Happy Tuesday! You may have noticed we didn’t publish a Sunday letter this week and that’s because we dropped a SURPRISE article last Thursday: a juicy tell-all with the Hollister team about their A++++, very nostalgic campaign featuring the first-ever cover of Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” starring Gigi Perez.
Someone we love who works in PR (you know who you are) called this campaign “as genius as Michael Cera/CeraVe,” so if you had any doubts, it doesn’t get better than that. The highest praise.
Today, we have another FREE feature story, this time in our PEOPLE BRANDS AND SPORTS column, with the WNBA’s Lexie Hull and Sarah Guller - roommates at Stanford turned co-founders - who just launched FORTA, a new performance-first beauty brand (FOR) (T)he (A)ctive.
To be clear, this isn’t a promotional feature on a new beauty brand. It’s a deep dive into the origin of the brand and the broader culture of consumer brand–sport and brand–athlete sponsorships, told from the perspective of an all-star WNBA player.
If you’re a brand currently partnering with an athlete or thinking about it - whether through in-arena activations or otherwise - this article is for you. She breaks it all down, including a snapshot of how the beauty industry has evolved over the past few years. Just a taste:
“When I first started playing, beauty just wasn’t really part of the conversation around athletics. The focus was always on performance, and anything related to makeup or skincare felt kind of separate from being an athlete. There was almost this idea that if you cared about beauty, it meant you weren’t fully focused on the game.”
Oh, how that’s changed, as we all know. 10/10 recommend this mid-week read.
Let’s start with the people behind the brand - Lexie Hull and Sarah Guller.
Lexie Hull is a professional player in the WNBA. After years of wearing makeup through high school gyms, NCAA arenas, and WNBA games, she found that traditional formulas consistently failed to keep up with sweat, movement, and long days. She co-founded FORTA to create a beauty line that moves with life, not against it, with products that perform as hard as she does.
Her co-founder, Sarah Guller, is a former consumer investor at Summit Partners and The Chernin Group, where she worked across leading brands including Vuori, Brooklinen, and Dr. Squatch. As a Stanford University graduate, Sarah experienced firsthand how beauty products fell short during long, travel-heavy workdays, leading her to co-found FORTA as a solution for high-performing, always-on lifestyles.
This emphasis on performance is hardly surprising coming from a WNBA player - they understand its importance firsthand. But beyond lived experience, it’s also a strategic perspective, especially when considering where the category is headed. As we predicted last year, more and more brands activating in the sports arena are highlighting performance as a key reason behind these partnerships. Why? It shifts the narrative from “we wanted to activate in sports because it’s the cool thing to do” to “our products can actually perform under tough conditions - lasting through competition, strenuous activity, and beyond.”
Such is the case with the CoverGirl and Gabby Thomas partnership from January. As the brand explicitly noted in their press release, the long-lasting wear of the Eye Enhancer Wrap Tubing Mascara mirrors Gabby’s elite performance and endurance.
That sense of performance isn’t just a principle on paper at FORTA - it’s baked into the core of the brand. Take their Lock & Go Setting Spray, for example. It’s the first product in their lineup designed for real life, where long days, travel, sweat, and constant transitions are the norm. More than that, the 16-hour wear claim was sweat-tested by athletes, with the product helping keep makeup in place through workouts, heat, humidity, and long days, without smudging, caking, or feeling heavy.
To kick off the interview, we asked Sarah and Lexie about their origin story - including their personal pain points, what this “for active people” audience really means, and how those insights inform their product development strategy:
PBT: Can you walk us through the origin story of the brand? Was it born out of a personal need for high-performance, on-the-go beauty, or from recognizing the growing intersection between beauty and sport as a big opportunity?
Sarah Guller: Both! I spent the last three years of my career in private equity, investing in other beauty and personal care brands. I saw hundreds of brands come across my desk, but none of them ever focused on the active woman. And as a consumer myself, I could never find something truly long-lasting. I was always sneaking into the bathroom between meetings to quickly touch-up my makeup, which was especially awkward in a male dominated industry.
Coincidentally, my roommate from Stanford was now playing pro sports. I called up Lexie, who plays in the WNBA, and asked her what she wore during games. She said nothing worked, and that her makeup was always off by the end of a warmup, before the game ever started. We sort of had this moment of “Woah, it’s 2024. We have self-driving cars and AI - we should have makeup that stays by now”.
