It all started at a mom's night out. Kelly Kreusler walked into the event not knowing anyone, hoping to meet some new friends in her area. Little did she know that the woman she'd sit next to would become not just her best friend, but also her business partner in building a clean beauty brand.

Join Bora Celik as he chats with Kelly Kreusler, co-founder of Crunchi.

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Kelly and Melanie Petschke hit it off immediately. Both were expecting their second children and shared a growing interest in living a healthier lifestyle. As they transitioned to natural products - from laundry detergent to food - they kept running into the same frustrating problem with makeup.

"We would find brands that had beautiful ingredients, they had all safe ingredients, nothing potentially harmful in them. The ingredient label looked great," Kelly recalls. "You had to use the product and it was a terrible experience. The foundation would get stuck, it would barely spread on your face. You would put eyeshadow on and mascara on and an hour later, you'd be like, 'I don't even have any on.'"

The solution came from an unexpected source - Kelly's husband. "Why don't you all just create your own?" he suggested. Their initial reaction was skeptical: "No way. We're not chemists. We're not formulators. We're not makeup artists. How could we do that?"

But his encouragement led them to start making calls to manufacturers and makeup artists. Many doors slammed shut. "A lot of people said no, not interested at all, don't even want to talk to you," Kelly shares. But they persisted.

The biggest challenge wasn't just finding manufacturers—it was finding ones who truly understood their vision of clean beauty. Kelly remembers one pivotal meeting in which a manufacturer pushed them to compromise on ingredients, promising it would be cheaper and faster to market.

The car ride after that meeting proved decisive. "I'll never forget," Kelly says. "I said to Mel, 'What do you think?' And she looked at me and she was like, 'Absolutely not.' She said, 'If we're going to do this, we're going to do it right or we're not going to do it at all.'"

That conviction became their north star. Melanie, whom Kelly describes as "a guru when it comes to ingredients," would spend entire nights researching new ingredients. If she found any data suggesting potential harm, it was an immediate no.

When Crunchi finally launched in 2016, it was far from a grand affair. They started with just a handful of products - foundation in four or five shades, lip gloss, a few brushes, and three eyeshadows. Orders had to be placed by phone. Fulfillment happened in Kelly's guest bedroom. Their launch party? A gathering at Kelly's house where they invited friends to try the products.

"You don't need all that stuff," Kelly reflects. "We didn't have a huge marketing plan. We just had some products that we were like, 'Gosh, these are really good. Let's start sharing them and get some feedback.'"

Today, Kelly sees the clean beauty marketplace as "messy" - a multi-billion dollar phenomenon where authentic brands compete with what she calls "pretenders and greenwashers." But Crunchi's mission remains clear: "One of our goals for the next three to five years is to become the most recognized, trusted brand in clean beauty. Not just to be recognized, but to be recognized for being trusted."

Looking ahead, Kelly and her team are excited about expanding into body care products. "We spend so much time and attention on our skin from the neck up," she notes. "We forget that we have skin from the neck down that needs attention, it needs quality ingredients, it needs to be treated just as well as our faces."

It's a long way from that chance meeting at a mom's night out. But the conviction that drove two friends to start a clean beauty brand remains unchanged: do it right, or don't do it at all.


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