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Kelly Kovack
Professional Background
Kelly Kovack is a distinguished figure in the fashion and beauty industries, widely recognized for her innovative approach and entrepreneurial spirit. Her illustrious career began in the fashion business, where she honed her skills working with prestigious establishments like Bergdorf Goodman, alongside the avant-garde mavericks at Chrome Hearts. This dual experience provided Kelly with a unique perspective on both high-end fashion and the more rebellious elements of the industry, enabling her to shape a career that defies conventions.
After gaining invaluable insights from the supply side of the fashion industry, Kelly made a significant transition into the beauty sector. As a member of the original executive team at Bliss, she played a pivotal role in transforming the beauty shopping experience, fundamentally changing the way cosmetics and personal care products were merchandised and presented to consumers. Her leadership as Managing Director of the Bliss Out catalog and product division was instrumental in the company's successful acquisition by luxury conglomerate LVMH, marking a monumental achievement that reshaped the beauty landscape.
Building on her successes at Bliss, Kelly co-founded Chemistry, a consultancy designed to provide strategic guidance to emerging personal care brands. Her expertise has been sought by a diverse range of clients, from multi-billion-dollar corporations like Old Navy and Mattel to independent brands such as Zirh and 21 Drops. This adaptability demonstrates her keen understanding of brand strategy and marketing, making her a sought-after advisor in the industry.
Additionally, Kelly's entrepreneurial drive led her to establish Purpose-Built, a comprehensive creative agency that specializes in integrated vertical product and brand development. In this role, she has further solidified her reputation as a trailblazer in the beauty industry, consistently delivering innovative solutions to contemporary branding challenges. Her creative vision has not only aided her clients but has also positioned her as a key figure in shaping industry trends.
Kelly's ventures are marked by her commitment to quality and excellence. Notably, she co-founded Foundry NYC, the parent company of the award-winning fragrance brand Odin, which was developed in collaboration with the acclaimed fashion label Odin New York. Odin's fragrances are celebrated worldwide and are available at renowned retailers, including Barneys New York, Colette Paris, and Liberty London. This venture further showcases Kelly's ability to blend the worlds of fashion and beauty into compelling consumer experiences.
Education and Achievements
Kelly's educational foundation played a crucial role in shaping her analytical and strategic thinking. She pursued higher education at the Catholic University of America, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Philosophy and Political Science. This rigorous academic background enabled her to develop critical thinking skills that have been invaluable throughout her career.
Over the years, Kelly's exceptional work has garnered numerous accolades and recognition within the industry. Her contributions as a creative director and brand architect have been featured prominently in various media outlets, demonstrating her influence and prominence in the beauty and fashion sectors. She has been recognized with several prestigious awards, including a Pantone Color Award, a Pentaward, and a FiFi Award, along with multiple Allure Best of Beauty awards, showcasing her commitment to excellence and innovation.
In her role as a thought leader in the beauty industry, Kelly has also taken on leadership positions in various organizations. She has served as Founder and CEO of BeautyMatter, where she continues to make significant contributions to the conversation around beauty trends and innovations.
Achievements
Kelly Kovack’s achievements are numerous and significant, highlighting her impact on both the beauty and fashion industries. Her role in the original executive team at Bliss was a transformative experience, setting the stage for her future endeavors. The acquisition of Bliss by LVMH not only marked a victorious milestone in her career but also illustrated her capacity to influence large-scale corporate transitions in the beauty sector.
As a founder of Chemistry and Purpose-Built, Kelly has crafted a unique consultancy that bridges the gap between creativity and strategic brand management. Her ability to collaborate with clients across various scales has led to the successful launch and growth of numerous beauty brands. Her expertise in brand strategy has been vital for brands looking to navigate the competitive landscape of the beauty market.
Moreover, Kelly's entrepreneurial ventures, including the co-founding of Odin New York fragrances, demonstrate her imaginative foresight in creating products that resonate with consumers globally. This brand's recognition and availability in prestigious stores are a testament to Kelly’s ability to blend creativity with commercial viability.
Throughout her career, Kelly has maintained an active presence in various organizations and has been instrumental in guiding new initiatives within the beauty industry. Overall, her career is a roadmap of innovation and impact, characterized by a series of game-changing ventures that have consistently pushed the boundaries of conventional beauty marketing and brand strategy.
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Clay is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Clay centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Clay makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Clay's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Clay isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Clay instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Clay is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Clay can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.