Naomi Watts

Company: Stripes BeautyTitle: Founder & Chief Creative OfficerIndustry: Consumer ProductsNotable in 2024: Watts established herself as a leading advocate for women's health, as Stripes Beauty was acquired by the private equity firm L Catterton.

"Over the course of my career as an actor, I've outrun tsunamis and come face-to-face with 'King Kong.' But nothing prepared me for early menopause."

For an actress who has delivered many lines during her career, this opening line in the founding story of Naomi Watts women's health brand Stripes Beauty, focused on menopause, is among her most memorable.

An estimated 1.3 million women in the U.S. alone transition into menopause each year – by some estimates, as many as 6,000 in a single day.

While menopause typically begins in a woman's late 40s or 50s, Watts was among the women whose transition began earlier, with her hormones changing at what doctors described as a drastic level, and the estrogen depletion resulting in common symptoms, such as dry skin, disturbed sleep cycles, night sweats and hot flashes. The resulting combination of physical ailments and psychological stress from the hormonal changes led Watts to say she felt as if "I didn't have control over my own body."

She launched Stripes Beauty in 2022 to focus on solutions for women experiencing perimenopause and menopause, with a range of products from skincare to hair and body and vaginal wellness. It wasn't Watt's first foray into the consumer space – she is also a co-founder of clean beauty retail company Onda Beauty – but as she told TODAY, this may be her most meaningful business mission.

"I reject the notion that [menopause] marks the end of one's life," Watts said in a virtual interview with TODAY's shopping site. "Just because it's the end of one's reproductive life doesn't mean to say you're invisible or irrelevant. In fact, I wanted to have it be reminded that this is the beginning of a new point."

Watts isn't alone in seizing the entrepreneurial opportunity to do more for women going through these health crises, with fellow 2025 Changemaker Joanna Strober founding Midi Health as a result of her difficulties finding treatment for perimenopause.

A major turning point for Stripes Beauty came last year, when it was acquired in a deal between Watts and private investment firm L Catterton, which is backed by Louis Vuitton parent company LVMH and has $37 billion in investments across hundreds of consumer brands. Watts had originally founded the company under biotech Amyris, but that firm went into bankruptcy and Watts had bought her brand back at auction for $500,000.

L Catterton has said it didn't see a bankrupt business model, but a high-end business model inside what was a failing, misaligned parent company, Amyris. It has brought in top female cosmetics executives for the next leg of growth for Stripes Beauty: former Revlon CEO Debra Perelman as executive chairman and former L'Oreal executive Cara Kamenev as president.

"The plan was always to scale," Watts told Fast Company at the time of the L Catterton deal. "We're expanding globally and creating more products to meet women's needs."

Initially available on Stripes website and through Amazon, the brand has expanded to QVC, and Canada (including retailer Hudson Bay).

It's lost on no one who has followed the company or entertainment industry that Hollywood is known to be as cruel as any industry to aging women. But Watts, who has become a national leader on the topic of menopause – this year, she released a book on the subject, "Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I'd Known About Menopause" – is looking ahead. "I really got going in my early 30s and I was told, once you get to your 40s it's pretty much done. And here I am in my 50s and still going," she told TODAY.

She stresses that her company's mission isn't to sell any idea of being able to reverse time. "Stripes is not an anti-aging brand," she wrote on the company's website. "Rather, we believe in aging well, with ease, and with pride. … Growing older is a privilege that we both nurture and celebrate."