Volition Beauty believes that a multiplicity of diverse perspectives creates better, richer product innovation. They are a trailblazing beauty brand that expertly formulates high-performance skincare, bodycare & haircare – containing the most unique ingredients – as ideated and validated by experts. Volition is designed to empower content creators to become beauty entrepreneurs, and to turn their ideas into best-sellers. Their mission of collaborative and transparent innovation has created a revolutionary product development process that puts content creators in the driver’s seat. They make the most effective formulations with safe ingredients so consumers never have to sacrifice performance for clean beauty. Volition is female-, AAPI- and LGBTQIA-founded and formulates products that are all clean, vegan & cruelty-free. The brand emphasizes sustainability with FSC unit cartons, corn-derived PLA labels, recyclable packaging and alsmeets EU and EWG standards for their formulas.
Founding Story
Patricia Santos has over 20 years of experience in finance and venture capital, focused on the beauty, retail and apparel sectors. She has been behind the curtain of hundreds of beauty brands and helped numerous management teams build their companies.
Patricia's journey to founding Volition Beauty started back in the late 2000s, where she was the only female investor at a big venture capital fund. She was able to meet and fund some amazing entrepreneurs but was faced with the sad reality that a lot of incredible female founders weren't getting funded. She noticed part of the problem was these female entrepreneurs didn’t look like the investors they were pitching and were selling to people who didn't fully understand their companies or brands. She became obsessed with changing that and giving those amazing female entrepreneurs an alternative way to get their groundbreaking product ideas to market. At Volition, these entrepreneurs don't pitch to board rooms full of male investors, but the actual customers.
A former venture capitalist with a passion for scaling consumer brands, Patricia has been an operator and investor in beauty for over two decades. Her passion lies in helping brand founders and creators build iconic brands that combine product innovation and market white-space with genuine storytelling.Patricia has extensive experience working with, scaling, and financing celebrity / creator / influencer brands. As a female entrepreneur and founder, she is fanatical about championing other women in business.
Patricia holds a BA from Harvard College magna cum laude and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She has been named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women by Entrepreneur Magazine and been featured in the New York Times, WWD and Glossy for her impact in beauty space.
Paul Deacon has more than two decades of experience in the beauty industry, principally in marketing but also in product development, operations and sales.
The first half of Paul's career was in Europe, working across a broad spectrum of high-profile, established haircare brands at the Estee Lauder Companies and within the L’Oréal group in London and Paris. He has experience in mass market brands (Elvive) as well as luxury and professional brands such as Kérastase, Aveda & Bumble and bumble. His roles grew not only with increasing financial responsibility, but also with their geographical footprint, scaling from the UK to EMEA and to global. Throughout his European career he has worked closely with the brands' headquarters in Paris and New York and had the opportunity to work with celebrities such as Catherine Deneuve, Claudia Schiffer and Gwyneth Paltrow,
Since 2012, Paul has worked exclusively in the USA reporting into the founders of - and leading the brand marketing for - smaller, entrepreneurial skincare brands in the San Francisco Bay Area such as Algenist and Juice Beauty. Currently Paul leads all aspects of brand operations for Volition Beauty, with particular focus on product development across all beauty categories, and talent management with Volition's roster of Innovators.
Paul is British and has a MA from Oxford University.
