Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / DYMO Presents: Bondi Blades founder Ali Clarke bootstrapped her biz from $50 bucks to $1M in ARR, here’s her exact blueprint to success

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DYMO Presents: Bondi Blades founder Ali Clarke bootstrapped her biz from $50 bucks to $1M in ARR, here’s her exact blueprint to success · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Ali Clark for Female Startup Club. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Female Startup Club podcast. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today on the show, we're learning from Ali Clark, the woman behind Bondi Blades, which is Australia's first at-home derma razor company.
• 0:28
  Bondi Blades launched as a pandemic baby with just a few hundred bucks and quickly turned into more than just a side hustle. Last year, she did a million dollars in revenue and is now stocked in more than a thousand stores in Australia alone. So crazy.
• 0:44
  This episode is really, really good because she breaks down her exact blueprint to getting her business off the ground and what she recommends every new founder do today. But the gem in this episode is where she breaks down her experience with Cosmoprof Trade Show, what it cost her and what the impact was.
• 1:02
  Today's episode is powered by the lovely folks at Dymo, which Ali actually uses every single day to help her business grow. They've been helping small business owners just like Ali for over 60 years. So a big thanks to Dymo.
• 1:17
  And while I've got you here, we have got something cooking and the time is fast approaching for us to release it. And I'm just so excited because it's relevant to literally every single person listening to the show. Everyone, whether you're a business owner, whether you've got a side hustle, whether you don't have any of those, but you're just thinking about business, whether you just love the show, all of it.
• 1:41
  If you head over to femalestartupclub.com forward slash waitlist and pop your name and your details there, you will be the first to know about it when we make the announcement ahead of the launch. I would love for you to be a part of it and to join the next phase of Female Startup Club. But for now, let's get into this episode. This is Ali for Female Startup Club.
• 2:04
  Ali, hi. Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Hi, Dune. It's so great to be here with you tonight. I'm so excited to chat with you. Me too. I'm so excited to learn all about your brand and your journey. I've been obsessed with your TikToks and kind of making my way through it. So I'm very excited to get into this today. Can you give us a little bit of an overview into who you are, what your brand is, and what the ethos behind it is?
• 2:31
  Absolutely. So I'm Ali Clark and I founded a brand in Australia called Bondi Blades. It was at the time Australia's first at-home derma razor company. And I started my business because I was going to salons and having dermaplaning done myself with the professional scalpel version. And I was pregnant at the time and it was costing $150 a fortnight.
• 2:54
  to go and have it done. And I'm really hairy, so I love hair removal. But I also didn't love the fact that it was going to be costing me this much money for basically a 15-minute treatment of someone shaving my face. And I thought, wow, I'm going on maternity leave. I don't want to burn through my savings. I'll put aside for that and be spending it on beauty treatments, but I still want to do that myself. So...
• 3:18
  I started looking for a product that I could use just thinking I would be able to buy it somewhere online here or in a store. And I was looking and I couldn't find anything. So I thought, okay, my first actual attempt at having a business was a dropshipping fast fashion business, which I learned a lot from that I've taken into this business.
• 3:38
  And so I did what people do when they're starting a business and I went on to Alibaba and I was searching, you know, face shaving tools, things like that. And I found so many. I was like, oh, this is cool. I'll be able to buy some from here and have, you know, two years worth and I won't have to worry about spending any money on salon treatments. So I...
• 3:59
  ended up finding a really good manufacturer and they sent me a box with a variety of samples of, you know, plastic handles, wheat short, all the different types. And I started using them at home myself and thought, oh my God, this is so good. And then I started to think, okay, I'm going to save an absolute fortune here. Surely other people might want to buy these as well. So a little cog started turning and then I thought, well,
• 4:24
  how do I market this? You know, what am I going to do? But the biggest lesson I learned from the first business, or one of the biggest lessons was don't tell anybody that it's your business to start with. So for about six months, I played around on Instagram and had a Wix site to begin with, which was really clunky and hard to use. And, you know, started to market it on Instagram and people were, you know, liking things and commenting and I had a couple of orders. And it wasn't really until lockdown hit that I was actually returning to work.
