Jenn Harper: Rock Bottom to Sephora Indigenous Beauty

"I'm proudly a recovered alcoholic and I'm no longer going to feel ashamed. Shame will kill us - it almost killed me."Jenn Harper had been selling seafood for over a decade when three little Indigenous girls covered in lip gloss changed everything. The dream came in January 2015, just two months into her sobriety, brown skin, rosy cheeks, giggling and laughing while covered in colorful gloss. When she woke up, she wrote down what would become the business plan for Cheekbone Beauty."It was so real to me that building a cosmetics company was the next thing on my path," Harper reflects. "It's crazy when I think about it now, I'm embarrassed about how much I didn't know about this industry."What she didn't know could fill a warehouse: product development, supply chains, ingredients, retail merchandising, the crushing competitiveness of beauty. What she did know was this: a brand representing Indigenous people deserved to exist in the world.Ten years later, that naive conviction has built something unprecedented, the first B Corp certified Indigenous beauty brand to hit Sephora shelves, a company that's donated over $250,000 to Indigenous communities, and a new category Harper calls "Indigenous Beauty" that puts sustainability and cultural values...