Mona Kattan has built a fragrance brand that most industry veterans said couldn't exist. KAYALI, the label she launched in 2018, sits at an unusual crossroads: it is a luxury product that doesn't behave like one. It skips the aloofness, the velvet-rope marketing, and the idea that a great perfume is only for a certain kind of person. In its place, Mona Kattan has offered something the fragrance world rarely leads with, genuine human connection.
Seven years in, the results speak for themselves. KAYALI is sold in 30 countries and nearly 2,700 retail stores worldwide. The brand generated a year-on-year earned media value of $198 million in 2024. And Mona Kattan, who once spent her first paychecks on perfume as a teenager, is now one of the most recognized names in the global scent industry.
Roots: Between Oklahoma and Dubai
Mona Kattan was born in Oklahoma to Iraqi parents and spent much of her childhood moving between cultures, a pattern that shaped both her worldview and, eventually, her business instincts. The family's move to Massachusetts during her teens was difficult. She struggled to fit in and, by her own account, went through a serious period of depression.
It was during those years that she first encountered personal development content, including motivational recordings by Tony Robbins. She was 13. By 14, she was holding down four jobs. The discipline that period built in her has stayed with her ever since.
The family's path shifted again after September 11, 2001. Facing increasing racism in the U.S., particularly directed at her hijab-wearing mother, her father began looking for opportunities elsewhere. He found a teaching position at the American University of Sharjah and moved the family to the UAE. What was meant to be a single year has now become more than two decades. For Mona Kattan, that decision opened a door into a fragrance culture unlike anything she had experienced before.
"Fragrance in the UAE is intentional and rich. It is part of daily life."
Watching people in Dubai layer oud and frankincense, use scent as a form of daily self-expression, and invest in fragrance the way others invest in fashion gave Kattan a reference point she would carry into everything KAYALI became.
The Road Into Business
After completing a finance degree at the American University of Sharjah in 2008, Mona Kattan went into investment banking. The career was solid, but entrepreneurship was pulling her in a different direction. She launched a beauty salon in 2012 while simultaneously watching her sister Huda Kattan begin to build something significant.
Huda had left finance to work as a makeup artist and started a beauty blog in 2010. When she struggled to find quality false lashes on the market, Mona encouraged her to create her own line. In 2013, the two sisters, alongside their sister Alya, introduced that first lash collection at Sephora. It was the seed that eventually grew into Huda Beauty, one of the most successful independent beauty brands in the world. Mona was present at the beginning, and she remained a core part of the company as it scaled.
Launching KAYALI: Fragrance as a New Language
In 2018, Mona Kattan launched KAYALI under the Huda Beauty umbrella. The name means "my imagination" in Arabic, a deliberate signal that the brand would be about more than product. From the outset, she treated fragrance as a storytelling medium.
This was not a small ambition to pull off. Selling perfume through social media, without the ability to let anyone actually smell it, is one of the more demanding challenges in consumer marketing. The first two years tested her. Competing against heritage fragrance houses with century-long legacies and enormous advertising budgets, KAYALI had to find another way in.
The answer was emotion. Rather than leading with notes and accords, Kattan led with memory, mood, and personal meaning. Each fragrance was given a story. Each launch was treated as a chapter.
"Every fragrance has a story. We focus on what it makes you feel, not just how it smells."
The strategy was slow to gain traction, then impossible to ignore. KAYALI launched eight new fragrances in 2023 and seven more in 2024. Its social following grew by 490,000 between late 2022 and mid-2024. The brand's world tour in 2024, covering seven countries and ten cities over six weeks, including stops in Milan, New York, Paris, Dubai, and Jeddah, brought that storytelling approach to life in person, with events built around the launch of Vanilla Candy Rock Sugar 42.
Making Luxury Work for More People
A consistent thread running through Mona Kattan's work is the conviction that luxury fragrance had, for too long, been built around exclusion. The aspirational distance that legacy brands cultivated, the sense that their products were for a specific, rarefied customer, never made much sense to her. KAYALI was designed as a deliberate counter to that.
The brand's marketing is educational rather than aspirational in the traditional sense. Kattan regularly shares content that explains how to layer scents, how fragrance chemistry works, and how different people experience the same perfume differently. She features other industry voices on her platforms. She is candid about her personal life, her challenges, and her process.
As of early 2025, she had 3.7 million Instagram followers, 918,000 TikTok followers, and over 112,000 YouTube subscribers. The numbers reflect an audience that trusts her, not just as a founder, but as someone who genuinely knows what she is talking about.
Dapper Daddy: A Personal Project With Commercial Purpose
In January 2025, Mona Kattan launched Dapper Daddy, a sub-brand under KAYALI built around a tribute to her father's lifelong love of cologne. The first fragrance in the line, Saffron Oud, was developed from a formula her father originally worked on for KAYALI back in 2018.
The sub-brand is designed to celebrate fatherhood, legacy, and the people whose presence we carry with us long after they've left the room. It is a personal story made into a product, which is, at its core, exactly what the KAYALI brand has always been about.
Going Independent
On February 17, 2025, Mona Kattan announced that KAYALI would separate from Huda Beauty and operate as an independent company. Global growth equity firm General Atlantic will acquire Huda Beauty's shares in the brand, with Kattan continuing as CEO and taking on a partnership role in the new structure.
The move formalizes what has been true in practice for some time, that KAYALI is its own entity with its own identity, direction, and ambition. "Our partnership with General Atlantic will unlock new opportunities, expand our global presence, and continue disrupting the fragrance industry with bold innovation," Kattan said in a statement.
Building Beyond KAYALI
Mona Kattan's work extends beyond the fragrance business. In 2018, she co-founded HB Investments, a private family office that backs consumer businesses led by founders with a clear mission and strong values. Its portfolio includes cloud kitchen Kitopi, e-commerce platform The Luxury Closet, supplements brand Humantra, and software company Fresha.
The approach to investing tracks closely with her philosophy in business generally: look for purpose, not just profit. Avoid trend-chasing. Back people who know why they are building what they are building.
Final Thoughts
Mona Kattan's career is a study in how to build something lasting in an industry that moves fast and forgets quickly. She entered the fragrance world without a chemistry background or a legacy name, and she built KAYALI into a globally distributed brand by doing one thing consistently well, treating customers as people who deserve to be spoken to honestly.
The numbers behind KAYALI's growth are impressive. But what is more telling is the consistency between Mona Kattan the founder and Mona Kattan the person. The same values that shaped her approach to building a brand: resilience, authenticity, a refusal to follow trends for the sake of it, are the same ones she has carried since she was setting goals as a teenager in Massachusetts.
With KAYALI now operating independently and a growing portfolio of work beyond fragrance, Mona Kattan is entering what may be the most consequential phase of her career. If the first seven years are any indication, she already knows exactly what she wants to build next.
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