Welcome to Second Life, a podcast spotlighting successful women who've made major career changes—and fearlessly mastered the pivot. Hosted by Hillary Kerr, co-founder and chief content officer at Who What Wear, each episode gives you a direct line to women who are game changers in their fields. Subscribe to Second Life on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you get your podcasts to stay tuned.
Claudia Sulewski has become the perfect example of catapulting an online presence into a successful brand with Cyklar, her luxury bodycare line. Long before “clean beauty” and “self-care” became billion-dollar buzzwords, 13-year-old Sulewski pressed record on a flip camera and uploaded her first makeup tutorial under the username BeyondBeautyStar. Nearly fifteen years later, she is the founder of Cyklar, one of the most talked-about luxury bodycare lines today.
What started as grainy bedroom videos—think drugstore hauls, middle-school GRWMs, and fashion reviews—quickly snowballed. Entirely self-taught, Sulewski learned to shoot, light, and edit on her own, cultivating a warm, unfiltered style that felt like hanging out with your best friend. By the time she graduated high school, she was already an official YouTube partner with an agent. Today, her main channel has almost 2.5 million subscribers, and she still posts regularly, garnering hundreds of thousands of views within hours. Beyond YouTube, she has also ventured into acting, with roles on shows like Apple TV+’s Shrinking, and she has directed several music videos for her fiancé, eight-time Grammy winner Finneas O’Connell (yes, Billie Eilish’s brother and producer).
Yet even with Hollywood credits stacking up, her first love has always been the intimate, one-on-one conversation she has with her audience through the screen. In fact, her decade-plus of filming morning routines and nighttime ritual vlogs gave Sulewski a deeper understanding of what her community actually reaches for when they want to feel good in their own skin. In 2024, she channeled all of it into Cyklar—a bodycare brand built on the idea that indulgence shouldn’t be saved for special occasions. Every bottle is designed to turn a two-minute rinse into a legitimate ritual.
Listen to the latest episode of Second Life to discover how Sulewski was able to create Cyklar as a natural extension of her influence. And keep scrolling to shop some of our Cyklar favorites.
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