It’s easy to recognize a girlboss when you meet one. A girlboss is a woman who is independent, self-made, and successful in her career. A girlboss is a woman who is brilliant, ambitious and confident. A girlboss is a woman who is kind, humble, genuinely interested in who you are and what you have to say.

I think I met the most girlboss of girlbosses: she’s Kathleen Pierce, Dyson Beauty’s global president. Kathleen joined Dyson in November 2022, bringing a wealth of experience in consumer marketing and brand building. During our chat in the futuristic Dyson store in Milan’s Piazza Gae Aulenti, among vanity mirrors, black leather couches and the prettiest Dyson devices, we delved into Dyson’s approach to beauty tech. We explored how the company balances global strategy with individual needs, and its commitment to innovation, as seen in products like the Dyson Supersonic r™, the Dyson Supersonic Nural™, and the new Dyson Chitosan™ styling range.

This conversation with Kathleen highlights how Dyson’s commitment to innovation and consumer-centric design is shaped by leaders who understand both the science and the soul of the beauty industry.

You’ve been in the beauty industry for a long time, but what’s your first beauty memory?

My grandmother took me to a department store when I was 12, she showed me a brand that she was using and bought me my first skincare products: a cleanser, a moisturizer and a toner by Clinique. Both my grandmother and my mother were passionate about skincare, so, that was my first beauty moment. Interestingly enough, I did the same with my daughter when she was that age – I brought her to that same place in New York, same counter, different people – and got her into that as well.

And now you are Global President of Dyson Beauty, which operates across diverse markets and cultures. How do you balance global strategy with local beauty habits and expectations?

You know, what’s interesting, I think, is that when we look at the invention process, we start by looking at what problems to solve. Engineers are always about taking things apart, understanding it and then rebuilding it and making it better. So, we do global hair studies – we distribute and sell in 84 countries – and we learn of everything we can about the consumer.

Dyson was studying hair science for 12 years before we ever launched our Supersonic™ or any of our formulations, so we decided we had to understand everything about the science of hair and about skin and the follicle and hair health because if you want to create a product that doesn’t damage your hair while styling, you have to understand what creates damage to begin with, right?

What does good look like?

That’s the question, and the answer comes from knowing about all different types of hair – you know, we categorize them T1 to T4, but there’s many more that inform our conversation. We always start with a vision of what we want to create, but we make sure that it can work against all hair types. And then we test, and we get it in the hands of consumers with all types of diversity, so that we can see how they would use it, and that shapes how we take the device from there. It’s a long process. The Dyson Supersonic r™, for example, took seven years.

That’s a lot.

Yeah. You know, we’re not on a marketing timeline, we’re really on an invention timeline. So, it’s hard for an engineer to put pencils down – they love solving problems. When we launched Supersonic r™, the first question that James [Dyson] asked the stylists when he was introducing the product was, “What can we do better?” – he’s always thinking about “how am I going to fix and change and work and evolve?”.

I think beauty is fantastic because our consumers are sort of all around us, and it’s a very diverse community, and very vocal community, which means you’re constantly having that feedback loop of what men and women are looking for. Then it’s just this never-ending list of problems that we can try and solve, and that’s very inspiring, I think.

And what does innovation mean to Dyson Beauty in 2025? And what does it mean to you?

Our passion statement is, “we solve problems that other people ignore”, so I think that’s sort of our North Star.

You know, we don’t really look to trend or look at things around us – we’re always looking forward. I feel like Dyson wins when they create things that people could have never imagined. Look at the Airstrait™, for example: who would have imagined using 45-degree jet angles of air would actually give tension and straightness to trusses? So, our mission is to always envision something completely new, that nobody else has thought of, and then take the invention from there.

In fact, Dyson has redefined beauty tech. What inspired the next step into styling products with Dyson Chitosan™?

Do you know what chitin is? It’s a protein that gives structure and strength; for example, in a crab, it’s what makes the shell strong. What we did is isolate chitin. We wanted things to be pliable and touchable and workable, so we found a vegan source of it in oyster mushrooms. In fact, if you take chitin from oyster mushrooms and then blend it into our technology, you can benefit from the structure but still have that sort of flexibility we’re looking for.

To answer your question, it’s interesting because, for us, this was a normal adjacency since, as I mentioned, we’ve been studying hair science for over 12 years, so we have chemical engineers, we have labs, and we have the coolest ability. Chemical engineers are looking at formulations in their lab and the minute they want to test it, they can just walk down the hall and torture test it to the engineers who are working on the devices – it’s a really cool synergy.

