Spend a Day with Rose Inc’s CEO & President

As a seasoned beauty executive, Caroline Hadfield was looking for a way to innovate in clean beauty back in 2014. She’d already been on the inaugural team that launched Sephora in the US, Japan and Canada, and spent years as an SVP at both The Body Shop and LVMH when she met John Melo, CEO of a company called Amyris.

“It was all a bit of an experiment,” Caroline recalls from her first meeting with the San Francisco-based exec. “At the time, Amyris’ core focus was biotechnology and the sustainable, renewable delivery of key ingredients in the flavors, fragrance and cosmetic industries. John had a vision of building a brand around one of the key ingredients that they had managed to develop and scale: a new, vegan alternative to squalene, called Squalane.”

Caroline was already very familiar with the ingredient: The number of sharks killed every year to produce the popular oil was a dark secret in the beauty industry, so her former Body Shop team had used a version of squalene made from olives instead. A more sustainable version, this time made using fermented sugarcane, sounded a lot like the future of clean beauty she wanted to channel her efforts into.

“It was such an exciting sort of entrepreneurial opportunity within a public company,  looking to see what would happen if we developed our own brand [with Squalane],” she recalls. It also fit into her life: Caroline and her husband had just moved with their two daughters from the UK to San Francisco. “And that’s when we started really building out Biossance.”

Biossance (and its cult products Squalane + Vitamin C Rose Oil and Squalane + Peptide Eye Gel) struck like clean beauty lightning, as did a concurrent business selling this new vegan Squalane to the whole cosmetic industry. Pipette Baby and JVN Hair launched in the coming years, then Costa Brazil came aboard, but launching clean color with Rose Inc in 2021 was different.

“It’s been fun working with Rosie [Huntington-Whiteley], building on her content platform and having her experience of being in the hair and makeup chair,” says Caroline. “This category has been a lot more difficult than others, getting ingredients that perform at that quality level within the high benchmark we set, but still ensuring high-quality color payoffs and pigments.”, but it’s also made success even sweeter: On the one-year anniversary of the Rose Inc line, the brand is thriving across the globe. Learn why by spending a Day in the Life of its CEO and president in its California headquarters… (click here to continue reading)