FFW x Priyanka - Kulfi Beauty - Jan 3 Episode
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Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World podcast. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show. I'm the person behind all things Female Founder World. And today I'm chatting with the founder of Kolfi Beauty, Priyanka Ganju. Welcome. Hi, Jasmine. I'm so excited to be here. You guys have done a lot since launching in 2021.
You're only a few years old, you're a Sephora bestseller, you have quite a big range of products now, your content is absolutely killing it, you have this hardcore dedicated community, you've had press coverage everywhere. I'm just so interested in how you've made all of this happen in such a short amount of time.
It's really impressive. Thank you. This podcast is all about learning from people who are like building right now, not people who maybe built 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So I want to get into some really like specific tactics and things that are working. Does that sound good to you? That sounds great. Okay.
Let's start at the beginning 2021. You'd been working in the beauty industry. Why did you want to start this brand of your own? [00:01:00] I always say it's wild to me that I have a beauty brand because growing up, I actually didn't wear makeup and I didn't really participate in beauty. It just never felt like something that I was given permission to participate in.
Quite literally because my mom would tell me not to wear makeup, but also because I just didn't see people who look like me in like on the, in the beauty campaigns, just being celebrated for our features. And so that's something that kind of stuck. With me through adulthood, but somehow I ended up making myself be part of the beauty industry from a business perspective.
So I worked at Estee Lauder where I did strategy and then I moved to Ipsy, which is a beauty subscription service where I ran merchandising, which was Playing with product and actually like testing product for what we wanted to put in our beauty bag. And so all of those experiences were in my adult life is when I had this aha moment of this is actually fun, makeup is fun, it's expressive, like it makes me feel a certain way when I put on a red lipstick [00:02:00] or a gold highlighter.
And that's where it clicked for me was that I. see a space where this joyful relationship with beauty hasn't really been centered, especially for women who are South Asian. And that was something that I wanted to build for because I hadn't seen it before. So that's really how we, I got started.
Amazing. I want to talk about money because, we're not following hobbies here. These businesses, how did you get the money to start? And what does it cost to start something like this? Yeah. So I left my job in 2019 to start. Like working on this I would probably recommend you keep your job if possible, as long as possible.
But at that point, I had about 100, 000 saved and I got like another 50, 000 from family. And that was the 150, 000 pool that I used to start the business. And I thought it would last me like two years, just got a start. through the launch day, which was Feb 2021. Wow. [00:03:00] Okay. And then since then, how have you been funding things?
So we did friends and family round. That's what got us to the Sephora launch. And then we did raise, go out and raise funding. Okay. How did you learn how to do that? It's really trial and error. I think you just have to go and put yourself out there. In fact, like the first time I.
Was able to get money was when I posted on my LinkedIn. I had posted about our story. I'd made an application to one of those competitions for early stage startups, and I just posted my application. On LinkedIn, and I said, this is my application like just for everyone to read about what I'm building and someone who I had gone to school with 12 years ago reached out and was like, Hey, what are you doing?
Let's chat. And then we chatted and he was like, do you want money for this? And I was like, wow that was easy. It sounds easy, but to get to that point, to get to the point where you have the confidence to be able to like. Totally. [00:04:00] Have a conversation and have your business plan laid out took a lot of rejection.
I think you just have to be very comfortable with putting yourself out there. And lots of people saw that post, but no , a lot of people, you would think that so many other people will come and, support you and that doesn't always happen, but the people who will support you, whether that's your customers or whether that's the Like the people who want to fund you will find you eventually just need to be very comfortable with rejection and very comfortable with putting yourself out there.
I want to like actually just talk about that a little bit more because people again, it's one of those things that you hear a lot of people talking about. You need to get comfortable with rejection. You need to be comfortable putting yourself out there and I'm confident asking people for money and you're like yeah, sure.
Tick. It's actually a really hard thing. It's something that I think a lot of people are really wrestling with. And how did you get to that point? Was there anything that you were actively doing to feel comfortable? Were you just born with some innate confidence? I've only had one person answer that question with, yes, I was born with innate confidence.[00:05:00]
I think I just got rejected a bunch of times. It's really experience. I think you, go in with you take every meeting as if it's going to be successful. And then you hear a no, and you're like, okay, not time for the next person on the list. Because ultimately, like you just I have had the singular mission that I had to get to the finish line and we had to get the launch date and we had to, I had to see this out in the world.
