How POOM Is Building a Better Foundation

Founder Irene Ham is taking a considered approach to complexion, community and what deserves to come next.

Beauty has never exactly been an industry known for holding back. There is always another launch, another category to enter, another trend to catch before the algorithm moves on. For a young brand trying to establish itself, the pressure to keep adding can feel particularly intense.

Irene Ham is taking a different approach with Poom.

The emerging complexion brand began with a realization from Ham’s own experience with acne-prone skin: sometimes the answer isn’t another ingredient or another step. Sometimes, it’s paying closer attention to what you can take away.

“One of the biggest discoveries I made through my own skin journey was that sometimes the answer isn’t adding more ingredients—it’s taking pore clogging ingredients out of my routine,” Ham tells The Beauty Brief. “It was such a simple idea, but it completely changed the way I approached beauty.”

That idea became the foundation of Poom, quite literally. The brand launched with acne-safe foundation formulated around an ingredient-conscious philosophy without asking customers to sacrifice the performance, finish or experience they expect from makeup.

But perhaps what makes Poom most interesting isn't simply what Ham has chosen to leave out of its formulas. It's the same level of discernment she is applying to building the business around them.

Starting With the Problem

Ham didn't come to Poom with an abstract white-space opportunity. She came to it as the customer.

Complexion had been central to her own relationship with beauty, and foundation felt like a particularly meaningful place to start. It is one of those rare products expected to do almost everything at once: match your skin, flatter it, perform throughout the day and, ideally, not create another problem in the process.

For someone with acne-prone skin, that last part matters.

Poom's foundation line was created to bridge the experience Ham wanted from makeup with the ingredient standards she had developed through her own skin journey. And rather than treating that first product as merely the beginning of an inevitable march through every makeup category, she decided to stay there for a while.

“I don't want Poom to launch products just for the sake of launching something new,” Ham says.

So while lips, blush and other obvious extensions could have followed, Poom instead expanded its foundation shade range.

It's a relatively simple decision that says quite a lot about how Ham thinks about growth. More SKUs do not necessarily make a brand more useful. Sometimes making an existing product work for more people is the more meaningful expansion.

Building in Public

Poom's early momentum also came from something that can't be manufactured quite as easily as a launch calendar: people became invested in watching Ham build it.

“I never pretended Poom was a huge brand,” she says. “I was honest from the beginning—I was a new mom starting a beauty brand from my bedroom because of my own struggles with my skin.”

That transparency helped Poom establish a community quickly. Instead of presenting a perfectly polished founder story after the fact, she was letting people into the process while it was happening.

The distinction matters at a moment when “founder-led” has become a marketing strategy in itself. Consumers are increasingly accustomed to seeing founders on camera, hearing origin stories and watching BTS content. But visibility alone doesn't necessarily create connection. Ham's story worked because the person building Poom was recognizably the same person experiencing the problem it was trying to solve.

“I wasn't just trying to sell them a foundation,” she says. “I was sharing the solution I had been searching for myself.”

And that community would eventually show up for Poom somewhere much bigger.

From the Bedroom to Ulta

Poom's relationship with Ulta Beauty began through the retailer's MUSE Accelerator program, which connected Ham with mentorship, industry resources and opportunities she says would otherwise have been difficult to access as a new founder.

Eventually, Poom landed on Ulta.com.

For Ham, the milestone was significant because many of the people who had been following Poom from its earliest days were already Ulta shoppers. She remembers watching what began as an empty product page slowly populate with customer reviews.

“Watching that page fill up with support from people who had followed Poom's journey was incredibly emotional for me,” she says.

The launch also gave Ham an accelerated lesson in what retail can do for an emerging brand. Being associated with a retailer consumers already trusted immediately changed perceptions of Poom's credibility.

It also reinforced a less glamorous but arguably more important lesson: founders need to understand their margins long before a major retail opportunity arrives.

“Founders should build their businesses with retail in mind from the beginning,” Ham says. “Your margins need to be strong enough that when an opportunity with a major retailer comes, you can actually afford to say yes and still build a sustainable business.”

It's the kind of lesson that gets less airtime than the celebratory retailer announcement, but one that reveals the increasingly sophisticated business underneath Poom's early momentum.

Listening Is the Product Strategy

The relationship between Poom and its customers doesn't end once a product reaches them. Ham is also using those conversations to determine what the brand should make next.

Its upcoming blue color corrector is perhaps the clearest example.

Ham repeatedly heard from olive-toned customers who found that complexion products could skew too orange on their skin. Some were already mixing blue correctors into Poom foundation to adjust their shades, but struggled to find an option that aligned with the ingredient standards they wanted.

Ham saw a problem Poom was particularly well positioned to solve.

“I don't ask, ‘What product is popular right now?’” she says. “I ask, ‘What problem does our customer still need us to solve?’”

It's an approach that feels almost countercultural in a market where relevance is so often equated with speed. Poom is giving innovation a job.

The blue corrector extends the usefulness of the foundation rather than distracting from it. The expanded shade range makes the original proposition more inclusive. Each decision takes the brand deeper into the problem it set out to address rather than further away from it.

That kind of focus may ultimately prove more valuable than having something new to announce every few weeks.

Building Anyway

None of this means Ham waited for ideal circumstances to build Poom. In fact, she was repeatedly told she had chosen a particularly bad moment to begin.

When she started the company, uncertainty around a potential TikTok ban and newly announced tariffs made the environment feel anything but founder-friendly. At first, those warnings got to her.

“I kept wondering whether I had truly chosen the wrong moment to start my brand,” she says.

Her first year in business changed her perspective.

There will always be a reason not to begin. Economic conditions shift. Platforms change. Costs rise. Consumer behavior evolves. A founder waiting for a perfectly stable environment could spend a very long time waiting.

“There will never be an optimal moment when every circumstance is perfectly aligned and there are no obstacles,” Ham says. “At some point, you have to decide that you're going to build anyway.”

Poom did.

The Foundation for What Comes Next

Ham's next ambition brings the story back to where it began: foundation.

She wants to see Poom in physical retail stores with national distribution, giving customers the opportunity to experience the product in a way an e-commerce page simply can't replicate.

Foundation is tactile and deeply personal. Undertones can be nuanced. A shade that looks right on a screen can feel entirely different once it's on your face. Being able to walk into a store, swatch several options and compare them side by side is still meaningful in a category built around finding your match.

For Ham, that accessibility is the next logical evolution of Poom.

And there is something fitting about a brand that has resisted the temptation to become everything instead concentrating on doing its first thing exceptionally well.

Ham describes the feeling she ultimately wants someone to have when trying Poom as the sense that their skin simply accepts the formula. She wants it to look glowing and healthy, yes, but she is ultimately chasing something more emotional: the confidence that comes when your complexion looks so good you stop thinking about it.

For now, Poom is still a young brand with plenty left to build. But Ham isn't approaching that future by asking how much she can add or how quickly she can add it.

She's building a better foundation first.

The Beauty Brief Recommends:

Natural Glow Hydrating Foundation

We love a full-coverage foundation that still manages to look like gorgeous, glowing skin, and POOM delivers. The finish is radiant without sacrificing coverage, while the acne-safe formulation makes it an especially exciting find for breakout-prone skin. Glowy, high-performing and thoughtfully formulated, this is complexion makeup we can absolutely get behind.