Jamie Kern Lima

Why organisations work with Jamie Kern Lima

• A founder track record at a scale almost no speaker in the entrepreneurship category can match: a category-creating consumer brand sold to L’Oreal for $1.2 billion, after Sephora said no for six years and QVC said no for three.
• First female CEO of a brand in L’Oreal’s history, with direct operating experience inside a $30 billion strategic acquirer post-acquisition, not just pre-exit.
• Two New York Times bestselling books, “Believe IT” and “Worthy”, giving sales teams and leadership audiences a tested framework on rejection and self-worth that the speaker has already road-tested with millions of readers.
• Host of the Gracie Award-winning Jamie Kern Lima Show, with first-time podcast interviews from figures including Meghan Markle and Michelle Obama, which gives the platform reach and the speaker a sharpened interviewer’s instinct for what actually moves an audience.
• A Columbia MBA and Columbia Business School board member who chooses to lead with the founder story, not the credential stack. The buyer gets the substance underneath the inspiration.

Biography highlights

• Founder and former CEO of IT Cosmetics; sold to L’Oreal in 2016 for $1.2 billion.
• First female CEO of a brand in L’Oreal’s 100+ year history.
• Two-time New York Times bestselling author: “Believe IT” (Simon & Schuster, 2021) and “Worthy” (Hay House, 2024).
• Host of “The Jamie Kern Lima Show”, winner of the 2025 Gracie Award for Best Podcast, Lifestyle.
• Guest Shark, ABC’s Shark Tank, Season 16.
• MBA, Columbia Business School; member of the Columbia Business School Board of Overseers. Listed on Forbes’ America’s Richest Self-Made Women.

Biography

IT Cosmetics was turned down by Sephora for six years and by QVC for three before Jamie Kern Lima got either retailer on the phone. By 2016 the company was the largest luxury makeup brand in America, and L’Oreal paid $1.2 billion to acquire it. She became the first female CEO of a brand in the group’s history.

The founding story is unusual because the product positioning was unusual. IT Cosmetics was built around real skin: rosacea, hyperpigmentation, post-chemotherapy skin, customers QVC’s buyers were not used to seeing on camera. Kern Lima insisted on putting them there. That decision, more than any single marketing tactic, is what separated the brand from the prestige beauty pack and made it acquirable at scale.

Post-exit, she has built a second platform with similar discipline. “Believe IT” and “Worthy” are both New York Times bestsellers; “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” won the 2025 Gracie Award for Best Podcast in the lifestyle category, on the back of first-ever podcast interviews with Meghan Markle and a multi-part series with Oprah Winfrey. She is on the board of overseers at Columbia Business School, where she earned her MBA in 2004.

For a corporate audience, the relevant content is concrete. How a category-creating consumer brand survives years of rejection from the gatekeepers it depends on. How founder-led marketing competes with conglomerate marketing budgets. What changes inside the business the day a $30 billion strategic acquirer owns it. What stays the same.

Key speaking topics

• Founder-led brand building and category creation
• Selling to and operating inside a strategic acquirer
• Authenticity as a marketing operating principle
• Rejection as a sales and growth discipline
• Direct retail, on-camera selling and QVC scale-up
• Resilience and self-worth for senior leaders
• Women’s entrepreneurship at scale

Ideal for

• Sales kick-offs, especially in consumer, retail, beauty, and direct-to-consumer categories
• CMOs and brand teams reframing what “authentic” marketing means in practice
• Founder and scale-up audiences inside corporate venture, accelerator, and women’s leadership programmes
• Annual conferences seeking a headline keynote with mainstream cultural reach

Audience outcomes

• A working playbook on building demand for a consumer brand the trade buyers have already rejected
• A clearer framework for how founder-led companies should think about brand voice after acquisition
• Specific tactics on handling rejection as a recurring operational event, not a one-off setback
• A renewed willingness, particularly among senior women, to put their own conviction back at the centre of commercial decisions