Female Startup Club

Hey and welcome back to the show! It’s Doone here, your host and hype girl.

Thanks for tuning in to the solo episode for this week, where we’ll be taking a deep dive into the beauty space, going over the biggest learnings our multi-millionaire beauty-founder-guests have gained from founding and building the brands absolutely killing it in their space right now. So Let’s get straight into it. 

Learning number 1 stems from the dreaming phase. When you’re n the very early days of imagining your beauty brand - and you’re dreaming about the vision you have. And you’re asking yourself what am I actually actually going to create? The luxury of being in this position is that nothing exists yet, because you haven’t made it. You can literally create ANYTHING. So why not create your product in a way that will make your life a little easier down the road? When we look at successful beauty brands today, there are a couple of things that founders seem to have gotten right straight off the bat. My first learning is that you should create something valuable, you should create something beautiful and (nowadays) you should create something memorable or memeable. 

My second learning is that you absolutely want to be making that pre-launch effort, and you absolutely want to kick off with a bang. Start as you mean to go on. The truth of the matter is, beauty is SUCH a saturated space, and you need to give someone a reason to pay attention.

The third learning, is to really think outside the box when it comes around to pitching your product to retail. Buyers in the beauty world are getting hit by constant blasts. There’s so much out there, there’s so much being created. Give yourself a chance by really making an impression. Ok. but I can hear you asking already. How to go about that? Amy Liu’s story for getting Tower28 stocked in Sephora is a real cracker, and we’ll talk through that in the episode.

Lesson number four is all around not getting complacent when you do land your dream retailer. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely a win worth celebrating. Give yourself a huge pat on the back, and celebrate with your team. But it’s by no means the finishing line. Getting in is the easy part, what’s hard is getting the sale through.

Which bring us to another area you can absolutely not get complacent in as a founder. It might not have always been the case, but today I can confidently say you would struggle to do well with your business if you’re not leveraging this platform. If you listen to this show you know what I’m about to tell you. TikTok, obviously! In beauty, you’re in such a fab position to do well on TikTok. 

So, that brings me to learning number 6, and one that lies particularly close to my heart. As a woman, if you’re planning to be an entrepreneur, a pitfall i’ve encountered time and time again is this idea of perfectionism. So much of our paralysis comes from spinning in circles around certain things, when what we should be doing is just putting it out, seeing how people react, and then changing it. Get it out and iterate along the way. We are smart enough that we can always pivot, no matter what comes our way.

And my last but not least learning from chatting to all these amazing women in the beauty space, is that all good things simply take time. We’ve heard time and time again, that it takes 0 years to reach overnight success. And it’s okay it takes time. 

Let’s get straight into it! This is me for Female Startup Club.

And if you have something specific you want me to cover, just directly reach out on Twitter or Instagram

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