Jamie Kern Lima

Jamie Kern Lima was the first in her family to attend college. She studied business at Washington State University's Carson College of Business before earning an MBA at Columbia Business School, where she met her future husband and business partner, Paulo Lima. Before business school, she worked as a morning news anchor in the Pacific Northwest, first at KNDU in the Tri-Cities and later as a news anchor and reporter at KPTV in Portland. In 2008, Jamie and Paulo founded IT Cosmetics from their apartment in Studio City, California, sketching the original business plan on their honeymoon. The motivation was personal: Jamie had lived with hereditary rosacea and hyperpigmentation for years, and no makeup on the market could fully cover it. What followed was roughly two years of rejection, from retailers and investors alike, before a QVC appearance changed everything. On air, Jamie wiped her own makeup off in front of the camera to prove the product worked. The segment sold out completely, and IT Cosmetics went on to become QVC's largest beauty brand and a top prestige line at ULTA Beauty nationwide. By 2015, the company was adding more than $100 million in incremental retail sales in a single year. In 2016, L'Oréal acquired IT Cosmetics for $1.2 billion in cash, and Jamie became the first woman ever to serve as CEO of a brand within L'Oréal's 100-plus-year history. She led the brand until stepping back from day-to-day operations in 2019. Since then, Jamie has built a second act as an author, podcast host, investor, and speaker. She's the two-time New York Times bestselling author of Believe IT: How to Go from Underestimated to Unstoppable (2021) and Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life (2024), which spent 14 consecutive weeks on the bestseller list. She hosts The Jamie Kern Lima Show, a chart-topping self-improvement podcast whose very first guest was Oprah Winfrey, and has appeared as a guest investor ("Shark") on ABC's Shark Tank. In June 2024, she hosted "Becoming Unstoppable," a 13-plus-hour live virtual event that drew more than 260,000 participants and featured Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Robin Roberts, and Maria Shriver. Jamie has appeared on Forbes' "America's Richest Self-Made Women" list every year since 2017, and has invested in more than a dozen companies since leaving L'Oréal, including Dutch Bros Coffee and Duckhorn Portfolio. Whatever the format, her message is consistent: the belief you hold about your own worth, not just your skills, is what actually determines what you build.