Thrive Causemetics: Karissa Bodnar. How a Beauty Business Made Millions for a Mission
episodePreviously titled “Thrive Causemetics: Karissa Bodnar. How $150 a Day in Sales Turned into a $150 Million Beauty Business with a Mission” — renamed by the publisher on Sep 14, 2026
Transcript
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I would have given you my left arm and I am left handed to be carried at Sephora, Nordstrom, Ulta, Anthropology. I mean I was I was pitching to everybody, QVC, and they they didn't really see the vision of of what I was creating. There were many days where we had no sales. Having an a hundred and fifty dollar revenue day, I I felt like an absolute baller. And so I was I was funding the production through working my full time job. And I wiped out my entire life savings.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Roz, and on the show today, how Carissa Bodner turned a purpose-driven side hustle into Thrive Cosmetics, a multi-million dollar beauty company.
The beauty business is huge and it's incredibly crowded. There are thousands of brands selling mascara and eyeliner and lipstick, and lots of them are really good. So for a new brand to break through, you need to give people a reason to notice you. And for Carissa Bodner, that reason came in 2013. Carissa had worked at a Sephora store for a few years and then landed a job at L'Oreal working in product development. And while she was there, one of her closest friends from college died from cancer. She was just twenty-four years old, and that really shook Carissa. And it got her thinking about what she really wanted to do with her life. And eventually, she came up with an idea for her own cosmetics company that would also give back to people in need.
She called it Thrive Cosmetics, as in C-A-U-S-E, Cosmetics. Now, having a mission is one thing, but you still have to make something people actually want to buy. And for the first few years, Thrive. Struggled. Carissa couldn't get her products into stores. Sales were mainly online and they were tiny, like a good day was $100 in orders. But then something happened that changed everything. And yes, as you will hear, it was a viral moment. But Carissa figured out how to capture it and help turn Thrive Cosmetics into a much bigger brand. As for Carissa, she grew up on a small farm in Stanwood, Washington, just north of Seattle. There were chickens and pygmy goats, even a horse named Blue. And like a lot of little girls, Carissa loved playing with makeup.
But she took it a little further than most.
Makeup to me was plain dress up when I was a little girl. I started formulating in my parents' kitchen when I was ten. But I have photos of my dad actually when I was putting my mom's blush on him and lipstick. He was just the best dad to allow me to to play around with makeup. But I think really where it clicked for me was the way that beauty has the ability to make us feel confident.
When you say formulating, like what like making what?
So my parents were incredible and would buy me any book that I wanted to. And I I was, you know, they they made me work for every Clinique eyeshadow palette that I got. I was weeding on those five acres. Um, at both my parents' as well as my grandparents' house. I was I was doing yard work, I was taking care of the goats, I was taking care of all of the animals that we had in order to earn the makeup that I got. But they always gave me whatever book I wanted. And so very early on I had different types of books like the cosmetic ingredient dictionary. And I started to learn how to formulate because this was before I mean we had we had dial up in in the in the late nineties and early two thousands. But I really was self taught on the the chemistry side um through just the imagination that my parents really fostered in our kitchen and in my mother's gardens that I was helping tend to.
So You know, we grew sunflowers and I would grind down the sunflower seeds to make a butter, which would ultimately become sunflower seed butter. And then I would steam the rose petals because that would help to get pigment. We had endless blackberries. And I'll never forget the first time I realized the pigment that was in a blackberry. It was because I forgot to wear gardening gloves. My hands were stained for death.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:10–6:28
2
How did Karissa’s childhood experiments with fruits and flowers spark her first makeup formulations?
6:28–12:10
3
How did Karissa land her dream product‑development role at L’Oréal?
12:10–17:28
4
Why did the loss of her close friend push Karissa to quit L’Oréal and launch Thrive Cosmetics?
17:28–23:44
5
What viral moment in 2015 turned Thrive Cosmetics into a breakout brand?
23:44–29:37
6
How did refusing large‑scale fundraising become a strategic advantage for Thrive?
29:37–35:52
7
Does the brand’s mission or the product performance drive customer loyalty the most?
35:52–41:27
8
Why did Karissa decide to keep Thrive Cosmetics strictly direct‑to‑consumer and online?
41:27–48:12
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Built This with Guy Raz
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