An investor told her nobody would buy makeup from a woman who looked like her. She got ten minutes on live television to prove him wrong. She spent them taking her makeup off.
It was September 2010. Jamie Kern Lima had quit her job as a morning news anchor two years earlier to build a makeup company out of her Studio City living room with her husband Paulo.
She had rosacea. Nothing on the market covered it under studio lights, so she made something that did.
Then she spent two years hearing no.
Retailer after retailer passed. Investors passed. She went three years without paying herself a salary.
One investor told her he was not sure anyone would buy makeup from someone who "looked like her."
Then a QVC buyer spotted her concealer at a trade show and offered her a single ten-minute segment.
The terms were simple. Sell 6,000 units in ten minutes, or do not come back.
She and Paulo took out a loan to buy those 6,000 units. Anything that did not sell came back to them as debt.
She nearly pulled out of the segment.
Then she went on air and broke from the script.
She wiped the makeup off her own face on live television and showed the camera her rosacea. Her models were not models. They were women of every age, size and skin tone.
Around the nine-minute mark the host started calling out shades. Deep, sold out. Medium, sold out.
At ten minutes, all 6,000 were gone.
That is the part people leave out. The moment that made her did not come from hiding the thing she was insecure about. It came from showing it.
Then Jamie broke the script for good:
↳ 101 QVC airings the following year, and more than 1,000 live shows over time ↳ Built IT Cosmetics into the largest beauty brand on the network ↳ Reached $182 million in net sales by 2016 ↳ Sold to L'Oréal that year for $1.2 billion in cash, its biggest acquisition in eight years ↳ Became the first female CEO of a brand in L'Oréal's 100-plus year history
The hardest part was never the ten minutes. It was the two years before them, when nobody was watching and every answer was no.
Here is how she puts it now:
"Rejection isn't a failure. It means that you're one of the brave ones who is willing to go for it!"
Jamie did not win because she got rejected. Getting rejected is not a strategy and it is not rare.
She won because she stopped trying to look like what buyers said would sell, and showed them what she actually was. The rejection was the price of that, not the cause of it.
Most of us edit ourselves before the pitch. We sand down the thing that makes us different, because we assume it is the reason we keep hearing no.
Usually it is the only thing we have that nobody else does.
Find the part of your story you have been keeping out of the room. That is usually the part that sells.