Shahna was homeless – now she’s building her own beauty empire
After moving to Adelaide, Shahna Smith found herself homeless. Three years and one pandemic later, she’s a CEO building her own beauty brand. This is how she did it.
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Shahna Smith caused quite the stir 18 months ago in Bunnings Adelaide Airport’s paint department. It was all part of the Indigenous Broken Hill-born entrepreneur’s masterplan to build an empire.
“I said to the man ‘I’m not your regular customer, I am here to mix paint for a lipstick line’ and he was like ‘I will be your Picasso’ and I was there for 2½ hours,” Smith, 24, recalls.
She was on a mission to create nude colours for the Australian cosmetics lab making her brand, Amplified Beauty Australia.
“I could have just sent them another brand’s lipstick and said do something similar, but I wanted my own original shades,” she says, adding they had to be “inclusive”.
Back then, Fenty Beauty, which has make-up for all skin tones, was not on the market and Smith had been unable to source nudes suitable for deep skin tones.
“I thought ‘I don’t have that problem why should these girls?’,” she says. “It was great at Bunnings, I was saying ‘mix these, these and these paints’.”
Smith’s perfect nudes are part of Amplified Beauty Australia’s range of eight liquid-to-matte lipsticks, released on Valentine’s Day. While the made-in-Australia, vegan and cruelty free collection immediately recorded an impressive $5000 in sales, Smith is no overnight success story.
Her brand has been eight years in the making, during which she has overcome many obstacles. The first was the loss of her mother Tracey, at 45, from bowel cancer when Smith was just 16.
“It made me who I am,” Smith says. “I was lucky I had a purpose to dive into. I had told Mum I was going to run an empire.”
Following Tracey’s death, Smith left school in year 11 to work four jobs to make ends meet. She registered her business name, Amplified Beauty Australia, and moved in with her “biggest fans”, her grandparents Pam and Bobby.
Relocating to Melbourne, she trained as a make-up artist, then became a star employee for international cosmetics company Sephora, until she had a car accident.
“I had temporary brain damage and (moved) to casual (hours), but I started thinking of my future,” she says.
Moving to Adelaide in 2019, Smith found herself homeless after a relationship breakdown, but that didn’t stop her from writing a five-year business plan or making “boss phone calls” to cosmetic labs: “I didn’t want my couch surfing to determine who I was and where I was going to go.”
Smith also confided in Kelly Moyle, who runs Glenelg business Style Hutt Studio, where she had been renting a make-up chair. Moyle and her partner Chris Burns gave Smith a place to stay and encouraged her to pursue her dream.
Smith also became a member of The Circle – First Nations Entrepreneur Hub, a collective run out of Lot Fourteen that is providing South Australian Aboriginal-owned entrepreneurs and businesses with industry connections and a work space: “They have been so supportive – it’s a community.”
Accepted into an Indigenous Business Australia program – through which she received a business loan – Smith resigned from her retail management role.
Now Amplified Beauty Australia’s chief executive, she is in talks with a leading cosmetics retailer: “Six months in, I am at year two in my business plan and expanding. Watch this space.”
The Circle now has more than 120 members. In October – Indigenous Business Month – the team will deliver the First Nations Business Showcase
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