Knoxville-based Blank Beauty is building new foundations, literally
A Knoxville company backed by robotics and paint industry giants is using patented color science to match customers to custom foundation shades in real time.
Beneath the sidewalks of the Old City, Knoxville, Blank Beauty is building the future of beauty. Founder Charles Brandon started the company about a decade ago with the idea of building a robot that could mix primary colors to create hundreds of unique color combinations on demand.
Brandon called the early days “humble beginnings,” which he said consisted of tinkering with robotics and prototyping in his garage in Memphis.
“We thought you actually had to build the product out fully and have it ready to go and fully functional before raising any capital. So we spent many years above a garage making our first prototypes,” he said. “The first five years of our journey were very humble and kind of self-made.”
That hard work paid off.
Today, the Knoxville-based company has secured investment from one of the largest robotics companies in the world, Epson, and one of the largest paint companies in the world, RPM. It has also unveiled capabilities to provide customized skin-match makeup foundation.
Brandon said that through patented technology and robotic mixing, Blank Beauty can match more than 400 skin tones, accounting for undertones and various lighting conditions.
“We unveiled our robot, Vivi, in January of this year in Miami at Cosmoprof North America. We matched dozens of customers and received such positive feedback that proved to us that this is the future of beauty innovation,” he said.
Thousands of people attended the conference. Blank Beauty hoped to generate enough interest to fill a queue of orders for the day. Within 30 minutes, they hit their quota.
Brandon said that was a good indication they had built the right thing.
Right now, there is no widespread custom makeup option for consumers. Many customers struggle to find a foundation shade in-store that matches their skin tone, often having to self-select or get professionally matched to a specific shade for every season.
“Blank Beauty is challenging this approach by doing a custom skin tone match, providing a warmer shade, a cooler shade, a deeper shade, and a lighter shade that kind of matches the customer throughout the entire year,” Brandon said. “We believe this will lead to less waste, better matches, and the ability for customers to be more informed about what they’re buying.”
In addition to the foundation-matching technology, Blank Beauty can also create more than 16,000 custom nail polish colors, a product offering already available to customers.
Laying the foundation
Teknovation has been covering Blank Beauty’s progress since 2024, when founding editor Tom Ballard connected with the company through APTUS DesignWorks in Maryville. Ben Nibali and his team at APTUS have long helped startups and innovators bring their engineering visions to life, and that was the case with Blank Beauty.
At the time, Brandon was still living in Memphis and focused on mastering the mixing of nail polish. The convenience of working with APTUS as an engineering partner was ultimately enough to convince him to move his company, wife, and team to East Tennessee.
Since relocating, Brandon and his team have secured investments from industry giants Epson, RPM, and Kirker Enterprises, the world’s largest manufacturer of nail polish, as well as local venture capital firms Three Roots Capital and Market Square Ventures.
The team also secured a downtown manufacturing location in the Old City.
“Because our robots are so small and kind of easy to work with, we don’t need a huge factory. We are beneath the Curious Dog in the Old City. And if you walk by the windows, you can actually see the robots making products in the evening or the mornings,” Brandon said.
Customization is the future
Though Blank Beauty has seen significant traction with its custom nail polish and foundation, Brandon said he does not want the company pigeonholed as a cosmetics brand. What he is most proud of is the mixing technology itself, which he says caters to human individuality.
“I would say that the best way to describe us is actually a tech platform. That is the right approach. Whether it’s cosmetics, paints, or coatings, the same science applies across all these different categories,” Brandon said. “To say that we’re a nail polish company sells the technology short. Most nail polish companies don’t have automated robotics handling all of production.”
Nail polish and foundation, he said, are just the beginning. Using their color science technologies, Brandon said the team intends to explore opportunities in paints, coatings, and custom-colored countertop devices.
For now, Blank Beauty remains focused on bringing the foundation-matching product to market.
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