Cause I had at that point worked on it for a while and I just felt it was such a beautiful brand and I really wanted to see it come to life. It was this attitude of I don't really, even if I get, even if someone says, no, it's not going to stop me from doing what I'm doing, at least till I run out of money and I'll continue doing it anyway.
So it's, you try not to take it too personally. And but I don't think like more than confidence. I think it just takes persistence. I think if you have some level of innate persistence, I think that is probably going to. take you a much longer way. Yeah, that's a really good way of phrasing it.
How are you finding investors? You found that one on [00:06:00] LinkedIn. The rest of them, were you reaching out to your network for introductions? Someone who doesn't have a network to get introductions, how do you go about this? Yeah it's hard. Ultimately, I would say the people who funded me in the friends and family round were people who had worked with me in that.
In the past, like my ex bosses some more my friends who were like, Okay, I see you're doing this. And I have some money to be able to give to you. And this is despite having a pretty strong professional network. I would say at that point, I'd worked in corporate beauty for a while and I'd been to some good schools.
I had a pretty good. Professional network, but even then convincing someone to invest in you is very hard. And so to the extent possible, I think the longer you can bootstrap, use your own savings, keep your job or like tap into people who know you, trust you, believe in you, whether it's like someone you've worked with in the past, I think that's probably the most Time efficient thing to do because I definitely reached out to a lot of seed funds, investment [00:07:00] funds.
Like I said, I got that first meeting because of my professional network, but all I heard was no. And it's honestly not easy. It felt like I was having hundreds of hours of conversations just to hear no. But, in the long run, it does help because now I feel like I know. A lot of the funds in the beauty space because I had that first conversation with them, but I also, that didn't mean that it converted in that first conversation.
So then you ended up launching in 2021. What did you launch with? What product? We launched with our cagel eyeliner, which is our, still one of our best selling products. Actually. We sell one every. Four minutes or something that my finance director came up with. And the Kajal is basically a traditional South Asian eyeliner.
It's culturally, we used to make it at home. You burnt like almond and mix it with ghee or casserole oil and use it to line the eyes. Culturally it's supposed to ward off evil eye or nazar. And so we had a campaign that played on that. It had that same like beautiful formulation that's very pigmented, [00:08:00] but in a very modern formula.
And we spoke to the idea of Nazar no more. So we said like evil eye no more, but the evil eye is, to the patriarchy and to the Eurocentric beauty standards that have kept us like, held us behind and rejecting those ideas. And, embracing self expression. So we launched it in black and also like a series of colors.
And it was like a really fun, like focused launch which again was very intentional because we had only so much money to be able to launch. We couldn't launch with a full collection. I want to talk about launch and launch marketing and What worked in that moment? And as you've since gone on to launch a lot more products, a lot more SKUs, what's working now?
What did those launch campaigns look like? Can you walk us through? I think one of the things that really worked for us was timing. And I think sometimes the fact that we were in this cultural moment in 2021 where Nobody else had owned this messaging before of being loud and proud South Asian in beauty, and we were [00:09:00] also, there was a lot of conversations thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement that around inclusion.
And so I think we were in a cultural moment where people were looking for those stories, looking for how do we uplift voices, and I'm a beneficiary of that, I do think that timing helped in terms of Being culturally in the moment. And then of course we had a beautiful photography. We had a beautiful product.
We had a Bollywood inspired photo shoot. We did we, the models we chose were from the community. We actually casted from the community and found models who you'd typically wouldn't see in a beauty campaign, and especially South Asian models, all three of our models were South Asian from different backgrounds and, diverse stories.
So it was such a fresh campaign in a moment where people were really looking for that. Not to say that they're not looking for it now. I'm just saying in that moment, it was so new that it just got attention. That's why we got the Vogue coverage on launch day, and we were in the allure for homepage and all these things, and I think it's because we were able to capture [00:10:00] that moment with a really beautiful and thoughtful brand and launch.
How did that press come about? Were you working with an agency? Were you pitching? How did that happen? That was my only marketing spend, actually, mostly because I actually didn't know anything about marketing when I launched the brand. You've done so well. It was really, truly like our PR agency, and then we used to have a blog back in the day called Kofi Bites, where we Worked with a lot of up and coming Gen Z writers who, we were probably the first time they'd ever written for a publication where we gave them a platform to talk about beauty and wellness.
