Toni Ko founded NYX Cosmetics in 1999, at age 25. In 2014, at 41, she sold the cult makeup company to L'Oreal for $500 million.
Toni Ko founded NYX Cosmetics in 1999, at age 25. In 2014, at 41, she sold the cult makeup company to L’Oreal for $500 million.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Toni Ko spent hours at department store cosmetics counters, testing out creamy foundations and prettily packaged blushes. Then she’d head to the nearest drugstore to try and replicate a high-end look on a teenager’s budget. “I loved beautiful makeup but couldn’t afford it,” she says. Ko bought “cheap, terrible” brands and improvised: “I remember having to burn the tip of my Maybelline eyeliner.”
Luckily for Ko, her formative years were also spent learning the ins and outs of the beauty supply chain. Her family moved to California from South Korea’s southeastern province of Daegu in 1986, when Ko was 13. They’d been in the fabric business but fell into perfume and cosmetics in L.A., first at retail, then as wholesalers. She worked for her parents after school and on weekends, then full-time after dropping out of Glendale Community College.
At age 25, armed with industry know-how and $250,000 in seed money from her parents, Ko set out to close what she saw as a potentially lucrative gap in the market: department store beauty at drugstore prices.