• 4:54
  full time at the same time as the lockdown starting after my maternity leave. And it was perfect timing because work was really quiet. So I could still work on this on the side. And I actually, to get it going, I thought, I didn't know much about influencer marketing at the time, but I had a friend who was an influencer. So I catfished her from the Instagram page of Bondi Glades and said, would you like to try something?
• 5:19
  Would you like to send you some free products? Because obviously I was like, I don't want to pay anyone at the moment. I didn't know if it was going to work or whatever, so I didn't want to spend too much on it. And I sent her the products and she did a story set on her Instagram and within half an hour I had nine or ten little pings on my Wix app on my phone and I was getting orders. And then I thought, oh, my God, this actually works. Yeah.
• 5:46
  And it kind of started to grow from there. And so I started documenting the journey on TikTok and I just kept learning along the way how to market. Then I discovered Canva, which was, you know, a godsend for me because I have no graphic design skills whatsoever. But, yeah, I also didn't even have, I forgot these orders. I thought, oh, my God.
• 6:07
  I've got no label printer or anything. What am I going to do? So I was handwriting out, you know, the Oz postings. It was like you just cringe when you look back. I didn't have any pretty pink packaging to ship them in. They were just came in basically what the manufacturer had sent them to me in. But I had, you know, a pink sticker on it that said Bondi Blades that I'd printed off Vistaprint or something. And it just started to grow from there.
• 6:30
  Um, so yeah. Oh my gosh. Wow. I want to, I want to pause here. Cause I feel like there's a lot to kind of dig into that we should, that we should talk about. Sorry. I talk a lot.
• 6:41
  I love that. Great for podcasting. The perfect guest. Okay. So you launch and you've just kind of obviously spent money on a Wix site, which is kind of free or maybe a small subscription. You've had those original samples that you got from Alibaba. If you had to kind of sum up, how much did you spend to get started? What was your startup capital? A couple hundred dollars.
• 7:05
  Not much at all, to be honest. A couple hundred dollars. Yeah. That is so cool. And so when did you have to start buying into, like, you know, more inventory and kind of getting ready for, I guess, when this wave of the business started to take off at the start of the pandemic?
• 7:21
  So I've started in ordering lots of 500 and that even freaked me out at the time thinking, oh, my God, I'm never going to sell these because I only started with very small order quantity. And when you start with minimum order quantity, they're not branded or anything like that. You've got to try and jazz the packaging up as much as you want. But the longer the lockdown went on and the more my confidence grew in the business and what I was doing and my marketing changed.
• 7:47
  the orders started to come through because people on TikTok were resonating not only with the product being that they were in lockdown, all the salons were shut, but they were also resonating with my journey because I like to share and be quite open about it. And people loved to support me that way. So they'd say in the comments once I switched over to Shopify, you'd see the comments saying, oh, you know, I've seen you on TikTok, I love your videos, and that really spurred me along and gave me even more confidence in the comments.
• 8:16
  Oh my gosh. And so just to summarize, you really just started by posting on TikTok, by posting on Instagram and starting to reach out to influencers to gift them product and see what happens. Yeah, that's it. I just started off with gifting. I was going six months before I paid someone and I was horrified at the time to pay a blue tick influencer. Oh my gosh. How much was it?
• 8:40
  It was just for a story set and I think it was about $550. And at that time I was still like, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm going to pay someone that much money. It's a lot for a small business owner, yeah. Yeah, and for 45 seconds of footage, that's fine for an influencer, you know, if you're an influencer. Yeah. But it actually went so well that I made my money back plus more and I had so many orders. It was great. Then I thought, right, I'm going to work with this person again because they paid.
• 9:08
  they can return it and then do the actual, you know, the reel or whatever it was, the more expensive post. But, yeah, it started to work and then I started to, you know, grow from there. But even, you know, back in when I was still gifting, I was actually fortunate enough to have lovely Innes that was on Maps. She had reached out to the page, even in its infancy, saying, oh, my sister and I would love to try this. This was in, you know, sort of towards the start of the lockdown. And I was like,
• 9:38
  this, you know, this would be amazing. You know, I can't believe she actually wants to just, you know, try the product and, you know, she shared that. And that was probably my first big moment in sales because I then used that money to purchase myself my first Dymo printer because up until then I was handwriting the label. So that was one of my little checklists that I needed to get this Dymo printer because I'm...