So there was this like very engaged writing community as well as a PR agency that was helping us also amplify those stories that kind of came together. Amazing. What agency did you work with? They're called 6 1. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Do you work with an agency or do you do it yourself now? Yeah. So we work with an agency actually that is an, one of the, one of the people that we worked with at Six One who was loosely affiliated with that agency, went on to start her own agency.
And so we like now work with her they're [00:11:00] called Good Apple PR. Okay. I love a good PR agency recommendation. They're great. They're great. Both of those are great. I think we were just like, now we're in that phase where we want to be very like there's a launch moment and there's the constant drumbeat. And so I think what Apple has done a good job for us. Do you think that the price you're getting leads to sales or is it more about like brand building, getting Sephora, like what does the press do for you? I would say if you go into it with a lens that'll convert to sales, you're going to be set yourself up for disappointment.
You think you can get this feature and then Shopify is going to be like ding. No it very rarely happens. I think we've had a couple of press mentions that have led to sales. I think we were once in the allure, email completely organic and that led to a lot of traffic.
The other one was that this year we were on the today show. She made it segment. And like the day the segment air, we saw like a huge jump in traffic. And how do you get on the show? That's so cool. You need to ask that. They did a great job. And of course, having a story and just also I think one of the things that was interesting was that they [00:12:00] look for like other times you've shared the story before because they want to make sure that, you have some experience sharing your story.
So even doing things that are just putting your story out there on social media will make it more likely that they'll pick you up because they know you're good at expressing your story. In fact, the segment is going to re air in December on December 27th. I'm really excited. And this time I'm ready.
So we have a, we'll have a discount code ready. Last time around, I didn't think of that, but this time I want to convert all the traffic that comes in. So those have been segments that have actually converted to sales, but those I would say are few and far between. Overall, I would say it's more about establishing credibility.
We, this year, won three Allure Best of Beauty Awards, which I think is again, unheard of for a brand that is our size and stage. That's like half of our product portfolio. But it just establishes that we're, us in the eyes of the beauty consumer that, they're.
Legit, and so that's if someone Googles you, there's 5, 10 articles that are talking about you that helps because again they're not like, Oh, this is something that's like a fly by night, like operation. [00:13:00] Something that you're doing so well is content, TikTok, community building, and I think it's one of those things where you discover a brand you go to their account and you look what they're doing.
And you're like, yeah, they've absolutely nailed it. Like I can tell exactly what they're about immediately. Like it feels really relevant and really fresh, but like still is like selling me on the product. And that's a really hard thing to do. And it's also a hard thing to teach people how to do, but I would love to try and capture what it is that you're doing.
That's working when you and your team are planning what you're going to post in your content. Can you walk me through what that process looks like in some of the tools that you might use to do it and who's helping you do it? Yeah, I would say taking a step back even from the direction of our content, it really stems from this idea of I didn't feel seen in beauty content before.
Our goal is to have people have a joyful relationship with beauty and see themselves in beauty. And that started with that blog I was talking about. The [00:14:00] evolution of that is storytelling, but in video format or in social media friendly format. And so a lot of what we do is feature people who have, who are using our products, their stories, showing those diverse faces in our content.
So it stems from what is our brand mission and what should be the kind of stories that we should be telling. And as we think about content and, doing a mix of, I would say product content, but at the same time, talking about the brand personality, talking about behind the scenes, now we have a theme that, you know sometimes.
Get volunteered to do content with us. It it's all about making sure we're still, showcasing different faces showcasing different stories. Making it fun and approachable because that's the ethos of the brand. I think in terms of specific. Tools. Now we have a team I'm not super into the day-to-day we use Plani leave for still for Instagram planning.
. I think TikTok, we just use a Google sheet to plan and, we'll I'll, we'll typically put in like the concepts, put in some like reference links and [00:15:00] then we're probably shooting, filming, editing content every week a couple of days of shooting content. And then, my team is like editing content every week.
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Do you work with any UGC creators? We do. But so we have our, we launched our ambassador program called Kofi Besties earlier this year, but that was a formal way of crystallizing the community we had already built of micro creators. A lot of the people in the Kofi Besties program are micro creators who do UGC.
So sometimes we'll ask them to be like, Hey for example, in December we're doing a lot of emphasis on our sets, our set of like Bundles of beauty products. So we just recently worked with them to create content for the [00:17:00] bundles. And so we reached out to some of them and it's a paid partnership, but it's like a way to have an already engaged community that loves your brand also creating.
content for you. Amazing. How do you, like in a really practical way, how do you start and then organize a community like that where they're dipping in and out with a paid arrangement, but you want to keep them engaged. You want to have the right people in there. Like, how do you manage that?
