Mally Roncal and Sarah Cheung on Virality, Product Innovation, and Building a Beauty Brand for the Long Haul

Twenty years can separate two entrepreneurs in age, experience, and media environment without separating them very much at all in how they build.

That became clear when celebrity makeup artist and entrepreneur Mally Roncal sat down with Sarah Chung, co-founder of Sacheu Beauty, for an episode of Forbes’ The Exchange. Roncal built Mally Beauty in an era when television shopping could turn a product into an overnight sensation. Chung built Sacheu in an era when one TikTok, celebrity mention, or customer video can do the same thing.

Different generations. Different platforms. Surprisingly similar lessons.

Their conversation offers a useful reminder for any early-stage founder: the distribution channels may change, but enduring businesses are still built around product insight, customer trust, calculated risk, and the ability to survive after attention moves somewhere else.

Start With a Problem You Actually Understand

Roncal did not begin with a spreadsheet showing an attractive category opportunity.

She began as a working celebrity makeup artist.

After years of creating looks for high-profile clients, she found herself repeatedly explaining the same techniques to magazines. Customers wanted to know how to recreate celebrity makeup, but the dominant format at the time was written instruction.

Roncal saw an opportunity to turn her techniques into products and then use QVC to teach customers how to use them herself.

When Mally Beauty launched on QVC on March 5, 2005, its one-hour show sold out in 36 minutes.

The important lesson isn’t simply that QVC worked. It’s that Roncal had built products around problems she had already encountered hundreds of times in the real world.

Chung followed a similar path decades later.

Sacheu initially launched with skincare tools, including a stainless-steel alternative to traditional stone gua sha tools. Chung had grown up around gua sha in Hong Kong and noticed that Western marketing often focused on the supposed properties of the stone itself.

Her insight was much more practical: the benefits came from the cooling effect and facial massage, while traditional porous materials could be harder to keep clean.

So she changed the material.

That is a powerful place for entrepreneurs to begin: not “What can we sell?” but “What frustration have we seen closely enough to solve differently?”

Virality Works Better When the Product Creates the Content

Sacheu’s biggest breakout moment came with its lip liner stain.

The product contains its own visual hook. It goes on dark, sits on the lips, and is then removed to reveal a long-lasting stain underneath.

That transformation made the product naturally suited to social video.

Chung acknowledged that the brand itself could not take all the credit for the virality. The application process gave creators something visually interesting to show, while the product’s performance gave customers a reason to keep talking about it.

Then Billie Eilish posted herself using the lip liner stain just days before Christmas.

Chung’s initial reaction was excitement.

For about three minutes.

Then came the operational reality.

Demand was about to surge, and she and her co-founder immediately began calling suppliers to increase production.

Roncal understood the feeling. Her first QVC sellout created essentially the same challenge two decades earlier.

The platforms were different. The founder problem was identical.

Attention can arrive faster than inventory.

And virality is valuable only if your company can turn it into customer trust.

Roncal offered an especially useful tactic for founders facing a sellout: have something adjacent ready to offer customers when the hero product is unavailable.

A viral moment might disappear tomorrow. The relationship with the customer doesn’t have to.

Your Customers May Show You What to Build Next

One of Sacheu’s smartest product-development signals came from watching customers misuse a product.

After the lip stain took off, customers started applying it beyond their lips—using stain formulas on their cheeks, eyes, and even for contour.

Instead of dismissing those behaviors, Chung’s team paid attention.

Those unconventional use cases revealed unmet demand for stain formulas across additional beauty categories, helping guide Sacheu’s product expansion.

For early-stage entrepreneurs, this is one of the most actionable lessons from the conversation.

Customer research does not always require a formal survey.

Sometimes it looks like:

• reading comments and DMs,
• talking to customers at events,
• watching how people actually use your product,
• noticing repeated requests,
• and paying attention when customers invent uses you never planned.

Your community may be conducting product research for you in public.

Great Products Can Still Fail Without Distribution

Chung also shared a less glamorous lesson.

After Sacheu’s early skincare tools gained momentum, the company launched a four-product skincare line. Chung believed in the formulations, but the brand was still small and could not put enough marketing behind the products.

The result: good products that struggled to move.

That experience changed how the company approached launches.

A founder can spend months perfecting a product and still underestimate the second half of the equation: getting customers to notice, understand, and repeatedly choose it.

As Chung put it, even a strong product can simply sit on the shelf without sufficient marketing support.

Roncal had her own failures over more than two decades of entrepreneurship, including products she strongly believed customers would want.

Her philosophy is one worth borrowing:

“You never lose. You always learn.”

Failure becomes especially valuable when founders are willing to treat a disappointing launch as information rather than an identity crisis.

What assumption was wrong?

Was the problem the product, positioning, timing, education, pricing, or distribution?

The answers can make the next launch dramatically stronger.

Copycats Are a Sign of Validation—and a Strategic Threat

Both founders also discussed what happens after innovation works: competitors copy it.

Chung watched the beauty industry embrace lip stains and lip liner stains after Sacheu gained traction. Roncal remembered seeing larger brands introduce products—and even marketing language—that resembled concepts she had pioneered.

Their reactions evolved from frustration to a more complicated kind of pride.

Copycats validate that you changed the market.

But they also expose an uncomfortable reality: product innovation alone is rarely a permanent moat.

That makes brand, community, execution speed, intellectual property protection, and continued product development even more important.

Chung drew a clear boundary when competitors use her company’s actual photos in marketing. Her lawyer, she joked, receives plenty of screenshots.

For founders, the takeaway is simple: build quickly, document what you create, protect what can be protected, and never assume being first means you can stop innovating.

The Hardest Lesson About Longevity Has Nothing to Do With Business

Near the end of the conversation, Chung asked Roncal the question almost every ambitious young founder eventually wrestles with:

How do you build a career that lasts instead of becoming another five-year viral success story?

Roncal’s answer wasn’t about social media, product strategy, or capital.

It was about life.

“Don’t forget that you’re a person first.”

She talked about protecting time with her husband and children, creating boundaries around business travel, and recognizing that professional success cannot return moments with family that have already passed.

That advice carried additional weight because Roncal lost her mother at 49. Crossing her own 50th birthday changed the way she looked at time, ambition, and what she still wanted to create.

After more than two decades associated primarily with beauty, Roncal is now thinking more broadly about a lifestyle brand spanning fashion, handbags, jewelry, home, and beauty.

It is a reminder that longevity does not always mean doing the same thing forever.

Sometimes longevity means giving yourself permission to evolve.

The Founder Advantage That Never Goes Out of Style

QVC and TikTok appear to belong to completely different entrepreneurial eras.

Yet Roncal and Chung reveal how little the fundamentals have changed.

Find a problem you understand deeply.

Create something meaningfully different.

Listen obsessively to customers.

Prepare operationally for attention before it arrives.

Accept that some products will fail.

Keep innovating when competitors follow.

And, perhaps most importantly, remember that the company is something you are building—not the entirety of who you are.

Platforms will change again. Algorithms will change. Consumer behavior will change.

The founders who last will be the ones who can change with them without losing sight of why they started.