Anisa Telwar Kaicker’s bet on the beauty industry came first; her endearment for the space arrived only after.
In the 30 years since that fortuitous foray, the Anisa International founder has manufactured makeup brushes for companies including Estée Lauder, Rare Beauty, Sephora and many others, even establishing a direct-to-consumer arm of her own, Anisa Beauty, in 2019. Here, she reflects on her journey.
What has your trajectory been like in beauty?
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It hasn’t been this rise; it’s been a slow development process. When I started, I didn’t look at it so much that I was going into beauty, but that I was going into a business that had international trading. I knew how to import products through my experience at my family’s business — which had fallen apart — and I saw [brushes] as a viable product that I could import into the country. I started Anisa in 1992, and it was during those first four years that I truly started to understand that, yes, I am committed to the beauty industry.
What inspired the genesis of your direct-to-consumer business in 2019?
I wanted to have that direct insight from and conversation with the consumer, and I wanted to innovate faster. For many of our partners, brushes aren’t everything: Their skin care, their makeup — that’s their real return on investment. For them, brushes are an adjacency; for us, brushes are all.
What’s one thing about founding and building a female-led business that nobody tells you?
I think sometimes that because women are nurturers and are empathetic at our core, we judge ourselves in ways that men do not. I’ve felt it and I’ve seen it — men give themselves a break in a way that women do not. So, if I ever wasn’t doing my best across all levels, I would feel like I was failing, even if I was doing great.
Sometimes we’re quick to tell each other, “Good job,” but don’t do the same for ourselves nearly enough. Can you pinpoint a time in your founder journey that makes even you think, “You know what? I’m proud of what I did there.”
There are a lot of things I’ve done that give me goosebumps now, you know? I have no college education. I went through a very rough time to start this business. I created relationships with international supply chain, created marketing plans, product plans, I hired, I fired — all of these things that I did, without acknowledging it, I was actually being a pretty good strategist. Now I look back sometimes and go, “That was smart! How’d you figure that out?”
Which steps are you taking within your organization to ensure that women’s voices are being heard?
We mostly have women at the table, and that’s how it’s always been: Now, it’s about having women in leadership roles where they can be empowered. Again, as women, we sometimes discount ourselves — I’ve started saying to the women around me, “You’ve got this, you know what to do — just go for it.” That’s something I did not do early on; I didn’t know, I wasn’t taught. It’s taken me a long time to figure this out, but that’s the direction I’m moving in.