We created FORTA to respond directly to our own needs; for Lexie, it was wanting makeup that could last her athletic lifestyle. For me, it was wanting products that I could trust for a full day at work or a night out at a music festival. For both of us, it was a brand that resonates with the woman who doesn’t slow down.
PBT: Your brand is built around people on the move - whether that’s busy consumers or professional athletes. How are you thinking about balancing those audiences in your marketing and comms?
SG: Fun fact: studies have shown that between a man and woman who workout at similar levels, the man is more likely to self-identify as an “athlete”. In other words, even a woman who runs marathons or is a competitive biker will seldom call herself an “athlete”. But the truth is that most women are active on the daily. Whether she’s a working mom, someone who loves to run, a pilates princess, or a busy professional, the active woman is on the go in some shape or form. We want this brand to resonate with all of those women.
In our comms, we focus a lot on language like “for the active” rather than “for athletes”. We also have a strict rule about never using language that could alienate the everyday woman, such as “on the court” or showing hyper athlete-focused visuals. We’ve been intentional about showing imagery of different types of the active woman, whether that’s a party girl at the club all night or a yoga addict.
Our whole motto here is that you don’t have to sit still to look pretty. If FORTA products work for Lexie playing sports at the highest of levels, they’ll work for you and me.
PBT: How does that perspective shape your product development strategy? What kinds of products or innovations can we expect from the brand?
SG: All of our products are focused on being sweat-proof and designed for motion. “Long-wear” isn’t a new concept - but for most brands, it’s a marketing shtick. For us, it’s the core identity of our brand. FORTA products are tested by professional athletes through heat, movement, and long days. I’m proud to say our setting spray has 16-hour wear, and at the same time, it’s safe for your skin. In fact, our setting spray only has 10 ingredients - it was really important to us to not sacrifice safety in the name of performance.
I can’t give away our secret sauce but we’ve focused on developing formulas that last through sweat. The salt in sweat is what breaks down products, and that ends up being at the core of all of our R&D. FORTA consumers can expect to see one-of-a-kind formulations that are built for motion above all.
PBT: Many beauty brands are entering the sports space through partnerships or performance-led products. How do you plan to approach this differently as a brand founded by a player with firsthand experience?
Lexie Hull: The biggest difference is that FORTA is coming from real, lived experience first. We’ve been working on the brand for almost two years now, and during that time we’ve watched a lot of beauty brands start trying to enter the sports space. Most of the time it’s through partnerships or marketing campaigns with athletes, which can be great, but the products themselves weren’t really built with athletes or active lifestyles in mind from the beginning.
Honestly, seeing that happen validated the gap we saw in the market even more. It showed that brands recognize athletes and sports audiences are important, but plugging an athlete into a campaign isn’t the same thing as designing products around the realities of living an active life.
For me, the starting point is always the environment we’re actually in - sweating through workouts, long travel days, running from training to meetings or events, and needing products that truly last and feel good on your skin. Because I live that lifestyle, product development starts with those moments. It’s asking questions like: Will this hold up through a workout? Does it still look good after sweating? Is it easy to throw on in a locker room, gym bathroom, or on the go?
And while my perspective comes from being an athlete, FORTA has always been about the active woman more broadly. It’s for anyone who is moving through full, busy, high-energy days and wants products that can keep up with that. Athletes are obviously part of that community, but so are women who work out, travel, run around all day, or just want makeup that performs with them instead of against them.
At the end of the day, the goal with FORTA isn’t to try to plug athletes into beauty. It’s to build performance-driven beauty for the active woman from the ground up.
And yes - having the opportunity to speak with a WNBA founder meant we had to step back from FORTA and ask about her perspective on the beauty landscape as a whole. Specifically, we discussed how she has seen the conversation around beauty in sports evolve since she started her career, which types of beauty sponsorships and partnerships actually resonate with WNBA players, and what we can expect when it comes to FORTA activating in-arenas and other IRL activations:
PBT: From your perspective as a player, how have you seen the beauty landscape evolve over the course of your career? In particular, how has the way beauty shows up within sports changed from when you first started playing to today?
