Mona Kattan on Finding the Courage to Go It Alone

**Imran Amed** (0:05)
Hi, this is Imran Amed, founder and CEO of The Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BoF podcast. It's Friday, July 3rd.
Mona Kattan has been collecting fragrances for most of her life. That obsession eventually became Kayali, a fragrance brand she built inside Huda Beauty, the global cosmetics company she co-founded with her sister Huda Kattan.
In 2020, something shifted. Mona entered therapy and uncovered a pattern that ran through her entire entrepreneurial journey. She had never built anything entirely on her own, and began to ask herself what it would mean to do something fully by herself.

**Mona Kattan** (0:48)
I am a very collaborative person, but I don't want to sacrifice my vision. Sometimes having like a partnership where it's like you have to decide, like both feet have to go in the same direction, doesn't really work if you're not able to decide on your own.
So that's where I just realized if I want Kayali to survive and thrive, I need to really create my own path.

**Imran Amed** (1:09)
That path was made possible through a complex corporate carve out that separated Kayali from Huda Beauty and brought in General Atlantic as Kayali's new backer.
Last week, Mona joined me on stage at the Business of Beauty Global Forum in Napa Valley, California to pull back the curtain on that corporate split and dive deeper into the realities of building a brand within a multi-stakeholder ecosystem. Here's Mona Kattan on the BoF Podcast.

**Mona Kattan** (1:42)
Such an honor to be here with all of the amazing people, and especially with you Imran. Thank you for having me.

**Imran Amed** (1:49)
Before we get into the journey of being a founder, I want to start with your earliest memories of fragrance. I know you've become like some extraordinary collector, 4,500?

**Mona Kattan** (2:09)
A little bit more.

**Imran Amed** (2:10)
More now?

**Mona Kattan** (2:12)
Probably 5,500 now.

**Imran Amed** (2:13)
Take us out. Where does that all start? I always find that people sometimes ask me, like, did you know you were going to do this job?
Of course, I didn't know I was going to do this job. But I did know from a very young age, I was just drawn to the fashion world. Is it the same for you and fragrance?

**Mona Kattan** (2:32)
I would say it's the same for me and fragrance, but also beauty and entrepreneurship. Since I was the age of 13, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I fell in love with stories that I read about people taking an idea and making it happen, the whole rags to riches story. I also went through a depression. Where's Tina? She talked about that.
I fell in love with Tony Robbins and I started really obsessing with personal development and really learning how to set goals. From a very young age, I just discovered that one day I want to create my own path.
Fragrance is definitely something that's always resonated with me. I've loved fragrances since I was a kid. Like in terms of my senses, my sense of smell was always the strongest to me, like more than visual, more than hearing, more than anything. Whenever I'd smell something, I would just remember it so deeply and I'd connect it to an experience, a person. But I'd say my passion for fragrance really skyrocketed when I moved to Dubai. I moved there 24 years ago, a very long time ago, and just reconnecting with my roots, which are Middle Eastern, and seeing how my friends that I met there would wear fragrances, I found it completely expanded my mind. I was like, you're putting oils on first and then you're doing the perfumed smoke and you're putting it on your clothing, your bedsheets, your house, and then you're putting so many different types of perfumes, you're layering, you're mixing. Men were wearing Coco Chanel and putting like ood oil with it and making it so unique and I was like, there's no rules. So I think that it was really foundational to creating Kayali. The people I met really inspired me. The rituals I saw were just, I felt like they needed to be shared with the world. Yes, that's when the obsession went from being like a normal thing to probably a little bit insane. Like, I'm like, am I okay? I don't know. But it happens to everybody who moves to Dubai. It's just such an infectious culture.
But yeah, I love beauty. I love entrepreneurship. And I really love fragrances like no other.

**Imran Amed** (4:39)
So it's one thing to be obsessed with something. I mean, we all have our personal obsessions.
It's another thing to build a business around it. So you have this very unique personal story intertwined with your sister, right? It was also had an entrepreneurial bug. Talk to us about how you first got involved with Huda Beauty and then within that business, you decided to create a kind of sub-business of your own.