Sarah Kugelman has been building and exiting beauty companies since before most of the industry’s current founders had a business email address. In 1999, with an MBA from Columbia Business School and a cum laude degree from Tufts already behind her, she raised $5 million and launched Gloss.com — one of the first online beauty retailers, selling 125 brands alongside a digital magazine. The company raised $25 million total, grew to 100 employees, and sold to the Estée Lauder Companies after just one year. The timing turned out to matter as much as the execution: Kugelman closed the sale two weeks before the April 2000 internet crash wiped out much of that era’s dot-com valuations.
She didn’t stop there. In 2005, Kugelman founded Skyn ICELAND, a clean, indie skincare brand built around a specific thesis: stressed skin needed its own category of treatment, distinct from the anti-aging and acne categories that dominated the shelf. She ran it for nearly two decades, growing it to $25 million in global revenue and navigating the 2008 financial crisis by restructuring the business rather than shutting it down — a decision that let her relaunch in 2012 and keep building until the brand’s acquisition by Amerikas in October 2024.
Most operators would treat back-to-back multi-decade exits as a natural stopping point. Kugelman used hers to launch a third: ALL GOLDEN, a skincare and haircare line she debuted in September 2024 aimed squarely at women over 45 — a demographic the beauty industry has historically either ignored or marketed to with thinly veiled anti-aging shame. ALL GOLDEN’s approach leans on patent-pending technology and a direct confrontation of industry ageism, rather than the usual euphemisms.
Kugelman’s influence now extends past her own companies. She sits on Tufts’ Derby Entrepreneurship Center Executive Board and served as a 2023 Columbia Business School mentor for Latino entrepreneurs — putting the same pattern-recognition that got her through two crashes and three companies to work for founders earlier in the timeline she’s already run twice.
Follow ALL GOLDEN: allgolden.com · Instagram @allgoldenbeauty