And is there a dedicated person on your team that does that? We have someone who is helping freelance manage so she probably does a few hours a day, I would say, manage the community and we have a group chat as well in Geneva that she runs and so it's really fun. I think it took us some time, right?
We launched in 2021, we finally launched this program this year, so it took us three years to even get to a place where we had the resources to be able to do that. And initially, I would say how we started was just, it started out by gifting products to influencers and we. Did a pretty blanket approach, I would say we were pretty generous with our [00:18:00] gifting because it was still all things considered, still one of the lowest cost, marketing tools we had, and then we saw who genuinely engaged and we try to keep like that relationship more informally, and then building that list for our new launches, continuing engaging them with new launches.
Maybe sometimes we'll reach out to them and be like, do you need a restock of this product? Because we see them using it. We see that they love the brand. And then finally coming to a place where, we were able to launch this community. But even then I would say not everyone engages all the time.
Everyone has. A million things going on in their lives, and that's totally okay. It's just more about making sure that, you're on occasion. We did a we did a zoom call where we did a holiday look together, and it was me, our team and some of the people who were able to join in. So it's just like that.
Constantly providing some sort of programming to keep them engaged. And it's okay for them to opt in or out of it, depending on like their life, because they have a lot going on too. I think the live programming is so key it's [00:19:00] one of those things where I think people get disheartened if they don't have a thousand people sign up to come to their whatever. Oh no, we had 20 people come. And that's the thing.
And that was, that's amazing. 20 people took 45 minutes to join your thing is absolutely incredible. Yeah, I agree. I think it's like people need to reframe in their mind about what success looks like with that because it is a form of influencer marketing and it's a it's a way of engaging those really influential and powerful people within your circle, even if they're not like huge influencers or press or whatever.
These are the folks that you want to be out in the world as ambassadors for you. And it's like a 20, 20 people on a 45 minute call. Huge win. Absolutely. And, it shows up in little ways now when we post something, we, I see the people who comment on our posts, and there are people who we've touched in some way and left, this impression, this joyful relationship manifested that in real life.
And so I think that's really important. And I think coming back to that first question you had around, [00:20:00] like, how do you make sure your content is successful? And you have to take some of those numbers out of it and really focus on are you able to generate quality engagements? Because those people are going to be talking about your brand even when you're not around.
And I think that's what you have to reframe, because if you just think about numbers, We don't even have 100, 000 Instagram followers, right? And a lot of brands do and, that doesn't mean that they're necessarily more engaged as an audience. And it doesn't mean they're selling more product.
Yeah, exactly. And, some of the comments, people say I love Kulfi. And I'm like, to create a brand that someone loves. That's just. That's the highest form of compliment you can have because you know how many there's so many brands it's so hard to fall in love these days with brands and people that's the that's what you want to try to accomplish through the content you're putting out through the interactions you're having and so you can Can't be too hung up on oh, this only got like 500 views.
Yeah, I totally agree. We're just coming off the back of Black Friday now, [00:21:00] like with the week after when we're recording this, and this is going to publish a little bit later, but we are in the thick of holiday as well. What's working? What's not working? Do you have a, did you have a Black Friday offer? What are your lessons from, you've done this a couple of times now.
What's your lessons on what's cutting through for Black Friday? I think people are looking for things that they have seen through the years. So one of my biggest lessons this year was that you can't really create new excitement for a product. Post October, like anything you, you're doing around like product awareness, brand awareness, you need to do between like January to September, because after that, it's really about reengaging the people that already have seen your brand before and then, or they've bought from you before, but maybe you're showing them a different product and just or in our case, we focused, like I said, a lot on bundles because we finally have enough products for people to do, be able To be able to do a full face of Kofi, so we're really focusing on telling people like we [00:22:00] have, hey, you've tried our eyeliner, try our concealer or try our, lip staining oil and that's really what we're focusing on.
It has worked really so far. We just did a test and it was really like. Pretty hacky, I would say, like our Shopify backend isn't fully working correctly, but we just were like, let's just test it out. And then if it works, if people are converting and they are buying like this we created about six sets on our site, like everything from a five minute phase to a no makeup look to a full face of Kofi.
