Camille Katona redefines beauty for the ages

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The Get

For this week’s MVP, we’re chatting with Canadian beauty founder Camille Katona.

By Rosemary Counter

With her best work friend at her side, Toronto-based beauty professional Camille Katona used her decade’s worth of marketing skills to stop selling other people’s makeup products and launch her own: 19/99 Beauty, an inclusive line of vegan, cruelty-free and synthetic fragrance-free makeup (and now, skincare) for Canadians of all ages and shades.

In this week’s MVP, we chat with the 33-year-old entrepreneur about the inspiration for her company, the pros and cons of being a “baby business” during the pandemic, and the decision to step away from corporate life and out on her own—well, kind of, as she wisely brought Stephanie Spence, her colleague-turned-business-partner-turned-close-friend with her.

Before 19/99, you and Stephanie were colleagues in the beauty space. How did you land there and what were you doing?

I did a general arts degree at U of T in art history, and Stephanie took sociology at Ryerson [now Toronto Metropolitan University]. Neither schooling is particularly related to the fashion industry, but that’s where we both wanted to work because we loved art, fashion and design.

I landed at Bite Beauty, a Canadian lipstick brand that was later acquired by LVMH, where I met Stephanie. In 2013, we went to New York City to open Bite’s first Lip Lab, where you could get a custom lipstick made.

Working at a startup was an incredible learning experience, but later on we sometimes felt discomfort working in an industry that felt as though it profited on insecurities. Makeup is too often seen as a tool to correct or fix yourself. There was an opportunity to create really intuitive, easy to use, fun products that were instead about expression and play.

Where did the idea for 19/99 come from?

From my mom, actually. She’s an active, working woman, but a lot of brands made her feel irrelevant or feel like she was being pigeonholed into “age-appropriate” behaviours.

Within much of the beauty industry, aging is seen as a big flaw. The messaging is always anti-aging and how to stop aging. But that’s just not possible, and it’s such a negative way of looking at it. A wrinkle is just a wrinkle, and who decided it was such a bad thing? The industry was not keeping up to speed with modern, mature women. We want to speak to them in a more sophisticated, relevant way.

19/99 popped up in April 2020—right at the start of the pandemic. Was the timing a good or bad thing?

We started developing the brand about a year before. The timing wasn’t the best, but I still feel like we were lucky. We didn’t have any overhead, so we were able to develop the brand slowly. It was just me and Stephanie, and we started with only two products: a pencil and our high-shine gloss. Our pencils can be used on eyes, lips and cheeks, and the gloss is a mixing medium so you can sheer out the colour and add a glossy finish to the pencil wherever you apply it. We wanted to show how you could do a lot with less product and a really curated toolkit. Now we have more than 30 SKUs and a dozen products.

What’s your secret to starting a business with a buddy?

We were colleagues first for many years, and we always had a really great working relationship. I know how she works; she knows how I work. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and we complement each other. She’s more on the operational side, and I’ve always been more into social media and digital marketing. We have a mutual understanding and the same long-term goals, though we constantly check in because those can change.

Even five years later, it still feels like we’re just starting and still trying to figure it out. But honestly, as I get older and talk to more people, I’ve realized no one really knows what they’re doing. You just have to be motivated and open to trying.

Rosemary Counter is a Toronto-based writer and journalist whose reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Guardian and others.

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