted ways after the taping, and the founders went on to bootstrap the company for another six years before taking outside investment.
What was the first Glow Recipe product?
The Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask, launched in 2017 at $45 and sold exclusively through Sephora. The product had a 5,000-person pre-launch waitlist, sold out in under four hours, and at peak was selling one unit every three minutes at Sephora. It remains the brand’s signature product.
How much is Glow Recipe worth?
Industry estimates place the company’s valuation in the $500 to $600 million range as of 2024. The brand generated roughly $100 to $125 million in revenue in 2023 and approximately $300 million in retail sales at consumer prices across all distribution channels. Sarah Lee and Christine Chang remain majority owners.
Where can you buy Glow Recipe?
Glow Recipe is sold direct-to-consumer through glowrecipe.com and exclusively through Sephora in the US. International distribution runs through Sephora and Sephora-equivalent retailers, including Mexico (38 doors), Colombia and Chile (Blushbar), France, and 14 additional European markets added in 2024.
When was Glow Recipe founded?
Sarah Lee and Christine Chang founded Glow Recipe in 2014 in New York City, with $50,000 of personal savings and a 200-square-foot office. The company started as a curation site for imported Korean skincare brands before pivoting to its own product line in 2017.
Who owns Glow Recipe?
Co-founders Sarah Lee and Christine Chang remain majority owners. Private equity firm North Castle Partners took a minority stake in October 2021 in the brand’s first outside investment round, on undisclosed terms. The founders kept their co-CEO seats and majority equity through the deal.
What are Sarah Lee and Christine Chang’s net worth?
Industry estimates place the founders’ combined net worth at $85 to $90 million, based on their majority stake in a company valued at roughly $500 to $600 million. Both still serve as co-CEOs and have not had a public liquidity event beyond the 2021 minority investment.
Where is Glow Recipe made?
Products are co-developed and manufactured in South Korea by Korean skincare labs that Sarah Lee and Christine Chang first worked with during the brand’s curation years. The Korean manufacturing roots are part of the brand identity, and most hero products lead with a Korean ingredient story.
Sources
- Fortune, “How Glow Recipe became a $300 million business,” February 2024. Revenue, valuation, founder background, retail expansion details.
- CNBC, “How Glow Recipe’s co-CEOs turned their friendship and $50,000 into a $100-million business,” May 2022. Founding capital, early operations, $100M milestone.
- Fashionista, “A Decade In, Glow Recipe’s Co-Founders Reflect on Their Industry-Defining Success,” January 2025. Pivot from curation, founder backgrounds at L’Oréal, ten-year retrospective.
- Worklife VC, “How Glow Recipe Passed Up a Shark Tank Deal and Still Won Skincare”. Shark Tank details, $550K pre-show revenue, walked-away deal terms.
- Beauty Independent, “How Glow Recipe Became Sephora’s No. 1 Indie Brand”. Sephora exclusivity, indie ranking, retail performance.
- Glossy, “Glow Recipe ramps up expansion to international markets”. 2024 international expansion, market splits, EU and Latin America launches.
- WWD, “Inside Glow Recipe’s Global Brand-building Aspirations”. Global expansion strategy, North America vs international split.
- BeautyMatter, “North Castle Takes a Minority Stake in Glow Recipe”. 2021 funding round, North Castle Partners, deal structure.
- Very Good Light, “Glow Recipe’s watermelon sleeping mask is so delicious you’ll want to eat,” July 2017. Watermelon Glow launch, waitlist, sell-through.
- GCI Magazine, “North Castle Partners Invests in Glow Recipe”. Investment terms, growth plans.