And we were like, let's see if people are converting. And if they are, then next year we can like really invest in like good photography and all of that and like a proper backend on Shopify. So I would say just, also just testing of testing new things. But for us, what's working is really engaging people who've seen our brand before and then showing them that now they can do more with Kofi.
Amazing. Got to talk about Sephora. How did Sephora happen? So Sephora happened because of Sephora Accelerate, which is their incubation program. Again I talk [00:23:00] about timing because That's the first time I heard about you guys was when you got on the, I think we reached out and did something about the Accelerator program.
I think we did. Like a newsletter or something. We had a conversation. I think we had just launched back then. So we, I applied to Sephora Accelerate in September or October 2020. So this is before we had launched. We launched in Feb 2021. And again, I talk about timing because that was the year they decided to focus on founders of color and really catering the program to that because they took the 15 percent pledge which was basically a pledge to have at least 15 percent of the shelf with founders who are founders of color or black founders.
And again, I was a beneficiary of that and we got into that program. We were selected even before we launched, and that was how the relationship started. But I would say from the time we got into Accelerate, which was, end of 2020, early 2021 to the time we launched on.com, which was September, 2022, that was still like 18.
18 months. It took a [00:24:00] while from the time we had that first conversation to actually being able to launch just on their website. And what were some of the things that you were doing during that time? Because my understanding with the founders that I've spoken to who launched in Sephora, it's like a, it's a one time offer.
Like you don't want to mess that up. You need to make sure everything goes really perfectly because you don't get invited to like launch again into Sephora for a second time. What were some of the things that you were doing on the backend in the Prepare yourself and make sure that A, you could fulfill that volume of product and B, that people are going to show up and buy it.
Yeah, I think that's where just launching online was a very smart move. I honestly, I wouldn't even say I suggested it. Sephora told us you should just launch online first. And I was like, initially I was resistant to the idea because I was like, you know what? I want to. Launch across channels. What's the point of launching at Sephora if not, if I'm not going to be in the store.
But they really insisted they were like, no, start online only. Actually that thing, that step by step approach has really helped us. Cause I agree. Once you launch at Sephora, you [00:25:00] want to be able to capture the momentum and grow. And, but there's a lot to learn, especially as an indie brand.
At that point we had just launched with one product and we had the minimum Like inventory, like I said, I didn't know anything about marketing. So all I had was a PR agency in our blog. And so there was so much to figure out. And everything from like inventory planning to how do we set up the best.
Product pages reviews. How do we like get people to leave reviews. How do you get people to leave reviews? So we do a lot of gifting and, again, it's not, it's, there's, they're supposed to indicate that product was gifted and they are free to leave the review, like an honest review.
We're not telling them what they write. And then after that, it's on our D2C, we just have an email flow that kind of keeps asking. On Sephora, we can't really control that. So we're just, I'm sure Sephora has their own initiatives to make sure people are leaving reviews.
So we were trying to figure all of that out just for the dot com launch. And this was, I was still, I think I [00:26:00] spent my last, I had 10, 000 left in my bank account by the time we launched online. And we had a moment where our concealer, which was the second product we launched, together with the Sephora launch went viral on TikTok and we sold out of it and then I had nothing to sell for a while and that was stressful too.
So I do think that with launching into retail you need to be prepared to be exposed to a very big audience. And I'm glad we were just online only at that point because had I also been in store and we didn't have any inventory like That would have been a bad situation to be in and I don't think I could have afforded it anyway because in store is very expensive.
So we launched in store in September 2023, like a year after we launched on com, and it took a lot more in terms of financial resources to be able to afford the level of inventory required. When you launch into Sephora, what are some of the costs that people need to think about? Or not even just Sephora, like I think in general with launching into a, like a big retailer like [00:27:00] that, sometimes I think people think it's going to be this solve of once I get into a big retailer, then I'm going to get these big orders.
And all of a sudden we're going to be like a big successful business. I'm going to be able to pay myself properly, like all of this kind of stuff. But like you said, it's really expensive. So obviously you have inventory costs. You have to actually like. buy the product and ship the product and a lot of it.
What are some of the other costs that you might have to think about when you're launching into a big retailer? Yeah. Retail P& Ls are complicated and I would say the first couple of years, it's very hard to be profitable. Yeah. I would say like maybe in a few years, maybe you can aim to be breakeven, but I would think about it let's say you're making 100 in retail, you have to then think about what is the retailer margin, right?
