FORTA Cosmetics
I'm the founding engineer and head of technology at FORTA Cosmetics, a performance cosmetics brand for athletes. I've been there since the pre-revenue days, back when I was just building the landing page. My older sister co-founded the brand with her Stanford roommate, WNBA player Lexie Hull, and they spent a few years developing the formula. Once the product was ready, they needed an engineer to put things together on the technical side and bridge the gap between their customers and their product.
Like any young startup, they wanted to save costs, so my sister advocated for me. I was the cheap option. Lexie was skeptical, and fair enough: they were Stanford grads launching a serious business, and I was a high schooler. I built the landing page, which got more than 2,000 people on the waitlist while they raised money, and then the store we launched on in March 2026, which Beauty Independent covered. We did over $16K on the first day and six figures in revenue in the first six months, converting at about 4%.
I built everything technical at FORTA from the ground up, and I still manage it. The store started out headless, with a custom React front end and a Shopify checkout. Later I made it completely Shopify-native to save on hosting, since we could have it all in one place. I should have done that from the start. I also set up our email marketing (Klaviyo), customer reviews (Judge.me), and analytics (Microsoft Clarity).
This was my first time working at a real company, and I really wanted to show I belonged. It also meant learning a completely unfamiliar domain. I interviewed pro and college athletes, flooded my For You page with Get Ready With Me videos, and became my twin sister's budget makeup artist. I learned how routines actually work, like using a sponge to blend foundation and cheek stain, then setting spray to lock it all in. Athletes told me they didn't want makeup rubbing off on their towel or jersey, and they wanted to see women like them using it. So I rewrote the headlines around makeup built for the active woman, designed a pop-up that bundles the lip and cheek stain with the sponge to complete the routine, and built a community section to build trust.
By the end, Lexie had really come to like my work, and one of her friends wanted to hire me to build a site for her brand. Being part of the brand as it got into Sephora Accelerate has been pretty cool. Also, as an Indian Muslim guy, telling my friends I work in makeup was a little weird at first. Now I'm proud of it.