LH: From my perspective as a player, the beauty landscape in sports has evolved a lot. When I first started playing, beauty just wasn’t really part of the conversation around athletics. The focus was always on performance, and anything related to makeup or skincare felt kind of separate from being an athlete. There was almost this idea that if you cared about beauty, it meant you weren’t fully focused on the game.
Now it feels completely different. Athletes are much more comfortable showing all parts of who they are, and beauty is just another way people express themselves. Social media has played a big role in that shift because fans get to see more of our lives outside of competition, like getting ready for games, traveling, training, and just everyday routines. Beauty naturally fits into that.
I also think brands are starting to recognize that athletes have different needs. We’re sweating, we’re outside, we’re traveling constantly, and we need products that actually perform with us, not just look good for five minutes. That’s something I’ve thought a lot about personally, and it’s part of what inspired me to start building products that really work for an active lifestyle.
Overall, I think the biggest change is that beauty and athleticism aren’t seen as opposites anymore. You can be competitive and focused on performance while also caring about how you show up and how you express yourself. That shift has made the space feel a lot more authentic for athletes today.
PBT: We’re seeing more beauty brands activate in arenas and partner with teams. From your vantage point, what kinds of partnerships actually resonate with players and fans?
LH: From my perspective, the partnerships that resonate most with players and fans are the ones that feel like they genuinely belong in the broader ecosystem around sports. That ecosystem has grown a lot — it’s not just the game itself anymore. It’s everything around it: the routines, the tunnel walks, the community, the culture, and the lifestyle that comes with being part of sports.
“…it’s not just the game itself anymore. It’s everything around it: the routines, the tunnel walks, the community, the culture, and the lifestyle that comes with being part of sports.”
The partnerships that work best understand that bigger picture. Fans can usually tell when something is just placed in an arena for visibility versus when it actually connects to the environment and the people in it. When a brand naturally fits into how players and fans experience the sport, it feels much more authentic.
For players, that means brands that understand the realities of our routines. The long days at the arena, workouts, travel, and often having to transition quickly between different parts of the day are just parts of it. When a brand really understands that lifestyle, it feels more like a true partnership than just a sponsorship.
For fans, I think the most impactful activations tap into the culture around game day - how people show up, get ready, and experience the event together.
That’s also how we think about FORTA. As the ecosystem around sports continues to grow, we see the brand fitting naturally into that space, especially for active women who are part of it in so many different ways, whether they’re competing, training, or just living really active lives.
“For fans, I think the most impactful activations tap into the culture around game day - how people show up, get ready, and experience the event together.”
PBT: Should we expect to see the brand showing up in arenas or through team partnerships in the near future?
LH: The sports ecosystem is growing fast, and beauty is naturally becoming part of it through arena activations, team partnerships, or moments that really connect with fans. We’ve seen brands lean into this in a big way, and we hope to do the same. This would be a first-of-its-kind partnership, with FORTA being an active, player-founded brand- but we do see ourselves showing up in that space eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later!).
That said, our priority has always been building the brand and products the right way first. We’ve spent almost two years focused on development, making sure what we’re creating actually performs for active women.
Arenas and teams are exciting because that’s where the culture around sports really lives. Fans are showing up, players are arriving, people are getting ready for the game- it’s all part of the experience. Long term, we absolutely see FORTA fitting into that ecosystem in a way that feels authentic and adds value for both players and fans.
“Fans are showing up, players are arriving, people are getting ready for the game- it’s all part of the experience. Long term, we absolutely see FORTA fitting into that ecosystem in a way that feels authentic and adds value for both players and fans.”
And it’s not just about visibility. If we show up in arenas or with teams, it will be because it genuinely makes sense for the community we’re building and the women we’re designing products for.
We can 100% see FORTA products being part of Sephora’s Parachute Drop activations at upcoming Unrivaled games, or the brand running OOH campaigns at Gainbridge Fieldhouse during Indiana Fever games next season. The possibilities are endless, especially, as Lexie says, being an active, player-founded brand.
A big thank you to Lexie and Sarah for taking the time. To say we’re excited about this one is an understatement, and we’re especially excited to study how their marketing efforts, as a brand founded by a player, differ from beauty brands trying to activate in this space from the outside in. More to come soon…