Photo Credit: PYT
Sephora’s former senior director of customer relationship management, Amy Carr, and her college sorority sister, entrepreneur Mary Schulman, have daughters in the same age range. When their girls showed an interest in makeup, Carr and Schulman started to wonder what was in the eyeshadows, blush, and lipstick their daughters coveted. If the mothers had raised their children concerned about what they put in their bodies, shouldn’t they be worried about what they were putting on their skin, in particular, their faces?
Photo Credit: PYT
Schulman and Carr noticed a void of natural beauty and quickly jumped at the chance to build their own brand. They wanted to create a makeup collection that was clean and high quality, but accessible. Carr’s time at Sephora made her an expert in all things beauty. “Makeup in and of itself has gotten incredibly complicated. The growth has, in a lot of ways, happened because new categories have been entered. Take the primer category. That didn’t exist four years ago. Now everyone primes,” she recently told Haute Living. “It’s gotten complex, so we wanted to create a brand that spoke to what we call the real girl. We did a bunch of primary research, my background being in insights and analytics. We went around the country and we did focus groups, we talked to consumers and really asked them what they were missing in their makeup routine.”
Photo Credit: PYT
Carr and Schulman realized that many women were missing the simplicity of makeup. “They were like, ‘I love this beautiful eyeshadow palette that has 56 colors in it. I use three. It’s huge. I can’t travel with it. I can’t take it to my office.’ There was a trend, #makeupnomakeup, and that was trying to go back to the basics,” Carr says. After several years of development, PYT was born.
Photo Credit: PYT
The high-performance collection is chemical, toxic, and synthetics free. PYT is compliant with EU standards which ban 1,400 ingredients out of makeup—the USFDA forbids only 60. The neutral eyeshadow palette is pretty and easy to use. Highlighters are lightweight. The double-sided mascara has a primer which can also be used as a brow gel. Lipsticks, glitter, eyeliner, bronzer, and other items are in the works—along with a broader range of shades in the existing items.
Photo Credit: PYT
PYT is only three and a half months old, but Carr and Schulman have already developed a huge local following. The line is sold on Fillmore Street at Credo and online at Ulta. Building relationships with consumers are essential to the duo who interact with beauty lovers on Instagram and in real life at events. With more brands jumping on the clean bandwagon, Carr and Schulman are ahead of the game.
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