Mario Dedivanovic is meticulously cleansing  the dust off a black office swivel chair with the one tool he has readily available — Makeup By Mario gentle makeup remover wipes, proving that they’re truly multipurpose.

He’s in what is going to hopefully by December be his first everlasting office, having had his team housed in a succession of WeWork offices (and at home through the pandemic) in Latest York City since launching his makeup brand, Makeup By Mario, which this weekend celebrates its two-year anniversary. 

But for now, the midtown Manhattan locale is a constructing site, full of paint cans, ladders, plaster, exposed wires and various tools. There’s even a construction employee ending painting considered one of the partitions white within the background.

Ever the visionary, Dedivanovic, who has now positioned himself in considered one of only two chairs within the office after covering it with some brown paper his assistant found, can already see it coming alive, pointing to the marketing and sales areas and to where the product development’s “mini lab” might be situated, set to take up the biggest space on the ground complete with special lighting to mimic natural daylight. It’s going to even be an area he envisions spending much of his time. 

“I even have tons of lab coats. I get really dirty once I’m working in product development,” he said. “It’s not typical of how many individuals work. I even have tons of pigments and stuff like that, and so once I’m considering of something in my head and I cannot verbalize or communicate it, I just make it.” 

Wearing a dark navy blue shirt paired with gray pants, he’s sitting in what is going to soon be his office, with the terrace that closed the deal for him clearly visible.

“I feel it’s very rare in Latest York to have a personal terrace in an office,” he added. “Once you’re working on product development, nothing beats the natural light — with the ability to just take a number of steps on the market into the natural daylight and see the tones and colours.” 

Moving right into a everlasting office has been a protracted time coming for Dedivanovic. Born and raised within the Bronx, Latest York, to Albanian immigrant parents, he has worked from the age of 12, from bagging groceries at a supermarket to a stint as a pretzel boy on the Bronx Zoo to managing a hot dog stand to working as a busboy at a restaurant in Little Italy. At 17, he set his sights on a profession at Sephora and got hired as as a greeter and fragrance consultant, before working his way as much as makeup artist and eventually booking clients outside of the shop. 

It was then that he met Kim Kardashian, whom he has been working with ever since, from international fashion weeks to quite a few magazine shows and all the pieces in between. In an Instagram post to have a good time her American Vogue cover earlier this 12 months, she wrote: “When Mario first began working with me his agent told him to not work [with] me anymore and dealing with a reality star would never land him a US Vogue cover. He said he would select me over the duvet and fired his agent. It may need taken us over a decade but I couldn’t be more happy with my glam team who all the time show up for me.”

Amid his busy roster of his celebrity clients and other ventures, Dedivanovic began exploring the event of his own makeup brand back in 2017, with the goal of launching in 2020, which might have then marked 20 years within the industry. After meeting with a lot of industry veterans, that vision began becoming a reality when he joined forces with Alicia Valencia, now the brand’s global president.

With prior experience working on other makeup artist-founded brands equivalent to Bobbi Brown Cosmetics and Pat McGrath Labs, she has been instrumental in helping bring his retail plans to life including the exclusive global retail partnership with Sephora, complementing Dedivanovic’s key concentrate on product development, creative and social media.

But it surely hasn’t all the time been smooth sailing for the brand, which launched through the global coronavirus pandemic, a time when large swaths of the country were still stuck at home and never buying much if any makeup.

“The most important challenge was the launch phase in the midst of the pandemic, but additionally pre-launch,” said Dedivanovic. “I feel it was March 17 when Latest York closed and we were just waiting to enter our latest offices at WeWork and had hired a number of key employees and all the pieces just type of stopped.

“I used to be here in the town at home, alone with my puppy, and I remember just considering the world was ending,” he continued. “I actually struggled from a private space: isolation, feelings of sadness after which fear. I used to be crippled with fear. I used to be kind of on top of the world until then by way of my makeup artistry profession. My Master Classes were booming and I had brand partnerships and clients and all these things happening and I used to be so excited to start the strategy of the brand and the brand new employees after which all the pieces just stopped.”

At the identical time, though, it was also the brand that helped him navigate these feelings. “[The business] was almost a savior for me because I needed to rise up every morning. We were developing the Master Lip Palette and so they needed the colours for the lab so I literally went to my makeup closet and pulled a whole bunch of lipsticks and started melting and melting and mixing and mixing,” he recalled. “That is how I initially created numerous the products for the launch — in my dining room by myself.”

