Why Stability Beats Virality Even After a Million Orders

BK Beauty founder Lisa Jauregui joins Erin Patten to talk about building a self funded beauty brand to over a million orders, what the Hoffman Process taught her about leading, how the Kitten Paw brush went viral on TikTok, and why she would choose stability over a viral moment every time.

Why Stability Beats Virality Even After a Million Orders

There is a moment in this conversation that I have not been able to put down.

Lisa Jauregui is sitting across from me, seven years into building BK Beauty. Over a million orders sold. The Inc 5000 list four years running. A concealer brush that TikTok made famous. All of it self funded, which means no investors, no board, nobody holding a percentage of the thing she built in her living room.

And she tells me about a private equity investor she once spoke to. She was proud, the way any of us would be. She told him about the growth. He asked how long she had been in business. Five years, she said. And he told her, plainly, that his firm does not like to invest in brands like hers.

Not because she was failing. Because she was growing too fast.

What he wanted was longevity. Stability. A brand that had proven it could still be here in twenty years. And Lisa, instead of being insulted, let that land. She calls it humbling. She says it made her stop attaching herself to the growth, because the growth is not guaranteed.

I would rather have a business with steady, stable growth year after year than a brand that is hot one year and forgotten the next.

I needed to hear that. I think a lot of us do.

The Woman Before the Brand

Before we got anywhere near business, I asked Lisa who she is when she is not the founder.

She is a third generation Austinite, which she is proud of and which I did not know. She is forty three. She is a mother of two girls. She is an animal lover. And she told me something that surprised me, given how much of her life is public. She is an introvert. She feels most like herself at home with her family or around people who have known her most of her life.

She also told me she spent a decade of her twenties working jobs that looked good on a resume while her real passion sat on the side. She was a makeup artist. She loved it. But she did not think it counted as a real career, so she kept it as a hobby and built a life around things that were easier to explain at a dinner party.

I hear this from women constantly. Our gifts get diminished by the outside world and so we hide them, or we shove them into a corner, or we treat them as the thing we do after the real work is done. Lisa eventually picked the brush back up. That decision changed the trajectory of her life, her family, and the legacy she is going to leave.

The Living Room and the Thirty Thousand Dollars

BK Beauty launched in 2019 with about thirty thousand dollars. That covered the first purchase order, the domain, the packaging, all of it.

What made it possible was not capital. It was community. Lisa had started her YouTube channel in 2014 with no strategy and no plan, purely because she loved makeup and was winding down the wedding makeup business that was exhausting her as a young mother. She had no idea it would become a distribution channel. But by 2019, she had women all over the world who trusted her and would buy something because she made it.

She did not need a retailer. She already had the relationship.

The brand is named after her daughters, Brooklyn and Kate. But BK also stands for Beauty Is Kindness, and the origin of that phrase is the part I find most moving. Lisa started her channel at thirty one, still carrying a lot of her own insecurities, using makeup to feel prettier and more confident. By the time she was launching the brand she had done enough of her own work to worry about what she was teaching her daughters. She did not want them to believe that putting on a face is what makes you beautiful. She did not want them to wait until thirty five to find their confidence the way she had.

We are all taught to be kind to other people from a really young age. I do not think we are taught to be kind to ourselves.

So she built the whole brand around that. Not kindness as a marketing line. Kindness turned inward, toward yourself, as the actual definition of beauty.

What the Hoffman Process Gave Her

This is where Lisa and I found each other.

I met her at a luncheon I co host here in Austin. She was the keynote. She talked about her business, her daughters, and the healing she had done to become the woman running the company she runs. I kept looking around the room wondering if everyone understood what she was giving them.

In 2022, at thirty nine, Lisa did the Hoffman Process. It is a seven day personal growth retreat. She found it through a podcast with the founder of TOMS and originally sent it to her husband Paul for his fortieth birthday. He was not interested. A few weeks later she heard about it again and thought, maybe this is for me.

She had been in therapy at different points in her life, starting in her late teens, and she credits that first round with a realization that shaped everything after. She could choose her life. She was not locked into a path by her upbringing or her education or her background. She could choose.

By thirty nine she felt a shift coming. She was entering her forties. She was carrying limiting beliefs and she wanted to know where they came from. The business was growing and she had a strong case of imposter syndrome, a sense that she did not quite fit the version of herself that people saw because of the brand.

