Mona Kattan, co-founder of Huda Beauty and founder of the luxury fragrance brand Kayali, spoke candidly about her entrepreneurial journey at The Business of Beauty Global Forum 2026 in Napa Valley, California. In a conversation that traced her evolution from operating within her sister Huda’s vast beauty empire to building an independent fragrance brand with its own identity, Kattan described the emotional mechanics of finding confidence when the safety net of a larger brand is no longer beneath you.
Kattan’s separation from Huda Beauty was gradual rather than abrupt, a process she described as learning to trust her own instincts after years of deferring to the operational machinery her sister had built. The transition involved not just branding and distribution changes but a psychological recalibration: moving from being a member of a founding team to being the singular decision-maker for a product category she had to educate consumers about from scratch.
Kayali, which launched in 2018 as a fragrance brand under the Huda Beauty umbrella, has since evolved into a standalone entity with its own distribution strategy, retail partnerships, and product development rhythm. The brand’s signature approach—layering-focused fragrances that encourage consumers to mix scents rather than wear a single perfume—has carved a distinct position in the growing niche fragrance market, a category that has seen double-digit growth annually since 2022.
For the wider beauty and fashion industries, Kattan’s story reflects a structural shift in how founder-led brands navigate growth. The old pattern was to sell to a conglomerate or scale within an existing corporate structure. The emerging pattern, exemplified by Kattan’s trajectory, is the deliberate creation of independence within a supportive ecosystem—a separation that strengthens rather than severs the connection between the founder and her first audience.
The fragrance industry has taken note of Kayali’s trajectory not just because of its sales performance but because of how it approached the problem of fragrance retail. Rather than competing with established luxury houses on heritage or brand equity, Kayali built a business model around discovery—travel sizes, sampler sets, and social media-driven scent education that lowered the entry barrier for a younger consumer demographic that had never bought a full-size prestige perfume.
