42 October 2016
|
beautystorebusiness.com
Image
courtesy
of
Cr•me
Collective
A New
Beauty
Kid in
Town
Crème Collective
continues its meteoric
rise as a boutique beauty
products distributorship.
by Katie OÕReilly
LEIL AH MUNDT IS THE CEO AND FOUNDER OF CRÈME
Collective, a sales agency turned beauty distributorship that
originally launched in January 2013. Mundt got her start in beauty
at The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los
Angeles and worked as a Hollywood makeup artist during her
college years. What followed were stints at Benefit Cosmetics
and Stila before working in corporate-beauty field sales, including
time with the iconic Jane Iredale at Iredale Mineral Cosmetics.
After learning much of what there was to know in many key
positions in the beauty industry, she left the corporate world
to launch her own sales agency without even one client to its
name. As she remembers fondly, it was to "pursue a passion for
the types of beauty brands I was actually using and obsessing
over—effective, luxurious, artisanal and, very often, natural." Mundt
was inspired by "a dear friend, Renata Helfman, who had the first
clean beauty boutique in the world in Venice Beach, California. She
was a brave leader in this luxury, indie, organic beauty movement,
and watching the success of her concept proved to me that this was
really the direction women wanted the industry to go."
Leilah Mundt,
CEO and founder of
Crème Collective