The retreat sends prep work weeks in advance. Lisa remembers sitting in her own backyard filling out the paperwork and sobbing. Deep reflection on childhood, on the lessons handed to her by whoever raised her, on what those lessons taught her about who she is and what she is capable of. She describes it as a default setting, and the work is learning how to choose a different one.

She went in with twenty five strangers ranging from twenty seven to their late seventies, with no agenda and no idea what each day would hold. She went hoping for some self development and more confidence.

She came out describing something else entirely.

If you have ever held your first child, there is this overwhelming tsunami of love you have never felt before. I felt that on the last day of the retreat. But it was love for myself.

The Four Parts of You

The practical piece she brought home is something Hoffman calls the quadrinity. The idea that every person has four selves. Emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual.

Most of us live almost entirely in the intellectual self. That is the voice that talks you out of risk because its whole job is to protect you. Lisa realized she was operating there while her spiritual self sat neglected, and that the imbalance was showing up everywhere.

The practice is simple and I loved it enough that I want to name it here. Close your eyes, open a journal, and ask each part of you out loud what it needs from you today. Body, what do you need from me. Then listen. Then go down the list.

That is it. No seven day retreat required to start. And what Lisa named that I want you to hear is that she does this every day. Not once. Not when things get hard. Daily.

When I asked her what it did for her as a CEO, she did not give me a business answer. She said it made her self aware. It taught her to pause and ask why she is being triggered, where the feeling is coming from, and why the person across from her might see things differently. That skill elevates you whether you are running a company, teaching a classroom, or parenting a teenager.

Keeping Fulfillment In House When a VC Said Not To

Lisa has a friend who is a venture capitalist. He has seen hundreds of brands. He told her she could not scale without handing fulfillment to a third party logistics company.

She did not take the advice, and her reasoning is the whole brand in miniature.

BK Beauty is not a faceless brand. In the early days especially, every customer was ordering because they wanted to support her personally. They watched her content. They liked her. That is personal, and Lisa was not willing to give up control over anything that touched that customer's experience. Fulfillment is customer service. If an order takes too long, if the wrong product ships, if a return sits, if the package does not feel cared for, that is the relationship.

They did research it. They asked every founder friend they had whether they loved their third party logistics partner. Not one said yes. So they kept it, and they have optimized it year over year to the point where Lisa believes they now fulfill faster, better and cheaper than any outside partner could.

What I want you to notice is that the decision was not operational. It came from the same place the brand came from, which is her community and what they deserve.

A Million Orders and Not One Dollar of Outside Capital

Lisa corrected me on air, and I loved it. It is four years on the Inc 5000, not three.

They have never seriously considered raising money. They have been profitable since the first year. And when I asked what she understood about that path that made her stay true to self funding, she gave the most useful answer in the episode.

When you take money, you give up equity. Everyone knows that. What people do not talk about is that you also give up control, and you get put on a timeline that may not be the one you would choose. The model is grow fast at all costs so that in five or six years there is an exit. If that is not your goal, the money works against you.

Being self funded let BK Beauty grow slowly and deliberately. They launch one or two products a year, which is almost unheard of in color cosmetics where the entire game is new, new, new. Early on they had a few makeup products, but brushes were where the traction and the margins were. So they discontinued makeup and went all in on brushes for five years.

Narrow and deep. That was the whole strategy.

They relaunched into color cosmetics this September, seven years in, and Lisa is proud that they waited. Now they have the community, the capital and the resources to build the product exactly the way she wants it built. Clean ingredients. High quality. Components she is not compromising on.

Not having anyone else to answer to has been the greatest luxury.

And there are no plans to sell. Ever. Lisa and Paul find their inspiration in Estee Lauder, who was offered a million dollars by Revlon in the 1940s within a year or two of starting, and said no. Lisa's dream is that her daughters might take it over one day if they want it.

How the Kitten Paw Actually Went Viral

Everybody wants this answer, myself included.

The brush is officially the Angie Hot and Flashy A506 concealer brush, but the internet calls it the Kitten Paw. It was always popular in its collection. The viral moment came from timing.

TikTok Shop launched a beta program in August of 2023. Most beauty brands, especially the big ones, would not touch it. There was uncertainty about the app, rumors it might be shut down, a general wait and see. BK Beauty onboarded immediately.

