How Glamnetic's CEO Is Luring More Beauty Lovers Into The Cryto Game

If there are two things you don’t hear mentioned in the same sentence very often, it’s cryptocurrency and cosmetics. Now, one beauty CEO is on a mission to change that. Ann McFerran, co-creator of beauty brand Glamnetic, is luring more beauty lovers into the world of crypto by announcing that her brand will now start accepting Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum as a form of payment through a partnership with BitPay. It’s only one of only a few brands to do so.

Born in Bangkok, Thailand, McFerran moved to Northern California when she was seven years-old and found herself living in a small town. “When I first moved to America, I was the only Asian person at my school,” McFerran tells Bustle. “No one looked like me and I felt very alienated. [The other students] looked at me like I was an alien. My way of trying to fit in was looking to beauty.” From there, she began researching makeup products and teaching herself application techniques.

As McFerran delved dipper into the beauty world, there was one skill that would prove to be a total game-changer: applying false eyelashes. “That was one thing that I felt like made the biggest transformation to my face,” she explains. “I gained so much confidence for the first time in my life. As silly as it may sound, when I put lashes on, it actually had ripple effects on the rest of my life. It was the first time I felt like I had some sort of power, and I never went outside without lashes after that.”

The 28-year-old entrepreneur’s love of eyelashes was the inspiration behind starting her own brand. Let down by the magnetic eyelashes on the market (and well aware of that the average beauty lover struggles to apply traditional strip eyelashes), McFerran taught herself the ins-and-outs of product development, spending over a year creating a new product that she was confident was superior. When the final innovation was made available in August 2019, her team was blown away by the response. Glamnetic’s launch was a massive success. “I knew it was a breakthrough product in my books,” she says, “and I really truly believed that it was going to work. But I had no idea at the level to which it would work for others.”

As McFerran’s brand catered to a mostly female customer base, it highlighted the lack of women involved in an interest she had picked up a couple years prior in 2017: cryptocurrency. “I was actually day trading cryptocurrency,” she explains. While recent stats suggest that more women are becoming more involved with crypto, there are still many who view it as a boys’ club.

Crypto remained a part of her life as she worked on Glamnetic, and it felt natural to combine the two. “I wanted to do a year one, but there was too much going on. And so, we finally got around to it this year, and I'm just really happy to be able to accept that.” Through graphics and videos on the brand’s social media pages, McFerran and her team are hoping to pique more women’s curiosity when it comes to investing and taking it upon oneself to learn more about what is it and how it works. It may seem daunting, but the founder notes that there are tons of free resources out there. For novices, she suggests YouTube and CoinDesk. It seems intimidating, but slowly but surely, you can teach yourself the basics.