With Keca’s Usna, Monica Walls is creating a beauty brand rooted in reinvention, confidence, heritage, and the quiet power of showing up as yourself.
For Monica, beauty was never just about color. It was about confidence. It was about identity. It was about the small, intimate rituals that help women feel grounded in who they are before they step into the world.
Long before she became the founder of Keca’s Usna, she built a successful career in executive leadership and corporate HR in Silicon Valley. It was a world that required discipline, strategy, emotional intelligence, and the ability to solve complex problems with clarity. But after years of leading in corporate spaces, she found herself being pulled toward something more personal, more creative, and more deeply connected to her own story.
That pull eventually became Keca’s Usna, a beauty brand centered on long-lasting, wearable, non-sticky lip products designed for women who want to feel polished without feeling unlike themselves.
“There is often this unspoken pressure that women should have everything figured out by a certain age,” she says. “We are told, directly and indirectly, that starting over later in life is risky, unrealistic, or even out of the question. I am living proof that none of that has to be true.”
That belief sits at the heart of the brand. Keca’s Usna is not positioned as a trend-driven beauty company. It does not chase every viral moment or build its identity around fleeting aesthetics. Instead, it feels personal, intentional, and founder-led, because it is.
For Monica, the brand is inseparable from her own life. Her heritage, her family, her professional experience, and her desire to create something meaningful are all embedded into the foundation of Keca’s Usna.
The name itself tells part of that story. “Usna” means “lips” in Croatian, a tribute to her Croatian background and the impact they have had on her life. “Keca” is her childhood nickname. Together, the name reflects both lineage and intimacy, a fitting foundation for a brand built around one of beauty’s most personal categories.
“Keca’s Usna is deeply personal,” she says. “My heritage, my life experiences, my creativity, and my problem-solving nature are all woven into the brand. In many ways, Keca’s Usna is a reflection of me.”
The original idea came from a practical frustration. Walls wanted a lip product that was long-lasting, pigmented, hydrating, and non-sticky. Like many women, she loved the look of certain lip products but found the formulas difficult to wear in real life. Some were drying. Others were sticky. Some looked beautiful for a moment but did not hold up throughout the day.
Rather than simply accepting what was available, she approached the issue the same way she has approached challenges throughout her career, as something to solve.
“I have always been a problem solver,” she says. “After years in corporate HR, I was ready for a new adventure. So I decided to apply those same problem-solving skills to something much more fun, lipstick.”
That problem-solving instinct is part of what makes Keca’s Usna stand apart. In a beauty industry often dominated by hype, fast trends, and constant launches, she has remained focused on function, feel, and emotional connection. For her, a product has to earn its place in a woman’s routine. It has to be beautiful, but it also has to be useful. It has to feel good. It has to support the wearer, not distract from her.
“One guideline I live by is that chasing every trend can cost you your personality and identity,” she says. “That does not mean trends are bad. It is important to be aware, current, and connected to what consumers are responding to. But if you are constantly shifting just to keep up with passing fads, you risk losing what makes your brand original.”
That originality is rooted in the brand’s core values: strength, faith, and love. While those words may not immediately sound like the language of a cosmetic brand, they speak directly to the emotional role beauty can play in a woman’s life. A lipstick can be part of a morning ritual. A gloss can be a final touch before a big meeting. A bold shade can shift posture, mood, and presence.
Monica understands that for many women, beauty is not superficial. It is personal.
“When a woman applies one of our shades, I want her to feel comfortable, confident, and fully herself,” she says. “There is no greater power than being at ease in your own skin.”
That philosophy has helped Keca’s Usna build a community around more than product. She has made connection a central part of the brand’s growth, meeting customers through conventions, networking groups, in-person events, and social media. She speaks about her customers not as consumers in the abstract, but as women she often knows by name.
That sense of community made Keca’s Usna’s recent appearance on Daytime Chicago especially meaningful. The brand was featured during a summer makeup segment, giving viewers the opportunity to see the products applied in real time and experience the texture, pigment, and wearability that Walls considers essential to the brand’s story.
For Monica, the moment was not about spectacle. It was about visibility, credibility, and connection.
“It was definitely a ‘pinch me’ moment,” she says. “So much of building a brand happens behind the scenes, from product development to packaging to customer conversations, so seeing Keca’s Usna come to life on live television was incredibly special.”
The segment also offered something that is difficult to replicate through still images or product descriptions, real-time interaction. During the appearance, Daytime Chicago host Tonya Francisco picked up one of the lipsticks and tried it on herself, an unscripted moment that gave viewers an authentic look at the product in use.
For a brand where formula is central, that kind of moment matters.
“Formula is everything at Keca’s Usna,” Monica says. “It was the entire catalyst for creating the brand. Whenever we can show the texture, pigment, comfort, and wearability in real time, that is a win.”
Still, Daytime Chicago is only one marker in a much larger journey. She is focused on growing Keca’s Usna with intention, making sure that every new opportunity aligns with the soul of the brand. As visibility increases through media, public appearances, and customer awareness, she is careful not to let momentum dilute the values that made the brand meaningful in the first place.
“For me, growth has to be intentional,” she says. “Every opportunity is exciting, but not every opportunity is aligned. As a founder, I have learned that protecting the soul of the brand means being clear about what we say yes to and what we are willing to walk away from.”
That clarity is especially important as Keca’s Usna prepares for its next evolution. Monica has shared that the brand will continue adding to the collection in the near future. While she is not revealing too much too soon, she confirms that a new color and finish are currently in the sample testing phase.
It is a careful, considered approach. Keca’s Usna is not expanding for the sake of expansion. Each product has to meet the brand’s standards for wearability, comfort, and quality. Monica says formula remains one of the most important deciding factors, along with whether a product truly fits into the lives of the women the brand serves.
“A product has to feel aligned with our values, our standards, and our customer’s everyday life,” she says. “It is not enough for something to simply be beautiful. It has to be wearable, comfortable, and thoughtfully made.”
That thoughtfulness also reflects her own season of reinvention. She is building Keca’s Usna at a stage in life when many women are told to settle into what they have already achieved. Instead, she is proving that experience can become fuel for a new chapter. Her corporate background did not disappear when she entered beauty. It became part of her foundation.
To Monica, reinvention is not about abandoning who you were. It is about bringing everything you have learned with you and using it to build something new.
“Reinvention, to me, means trusting that there is still more life to live, more creativity to explore, and more purpose to step into,” she says. “We went from shipping orders out of a garage to being on television. That still amazes me.”
That arc, from garage shipments to television visibility, reflects more than business growth. It reflects the quiet courage of a woman willing to begin again, not because she had to, but because she trusted there was something more to create.
And that is the bigger vision behind Keca’s Usna.
“This is more than makeup,” Walls says. “It is about self-trust, confidence, and kindness toward yourself and others. I want our customers to feel like they are part of a community, not just buying lipstick.”
For Monica, the future of Keca’s Usna is not only about new shades, new finishes, or broader visibility. It is about continuing to build a brand that cheers women on as they become more fully themselves. Inside and out.
