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The Hustle
Welcome to Byrdie’s series, The Hustle. We’re profiling diverse, interesting women and woman-aligned folks in the beauty and wellness industries who are usually behind-the-scenes. From the cosmetic chemists formulating your holy-grail serum to CFOs driving the biggest beauty companies forward, these women are the definition of career goals, and they’re getting real about the journeys that led them to where they are—the highs, the lows, and everything in between.
Ani Hadjinian has built a career at the intersection of beauty, business, and innovation. Over the past two decades, she’s helped shape the trajectory of some of the industry’s most influential brands—including Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, The Estée Lauder Companies, and Augustinus Bader.
With a rare ability to pair analytical rigor with an instinctive understanding of what beauty consumers crave, Hadjinian has built a career turning ambitious ideas into category-defining beauty businesses. Now, she’s bringing her wealth of experience to a new chapter as co-founder and CEO of POV Beauty, the beauty brand she launched alongside beauty creator Mikayla Nogueira in 2025.
We spoke with Hadjinian to dive into her career journey, the pivotal moments that shaped her leadership philosophy, and the lessons she’s learned from building some of beauty’s biggest brands and one of its newest.
How She Pivoted From Investment Banking to Beauty
“Beauty was always where I was headed; I just needed to build the foundation first. I grew up completely immersed in the beauty world. My mom was a serious beauty consumer across every category, and from a young age, I was fascinated by it. But I was also practical about my career. I knew that finance, and investment banking specifically, would give me something that most people who go straight into beauty never get: true business bedrock. The timing of [my pivot] was also very intentional. In banking, you hit a fork in the road fairly early, where you have to decide whether to stay on that track or get out, because the longer you stay, the higher the switching costs. I knew beauty was my end game, so I made the move before the golden handcuffs had a chance to close. Joining Estée Lauder Companies through internal M&A was the perfect bridge. It let me bring everything I had built in finance directly into an industry I had loved my whole life.”
The Biggest Career Risk She’s Taken
“The biggest recent risk was jumping into the creator-led beauty space to build POV Beauty alongside Mikayla. Coming from a traditional background leading legacy and luxury beauty brands like Tom Ford, Bobbi Brown, and Augustinus Bader, I was used to an environment where everything is hyper-curated, and anything outside of perfection is pulled from public view. The risk was layered. There were the career optics of walking away from legacy luxury for a space that still needed proof. There was the real question of whether creator-led brands had genuine longevity or were just a moment. And then there was the most personal risk of all: staking my professional reputation on someone else’s personal brand. But when I spent time with Mikayla, I learned more about her, and I was hooked.”
How She’s Approached Mentorship
“Not a single one of [my] relationships started with me asking someone to be my mentor. It was always organic. It was proximity, observation, someone pulling me into a room I had no business being, but he/she knew I could add value, someone going to bat for me behind closed doors because my work and my output had delivered multiple home runs for them, someone giving me an opportunity because they saw my full potential before a formalized HR process would accept it. That is what real mentorship looks like in practice.”
The Best Advice She’s Received
“Quantity will lead to excellence, so just do it…iterate and do it again. I live and die by this.”
The Worst Advice She’s Received
“You need a steering committee to make decisions. In theory, it sounds reasonable. Get the right people in the room, build alignment, and move together. In practice, it is one of the greatest killers of momentum. By the time a committee agrees on anything, the moment has passed, the energy is diluted, and whatever you started with has been compromised beyond recognition.”
The Gap POV Beauty Is Filling
“We saw a massive gap at the intersection of skincare and makeup. Mikayla noticed from her years in beauty retail and content creation that so many people struggle with makeup simply because they don’t know how to prep their skin properly. When people piece together primers and moisturizers from different brands, the formulas often clash and pill. We built POV Beauty to offer a streamlined, cohesive system designed specifically to layer beautifully under makeup.”
Why Mikayla and Ani’s Partnership Works
“We are a true yin and yang partnership. Mikayla’s superpower is an incredible, bulletproof connection to her massive community and an innate understanding of how to drive digital conversation. My superpower is operational execution, fusing rigorous, data-driven business insights with a creative sensibility to scale the business, manage supply chains, and build a lasting brand infrastructure that can sustain that massive social momentum.”
Her Day-to-Day Responsibilities
“I’m deeply involved in shaping the overall strategy of the brand—defining what we’re building, why it matters, and how it shows up in the market—while also working closely across product development, formulation, and packaging decisions to ensure everything we launch is both high-performance and aligned with our skin-prep philosophy. A big part of my role is also translating that vision into execution, which means collaborating across marketing, PR, and retail to build cohesive go-to-market plans and ensuring every launch is fully supported from both creative and commercial standpoints. I spend a significant amount of time on external-facing work as well, including partnerships, press, and investor conversations.”
The Most Challenging Part of Her Job
“The most challenging part is every part. It’s really hard to start something from nothing and do it all live in front of a ‘studio audience,’ if you will. Every mistake, every failure, is looked at through a microscopic lens and dissected until nothing is left to see that hasn’t already been seen.”
The Most Rewarding Part of Her Job
“The most rewarding part is seeing the vision come to life and watching people interact with the brand and the products in real life. For every comment people make about the brand—from the clean packaging, the clever naming convention, the beautiful formulation—there’s a memory, a story, and most likely a trauma trigger associated with the reference. Every part of the build is forever imprinted in my memory, which beautifully captures the history of our brand.”
Her Go-To Power Look
“Skin prep, of course. My makeup skills are definitely not at the same level as Mikayla’s, though it does include all key items from each makeup category—brow pencil, brow gel, liner, neutral shadow, and mascara. I’m a fan of cushion foundation and cushion blush. The fashion is where the power play comes in. It depends on the season, but I definitely go for something timeless with an edge. Always paired with a good pair of heels, of course.”
The Legacy She Hopes to Leave
“I hope my lasting impact on the beauty and wellness industry is helping shift the focus from surface-level results to skin health, texture, and how products actually perform in real life over time. I want to be part of a broader move away from overly prescriptive beauty standards and toward a more intuitive, ingredient-led approach where formulation integrity and sensorial experience matter just as much as aesthetics. More personally, I want my legacy to represent building a brand that stayed close to its community—listening, iterating, and creating products with real input from the people who use them—while proving that indie, founder-led brands can still lead in innovation without compromising on quality or intention.”
What Her Younger Self Would Think of Her Career Today
“The fact that she/I started a company while living in Paris….I can just feel the giddiness in my younger self knowing that’s what she has to look forward to.”
Read the original article on Byrdie
