Sephora champions 15 female beauty entrepreneurs with 2019 business program

Beauty giant Sephora has welcomed 15 new female entrepreneurs to its fold, as part of its 2019 Sephora Accelerate Cohort program.

The retailer has selected its largest number of female founders to date as part of its 2019 cohort, bringing the total number of women who have benefitted from the program in the four years it has existed to 46. The founders will benefit from months of mentoring and feedback, a week-long bootcamp, networking opportunities and monetary grants -- all with the aim of helping them to develop their businesses.

"We first launched Accelerate in 2016 with the goal of growing the number of female founders within the beauty industry, and to date all Accelerate participants that have aimed to land in retail have done so, including Sephora," said Corrie Conrad, Vice President, Sephora Stands and Diversity & Inclusion for Sephora, in a statement. "We are proud of the community we've built so far, as we track toward our goal of supporting more than 50 women by the end of 2020."

The women who made the cut for this year's edition of the program come from a total of eight different countries, and include Julie Corbett, whose Ecologic Brands has developed the world's first paper bottle made from recycled cardboard, and Natasha Dhayagude, whose Chinova Bioworks has come up with a natural, clean-label preservative extracted from mushrooms for use in the cosmetics industry. Greta Fitz, whose startup Ascention provides a self-care fragrance collection that helps people heal, has also been selected, alongside Marie Cadilhac, whose Anagem brand is made of 95% natural ingredients that support growth for hair, lashes, brows and beards. Patricia Camargo -- the cofounder of CARE Natural Beauty, an organic Brazilian brand, and Elena Muñoz, whose Polvos Magicos label makes organic superfood-based skincare products using locally sourced ingredients native to Mexico, have also been welcomed onto the program.

The Accelerate program is part of the company's wider 'Sephora Stands' social impact strategy, which focuses on issues relating to entrepreneurs, communities in transition, Sephora employees and the planet.