This time, the problem to solve was retention because, as you know, working in the industry, the only way to truly keep a shape 100% is to burn it into the hair, which we would never do. With Airwrap™, we’re using air to style, but it’s at a lower temperature, so naturally the retention is not going to be as strong as if you use something really aggressive and very damaging; however, we recognize through just listening to our customers that they want the retention to last. So, we said, “How can we actually supplement our styling devices and take all of this lovely knowledge that we’ve been investigating for years to inform devices and put out a complementary range?”. For us, Chitosan™ was a nice balance, I think.

In fact, I do possess an Airwrap™, but my hair is very thick and kind of untamable, which means I need to restyle it almost every day if I want it to look good. Perhaps Chitosan™ might be helpful to avoid stressing my hair so much.

Exactly, you definitely need to try it.

“We’re always looking forward”

What were the biggest challenges in developing styling products that live up to Dyson’s engineering-driven philosophy?

The process was really fun, actually. Let me tell you about it.

To begin with, I wrote down 10 or 12 problems that I thought were existing within styling products. For me, for example, one of the biggest issues was dosing because oftentimes when you have a styling product, you’re just squirting it out or you’re dipping your hand in it, and then you get inconsistent styles because you really don’t know how much you’re using. So, I told that to the engineers, and they developed precision dosing. With Chitosan™ products, every single dose is the same: the intent was you can figure out your formula, and then you never have to worry because you’re never going to have too little or too much. That was so cool. Then, we also wanted to make sure that there would be skincare-like ingredients because, to your point, it’s all about hair health. But how could we make sure that it could shear, and the technology could become incredibly translucent so that it could go on every strand (because we didn’t want it to clump)? It was about making sure the formula was thick and rich but could be easily sheared for application. We had four different variants because we wanted to make sure we were talking to women with different hair. You know, if you have type 1 hair, which is a bit thinner and perhaps straighter, you don’t need as much moisture in your hair as it might go limp, so, we had to make sure that we had different formulas to talk to different people.

Moreover, the product is refillable, and this is a passion point of every engineer because engineering is by definition sustainable.

How do tech innovation and ingredient innovation influence each other in your beauty vision?

Well, to be fair, ingredients influence our tech decisions a lot. That’s like future stuff that we can come back to you on because we like to keep our secrets secret.

Sure.
The Jasper Plum collection is also about to be released, which is more than a color launch: it’s a celebration of self-expression and individuality. What does this special edition represent for Dyson Beauty, and why did you choose to tie it to Mother’s Day?

We have a beautiful CMF lab (Colors, Materials, and Finishes), and our CMS specialists wanted to create something that celebrated the notion of Mother’s Day, which is a representation of the strength that women bring. In fact, the color of the Jasper stone symbolizes strength, inner power and peace. So, that’s where the origination point started.

And how do sensory elements like color and texture improve the experience of daily beauty rituals?

Color plays a very passionate role at Dyson. In fact, the way we use color is to highlight technology, highlight where the technology actually is. We’ll often do that through buttons, small details, to make sure that people understand how to use the product, what the industrial design of it is, but most importantly, to signal where the interesting bits are, encased in the product.

A really good source of that is Dyson Supersonic Nural™. If you look at the first Supersonic, the Origin, where the pink is, we decided for the Nural™ product to have it be clear because we wanted people to see the wires, the connectivity and the intelligence of the machine. You know, it’s called Nural™ from the neural pathways, the paths within your brain, and in fact, this particular machine has intelligence: when you move it towards you or away from you, it self-adjusts the heat flow and temperature based on the proximity to your head, with sensors that enable this, which we call “time-of-flight sensors”. Because the machine was so intelligent, we wanted to make sure that the colors and the experience were visceral to the consumer. So, for us, the materials, the design, the colors, everything has a reason.

The Nural™ looks so cool, it’s like a spaceship!

Yeah, it’s really so powerful. You know, we launched the Supersonic™ in 2016, and the Nural™ was our first update because the machine is just so strong and so integral that we really hadn’t touched it. Anyway, this was a level of intelligence that we thought would be helpful.

Everything about Dyson is thoughtful: there’s a reason for everything. The Nural™ speaks to the original Dyson, because when Dyson launched its first vacuum cleaner, the DC01, it had a clear bin. At first, when James showed it to retailers, they said, “Nobody will want to see the dirt and the dust”. Actually, now it’s one of the most popular things about our products. It’s all about transparency and honesty, I think, which is really interesting.

As you said before, sustainability is also vital for the brand, with refillable bottles and recyclable elements. How does this align with Dyson’s long-term vision in the beauty field?

