Huda Kattan is a multi-millionaire mogul who created the beauty empire Huda Beauty. Since launching her brand to the Irish market through Brown Thomas in 2017, Huda Beauty has swept through Europe, becoming a cult favourite.
But before Kattan became the success story she is today, she was a struggling student in Dubai trying to forge her own path.
“I ended up studying finance and it really wasn’t the right career for me,” she said on her Youtube channel, which to date has 3.56 million subscribers.
“I really honestly did not like it at all, but by the time I kinda realised I didn’t like it, it was too far. I had gone too far, I would’ve spent way longer in university than I would’ve wanted to.”
After spending two years in finance feeling unhappy, Kattan realised she was not going to work in anything unless she was passionate about it. With the encouragement of her family she booked a ticket to Los Angeles to study makeup in the Joe Blasco Makeup School, and began her career as a makeup artist.
Soon after getting her degree Kattan struggled to find a platform in which she could share her skills and create a brand. In 2010 she created her blog “Huda Beauty,” and she started to gain notoriety within the makeup world.
“It was a lot of work and it was a lot of round-the-clock exhaustion. I felt like I was also kind of living my dream doing what I wanted to do. It was a really great thing that I actually did that because I feel like so many people actually found me and found out who I was by doing that.”
The blog gave her the exposure that she needed and soon she began to build her list of celebrity clients, such as Eva Longoria and the Kardashian sisters.
However, she admits that for the first three years of her career she struggled financially due to not doing as many sponsored posts on her social media platforms, compared to her influencer peers.
“Still to this day I’m not somebody who does a lot of paid posts. I felt like for me it just didn’t fit,” she said.
In 2013, the Huda Beauty business was created with her two sisters, Mona and Alya, after Huda struggled to find eyelashes that they liked. Huda was initially against the idea of creating a lash line:
“She [Mona] ended up kind of forcing me into it. She found manufacturers for it and she showed me the sample and I was like “that’s actually what I want to create.”
Soon after launching the lashes, the ladies got to work on trying get stockists such as Sephora, specifically Sephora in Dubai Mall on board. After not taking no for an answer for months and finding a distributor that helped them achieve their goal, Huda Beauty launched in Dubai Mall in 2011, later launching to the US market in 2015.
Since the brand’s humble beginnings they have expanded from lashes to makeup, and most recently fragrance. According to Forbes, Huda Beauty sells more than 140 different products in her range which brings in at least $250 million in annual sales. Kattan has an estimated personal net worth of $610M.
What’s next for Huda Kattan? Fans can watch her and her sisters grow and run their business on their reality show “Huda Boss,” which launched on Facebook Watch in 2018.