Let's say that's 50 percent just for sake of this conversation. So you're left with 50 and with that 50, then you have to take into account testers, damages, RTVs, which is return to vendor, which happens sometimes. Let's say the, shut down a [00:28:00] store and then there's inventory in that store or in our case, we had to reformulate our eyeshadows because Sephora updated their clean requirements and it was literally one ingredient and the formula is perfectly fine.
It's just one ingredient. So we had to reformulate our entire eyeshadows and then the old eyeshadows, which were perfectly good product, unfortunately had to be RTV'd and and we had to eat that cost. You have to plan that there would be these unexpected things that'll happen and buffer that in.
So let's say like your test scores, damages, RTVs is like 15 percent or 20%, right? So now you're back to 30. left. You're still paying for cost of goods, right? And then you're still paying for marketing. Really effectively in the first couple of years, it's very hard to make money and Pay yourself a salary, that's the dream.
But are you paying yourself yet? In April of this year was the first time I started paying myself. Again, something people don't talk about enough. So many founders are doing, founders of consumer physical products, not [00:29:00] agencies or, service providers, but people who are like building like scalable product based businesses, not paying yourself, doing consulting work, doing other things, living off savings for a long time.
For a long time, and you have to be ready for that like marathon feeling too. But it's nice to be able to, even if it's a small amount, I think being able to pay yourself is there's a psychological benefit to it that I realized. It was just like feeling, okay This is going to be okay.
As opposed to I'm always like living on my also like this business is draining everything from me. Exactly. Including my bank account. Exactly. Yeah. So I do think there's benefit even if you pay yourself like a small amount, like I think there's benefit in doing that. But coming back to this what it takes to launch.
So you have to think about your P& L. And then on top of that, there's cash flow. So that basically means you're buying inventory, especially as you're starting out, you're probably having to prepay for your inventory, which I had to. I had to pay 100 percent for my first order because they were like, who are you and why should we trust you?
And I think your suppliers. Yes. They're like, we're not going to just send you and [00:30:00] wait for it. Yeah, exactly. They're like we're not even going to start production. We're not even going to, sometimes they wouldn't have Sampling costs for lab samples, producing lab samples.
They're like, you need to commit like this much. Cause we don't know if you're even going to place your first order. So you have to be prepared, especially as an indie brand to work. Out the cash in the beginning for that inventory. And then your retailer will typically have a payment terms.
So they could be like net 30, net 60, whatever it is. And then that increases your cash conversion cycle from the time you, the money left your pocket to the time you're actually getting paid is so long. So you need to have that. Cash in addition to accounting for the fact that you're not making any money.
It's expensive I think about that for Kofi too, there is benefit if we had stayed maybe DTC only for a little bit longer and figure it out, product market fit, figure it out some of these things, because we had to grow up really quickly, really fast.
And also with retailer, they retailers, I think there's expectations of [00:31:00] launches of newness. So they want some, they want us to launch three to four times a year and you can stay true to that. To your brand like this year, we only did two launches and that's totally fine. And you can still be successful, but we do see lifts across the collection when we launch something new because more people get introduced to the brand.
So I see why the retailer is asking for it, but it's also. Again, very hard as an indie brand to have this pipeline of four launches a year, out of nowhere, out of launching one product in two years, right? And so there is a lot to get ready but take it step by step and I think you'll figure it out, it's just don't try to do everything at once.
And you're exclusive with Sephora, so you're not with any, you're not doing any like indie boutiques, you're not doing any other mass retail, it's just Sephora. Yep. It's just Sephora. I think we had that like break in and got that break through Sephora Accelerate. And at that point I was like, Sephora is like gold standard.
It's gold standard. It's going to get us the skill that we need. And so we didn't have to [00:32:00] go through that route of going to the indie boutique. So now I've, again, I've heard of They're making it pretty easy to reach out to those smaller boutiques. We have a program as well, for anyone who's interested that's starting on, I think the next one starting the 5th of January, but we, it's called Retail Bootcamp, and we focus on the difference between chain retail, indie retail, how to build up a scalable indie strategy, like when to pitch Sephora, all of this kind of stuff that's in there.
So if anyone's listening to this and they're like, I just need to go a little bit deeper, go jump into that program because it's really good. And we work with different founders to teach in there as well. Something that. I think a lot of business owners are facing as a barrier to growth is being able to tap this like deep expertise that you need in certain areas.
