Vulnerable AF
More Secrets of Loni Venti, the Editorial Brain behind Ulta and IPSY
👋, I’m Kimberly. I’ve been creating obsession-worthy brands for the past fifteen years. And now, I’m giving away my secrets every week in this newsletter.
Welcome to the Secrets of… Series — in which I’ve carefully designed a series of thought-provoking questions to tease the most interesting and insightful information out of the best brand builders in the world.
This week, I’m bringing you Part 2 of my interview with Loni Venti, the beautiful writer and beautiful soul behind brands like Ulta and ipsy who I could literally spend days talking to — but we had to cap this convo at two hours.
In our interview, Loni gets personal and (in her words) “vulnerable AF” about her experiences in the beauty and fashion industry, as a woman working to become more confident and comfortable in her own evolving self-image.
On its surface, this newsletter is about brand building.
But we as brand builders bring so much of ourselves and our personal lives into our work — and the campaigns and messages we create potentially have such a tremendous impact on people’s views of themselves and their worlds — that we need to be mindful of the personal as well as the professional, growing ourselves as people who genuinely “show up” in our brands and for our audiences.
This intersection is what I hope to continue exploring through the Secrets of…. interview series. And I hope you’re all as excited about it as I am.
With that, read on for a mix of branding insights and realness from the incredible Loni. And if you didn’t catch Part 1, be sure to read it here.
Loni Venti is a writer, editor, and creative director based in Brooklyn, NY. You can find her words in Bustle, Allure, Glamour, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and Teen Vogue—to name a few. Currently, she is the Senior Manager of Editorial for Ulta Beauty. Some previous roles include Creative Director at IPSY and Senior Beauty Editor at Cosmopolitan. She has written about fashion, fitness, and relationships—but beauty will always have her heart.
6. What marketing principles do you think great marketers overlook all the time?
#1: People follow calendars too literally.
Marketers will say…
"Okay, it's Spring. That means we're all going for picnics!" And all of our content is about being outside.
Then it's Summer, which means we're at the beach — and we’ve gotta have beach hair.
Suddenly, it’s Fall. And we're reinventing ourselves with fashion and beauty and lifestyle all over again….
Let’s remember that at any moment — someone can start to evolve for reasons that have nothing to do with the weather or the season or the holidays. Or someone can also stay the same for a very long time.
It's great to inspire them and give them ideas to help them celebrate the big and small moments, but let's also help them celebrate their everyday lives — because they're living their everyday lives in their bodies, in their minds, and in their hearts, 365 days.
That's what's the most important. It’s not necessarily the big calendar events or the big seasonal moments.
An editorial calendar is a great way for someone to plan out their storytelling for a year and think about the journey that your brand is going on. You can factor in moments like shopping for holiday gifts or needing to buy SPF during the summer. Those are definitely considerations — but they shouldn't be the only consideration. People are so much more complex and layered and thoughtful than that.
#2 Being a bit too prescriptive when it comes to inclusivity and diversity — rather than embracing intersectionality.
A lot of box-checking happens in marketing when casting a shoot or telling influencer stories, and I believe that can make it feel inauthentic.
I try to think more about the whole person, the diversity of someone's entire journey, including all of the intersectionalities and experiences that led to them being who they are right now — versus thinking, "Okay, we need to have a plus-sized model in this ad."
It's tricky, but I believe it’s important. And I can see that the brands who “get it” really make an impact on the way that people see themselves, find themselves, and connect with the brand’s content — versus being another brand that’s just “doing diversity."
This also ties back to not playing the calendar.
For example, Pride month is an amazing celebration of a community of self expression of a marginalized group who have endured so much and deserve to be celebrated and honored.
But don't just celebrate the LGBTQ community in June.
We shouldn't only be honoring Latinas when it's National Latin Heritage month. We shouldn't only be celebrating the Black community in February. It should be a constant conversation and celebration of folks of all backgrounds and walks of life.
I aim to genuinely embrace the intersectionality of the diversity of humans all year long.
I’m sure there are a lot of marketers who want to be celebrating diversity in the right way and don’t want to be filling in checkboxes — but they’re defaulting to that because it feels like the easiest way. What advice would you give them?
Try to think about casting with stories in mind versus just faces and skin tones and hair types and sizes.
When casting, go one step further and have a brief interview with them. Find out who they are and what makes them tick and what they value. This allows you to learn more than what you see on the surface (i.e. their intersectionality) Plus, if you have the opportunity to include their quotes or sound bites, your content will be so much richer.
