Some friendships turn into businesses. For Lexie Hull and Sarah Guller, it turned into a business built to survive a professional basketball game.
The two met as roommates at Stanford, where Hull was becoming one of the best players in the country—a three-time All-Pac-12 selection who helped lead the Cardinal to the 2021 NCAA national championship, putting up 10 points and 10 rebounds in the title game itself. A year later, Hull was drafted sixth overall by the Indiana Fever, well ahead of where most pre-draft projections had her, and has gone on to win a WNBA Commissioner’s Cup and an Unrivaled title.
Guller took a different path, into private equity, where she spent years evaluating consumer brands professionally. Years after graduating, the two Stanford roommates reunited to build FORTA, a performance cosmetics company, together, with Hull’s career supplying both the problem the brand exists to solve and the testing ground to prove it worked.
The Towel Problem
Hull didn’t set out to become a beauty founder. She set out to stop ruining towels. “It was every game,” she shares. “I remember wiping my face with a towel at a timeout and seeing half of my makeup on it. I honestly became used to my mascara running by the fourth quarter.”
For an athlete who believes appearance and performance aren’t supposed to be in tension, that wore thin. “I’m a huge believer in look good, feel good, play good, so I refused to accept the idea that I need to compromise between performance and beauty. That’s why I started FORTA…because women deserve makeup that can keep up with them.”
What makes the brand’s approach to “long-wear” different, Hull says, is that it was tested against her actual job, not a marketing lab. “Everything I wear on the court is built for a specific job, and it’s tested under real conditions, not in a lab,” she explains. Getting there took 18 formula iterations across multiple labs over roughly two and a half years. “A lot of brands say ‘long-wear’ and mean ‘it survives a desk job.’ Our bar was: does it survive a WNBA game?”
The Big Bet
Guller’s route into FORTA, she admits, started with a leap of faith taken while she still had a private equity paycheck. She and Hull entered Estée Lauder’s new brand competition with nothing but an idea.
“We had zero product samples or any traction. We were just two girls and a dream,” she says. They were chosen as finalists and flown to Paris to pitch in person. “Unsurprisingly, we didn’t win since we had no product to show, but being chosen as finalists was a huge moment for us, as it validated our thesis behind the brand. That’s when I realized this was something I wanted to go all in on.”
Her years spent evaluating beauty and wellness brands from the investor’s side gave her a clear-eyed view of exactly where the category’s long-wear claims tend to fall apart. “Most long-wear claims get tested in controlled conditions: a person sitting still, room temperature, a few hours,” she says. “Real life means heat, sweat, touching your face and a 12-hour day. ‘Longwear’ often just means waterproof, whereas sweat contains salt that breaks down products, so we had to solve for that.”
She and Hull also had a second constraint to solve for at the same time: “A lot of what’s available today that does last is either tacky or causes breakouts, so we always make sure to keep our ingredient lists clean and intentional.”
Going all in meant Hull and Guller personally funding their first production run—roughly $17,000 of their own savings, which, Guller clarifies, only covered the caps for their setting spray bottles. “It was a lot more expensive than that to fund the full run,” she admits. “But our first month showed us it was worth it and that we were onto something.”
That first month did the convincing to the tune of $30,000 in sales in the first week with no paid advertising, unprompted press coverage from outlets including Marie Claire, Glamour, Business Insider and Glossy, and athletes like Sophie Cunningham and Genie Bouchard mentioning the brand on their own.
“That unpaid pull was the signal,” Guller says.
The Fall Finish
With football season back and everyone’s schedule running from early workouts to desks to watch parties, the product of that friendship and that testing standard is a two-piece lineup built for zero touch-ups. The Lock & Go Setting Spray ($26) is an ultra-fine mist designed to lock makeup in place through heat, sweat and long days while still finishing breathable rather than stiff. The PR Proof Lip Stain ($26) is a water-based lip and cheek stain built to hold up through food, water, sweat and more—buildable enough to wipe away after 10 seconds for a sheer tint, or left on for deeper pigment, with hyaluronic acid and glycerin worked in so it doesn’t feel drying.
It’s the routine Hull relies on herself. “First thing in the morning, I’ll put on my makeup and finish with FORTA’s Lock & Go Setting Spray before I leave the house, so I don’t have to think about it again,” she says. “I always do my brows and mascara, and if I’m going to a game or a night out, I never leave without putting on our PR Proof Lip Stain. It’s made with long-lasting pigment that has literally lasted me up to 12 hours before, while still being very hydrating and gentle on the lips. My whole makeup routine is built around not having to touch it up. That was always the point.”