Like when you're talking about finance and when you're talking about, the the complexity of the finances of scaling wholesale and also with fulfilling big wholesale and getting those like chain retail introductions, like it takes working with people who've done this [00:33:00] before. How are you tapping that expertise, both with the Sephora launch, but also like the finances of the business?
Like you said, you have to grow up really quickly and that requires just like someone who knows what the hell they're doing. And like, how do you figure that out? You make a lot of mistakes. Do you have a fractional CFO or like how, who are you working with? So I definitely using a lot of agents.
We are consultants. So we used to have a fractional finance consultant. Now we ended up hiring full time last fall. And for people that don't know what fractional means, it basically just means they work across multiple different businesses at a high level. Yeah. And they're like part of your team but they're working across multiple teams and in, in many ways it's great because they're bringing in experiences, very relevant current experiences from other brands that they're working with.
And so we use. Consultants for like our operations team is still a consultant, ACPG. They're amazing. Gia who started ACPG she was starting around the time Kofi [00:34:00] was starting. One of our formative experiences is all Gia and I like backing. Packing things to move from my house, move our warehouse from my apartment to a proper warehouse.
She and I were like packing things and now she's this big boss with the whole team and everything. But it's great to see her grow. Okay. Hey, CPG, that's a great recommendation. We used again, for our creative, we used Super Spicy, that's Badal Patil. She done, she's done a lot of our packaging, our logo, all of that stuff.
Which looks so good. And yeah, she's amazing. She's absolutely amazing for Sephora, we used Vue from 32. So it's a consulting service form by three ex Sephora employees that ran merchandising and marketing. And so those were really, they were really great in helping me understand the Sephora ecosystem, cause there's.
A lot going on there, so we use them for a while. So again I think finding brokers is that what you would call? No, they're not brokers because in this case, we didn't need a broker because we had that relationship due [00:35:00] to accelerate, but they were helping us understand What's Sephora, like how to think about Sephora merchandising planning, how to think about Sephora marketing programming, and what does this mean?
What does that mean? Like, how do we approach those conversations from an insider having been on the other side as a merchant at Sephora, like they had that perspective, which was really helpful. It's just like finding those consultants, which you Will need at different stages of the business and I also think like that consulting or maybe temp to like freelance to permanent if you need it eventually is a better model because it helps you not have to commit, especially the startup where you're trying to make sure you have a low like burn rate it allows you to test out something and see if it's worth it.
If this is something you're going to need ongoing or just for that specific purpose, specific moment and then make a decision of whether that's something eventually you want to bring in house like we did with 5S. Something else that you've done really well is, I feel like your Shopify store looks awesome.
I know you said before that you're like, the back end is not perfect yet, but it looks amazing. It looks like you've got all the stuff you need on there. Who built that for you? Did [00:36:00] you guys do that in house? No, it was, it's an agency on site as well. Amazing. Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. So the last thing I'm going to ask you, and you've just given us so many, but was for a resource recommendation.
I'd love to end with a practical thing people can go and check out. What do you recommend? I love reading the trade publications. So I read Beauty Independent, Business of Fashion has a beauty section now Beauty Matter. I read all of them because there's so much insight to be gained from what other companies are doing, what are the conversations people are having.
Recently, I read an article about like they had an article about lines of credit and like what is an appropriate amount to pay for a line of credit. And they had someone in finance talk about it's 15 percent too high, it's 20 percent too high. Even just that level of granular information you can find in these publications.
And I. I find that to be really helpful outside of obviously having a network you can reach out to and call and be like, Hey, what's your light? What's the percentage of interest you're paying? Jump into the Female Founder World group chat [00:37:00] guys. We've got an app now. It's free to join. Come in and find some people to that's perfect.
Exactly. So that's like the other shortcut to get the answers you need. But if you don't have that yet, or if you don't find that resource, I think having this A whole host of knowledge in these three publications is helpful. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Would you be happy to do a, like a coaching call in the group chat sometime with the community where people can come and ask some questions?
Yeah, sure. We did them with a lot of the girls that are on the podcast, so I'd love to do it with you. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much. This was so helpful. Thank you. And also just congratulations. You've done so much in three years. I hope that you, as we come to the end of the year, I hope you like sit and reflect and.
feel really proud of yourself and excited and not just like going straight into 2025 and your to do list for next year, because it's very impressive. Thank you so much.
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