Beauty advocate Kate Morris, founder of Adorebeauty.com.au, started Australia’s first beauty e-commerce site in 1999 from a garage in Melbourne at the age of 21. Starting with just $12,000 and two little known cosmetic companies on board, Adore Beauty has grown to more than 200 brands, 13,000 products, and hundreds of thousands of customers. A university job on the cosmetic counters led Kate to realise that most women found department stores intimidating and unpleasant. Kate was inspired to create a disruptive beauty shopping experience that empowered consumers.

In May 2015, Adore Beauty announced an investment from retail giant Woolworths Limited. Kate was awarded the Business Innovation Award for Victoria at the Telstra Business Women’s Awards in 2014, and was inducted into the Australian Businesswomen’s Network Hall of Fame in 2015.

In 2017 Kate was the first woman to be awarded the Industry Recognition Award for online retail in the nine-year history of the StarTrack ORIAs. A passionate advocate for gender equality, Kate was named the Top 3 person in e- commerce for 2018 by Inside Retail. Adore Beauty has also been scooping up accolades, making the lists for Deloitte’s Tech Fast 50 Australia and Tech Fast 500 Asia-Pacific for the last five years in a row. 

In 2017 she implemented the Adore Beauty Women in Tech Scholarship, which aims to provide Australia’s future female tech leaders with a paid internship plus a $2,000 boost to their tuition fees.

Additionally, under Kate’s management, Adore Beauty has implemented paid parental leave policy for men and women for up to three months, as well as paid domestic violence leave, encouraging all small businesses to do more to support the victims of domestic violence.