And even if you’re only featuring photos, I really believe that it comes through when you're casting for more than just what somebody looks like.
Recently on set, there was someone who we cast because of their hair texture. But then in speaking with them, we found out that they were also queer and AAPI. We discovered so many facets of who they are — this beautiful, complicated, wonderfully unique human — and all of these things that they can bring to the conversation and to the table.
When you're casting, having these interviews and talking to people and finding out who they are and what's important to them can really go a long way.
I’d also say that you need to think of the long haul, not just that one project, and understand that you cannot check every box in one shoot. That would be a really, really big cast!
I worked on a campaign once that I'm super proud of where we cast 18 people for an underwear shoot.
It was about redefining what it means to be sexy, and I loved that project so much.
We cast so many people — and still, people were writing in saying they were disappointed that they didn't see themselves featured.
I never want that to happen. However, we will have an opportunity to cast somebody that you can see yourself in an upcoming project.
You can't be too literal about trying to go over every base in every single story. Instead, you need to think about who the right people are to be telling this story at this moment. Then tell new stories in the next season or the next month — and keep going.
You can build a library and think of the stories that you've told before and the stories that are missing that you want to try and cover and capture moving forward.
That way, your brand as a whole is representing this really rich, beautifully diverse range of humans and stories and minds and souls and hearts — but also skin tones and body shapes and sizes and hair textures.
And when you think about it in terms of the long haul, you can make sure that you're telling the right stories, enough stories, and a range of stories over the course of a year, over the course of five years, and so on.
That’s such a great way to think about it.
So many brands today struggle with constant content demands — and the pressure of having to create so much, so often, for so many platforms. What’s your best advice for them?
Spend more time understanding what the story is upfront, and you’ll have endless content possibilities later on.
Start with a seed of an idea of the story you want to tell. Then look to the talent and the community and your creatives to let it evolve organically — there's so much more potential there.
I used to be really firm in where a campaign needed to go in the beginning, and I learned that that's not how you inspire or energize creatives.
Walking in and saying, "This is what we're doing" is never going to get creatives buzzing.
But walking in with a seed of an idea and letting people who have these magical beautiful minds do their thing…oh my gosh, it's like night and day.
Pull in a team of brilliant creatives and let them all get their fingerprints on it.
What you end up with will be infinitely more powerful when you're tapping into people's potential and letting them shine.
Giving enough room for flexibility, fluidity, and evolution is really important. And from my experience, the outcome is so much more impactful and powerful when you do that.
7. What advice would you give your 26-year-old self—both career-related and not career-related?
Advice #1
”You make mistakes for a reason, and that’s ok.”
Sometimes you have to learn lessons by living through your mistakes — and those are the things that end up sticking with you.
I recently posted this wonderful quote from an interview with from Zoe Saldana:
I know who I am. I love who I am. I like what I do. And I like how I do it. And I like my mistakes and I like the way I learn and I like the pace with which I learn my mistakes.
When I heard her say that, I thought, "That's it. That's what I've been trying to do!"
I'm not there yet, but that's what I strive towards.
Advice #2
”Don't worry so much.”
It’s taken me to be in my late 30s to realize that things are usually not as scary as I worry that they will be.
Especially when I was in my 20s, I was really, really anxious and just constantly worried. Worried about what people thought of me. Worried that no matter how hard I worked, I wasn't working hard enough.
I'd say, "Just go a little easy on yourself, and don't worry so much."
Advice #3
"Stop thinking you're not cute."
Oh my gosh, I see pictures of me when I was in my 20s, and I looked so freaking good. I was running all around Manhattan in 8-inch heels, and now I can't even stand in them for two minutes.
The thing is — I thought I was so ugly, and unattractive. I was really, really tough on myself physically.
That's not a good way to go through life for anyone.
So I would tell my 26-year-old self, "Girl, you look really good. You need to just appreciate and learn to find your beauty."
That may be a silly thing — but as a beauty editor, it feels important to be able to find your beauty and be proud of who you are and be proud of what you look like.
It’s important to not beat yourself up and not obsess over trying to look “better.” I was always beating myself up and trying to change something, whether it was getting hair extensions or cellulite treatments.
I’m not saying anyone should be ashamed of doing those things. If they make you feel great, do you! But those things weren't making me feel better. They were doing the opposite — and making me feel like nothing would make me look the way that I wanted to look.
I had access to the very best, most high-tech, celeb-worthy beauty and dermatological treatments in the world. And nothing would have ever made me feel beautiful.
I just wish I could say to myself, "You are beautiful. You are enough. Just go feel fabulous and enjoy it."
