Kate McLeod on bringing a baking background to beauty: 'The pastry chef in me came alive'

The road from investment banking to baking to beauty isn’t obvious, but it's a circuitous career path that led Kate McLeod to launch her eponymous skin-care brand.

“I was a trader at Goldman Sachs and ended up leaving Goldman and went to culinary school. I had a made-to-order bakery and I loved what I was doing, but then life always changes,” said McLeod on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. “Something very unexpected happened — I was living abroad — that brought me back to New York City in 2015.”

McLeod reunited with a former boyfriend, Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of Hinge, thanks to the help of a New York Times journalist, and the two married shortly thereafter. With her love life on track, McLeod started rediscovering her own passions and personal rituals. A chance introduction by her sister-in-law to solid cocoa butter, the key ingredient of her now hero body stones, led her to play with the material in a deeper way.

“The pastry chef in me came alive,” she said. “I also have a really long history and training of working with chocolate, so I took the cocoa butter into the kitchen and I thought, 'If I play with this, pretend I'm making a good ganache, what can I do to enhance that application process?’ That's really what sets us apart.”

Thanks to a key endorsement from Naomi Watts, McLeod went from handmaking her body stones for friends and family to selling 20 body stones in a day in Watts’ Onda Beauty and then 40 more on a weekend. It was then that McLeod went from wrapping her stones in parchment paper to repackaging them in canisters with an official brand label. Three years later, the line is now sold at QVC and Sephora.