That gave them a window with almost no competition and very little noise. TikTok at the time was actively pushing content that had products tagged, because tagged content drives sales on the platform. Creators were tagging that concealer brush. TikTok accelerated those videos. Money went into the creators' pockets and into BK Beauty's, and the brush took off.

Lisa is clear eyed that jumping on the wave early and riding it is most of the story. That was 2023 and she calls it the inflection point for the entire brand, not just for one product.

What a Deep Creator Relationship Really Looks Like

I asked this one for myself as much as for you.

BK Beauty keeps social and influencer marketing entirely in house. Lisa believes strongly that you cannot build a real relationship through an agency. Her influencer lead, Sophia, knows creators' children's names. She knows when someone's dog died and sends flowers. She consumes their content. She knows what is happening in their lives.

In July they flew five of their top TikTok Shop creators to Austin. Dinner at Lisa's home. Shopping on South Congress. A tour of the office. Five people, because that is what they could do well, and it is something they intend to invest more in.

Lisa also still considers herself a creator, and she thinks that is a quiet advantage. She knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a brand email. She knows what lands well and what feels careless, and she brings that straight back to her team.

What You Build Before the Viral Moment Arrives

This is the part most founders skip, and it is the reason brands implode when their moment finally comes.

Lisa gave me a specific example. In March, BK Beauty participated in Ulta's 21 Days of Beauty for the first time, having only gotten onto the Ulta platform in December. The Kitten Paw kit went half off for a single day. Ulta projected they would sell around 4,800 units.

Lisa woke up at seven in the morning and they had already sold five thousand. By the end of the day they had sold twenty two thousand.

And they were fine. Because weeks ahead of any launch or sale, they prep. People in the office building boxes. Temp staff already arranged and scheduled, which is how they solved the hardest part of owning your own fulfillment, the fact that you might need four people one week and twenty the next. Their fulfillment manager sorts orders by complexity so that single item orders go to a station where someone can grab, seal and move.

There is also a letting go in this story that I think a lot of us need. Lisa used to put every single order in a box with an elaborate packing process. She timed herself once at five minutes per order, which works beautifully at thirty orders a day and not at all at seven thousand. Switching to bubble mailers for small orders was hard for her. She braced for the customer backlash every time they made a change like that.

There was none. People were just happy to get their product quickly.

Stop Chasing Someone Else's Moment

Which brings me back to where I started.

I asked Lisa what she would say to a founder watching a peer go viral and wondering whether to chase the same play. Her answer was that beauty is oversaturated, that you will always find brands with similar names and similar products, and that what actually differentiates you is the quality, the integrity and the customer experience.

And then she said she would love a viral moment, but stability matters more to her. Because virality does not guarantee you a business next year, or the year after that. She would rather have the long game.

She is proud of the Inc 5000 list not because it is a trophy but because hitting it four years running is proof of sustained growth, and sustained growth is proof of a stable business.

To anyone listening who is frustrated because they have not had their viral moment, it is okay.

What I Am Taking With Me

I am a beauty founder too. Ra Beauty is my baby, and I am early enough in it that I am still tying ribbons and handwriting notes and figuring out how to build relationships in a creator world I do not yet know how to move through.

So I came into this conversation with real questions, and I left with a few things I am still holding.

The first is that the inner work is not separate from the business. Lisa's decision to keep fulfillment in house, her refusal to take capital, her patience in waiting seven years to launch color cosmetics, her ability to hear a private equity investor tell her he would not invest in a brand like hers and receive it as a gift instead of an insult. None of that is strategy. All of it is self knowledge showing up as leadership.

The second is that the daily practice matters more than the retreat. Seven days changed her life. Checking in with four parts of herself every morning is what keeps it changed.

And the third is the one I will be sitting with the longest. We are all chasing the fifteen seconds. I have done it. But the women I actually admire are not the ones who had the biggest year. They are the ones who are still here, still whole, still building, ten years in.

Stability is not the boring choice. It is the sovereign one.

Where to Find Lisa and BK Beauty

BK Beauty  |  bkbeauty.com, plus Ulta, Nordstrom, Amazon and TikTok Shop

BK Beauty on social  |  @thebkbeauty

Lisa on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok  |  @lisajmakeup