I also wish I could tell myself that fat is not the opposite of beautiful—and just that so many things that I was thinking were really toxic.
They were deeply rooted in the beauty standards of the time and the industry that I was working in. That's why it's so important to me now that when I'm working on beauty I'm doing everything I can to repair the damage that I contributed to. It was damaging me, and it was damaging so many people around the world.
You will change. Your body will change, and all sorts of other things will change. If you can't learn to love yourself now, how will you learn to love yourself then?
I want to help make sure that our children are brought up in a world where they understand what beauty means, they see that beauty celebrates what everyone uniquely looks like, and beauty is who they are on the inside.
I might have started this off in a little bit of a vanity place where I said, "I was really cute. I should have celebrated that I was cute."
But it’s deeper than that. The reason I couldn't find my beauty is because of the messages that were all around me that I was helping to share.
It’s so true that your outer beauty comes from your inner beauty. If you feel good about yourself, then you project that to the world.
Yes. Exactly, exactly. A million percent.
The mom thing is also really tough because there's so much shame put on moms, no matter what they do. Literally, there's no way to do it right.
And the pressure, even in 2022, to “bounce back”... I hate that phrase. I'm not a fucking rubber band. I'll tell you things are bouncing, but not the way that it's intended.
I was really lucky that I was able to nurse Leo for almost a year and a half. It was a life-changing experience, and I wouldn't take it back.
As soon as I stopped, weight just started coming on like crazy. And my skin went through this whole hormonal adventure.
It was bittersweet when the nursing window ended. But I did feel like, "Okay, well, a bonus is that I will have my body to myself again.”
I could spend a whole day out in the world without worrying about pumping or nursing. I could maybe even go on a business trip without it, or go somewhere with my husband.
And then when things finally settled into whatever the next iteration of me was going to be, I didn’t recognize myself.
I had to learn — how do I dress this body? More importantly: How do I make friends with this body and this skin and this hair? Because there is no bouncing back, there's only moving forward.
I could have fought it very aggressively to try and “bounce back.” It wouldn't have been the same; it might have been similar.
But that's not how I want to spend my life right now. There're other things I want to do with my life.
Let’s be in awe of the magic of what our bodies can handle and produce and do, and how we survived a pandemic and are pandemic parents.
Let's stop beating ourselves up over stretch marks or a FUPA or whatever weird names they want to give to body parts to make us feel bad about ourselves — and just start feeling really good about ourselves because we're fucking awesome.
8. What’s the most valuable positive feedback you’ve ever been given? And what’s the most valuable negative feedback you’ve ever been given?
Feedback #1
”You care too much.”
I've gotten from many coaches, managers, and therapists — and so I have to do the "So what?" exercise.
For the "So what?" exercise, you envision the worst possible thing that can happen and say, "So what?" And even if you go all the way down that train, what's the worst thing that can happen?
Maybe the bad thing is we won't get the campaign assets in time.
So what?
Well, then we have to pivot and use pre-existing assets.
So what?
And so you go down this little train and it's usually not that bad. Then you can calm down the anxiety and the obsessing and the overthinking.
Feedback #2
”You need more work/life balance.”
This became really important for me when I became a manager — because when I was living to work and had no balance, I was setting a bad example and expectation for other people.
That's not healthy, but it's something I struggle with because I love what I do and I could do it all day.
I could edit something forever. I wrote a casting brief two days ago, and I changed that thing maybe 100 times. Guess what? They were going to cast it the same way. They were going to send me the same options. I don't know why. I just love it.
I think in stories. I think in editing. I think in words and pictures. I walk down the street and I look at billboards and think of how the copy could have been better or why the model doesn't feel genuine.
It’s hard for me to have work/life balance because I love what I do so much — which I know is such a blessing, and I feel very lucky for that.
But you need to have downtime. You need to have rest to be your best self at work. And now that I'm a mom, it's really important to me to spend time with family. Nothing is more important than that.
As a manager, it's important that your team sees you having work/life balance. If you don't, then they assume that that's what's expected of them — and you're just keeping the cycle going on and on and on.
Feedback #3
“Continue being your authentic self.”
Recently I was on set, and I wasn’t speaking in any corporate lingo. I was being vulnerable in moments of vulnerability. And I was just bringing my authentic self to the situation — versus an edited, more “professional” version of myself.
I heard from a few different people that they felt like they could be their authentic selves because I was being my authentic self. And we all had a positive experience and a great outcome of the project.