Yes, as I mentioned, we’re all about sustainability. We’re all about creating things that make sense, that are adjacent to our devices. It’s interesting that we look at sustainability across a host of different things; for example, it seems like a random topic, but we actually have farms. James is really passionate about food and creating a sustainable ecosystem, and we have farms that are 100% full recyclability ecosystem. Here, anaerobic digesters take all the products in the waste and it either converts it to fertilizer or it converts it to gas and then re-puts it into the land. And then we grow, and then we harvest, and then we recycle. So, what’s really cool is that we use the farms as testing grounds for all our inventions – we’re looking at robotics, we’re looking at cleaning and filters and power and suction, all these different things, and we actually can go test them in real-life situations such as the farm. Just that notion of invention, sustainability, lean engineering, and ultimately giving back to one system is super interesting.

Today, the beauty tech space is more competitive than ever. How does Dyson stay on top, and how do you personally stay inspired?

I think for us it’s just always looking forward. We take our time, and we create disruptive products when it makes sense to bring them to market, when they’re ready, and when they’re delivering on their promise. And we have quality: if you have a Supersonic™ from 2016, you’re probably still using it, and it’s probably just as well as it was the first day. So, I think that’s what we pride ourselves in is quality and invention and always looking forward.

What excites you most about the future of beauty, and Dyson’s role in shaping it?

Well, I think we’re always really humbled by the positive reaction that we get from consumers. And if you think about it, there’s this never-ending feedback loop that we get predominantly through social, so, we are never going to run out of problems to solve. You know, that’s what fuels us, and that list is ever-growing. That’s what I get excited about.

What was the biggest obstacle you had to overcome in your journey?

That’s a big question. I think like many women, I’m a working mom, I raised two kids, and that is always a balance and a struggle. My kids are now grown up, and I get this wonderful, positive feedback from them, so, all the years of worry and guilt that I had about trying to juggle both things are actually resolved. Now, my daughter will send me messages saying, “I’m just bragging about you at a party”, and tears come to my eyes. You work so hard, you try and do the best of both worlds, you wonder whether it’s the right decision, and then at some point, you get that wonderful notion that your kids benefited from having a mom try and pull together all these different things that they’re trying to juggle. I think that’s probably what most women are facing this day and age, right? And it’s not just kids, it’s partners, family, parents.

Of course. And what was the latest thing you discovered about yourself thanks to your job?

How agile I can be. You know, Dyson moves fast. Everybody says they’re fast, but Dyson is faster. Dyson is one of those places where we don’t say no. Somebody will have an idea, and it’s in flight one week later because we don’t sit still. It takes a lot of energy and excitement to sort of feed into that, and I’ve absolutely loved it. Now, I don’t think I could do anything else – you kind of get accustomed to that momentum.

What was, in your career, your biggest act of rebellion?

I guess, when I quit. When my daughter was two, and I was pregnant with my second, I stopped working. I think in that moment I just needed to focus on being at home, and I remember thinking it was such a colossal decision. In my mind, it was like, “I’m done. I’m stopping work. It’s over” and I was so panicked.

What I’ve learned is that life is long – after two or three years, I decided to go back, and my family was fine, and I could juggle it. So, the world didn’t end. I think I needed to see both sides and to understand what worked well for my family. However, walking out that door initially was really jarring because so much of our identity is intertwined with what we do, and when you make a choice to leave that behind, it can be very upending.

So, I think it gave me great perspective, and it allowed me to come back to the workforce approaching it in a different way, with a stronger vision.

As Dyson recognizes, finding the time to give priority to self-care in our super busy lives is a big challenge, and the brand tries to come in help with its products. How do you personally find that time? Do you have any special self-care routine?

For me, work and personal life kind of always is intertwined – this notion of balance, or “one thing shuts off and another thing starts” to me is inconsistent.

It’s interesting that you mentioned how Dyson gives people confidence. You know, I was a consumer before I worked at Dyson, I bought my first Supersonic™ in 2016. I too sat there and looked at this thing and thought, “Oh my gosh, what is this? And how does it work? And where’s the air coming from?”. But the game changing moment for me was when I bought my Airwrap™: I used to look with envy at women walking past me who looked so put together. When I got the Airwrap™, it made it possible for me, too, and the confidence level that it gave me was just off the charts. That’s how you develop that brand love because you can see how a tool can give you something so simple as a great routine that’s easy to execute where you feel good about yourself when you walk out that door that day.

What does it mean for you to feel comfortable in your own skin?

Well, it comes from confidence, poise, happiness and balance. It changes with age and over time and it gets better and easier over time, I can say. For me, I think it just means balance and peace.

One last question. What’s your happy place?

Sitting on my deck having coffee with my husband. That morning coffee routine is the absolute best.

Thanks to BPRESS. 

Thanks to Dyson.