When it comes to the beauty industry, John Cafarelli is mix of creator, innovator, and commercial strategist. His experience ranges from serving as a financial advisor, helping well-known brands understand and secure the resources they need to grow, to creating iconic culture in online publishing (ask him about “Break the Internet”). He’s also the Founder of multi-award-winning skincare brand, Ernest Supplies, and, as Co-Founder + President, has overseen the commercialization of BeautyMatter to become a premier resource of news, insights and connections for executives in the beauty and wellness industries.

With a keen interest in the nuts-and-bolts side of the media and consumer industries, he has advised on, written and spoken about things like the rise of community media, consumer investing, retail, distribution strategies, markets, operations, entrepreneurship and finance. As the creator of the multi-award-winning skincare brand, Ernest Supplies, Cafarelli was a pioneer of the clean beauty movement and became one of the first entrepreneurs to build a brand that placed clean chemistry and sustainability at its core, long before it was commonplace in the industry. Ernest Supplies was the first American skincare brand to launch products in eco-friendly spouted pouches and was committed to minimizing its eco-impact almost a decade before other skincare brands were contemplating sustainability.

Cafarelli is currently the Co-Founder and President at BeautyMatter. He was previously the COO / CFO of Paper Magazine, where he helped transform it from a legacy media property into one of the most powerful, sought-after arbiters of pop culture, art, fashion, nightlife, and music. He helped sell Paper to an investment group in 2018. Prior to that, Cafarelli was a Principal at Goode Partners, a $225 million consumer investment fund at which he was a founding team member. Prior to that, his experience includes investment banking, as well as working at the White House for President Bill Clinton on his National Economic Council.

Cafarelli has served on the Board of Directors of fashion retailers Intermix and AllSaints, and eyewear brands Morgenthal Frederics and Robert Marc. He also spent 10-years as the National Chairman and a board member of AmFAR Generation Cure, an organization dedicated to finding the scientific basis of a cure for HIV/AIDS in our lifetime.

Nadia Kapleva is Medical Director and Co-Founder of Lóvi, an AI-powered skincare analysis and personalization platform serving a large international user base. She leads the medical side of product development, authoring the methodologies behind Lóvi’s skin-condition interpretation and care recommendations and directing a cross-functional team of doctors, chemists, and technologists. She brings 15+ years in cosmetics and aesthetic medicine, combining cosmetic-chemistry and product-development expertise with executive operating experience—including a decade leading an aesthetic-medicine group—and a business processes consulting foundation at KPMG and PwC. She speaks regularly at international industry congresses.

Dr. Wayne Liu is the Co-Founder, President, and Chief Growth Officer of Perfect Corp., where he has led global growth, strategic partnerships, and the company’s evolution into a publicly listed firm on the NYSE. Since 2015, he has built the company’s foundation by recruiting key talent and establishing collaborations with major beauty brands and retailers, including Estée Lauder, Walmart, Google, and Sephora.

Previously, Dr. Liu held engineering and leadership roles at NVIDIA, Intel, and Broadcom, and was a designer of NVIDIA’s shader processor architecture, now widely used in AI and advanced graphics computing.

He holds a doctorate from the University of Southern California, an MS from Case Western Reserve University, and an MBA from Santa Clara University. Dr. Liu is a Forbes contributor and a frequent speaker at global forums including the World Economic Forum in Davos and CES. He also teaches AI and entrepreneurship at the university level and hosts a technology and innovation podcast.