By Ryan Clark
CHS Communications Director

When Kamryn Tucker was young, she remembers watching her mother — a television news reporter — put on her makeup while getting ready for a broadcast or event.

The fascination with makeup and beauty products made an impression, and now the 21-year-old senior Clinical Leadership and Management major from Atlanta owns her own beauty company.

That’s right — she’s a business owner before becoming a college graduate.

“Skin care and beauty products were a consistent love for me,” Tucker says. “I knew someday I would probably take the leap and start my own business.”

But it was a lot of work to get to that point. Tucker chose to come to UK after friends recommended the school. She toured, learned about the College of Health Sciences and the CLM program, and she was hooked on the idea of helping others, but also on how the major would help her see the vast array of available healthcare jobs.

In her sophomore year at UK, she began to put her beauty business plan together. After years of researching what kinds of products she liked, she began to research how she would start the business.

And she realized right away how her CLM classes would help her.

“The leadership and management and finance classes helped me quite a bit,” she said. “Just learning about how to be a leader, how to start a business. Taking initiative and leading the pack. It all contributed.”

She researched collaborators and vendors, who would make certain products for her. She would then test those products and the vendors would order up the tweaks she wanted (for instance, she may want something in a different texture or color). In the end, she helped create her signature line of products, called Better Beauty.

Tucker now runs every aspect of the company, from the marketing and branding to the website and the business plans.

“I’ve taken on a lot of responsibility,” she said. “But I’ve had a lot of help along the way. I’ve always been someone who wants to do a lot of things at once, and I do everything here. But I think my love for it allows for me to make the time to get it done.”

Tucker’s products are gender-neutral, and for all types of skin tones and races. She says her goal is to have the products sold in major chain stores like Sephora and Ulta Beauty.

“Someday I hope to have employees, and to really grow this into something I can be proud of,” she said.

And she owes part of the credit to her CLM degree program. She has already interned at Marshall Lifestyle Medicine in Lexington, and she is currently working at UK HealthCare in the Office of Performance Services. Both experiences have given her a sense of what she wants to do in life: She wants to care for people, one-on-one, in a clinical environment.

But she also wants to run her company. CLM has helped her learn to do both.

“The CLM program brings a lot of opportunity to create great managers and leaders,” she said. “And these people then bring wellness in its totality. CLM is very flexible, and you can do a lot with it — sales, administration, the clinical side. CLM supports anyone passionate and with a love for healthcare.

“I just think you can’t lose.”

Follow Better Beauty on Instagram at @betterbeautybrand