Lexie Hull And Sarah Guller Built The Activewear Version Of Makeup

How A Pro Athlete And An Investor Are Rewriting What Long-Wear Actually Means.

Lexie Hull was in the middle of a WNBA season. Sarah Guller was in the middle of sixteen-hour days in private equity. On paper, the two former Stanford roommates didn't have much in common anymore besides a group chat. Then Hull mentioned that nothing in her makeup bag could survive a game, a travel day, or even practice. Guller admitted she'd been sneaking out of meetings to redo her own makeup in a bathroom mirror, wondering why nothing ever just stayed. Two completely different lives, somehow landing on the exact same complaint. That conversation became Forta, a performance cosmetics brand built on one deceptively simple idea: beauty products should work exactly as hard as the women wearing them. Here's how a locker room and a boardroom ended up building the same brand.

Two Different Worlds, One Identical Problem

Hull was drafted sixth overall by the Indiana Fever in the 2022 WNBA Draft, a genuine surprise pick after a Stanford career that included a national championship, two Final Fours, and three Pac-12 Tournament titles. Guller, meanwhile, was on the other coast building a career in private equity, spending her days evaluating consumer brands, including plenty in the beauty space.

Their now-famous catch-up conversation wasn't a business meeting. It was two friends comparing notes on a small, specific annoyance, until they realized it wasn't small at all. "That was the lightbulb moment," Guller says. "Two women, totally different lives, same problem." What turned the observation into an actual company was Guller's professional vantage point. She'd spent enough time evaluating beauty brands as an investor to notice a pattern: everyone claimed long-wear, almost no one engineered for it. "Nobody had actually built a brand with performance at its core, formulated for the way modern women actually live," she says. "As an investor, that kind of white space was glaring."

Pictured: Lexie Hull, via Instagram

An Industry Built For Sitting Still

Ask Hull and Guller why this gap existed in the first place, and the answer isn't flattering to the beauty industry. "Beauty was built by and for a very specific image of womanhood: the woman getting ready for a moment," Guller explains. "A photoshoot, a dinner, a red carpet. Beauty was something you preserved, not something that moved with you." For decades, nobody questioned it, because the people making the decisions weren't designing for the woman who sweats for a living, works a twelve-hour day, or goes from a workout to a meeting to a night out without a costume change in between.

That woman, they're quick to point out, was never actually missing. She just wasn't who the industry had in mind.

The Comparison They Keep Coming Back To

Hull and Guller talk about their category the way founders usually talk about a category they're trying to blow up, by pointing at the one next door that already got it right. "Activewear didn't succeed because women suddenly started working out," Guller says. "Women were always working out. It succeeded because someone finally decided to design for how those women actually lived instead of asking them to compromise." They believe beauty is having that same overdue moment right now, and Forta is betting its entire brand on it.

Building It Backwards, From Real Life Instead Of A Lab

Most beauty brands start with a formula and build outward. Forta built in the opposite direction. "The brief for every product starts with the same question: what does a busy woman's day actually look like?" Guller says. Not one task, but a relay: a workout, a work meeting, school pickup, dinner out, often without a single stop in between.

The WNBA Game Doubled As The Lab

That backwards approach meant the brand's testing had to be as unreasonable as the lives it was designing for. Before Forta's debut product, Lock & Go Setting Spray, ever reached a customer, Hull wore it through a full WNBA game: two and a half hours of live competition, full sweat, full contact. Guller wore it dancing through a Coachella set in ninety-degree heat. They tested it on other professional athletes, on women doing hot pilates, and on working mothers running from school drop-off straight into back-to-back meetings.

"If it couldn't hold up in those conditions, it didn't pass, and we'd try a new formula," Guller says. It's a genuinely low bar to clear on paper and a nearly impossible one in practice, which is exactly the point. Plenty of brands can print "long-wear" on a label. Not many can say their product survived a professional basketball game and mean it literally.

Pictured: Sarah Guller & Lexie Hull via Instagram

Killing The Touch-Up, On Purpose

Ask either founder what women get wrong about long-wear makeup, and they'll both land on the same misconception: that performance and beauty are opposites, that anything built to last has to feel heavy, sticky, or borderline suffocating by hour six. Women have also just quietly accepted touch-ups as a cost of doing business, taking a photo before the event starts because they already know they won't look the same after, ducking into a bathroom mirror mid-night out for damage control.

Forta was built to argue with both assumptions at once. Long-wear, in their world, isn't supposed to announce itself. "You should be able to put it on, walk out the door, and not think about it again," Guller says, "and it should still feel like nothing is there."

Strength And Beauty Were Never Actually In Tension

This is the part of the Forta story that reads less like a beauty pitch and more like a mission statement for anyone building something demanding of her own. For a long time, Guller says, the beauty industry's message to women was quietly consistent: slow down, sit still, look pretty. The ideal was always passive, a woman posed, polished, preserved. Forta was built as a direct rejection of that.

"The woman who runs a company, travels constantly, works out at 6am, and has dinner meetings at 8pm, all while wearing a full face of makeup, she's not choosing between ambition and femininity," Guller says. "She's both, at the same time, without apology."

Forta wasn't designed for a customer who has time to think about her makeup. It was designed for the one who doesn't, and refuses to compromise on either half of her day because of it.

Image via @fortacosmetics

Try It

Forta's debut product, Lock & Go Setting Spray, is $26 and built to do exactly what its name promises. Follow along at @fortacosmetics on Instagram, and use code BLOOM20 for 20% off.