Former Rhode CEO Just Started Her Own Beauty Brand—and It's Next Level

Welcome to Second Life, a podcast spotlighting successful people who've made major career changes—and fearlessly mastered the pivot. Hosted by Hillary Kerr, co-founder and chief content officer at Who What Wear, each episode gives you a direct line to people who are game changers in their fields. Subscribe to Second Life on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts to stay tuned.

Breaking into the fragrance industry is not an easy feat, and Melanie Bender, the founder and CEO behind the new fragrance brand Lore, found the perfect olfactory niche. In fact, we deemed Lore's Disfruta Eau de Parfum the best smoky fragrance in October.

But long before she became the visionary behind Lore, Bender was calculating rocket trajectories on Oahu. As a self-described “STEM girl,” she started college as an aerospace engineering major, and then pivoted to environmental science and cut her professional teeth as a sustainability consultant.

After moving to New York, she traded lab coats for mood boards, diving headfirst into fashion and beauty marketing—making a major impact in the industry. Her reputation grew fast: if you wanted to turn a good idea into a cultural moment, you wanted Bender on your side. She actually served as Who What Wear’s VP of Marketing and Brand Development, where her role quickly expanded into launching skincare darling Versed and minimalist-makeup phenomenon Merit. And most recently, she was the CEO of Hailey Bieber’s Rhode, orchestrating explosive growth and seamless global expansion, transforming a viral grey hoodie and peptide lip treatment into a full-fledged beauty empire.

After years of building other founders’ visions into nine-figure realities, Bender was ready to author her own story. Enter Lore.

The brand launched in September exclusively with Sephora, and it was created with the intention of designing entire worlds through scent. Each scent is conceived as a portal (layered, narrative-driven compositions that aim to evoke memory, place, and emotion with the precision of a novelist). Bender brings the same “engineering mindset” that once solved for fuel efficiency to solving for emotional resonance: obsessive iteration, rigorous testing, and a refusal to release anything that doesn’t feel like a fully realized world.

Listen to the latest episode of Second Life to hear how, after spending a decade making everyone else’s dreams smell like success, Bender has finally bottled her own. And keep scrolling to shop some of our favorite Lore scents.

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