Built from
inside out.

We didn't start as consultants. We started as operators: inside the labs, on the production floor, in the retailer conversations that made or broke launches.

40+

Years Inside Beauty Execution

Not observing. Operating across development, manufacturing, and launch

200+

SKUs Brought From Concept to Shelf

Across cosmetic, OTC, and SPF categories

Tolerance for Preventable Failure

Execution discipline is built into every system we design

Multi-Channel

Launch Experience

DTC, Prestige, and Mass retail environments

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The Beginning

We watched
brilliant ideas
die at the door.

"The brand had a vision. The labs had the science. Nobody had the bridge."

SKU Beauty was born out of a simple belief: there has to be a better way to bring a new beauty product to market without the guesswork that derails so many good ideas.

Before founding SKU Beauty, our team worked deep inside the industry. Managing formulation pipelines. Negotiating with manufacturers who had their own priorities and timelines. Navigating retailer compliance requirements that appeared late and changed everything. Watching launch after launch stumble, not because the product wasn't good enough, but because no one was holding the whole process together.

We saw prestige brands with extraordinary formulas miss their retail windows because nobody caught a labeling discrepancy until it was too late. We saw emerging founders sink their seed rounds into minimum order quantities they couldn't move. We saw brilliant strategy teams that had no idea how to talk to a contract manufacturer, and manufacturers who had no interest in bridging that gap for them.

After enough time in that room, a pattern becomes impossible to ignore. The problem was never the brands. It was never even the manufacturers. It was the space between them. Between creative ambition and operational reality. And the fact that most brands trying to cross that gap had no one in their corner who truly understood both sides.

We built SKU Beauty to be exactly what was missing. Not another agency layer. Not a consultant who sends decks and disappears. A partner who thinks like an operator because we were operators, and still are. SKU Beauty sits inside the process and stays until the product is on shelf.

Most brands don't need more advice. They need someone who can help everyone involved see the same picture, clearer: what the product is, where it's going, and what needs to happen next.

THE
GLITCH
IN THE
INDUSTRY.

SKU Beauty is the fix to a system no one realized was broken.

The beauty industry is optimized for innovation. It is not optimized for execution.

There is no system that governs how beauty products get to market. Everything around it exists: innovation pipelines, marketing engines, brand storytelling, trend forecasting. But the execution layer is fragmented, invisible, and unmanaged. Everyone in the industry knows it. Nobody talks about it.

R&D owns the formula. Operations owns manufacturing. Marketing owns the concept. Project managers own the launch timeline. No one owns the system that connects them.

Dates get set based on ambition, not feasibility. Dependencies aren't mapped. When delays happen (and they always happen) no one recalibrates the system. They just push the date.

What's developed in the lab doesn't always scale to production. Stability issues, fill incompatibilities, and packaging constraints surface after the money is already committed. Launch readiness isn't measured. It's assumed.

The signals that something is wrong are always there. Missed milestones. Reformulation loops. Supplier friction. Shifting claims. Wasted resources. The blame game. The prolonged angst.

Strip it all the way down and the problem is this: execution in beauty is managed through conversations, not systems. Conversations don't scale. They don't reveal risk early. They don't protect a launch when things start to drift.

The glitch is that execution is happening, but no one can see it clearly.

We spent years inside that broken system. Now we've built the one that actually works. Someone had to.

Mission

We turn product ambition into
disciplined, successful launches.

SKU Beauty exists to eliminate the execution gap in beauty: the space where strong concepts fail under operational pressure.

We bring structure, intelligence, and leadership to the moments that determine whether a product actually makes it to market, and performs when it gets there. From first SKU to scaled portfolios, we don't just support launches. We make them viable, aligned, and repeatable.

What We Stand For

Operational Truth

We surface risks early, quantify what others overlook, and challenge assumptions before they become failures. Our value to clients is not to tell them what they want to hear. It is telling them what they need to know, with enough time to act on it.

Embedded Execution

We integrate directly into the execution layer as needed, across R&D, manufacturing, regulatory, and commercialization, where launches are determined. We are present in the decisions, not informed of them afterward. That proximity is what produces outcomes.

Intelligence-Led Decisions

Every recommendation we make is grounded in structured diagnostics, pattern recognition, and real-world execution data. Our proprietary systems, including Launch Triage™ and the Deviation Intelligence System™, are designed to make visible what is normally invisible until it is too late.

Discipline as Competitive Advantage

We bring the governance, structure, and operational clarity required to deliver consistently in a high-variance, high-pressure environment.

Experience & Credentials

Decades in
every corner
of the industry.

Our team brings direct experience across formulation science, contract manufacturing, retail compliance, regulatory affairs, and brand operations.

Product Development & Formulation Science

Direct experience spanning skincare, color cosmetics, fragrance, and wellness categories. Our team has managed formulation pipelines from brief to stability testing to final approval, working alongside chemists and regulatory teams at CMOs across the US, Europe, and Asia.

Contract Manufacturing Relationships

Years of hands-on manufacturing management across domestic and international facilities. We know how to negotiate MOQs, manage lead times, maintain quality standards, and build the kind of manufacturer relationships that protect brands when timelines compress.

Retail Strategy & Compliance

Extensive experience with prestige, mass, and specialty retail channels, including Sephora, Ulta, Target, and independent boutiques.

Fractional Leadership & Interim Management

Proven track record stepping into brands as embedded operational leadership, functioning as fractional VP of Product, Head of Operations, or Launch Director during critical growth phases. We've scaled brands from 3 SKUs to 30, from DTC to full omnichannel.

Regulatory & Claims Expertise

Deep knowledge of FDA cosmetics and OTC drug regulations, EU cosmetics regulation, and international market requirements. We help brands substantiate claims, navigate INCI compliance, and build the documentation infrastructure that survives retailer and regulatory scrutiny.

The Team

The People Behind
the System.

SKU Beauty is not built on theory. It is built on operators who have worked inside the exact conditions that cause launches to succeed — and fail.

We have sat inside formulation labs, manufacturing facilities, and executive decision rooms. We have seen where timelines break, where communication collapses, and where products lose their way before they ever reach shelf.

This is not advisory from the outside. This is execution, designed from the inside.

Kim Cervino, MBA

Founder & Managing Partner

The gap between a strong concept and a product that performs at shelf is rarely an innovation problem. It is an execution problem. Kim has spent her career closing that gap. As Founder and CEO of Paradigm Science Inc., she built a fine ingredient supplier from inception into a globally recognized business, earning a strategic acquisition by Charles Tennant Company. Her experience spans research, formulation, and executive leadership across the full length of the value chain — giving her end-to-end command of the scientific, operational, and commercial forces that determine whether a product succeeds or stalls.

Most operators understand one layer of the system. Kim understands how the layers interact — and where the interfaces between them break.

Angelique Williams, MSc, PMP

Founder & Managing Partner

The distance between a well-conceived idea and a product on shelf is determined entirely by the systems built to carry it there — and the discipline to enforce them. Before co-founding SKU Beauty, Angelique served as Vice President of Product Development, Project Management, and Business Development, leading end-to-end commercialization across skincare, suncare, haircare, and body care. Her defining advantage is positional: she has operated from inside brand organizations and inside contract manufacturing — giving her direct visibility into where development quietly fails, and why both sides of the table allow it to continue.

She builds the governance structures that prevent strong teams from producing preventable failures.

Together — they bring executive-level strategy, deep industry experience, and the operational systems that give brands the direction, structure, and execution discipline to move from concept to market with confidence.

Built frominside out.

We watchedbrilliant ideasdie at the door.

We turn product ambition intodisciplined, successful launches.