Liz Folce starts product development with a phone call. She asks one question, then listens.
“What is one thing this brand must be?” she asks.
The answers come in women’s own words, real, raw and unfiltered. They talk about sweat under their breasts. About joints that don’t cooperate. About sagging, crepey skin.
They talk about arthritis, inflammation and the daily decisions they make about what they can and can’t manage. Many mention the moment they realize the beauty industry no longer assumes they’re the customer.
Liz writes down these words, then builds around them. She treats the calls as field notes for what the business needs to make next.
“My favorite part of the job is definitely the customer,” she says.
That listening-first approach has turned Nakery Beauty into a $20 million business built for women over 50. The company generated $21 million in sales last year and expects to hit $25 million this year.
A 12-person team handles direct-to-consumer sales, Ulta Beauty, Amazon and television retail, including HSN and QVC.
Liz founded Nakery Beauty and serves as CEO. Her husband and business partner, Robert DeBaker, serves as COO.
Liz spends most of her time in product development and operations, where promises either hold up at scale or quietly fall apart.
Liz sees the opportunity in how often customers return and what they ask for next.
She has watched brands treat older women like a niche. She sees a customer base with purchasing power and persistent problems that span years.
Pain pulls people into the present
On the calls, Liz hears the same pattern. Women explain pain through the structure of their days and the limits it sets on what they can plan.
Researchers have studied this shift.
A 2023 study published by Cambridge University Press found that both physical and psychological pain can increase people’s preference for immediate, smaller rewards. Researchers call the shift intertemporal choice, a measure of how people weigh the present against the future.
That conclusion echoed what Liz had heard countless times: When pain stays in the body, the future becomes harder to plan for. Relief that works now is far more valuable than promises that sound good later.
Liz built Nakery Beauty around that reality by making products that fit into customers’ daily routines and earned repeat use.
The first product said the problem out loud
Before Liz launched anything, she ran focus groups. Using Facebook and Zoom, she reached women across the country. She listened carefully and wrote down the needs that kept surfacing.
The first demand was clear.
“Clean ingredients,” they said. “Please make it for us, women over 50. We feel forgotten, like nobody listens to us.”
The focus group sessions kept circling back to the same expectations: Women wanted clean formulations. They wanted clinical testing. They wanted products that would actually solve their everyday problems.
“They want clinically tested products to prove they actually work,” Liz said.
Liz hired a chemist, brought Robert into the business and built the first products with people who could execute at scale.
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The first product targeted a problem women had been describing for years.
“The first one was for boob sweat,” Liz said.
The deodorant tackled sweat under the breasts, a problem women had quietly managed for years. Early sales confirmed Liz’s suspicions: When a product solves a real problem and does what it promises, customers return.
A two-page spread in New Beauty magazine drove early traction, and the company expanded into direct-to-consumer sales, Amazon and television retail.
Robert says the company leaned into television because it already reached the customer they wanted to serve.
“Who watches TV and buys from TV?” he said. “Women over 50.”
She values television for a different reason: It forces clarity. It forces performance. A product either earns a place in a woman’s day or it doesn’t.
Pain reshaped the business
As Liz continued running focus groups, one subject kept coming up.
Pain.
Women didn’t describe pain as a single symptom. They described it in terms of what disappeared: Errands they stopped running. Hobbies they gave up. Plans they avoided because they couldn’t trust their bodies to cooperate.
One woman told Liz she could no longer lift her arms high enough to make art.
“She said, ‘Raising my arms hurts so badly, I can’t do that anymore,’” Liz recalled.
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That conversation stuck with her. The company decided to develop an over-the-counter pain product and submit it to the FDA.
It took time. It took money.
“It took us two years and a lot of money to put it through the FDA,” Liz said.
The FDA verified the ingredients. The company ran third-party clinical testing. The pain product became Nakery Beauty’s top seller, changing the company’s revenue mix.
Robert says television helped early growth because it matched the customer and generated faster cash flow than slower brand-building strategies.
She comes back to the same test: does it work when a woman uses it every day?
A sunscreen problem sits in the middle of her story
Customers ask Liz for sunscreen, just as they ask for everything else. They want it clean, tested and made for skin that changes with age.
Liz has reviewed formulas and walked away from them. Sunscreen remains one of the few requests she has not turned into a product.
Her hesitation is not theoretical. Her brother died from malignant melanoma at 24. By the time doctors diagnosed it, he had two weeks left.
Sunscreen carries consequences she does not take lightly. She has chosen not to release one until she can stand behind it.
The week her brother died still shapes the way she listens
Liz learned what it means to pay attention long before beauty became her career.
“I grew up in Santa Monica, California,” she said. “Raised by a single mom who couldn’t really afford to take care of us.”
For about a year, she, her brother and their mother lived at the Santa Monica Pier. Liz was five. Her brother was seven.
“Hot dogs,” she said. “And the hobos. A lot of homeless people.”
She still remembers the adults who noticed two kids and did something small that mattered. A woman named Patty bought them ice cream while their mother worked.
“She always bought us ice cream,” Liz said. “She made sure we were okay.”
Later, the family lived in a car for about a year while her mother worked toward stability. She started as a department store salesperson, then worked her way into management and buying roles in beauty and clothing.
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“She worked really hard,” Liz said. “She left early in the morning and came home late at night.”
Her brother grew up to build a clothing business in Los Angeles that took off quickly. Then he got sick.
Her father had left when Liz was two and her brother was four. Liz did not maintain a relationship with him. Her brother kept hoping he would come back.
In the final week of his life, her brother found their father and asked him to come. He did.
“It was strange having him there,” Liz said.
A nurse later told the family the timeline looked shorter than expected. Liz’s mother adjusted the morphine to manage pain. His organs began shutting down. He woke during the night, knocked over flowers, woke their mother and died in her arms.
“Watching him die was awful,” Liz said. “I left California after because I didn’t want to be there anymore.”
The business gap became visible at the counter
Liz built her beauty career in New York the old-school way, starting at the Estée Lauder counter and moving into executive roles.
She learned what the job rewarded. The counter moved fast, and every extra minute with a customer came with a cost.
“They’d say, you’re missing sales,” she said.
Time made the gap harder to ignore.
Women talked plainly about what they needed as they aged. Leadership teams treated those needs as a joke.
“I went to companies and said women are complaining about boobs,” Liz said. “They laughed.”
One company told her the market was too small.
Liz left her job and used her savings to start Nakery Beauty anyway. She launched the brand around 2020 or 2021. She was about 52.
“It wasn’t the safest thing to do,” she said. “But I quit my job and started a brand.”
A Florida operation built for control
Nakery Beauty manufactures and packages its products in Florida and operates a warehouse in New Jersey. Liz said the structure gives the company speed and control.
“We do it all in-house,” she said. “Everything is done here locally in Florida.”
Liz moved her mother from California to Florida about a decade ago. Her mother now lives in assisted living.
“She never recovered from losing a child,” Liz said.
The company has expanded internationally, including launches in London and across Europe. Liz said the small team imposes discipline. Each new product must earn its place in the catalog, the supply chain and the customer’s routine.
Liz and Robert support organizations focused on cancer care, Radiant Church, homelessness and women’s shelters.
“It’s easy to write a check,” Liz said. “Showing up changes you.”
When Liz talks about what she wants customers to take from Nakery Beauty, she returns to the principle that shaped the business from the beginning.
“Everyone deserves to be heard,” she said.
Her brother’s death left behind another lesson, she said, that she carries into work.
“Life is short,” she said. “You never know when it can change that fast.”
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