Category Failure, Diagnosed
Walk any beauty aisle in Canada and count the Indigenous-owned brands. Before 2016, the answer was zero.
According to Statistics Canada, Indigenous people represent roughly five percent of Canada's population, yet until Jenn Harper, nobody at shelf level was building for, by, or about Indigenous people. Not a foundation shade. Not a campaign. Not a face.
Harper saw the gap from the inside.
An Anishinaabe woman from Northwest Angle 33 First Nation, raised in the Niagara Region by her white mother and disconnected from much of her Indigenous family for most of her life, she spent years feeling ashamed of the very feature she would later name her company after.
The diagnosis wasn't just representation.
It was waste.
Beauty is one of the world's most extractive consumer categories, generating billions of units of packaging every year. Harper looked at her culture's principle of considering the impact of decisions seven generations into the future and saw an industry that couldn't think past next quarter.
Two failures. One brand built to answer both.
The Dream
The origin story is literal.
Harper got sober on November 26, 2014, after years battling alcoholism.
Two months later, she dreamed of Indigenous girls laughing, rosy-cheeked and covered in lip gloss.
She woke up at two in the morning, opened her laptop, and started writing.
At the time, she worked in sales in the seafood industry.
Cheekbone Beauty was a nights-and-weekends project.
A basement side hustle.
One employee.
One family friend.
Around the same time, Harper learned more about her family's history.
Her grandmother, Emily Paul, was a residential school survivor.
The trauma moved through her grandparents to her father to Jenn and her siblings. Sobriety and that discovery happened in the same window.
She has said Cheekbone is her healing journey.
She built the company in her grandmother's honour.
The Cost
In 2016, as Cheekbone Beauty launched, Harper lost her brother, B.J.
He was the person constantly sending her stories about Indigenous people doing extraordinary things.
Only after his death did she fully understand why.
As Harper has said, representation saves lives.
He became the reason behind the mission.
She has since lost a second brother to addiction and continues building.
This is the part of the story that doesn't appear on a Sephora shelf.
The brand wasn't built despite the trauma. It was built as an answer to it.
Intergenerational trauma.
Addiction.
Suicide.
Cultural erasure.
Cheekbone Beauty was designed to push back against all of it.
What She Built
Cheekbone Beauty — Canada's first Indigenous-owned and founded cosmetics company.
Started with $500 in a basement.
Now sold through Sephora Canada and more than 600 JCPenney locations across the United States.
The company's product philosophy is built around Two-Eyed Seeing:
One eye Indigenous wisdom.
One eye Western science.
Both open.
The line is clean, vegan, cruelty-free, and formulated in Cheekbone's in-house lab in St. Catharines.
Its Sustain Lipstick Collection was designed around Life Cycle Thinking:
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Less waste in.
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Less waste out.
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Compostable packaging.
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Waterless formulas.
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Mail-back recycling programs.
And the campaigns go beyond cosmetics.
The #GlossedOver collection named products after communities living under long-term drinking water advisories.
Beauty as advocacy.
Lip gloss as awareness.
Products with a purpose.
Capital, Not Campaigns
In 2019, Jenn Harper walked into Dragons' Den seeking $100,000.
She received an offer.
She turned it down rather than give up a controlling stake in the company.
The exposure worked anyway.
Soon after, Raven Indigenous Capital Partners invested $350,000, alongside additional funding from Desjardins.
The capital allowed Cheekbone Beauty to move from white-label manufacturing to proprietary products.
By 2021, the company had completely reformulated its line.
Its own lab.
Its own chemist.
Its own formulations.
Then came the retail dominoes.
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More than 600 JCPenney locations across the United States.
Harper has described standing at Toronto's Eaton Centre fountain, looking up at a Sephora billboard featuring her brand, and crying.
Industry Rebranded
The beauty industry didn't make room for Cheekbone Beauty.
Cheekbone Beauty forced the industry to rethink what beauty could look like.
Sephora Canada has committed to increasing representation of BIPOC-owned brands across its assortment.
The category Harper entered with virtually no Indigenous representation now looks very different than it did a decade ago.
That's not a trend she benefited from.
It's infrastructure she helped build.
Harper's goal is equally ambitious: To become the first Indigenous woman to build a billion-dollar business.
Not a billion-dollar Indigenous business.
A billion-dollar business.
Period.
She also rejects the idea that Cheekbone Beauty exists only for Indigenous consumers.
As Harper has said:
"We would never ask Lancôme if they were just for French people."
The roots are Indigenous.
The market is everyone.
The Proof
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Canada's first Indigenous-owned and founded cosmetics company.
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Started with $500 in a basement. Now sold through Sephora Canada and 600+ JCPenney locations.
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More than $250,000 donated to organizations including Shannen's Dream, the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society, the Navajo Water Project, and One Tree Planted.
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Certified B Corporation.
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Creator of the #GlossedOver campaign.
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Named one of WXN's Top 100 Most Powerful Women in Canada.
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Recipient of an Honorary Doctor of Laws from Brock University.
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More than a decade sober.
And perhaps the most important proof point isn't measurable.
A mother once wrote to Harper about her adopted Indigenous daughter receiving a Cheekbone postcard featuring Indigenous models.
The little girl looked at the image and said:
"They look like me."
Then she slept with the postcard.
The BFT Take
Jenn Harper didn't have a background in beauty or chemistry. She had a dream, a brother she lost, and a grandmother whose story carried a century of trauma. She started with $500 in a basement and no roadmap.
Her edge wasn't talent or capital. It was consistency.
She showed up. Every day. For ten years.
She didn't wait for the beauty industry to include Indigenous people.
She built a door that didn't exist, held it open, and is now watching others walk through it.
Sephora didn't come calling because the market was ready.
Sephora came calling because she made them ready.
That's not a brand story. That's infrastructure. And infrastructure is what Built For This exists to document.
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