Huda Beauty’s Huda Kattan is making the first investment from her angel fund in a sexual and feminine wellness brand called Ketish, which is being launched by a former Huda Beauty product developer.
Ketish, founded by Emaan Abbass, plans to create products across the landscapes of feminine and sexual wellness.
Over Zoom, Kattan said she supports the brand’s goal of breaking down stigmas around women’s sexual well-being.
This is Kattan’s first investment through HB Angels, the angel investment fund that she set up when Huda Beauty got a minority investment from TSG Consumer Partners in 2017. Kattan has made several other investments through HB Investments, including in spa software Fresha. HB Angels falls under HB Investments.
Kattan has openly talked about how difficult it was for her to find funding when she was beginning her business, and her desire to support other entrepreneurs.
Kattan and Abbass have known each other for several years, ever since Abbass — then working in supply chain at Sephora — went to Dubai on vacation and asked to visit Huda Beauty headquarters. “I have been a huge fan of Huda’s for years,” she said. “She was the first influencer that looked like me and had a similar experience, she grew up in the states, she was Middle Eastern, I felt like there was a piece of me in her.”
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Later, when Kattan was in Los Angeles, the two met up. “I was asking a bunch of questions and I was like, ‘OK, so when can you start?’” Kattan said. “She was like, ‘oh, this is the interview?’” Kattan recalled. Abbass was hired, and moved out to Dubai where she worked in product development for Huda Beauty.
For Ketish, Abbass said the brand inspiration stemmed from her experiences growing up as a Muslim, Arab-American woman in a household where sex and feminine wellness were not discussed. At 21, during her first trip to the gynecologist, she discovered she had cervical cancer that had been caused by HPV, she said.
“During a time like this you usually call your parents, you try to seek comfort, and the more I thought about it the more I realized that I really couldn’t go to them. A lot of that stemmed from fear and shame and embarrassment and feeling like I would disappoint them so much just because of how taboo premarital sex is in our culture,” she said.
“I realized that maybe if I had the adequate education around preventative feminine health care, or maybe if I had a community that I could turn to, maybe I wouldn’t feel this sense of shame or fear, and maybe my situation could have been different,” Abbass continued.
With Ketish, Abbass plans to build out a community where women can talk about topics they have questions about, to help close the “education gap” when it comes to feminine health. On the product front, her goal is to launch credible sexual wellness products that have a self-care angle she said, and that are not pink — the color scheme for Ketish will include gold and black.
“The more she talked about it, I was like, ‘oh my God, this is a really interesting and sexy brand,’” Kattan said. “This has a very personal touch for me, I was very much betting on emotion … I have my own stories of shame, so I felt like my story was within her.”
Ketish launches mid August on ketish.com and hudabeauty.com.
Abbass said her parents are proud of her new venture — “It’s done a lot for our relationship,” she said.
For more from WWD.com, see:
Huda Kattan Launches No-Makeup Makeup With Glowish
Huda Kattan Talks Launching a Skin Care Brand During the Coronavirus Pandemic
How Huda Kattan Broke All the Rules and Built a Beauty Empire
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