It’s something that a lot of us have a hard time with because there are so many corporate do's and don'ts, and circling back, and “per my email” and stuff like that.
But in the role that I'm in now, a focus of mine since I started is to worry less about following the corporate norms. In a respectful and professional way, I want to be myself whenever possible.
When I was at Cosmo, a lot of the stories I wrote were super vulnerable.
And when I would be the most vulnerable and the most honest with the pitches and with our readers is when I would get the most positive feedback. It’s when I would hear from people the most and when the stories would perform the best.
There's a common thread there.
When I've been able to stop worrying about what everyone thinks about me and just embrace who I am, I'm able to get a better result.
And it’s very important to me to help other people feel like they can be themselves too.
9. What motivates you to get up and go every day?
I feel a personal responsibility to fight conventional beauty standards to repair the damage done by the beauty industry in the past and to help people feel beautiful.
That's what keeps me going. That's what helps me decide whether or not I take on a project, whether or not I work with a brand.
Being a mom and seeing my son Leo, I want the world to be a friendlier one for him and his generation when it comes to the messages that they're receiving.
I'm fortunate that I get to impact the messages in some small way that will surround him as he grows up and as his generation grows up.
10. Who do you most admire—and what question would you most like to ask them?
Person #1:
Glennon Doyle
I would love to ask her where she finds the courage to go against the rules.
All of the tides and all of the energy and everything around us is pushing you to do what you're supposed to do.
I've always felt I was an other or a weird kid or a rebel.
But a lot of times, I do what you're supposed to do anyway — because I'm not able to find the courage to do something different in the moment.
After the moment has passed I can recap and say, "Wow! I totally wish I would have done this. Next time I'm going to do this."
But when you're in that moment and you have the opportunity to go with the flow or do your own thing, where do you find the courage?
What is the mantra you tell yourself or the switch that you flip to fight it to be untamed and to tap into your wild self?
I haven't figured it out yet, and I would really love to know.
Person #2:
Marilyn Monroe
I love Marilyn Monroe so much.
I would have to ask her what she didn't get to do that she wishes she could do most.
I'm older than she was when she passed. And Marilyn had a lot of big dreams.
She was much smarter than most people realize and much more of a humanitarian than most people know.
There are so many things that we didn't get from her, so I'd love to ask her what would have been next for her.
11. Last question—what's a secret?
A secret is that this is it.
The here and the now is the only reality that we actually have, and the only thing that really, truly matters.
Knowing that “this is it” can influence your decisions in a really positive impactful way. It can help you be present. It can help you be authentic.
Especially with everything we've seen in the past few years — who knows how much time we have, whether as individuals or as a planet?
Not to get dark, but these moments that we have and how we choose to spend them and who we choose to spend them with… the decisions that we make and what we're doing, how we're treating each other, how we're treating ourselves — it's literally it.
If you can remember that this is it, and focus on how you choose to spend this moment right now and then the following moment right after it, it will drive your whole life.
It's so simple. But we forget because we get so wrapped up in thinking, “What are my plans next weekend? What are our goals for the quarter? What kind of college is Leo going to?”
But how am I spending my time with him today when I pick them up from school? Am I going to go to the playground for an extra 10 minutes and maybe be late for a meeting? Am I going to have that moment of pure joy and laughter and time with my son — or am I going to worry about work and other things?
Bonus: Who do you want to hear the Secrets of… next?
Priyanka Ganjoo. She was at IPSY while I was there, and now she is the CEO and founder of Kulfi Beauty.
I am so obsessed with her. I'm obsessed with her as a founder. I'm obsessed with her brand's story and with everything they stand for. They're so creative, and their branding is freaking crushing it. I'm their biggest fangirl. I like and comment on everything they post. I just want them to be the number one beauty brand in the world. So, Priyanka.
And then a new creative partner and friend of mine named Sasha Gulish. She’s an amazing photographer and creative director. She leads everything with love.
I always gravitate toward creative partners who lead with love. And she does that so much. She also has a really beautiful mind when it comes to tapping into humanity and capturing souls and who people actually are versus what they look like. I'm so inspired by her, so I would love to hear her answer these questions, as well as Priyanka.
I know they would have so much cool, valuable, magical, stuff to say.
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About Me
I help early-stage founders create the kind of brands that get customers so obsessed, they’ll do your advertising for you.
Based on my experience founding my own consumer brand, I developed The Branding Sprint—a uniquely collaborative, streamlined, and agile approach to brand creation.
Click here to learn more about The Branding Sprint, or schedule a call with me.
Again, more wonderful insights. Thank you for sharing!