But since then, lots has modified. His brand is now in over 1,500 doors globally via Sephora. Sources told Beauty Inc. that sales are forecast to finish the 12 months at around $50 million. Dedivanovic and Valencia declined to comment on sales, but a representative for Makeup By Mario said every product that has launched in 2022 has ended up in the highest five of its category at Sephora, with Moistureglow Plumping Lip Serum selling out in all shades in lower than 24 hours after its launch. The SoftSculpt Shaping Stick had a waitlist of 20,000 people before it got here back in stock in June, and Dedivanovic said that the Master Mattes Eyeshadow Palette is the best-selling palette within the U.S., despite the proven fact that “sales weren’t great at the start obviously.”

“That’s something that’s incredibly meaningful to me because I remember the painstaking passion and energy, research and studying that I did for years for [the Master Mattes Eyeshadow] palette. I remember people telling me through the process that you simply’re doing a texture that the patron isn’t used to, and I just knew in my heart that it was going to work,” said Dedivanovic.

On social media, too, the brand has built up a big following, with over 1 billion hashtag views on TikTok and 11.5 million followers on Instagram.

As for its performance at Sephora, Alison Hahn, senior vp of makeup and fragrance, said: “After we first began discussions regarding a possible partnership, we knew our clients would clamor to get their hands on products that Mario had personally developed and that he uses to create such iconic looks — and it was extra exciting given his personal history with Sephora. Unsurprisingly, since Makeup by Mario first launched two years ago, the road has done exceptionally well — together with his Master Mattes Eyeshadow Palette, Soft Sculpting Collections and Moisture Glow Lip Serum being just a number of of the products beloved by our clients.”

Dedivanovic added: “I even have a deep history with Sephora. It was a dream of mine to launch in that store which happened exactly 20 years after I began working there. The partnership may be very near and dear to my heart. We work thoroughly together.”

And there’s more to come back. The road is launching in 4 markets within the Middle East this 12 months (United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait) and one other five in South East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines), plus the U.K., all via Sephora. It’s going to also this 12 months open in one other 200 doors in Kohl’s x Sephora. It’s already within the U.S., Canada, Australia and Latest Zealand and ships to each country worldwide on Makeupbymario.com.

By way of categories, Dedivanovic sees complexion as the largest opportunity. “I can’t say what we’re launching, but we’ve got things coming which are ground-breaking formulas, true innovations, first to market. That’s also going to bring numerous global growth to the brand concurrently.”

With all this growth, his team has expanded from just three members at the tip of 2020 to 36 full-time employees today, along with several freelancers, contractors and part-time staffers. 

For now, the business is self-funded, starting with little or no money, which is how Dedivanovic desired to do it. “We did it starting at the underside. And that’s how I’ve done all the pieces in my life, really starting at the underside.”

But he doesn’t know for a way long as expanding and growing a business is “very costly,” although he declined to comment on whether or not he was actively exploring funding opportunities.

On what makes his brand stand out in a crowded space (NPD Group said artistry brands were makeup’s biggest gainer in the primary half of 2022, with sales topping $1 billion), he believes that it’s the brand’s ethos of artistry and craftsmanship and approachable education. “All the things is predicated off of my techniques as an artist and I’m taking those techniques and turning them into products which are very easy to make use of. That’s where the core strategy is for all the pieces.”

As for Master Class, his makeup tutorial workshops that began life in 2009 and ballooned from about 20 students to greater than 2,000 in some cities, before being halted on account of the pandemic, they’ll come back in some unspecified time in the future although likely in a special form.

“I give it some thought on daily basis. Master Class ended on March 17 when all the pieces closed down. Then I used to be too busy with the brand and attempting to balance my clients,” he says. “Now that the pandemic is best I definitely do plan to do Master Class, but I need to reinvent it. I intend to make it larger and higher. I need more people to give you the chance to have access to it.”

There’s also the query of managing his time, from flying around the globe with celebrity clients to constructing his brand to Master Class to self-care — a skill he remains to be learning.

“I didn’t really manage my time my whole life,” he said. “Since I used to be 12 years old, I’ve been working and I’ve spent my entire profession traveling, never in a single place and living out of a suitcase because I used to be on a mission.”

For the primary time in his life he recently took two months off from traveling for work. He’s also about to take a vacation to Turks and Caicos to have a good time his fortieth birthday.

On turning 40 this Saturday, he says: “I feel great. I feel confident. On a private level I feel like I’ve stepped into my manhood. I don’t have fear anymore. I used to have numerous fear. I’ve overcome that. I’m completely satisfied to be turning 40. And I’m so optimistic and excited for the longer term and turning 50 and 60. I feel in a very, really good place immediately.”