Kristen Jones Miller

KJ Miller — Kristen Jones Miller — attended Harvard Business School, where she and Amanda Johnson identified the nude lip shade gap for darker skin tones and decided to fill it.¹ Miller's background before HBS included retail and consumer goods strategy. Johnson's background included marketing and brand development. Together they had the product discipline and brand capability to take the Mented concept to market.

They launched Mented in 2016 with a direct-to-consumer e-commerce model targeting darker skin tones with nude lip shades specifically formulated for melanin-rich complexions.¹ The founding insight was not new — Black women had discussed this gap for decades. What was new was the infrastructure: DTC e-commerce made it possible to reach a national audience, and Instagram made it possible to build brand awareness, without traditional retail distribution.

The VC Fundraise

Raising venture capital for Mented required overcoming two compounding constraints: the 'niche market' framing applied to beauty products for darker skin tones, and the racial and gender funding gap that made it difficult for Black women founders to access institutional capital regardless of market thesis.² Miller and Johnson raised $1 million in 2017 — among the first sixteen Black women in American history to reach that milestone.² Total funding reached $9 million.

The Acquisition (2024)

West Lane Capital acquired Mented Cosmetics in May 2024.³ Over eight years, Miller and Johnson had built Mented from a concept at an HBS cocktail party to a nationally distributed, venture-funded brand with a strategic exit. The acquisition is the market proof: the category they proved existed was real enough to attract institutional buyers at an exit.

Proving a Market That Investors Had Decided Didn't Exist

Miller and Johnson's core challenge was epistemological: how do you prove a market size to investors who have decided the evidence doesn't justify the thesis? The mainstream beauty industry had underinvested in darker skin tone products for decades — which meant there was no large-scale commercial data demonstrating demand at scale, because scale had never been tried. The absence of scale became the evidence for the niche label, which justified the absence of investment in scale.

Miller's approach was to use available proxies: social media conversation, customer waitlists, and early direct-to-consumer sales that demonstrated willingness to pay at premium price points. Each piece of evidence required translation — converting it from 'this many people follow this Instagram account' to 'this implies this addressable market size.' The translation was part of every fundraising conversation and required sustained patience with investors who required more evidence than the data could provide.

Acquisition and Category Proof

The West Lane Capital acquisition of Mented in 2024 closed a chapter that began with a Harvard Business School cocktail party conversation in 2015. Miller and Johnson had demonstrated that a beauty brand founded by Black women, for darker skin tones, with no major brand backing, could raise institutional capital, build national distribution, and achieve a strategic exit. The thesis — that the market was real — was proved by the business's existence over eight years.

Miller has continued to be active in the Black women founder community — speaking at conferences, mentoring entrepreneurs, and advocating for the structural changes in venture capital access that Mented's fundraising experience made visible. The Mented story is taught at several business schools as a case study in market creation and minority entrepreneurship financing.