Huda Kattan Quotes
19 quotes from Huda Kattan — Founder of Huda Beauty, a cosmetics brand she built from a beauty blog into a company valued at $1.2B+..
“I loved business.”
“When I started my business, people thought it was just a hobby and I wanted people to take me seriously.”
“People assume if you need a specific product for something, it's already out there, instead of creating something yourself from the ground up. If you have a great idea and don't try and create something from it then I really believe you're doing the world a disservice. If it fails, what's the worst that can happen? You might have wasted a little time but you're going to learn a lot.”
“We started our business with no funding or had any outside investors. Our sister was our first investor! There was a year where I didn't take a salary because we needed to pay our employees.”
“I don't think about them [setbacks] too much. I don't care about the problems, my immediate thought is always 'What's the solution?' There are always going to be problems along the way but you can't let them consume you.”
“If I do something I'm not passionate about, how am I going to impact the world? And if I am not changing the world in some way then what am I doing?”
“Our brand started as a blog. It was really challenging at the beginning because when you start a brand all you have is a belief and passion for something – you don't actually know if that 'something' will materialise into anything.”
“Am I comfortable talking about fillers and going under the knife? Yeah. I've gone under the knife, so what? People can judge me, I'm comfortable with it.”
“I struggled so much and said – what do I want to do with my life? I had dinner with my family and my sister Mona said, you should go study makeup and my parents were like, you should do that, I said, what, so then I literally got up booked my ticket to LA found a school and studied makeup.”
“It feels really powerful to be able to embrace being a woman in the Middle East who's not afraid to go into a boardroom and tell a room of men how it is.”
“I love to surround myself with strong, opinionated personalities. I like to hear people's opinion in the team, but I definitely have the final say.”
“We were told we couldn't do a brand from Dubai. We were told you have to sell your brand and you can't buy your equity back from TSG. And we just proved them wrong.”
“People are so often after the dollar, and it makes beauty so boring. For me, part of us buying back Huda Beauty is we don't have to worry about that. Money is important to me in that I care about creating a healthy business, but that's the third most important thing.”
“Why can't every woman be every single part of who they are?”
“In 2012, we invested $6,000 in our brand Huda Beauty. Five years later in 2017, we got our valuation at over a billion dollars.”
“I felt really ugly as a child. We grew up in Tennessee; we were the only brown people in the city. There were a lot of times when children made us feel like we were not beautiful.”
“Even when Huda Beauty became a billion-dollar business, I still looked for validation outside. I wanted someone else to tell me I was worth something. As a result I wasn't the leader I wanted to be.”
“I'm not doing anything unless I love it, because I've already given my life to so many jobs. I need to love what I do, because I'm going to give 110 percent.”
“When people go through situations where it's a little rough, they want to quickly Band-Aid it and go back to where they're comfortable. It's really important to lean into that discomfort and see what is there and pursue something that you never thought you can pursue.”
