When Laney Crowell left her communications job at cosmetics behemoth Estée Lauder in 2016, she didn’t have a clear roadmap to creating Saie — her clean beauty brand that now sells $100 million annually. What she did have, however, was a deep Rolodex that she believed could help her build anything.
“I have this thing where I tell myself that I just have to talk to 70 people,” Crowell told NYNext of her approach to networking. “I make a list in Google Sheets and I just cross people off the list — I ask for their recommendation for who I should talk to next, and then I get another name and just keep going.
“My mantra is, just get up one more day, then [connect with] the next person and you’ll get there.”
That networking ethos ultimately helped Crowell identify the market opportunity and secure funding for Saie, which is beloved by celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Kristen Bell.
After leaving Estée Lauder, Crowell launched a beauty blog where she reviewed products and discovered a significant gap in the high-end clean beauty market.
This was well before #cleanbeauty started trending on TikTok or Sephora launched a “clean seal” in 2018 — an indication that something is formulated without ingredients like mercury compounds or formaldehyde.
At the time, the clean makeup industry, which is expected to hit $52 billion by 2030, was then valued at closer to $5 billion.
So Crowell, now 43, started speaking with dozens of people about her idea of launching a brand free of chemicals, like sulfates and parabens, that can disrupt hormones and damage skin.
By 2019, Crowell had launched with mascara 101 and secured investments from notable figures like Gwyneth Paltrow and G9 Ventures founder Amy Griffin, who has also backed Bumble, Hello Sunshine and Goop.
“A huge part of my success was that being in New York gave me proximity [to investors and other power players]. I could do five meetings in a day if I wanted to, and I did because I like to work fast,” Crowell explains. “Proximity is everything.”
That proximity is even how she got her first job when she moved to New York looking for work after graduating from Pomona College.
“I read every single magazine front to back, so of course I knew what the editors looked like because I would read their editor’s letter,” Crowell explained.
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When she spotted Kim France, then the editor of Lucky, on Fifth Avenue, Crowell introduced herself and walked away with France’s business card.
“I emailed her and she wrote back and she said, You have what it takes to be in this industry, and that’s fearlessness,” Crowell said. That led to her first job, when France hired her as an assistant.
Her brand’s very name is derived from the idea that she is always speaking with people and staying connected with customers. “You Saie It, We Create It,” is a phrase Crowell used early on as she developed products — she changed the spelling of the word “say” to make it a bit more feminine and unique.”
“We’re in business for the people who are buying our products,” Crowell said. “So I always want to be talking to them and asking them what they’re looking for and listening to what they’re saying [on social media].
“I think that’s where brands can really get in trouble, is when they get too distant from that conversation.”
Saie, which had been operating out of Laney Crowell’s home for years, finally got its own global headquarters in the city — an airy Soho loft — last year. It’s become a space where clients can drop in to get their makeup done and influencers can shoot videos in the brand’s video studio.
And they are very vocal about what they want.
“They said, I want it to be really clean. I don’t want it to just be marketing,” Crowell said of her community. This led to Saie’s strict ingredient policy which excludes over 2,000 chemicals, like synthetic fragrance and GMOs common in other brands, from their formulations.
Crowell says she also wanted a product she felt safe putting on her skin. “I’m not a makeup artist. I’m a normal, everyday girl just trying to look her best and have my skin look its best.”
This story is part of NYNext, a new editorial series that highlights New York City innovation across industries, as well as the personalities leading the way.
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