Access over money: How Sephora is quietly supporting female entrepreneurs

For the past two years, Sephora has been quietly supporting female-founded beauty businesses with an incubator-like program called Accelerate. More than money, it’s access and education that the program looks to provide.

“We are passionate about using our strengths for the greater good and recognized a gap in female leadership, even in the beauty industry,” said Corrie Conrad, Sephora’s head of social impact, who was brought on from Google in 2015 to build out Sephora’s social initiatives. The void is especially glaring in the startup space, where a whopping 85 percent of venture investment goes to men.

Conrad and her team set out to help turn that around, developing a seven months-long mentorship program to help female founders take their businesses to the next level by securing new investments and/or retail partnerships — only sometimes with Sephora.

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