Sephora selects Georgia beauty entrepreneurs for incubator

Even women with the drive to begin their own beauty businesses can use a boost.
By 2020, Atlanta-based beauty giant Sephora aims to build an "ecosystem of support" for 50 beauty businesses founded by women.
Two Georgia entrepreneurs will help set the tone for the social impact program, as part of the inaugural Accelerate class of eight female "fellows" hand-selected by Sephora and announced this week.

The first, Suzanne LeRoux, is founder of One Love Organics, producing micro-batches of ECOCERT® licensed natural and organic cosmetics at a facility in St. Simons Island, Georgia--one of just 10 such facilities licensed in the U.S. and the only one in Georgia
The second, Candace Mitchell, co-founded Atlanta's Myavana with Chanel Martin.
Positioning itself as the first hair-care recommendation system, Myavana performs analysis of customer hair strands at the microscopic level and then matches hair needs to hair products on the market. The company evolved from Techturized Inc., founded in June 2012 by four female engineers from Georgia Tech.
Though beauty industry consumers are overwhelmingly women and girls, female-owned beauty businesses are still underrepresented, and Sephora hopes to compensate with the Accelerate program.

Their requirements for this year's inaugural incubator class were businesses founded by a woman, headquartered in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, or Brazil, and sharing a passion for social good through their work, such as sourcing eco-friendly materials or donating sweat equity to charities.
They also looked for "early stage" businesses not yet distributing their products widely or carried by Sephora.
The fellows will receive an all-expenses paid trip to a boot camp in San Francisco in April, where they'll work on business models, market analysis, growth plans and funding strategy in preparation for a Demo Day in late August. The fellows also receive a $2,500 grant, mentoring, and possibly additional business funds.
The inaugural incubator Sephora Accelerate fellows include these eight entrepreneurs: