A Decade of Industry Experience That Almost Didn’t Lead Anywhere
Amy Liu spent more than 15 years inside the beauty industry – working in senior roles at Kate Sommerville and Josie Maran – before she built a single product under her own name. She had the contacts, the category knowledge, and the personal motivation: a lifelong battle with chronic eczema and sensitive skin that had shaped how she thought about every formula she ever touched. And still, she didn’t feel ready. That hesitation lasted until she was 40 years old, when a former business school classmate asked her, point-blank, what she was waiting for.
That classmate didn’t just ask the question – she offered to back the answer with money. From there, Liu reached out to other friends and family, all of whom agreed to invest in her vision. Tower28 was funded, from the very beginning, by the people who already knew her. Seven years later, the brand moves a product every 10 seconds inside Sephora.
What Sensitive Skin Actually Had to Do With It
Sensitive skin is a category the beauty industry has gestured at for years without particularly committing to it. Fragrance-free labels get slapped on thick creams. “Gentle” formulas still contain the same five irritants in smaller concentrations. Liu built Tower28 around something more specific – the reality of living with skin that reacts constantly, regardless of price point or brand reputation.
She had that experience herself. Chronic eczema isn’t an occasional inconvenience; it’s a condition that dictates which products you can use, which ones you have to throw away after one application, and which marketing claims you’ve learned to distrust completely. Working at companies that specialized in efficacy gave Liu a technical foundation, but it was the personal experience that shaped what Tower28’s product development would actually prioritize. Sensitive skin wasn’t a marketing angle for her – it was the reason the brand exists.
The brand has since attracted a genuinely wide range of customers. Essential workers, gym-goers, celebrities, and influencers have all found their way into Tower28’s customer base. Hailey Bieber is among the notable names publicly associated with the brand, alongside creator Toni Bravo, who appeared alongside Liu on the podcast Naked Beauty. That range isn’t accidental – it reflects the fact that eczema and skin sensitivity don’t belong to any one demographic, income bracket, or lifestyle.
What Liu built is a brand where the constraint became the product. The restriction of developing for reactive, sensitive skin forced a rigor in formulation that less specialized brands don’t necessarily apply. That discipline shows up in the retention numbers, even if the detail that tends to get the most attention is the Sephora sell-through rate.
Growing Up in Los Angeles, Between Cultures
Liu grew up in Los Angeles, but not in a Chinese-American neighborhood – in a predominantly white community, which shaped her experience of identity in ways she has spoken about directly. Her parents had made the decision to move to America, bringing with them a set of expectations and values that included, notably, entrepreneurial thinking. Her father was himself an entrepreneur. And yet, when Liu started moving toward building Tower28, he tried to talk her out of it.
That detail is worth sitting with. A father who built something of his own, actively discouraging his daughter from doing the same. The friction there is specific and familiar to many first- and second-generation Americans who find that their parents’ immigration calculus – risk taken once, stability protected forever after – doesn’t map neatly onto their own ambitions. Liu pushed through that resistance, and through the internal hesitation that kept her in other people’s companies for over a decade before she built her own.
What She Did With the Platform Once She Had It
Running Tower28 means operating as CEO while also being a mother and, by her own description, a lifelong advocate for clean beauty. Those roles don’t always pull in the same direction, and Liu hasn’t pretended otherwise. Her leadership style, as she describes it, is defined as much by what she’s witnessed as by any formal training – she has been candid about having worked for some genuinely poor managers early in her career, and has used that experience as a negative blueprint.
In the summer of 2020, she launched Clean Beauty Summer School, a professional development initiative designed to educate others in the industry. It was a deliberate use of visibility – taking the platform that comes with running a growing brand and pointing it outward rather than just inward. The timing, mid-pandemic and mid-reckoning across industries about who gets access to knowledge and mentorship, made the project land with particular weight.
Tower28 is now seven years old. The brand that started with friends’ investments and a founder who almost didn’t bet on herself is selling a product every 10 seconds in one of the most competitive retail environments in beauty. Liu is still asked, in interviews and on podcasts, what finally made her take the leap at 40. The real answer might be less inspirational than people expect – someone she trusted asked the right question at the right time, and then put money behind it. Whether the next founder waiting in the wings has someone in their life willing to do the same is a different question entirely.
