Jade Beguelin is the co-founder and CEO of 4AM, the skincare brand for people with somewhere to be. A former JP Morgan derivatives trader turned growth marketer, Jade spent over three years managing seven-figure budgets for top DTC brands before leaving the corporate track to build the brand she couldn't find on shelves.
4AM exists for the person the beauty industry forgot: someone with a demanding job and a full life who still expects their skincare to actually work. Every product is built on the belief that efficacy and convenience shouldn't be a trade-off, with serum-grade formulas engineered for real routines, from the brand's cult-favorite The Routine to Clean Sheets, its credit-card-sized reinvention of the facial wipe.
Featured in Vogue and named a W Magazine Select, 4AM closed an oversubscribed $4M+ seed round in 2026, led by CAVU Consumer Partners and backed by the founders of Youth to the People, Violet Grey, and Starface. The brand launched into over 1700 Target stores nationwide, alongside Revolve and Bloomingdale's.
The biggest one: beautiful photography and brand is no longer a strategy. Not that long ago, you could invest in a gorgeous product shoot, run those images everywhere, and let them do the selling. In 2026, that's table stakes. Brand building is a content game now—showing up constantly, talking to camera, letting people behind the curtain—and you have to be willing to actually do that, at a volume that would have sounded insane a few years ago.
Without a question. When you're narrating the highs and the lows to an audience, you can't quietly let things slide—accountability is sort of built in. But what's shocked me most is the opportunity side. Videos that don't get a ton of views somehow stumble onto exactly the right person. Target first reached out to me over TikTok DM—and I get so many questions about that, because getting into a major retailer is supposed to be one of the hardest things in this industry. Building in public made it dramatically easier.
It's also been an education in what consistency actually costs. It would have been easy to hand our content off to someone else from day one and never understand how hard that job is. Doing it myself means I'll never underestimate it.
The direction of discovery. I assumed our job would be driving our existing community to the retailer (which it definitely is), but it's been so cool to watch people pick up Clean Sheets in Target having never heard of us, try the product, and then find and follow the brand afterward. The shelf has become an acquisition channel in its own right. After years of being online only, seeing our product in an aisle never gets old.
I don't think of failure as an option—but I pair that with a real willingness to pivot and try new things. Those two beliefs have to coexist. Clean Sheets, which has been a huge driver of our success, came out of exactly that process: sitting down and thinking long and hard about what worked in our earlier products, what didn't, and what should come next. The commitment is non-negotiable. The path is always up for revision.
Michelle Hu, the founder of ÉTOILE. She bootstrapped her business into something hugely successful by staying scrappy and trying everything to grow. I remember her telling me she was going to invest seriously in brand marketing to elevate ÉTOILE—I wasn't sure how she'd pull it off, and now an ÉTOILE case is known as the vanity case. Watching her make a bet like that and land it has stayed with me. She's since invested in 4AM and has become a great friend.
Dry shampoo. I’m a sucker for blowouts, and am convinced if I just make them last as long as possible I’m saving time by not having to wash my own hair.
Sports—which surprises no one more than me, because I'm really not a sports person. But between the World Cup and the Knicks winning, this year has been a master class in all the different ways you can build community and connect with your neighbors. I've loved every second of it.
It feels basic to say, but Atomic Habits. The idea that stuck with me is that you need habits and systems so you don't have to rely on discipline every single day. Willpower is a terrible operating model. Build the system once, and the right thing becomes the easy thing.