• 10:05
  I'd seen on TikTok people printing out all these streams of what I wanted to be one of them, but I hadn't made the money yet to invest to buy that. I didn't know if it was going to pay off. And it did. And it did. So, yeah, that was really exciting.
• 10:21
  I feel like this is a great moment to give a segue to Daimo. They're today's sponsor. They have made this episode happen and that is just so cool as a small business owner kind of having that first pivotal moment where you're able to invest in machinery or whatever it might be. So I'd love to kind of understand. I don't know if you're, well, first special shout out to Daimo. Thanks a lot for making this episode happen.
• 10:48
  I'd love to dig in just one layer deeper for that particular like influencer moment that you had. Are you able to share like the numbers of what she drove in terms of sales? I don't have an exact figure because she didn't have a discount code, so it was an organic share. So, look, it probably would have been, you know, 30 or 40 orders at least that came through that I could kind of match up to
• 11:15
  the timing of when she shared that to the aftermath of it. Got it. Got it. I read somewhere in an article that in the first kind of nine months, you ended up doing about 150,000 in revenue or something crazy like that. If you had to kind of like just distill information,
• 11:34
  what it was that you were doing to make that first kind of significant piece of capital as a full-time kind of business owner, well, full-time in your job and then having your other business on the side. Is it influencer marketing? Is that just it? It was, and that's, I want to clarify, that is turnover. That's not profit. Some people just read the headlines, you made $150,000, but I want to be transparent with the listeners that, you know,
• 12:02
  because I like to be honest and clarify that that is a headline, but that's turnover, which is a very different thing to your net profit, which a lot of business owners will understand. But that was from just hammering TikTok every day with content. It was influencer marketing. I started to run paid ads on Facebook, Google ads, TikTok ads, Spark ads on TikTok.
• 12:28
  It's a lot of investment and a lot of influencer marketing. I think in the first year we spent, it was only 50 grand on influencers when we looked at our tax last year. Like it was a lot. But you've got to spend money to make money. So if you're not investing, and while not every influencer returns sales, you may not get your money back, but it's brand credibility. People see someone who, by the social media status, is a credible person.
• 12:57
  They see them using the product and then you've got that footage you can reshare to say, you know, for example, we used Emily Hembrough. We can say Emily Hembrough, here's a video of her using Bondi Blades. And that was very powerful for us. So you've got to spend that money. But you've got to think of it as well that while you're spending that money on the influencers, you're getting great content because you're paying for a great video that you can then repurpose however you want.
• 13:21
  When you say you were posting on, you know, TikTok every single day, what was your posting schedule like? Like how many times a day were you posting? What were you talking about? Like, how were you kind of leaning into that channel?
• 13:35
  I was actually doing lives every day as well, every evening. Oh, my gosh. About 8 o'clock onwards in the evenings, once my daughter was asleep, I would just sit there on live and answer questions and talk to people, talk about my product, my journey. And as I'd be on the live, you know, the Shopify live map would be lighting up and people would say they were on the store purchasing because I'd give a discount code in the live as well. And I was driving business organically myself that way.
• 14:03
  So that was a big thing. Wow. How long would you be on live for? Sometimes two or three hours because obviously we were in lockdown. There was nothing to do. So I just, you know, I would sit there and just talk to people and just talk about
• 14:18
  anything and, you know, try to obviously talk about what I'm doing. Then the longer I did that and the more followers I started to get on my page, the more business questions I would get asked by people and I would try and help everyone answer their questions and just spend time getting to know the other small business owners on there as well. And, you know, we formed this great little community on there of supporting each other and sharing tips and just trying to, you know, support everyone and share our best practices. Yeah.
• 14:46
  Do you still go on live? Do you still use that as part of the strategy? To be honest, I don't and I really should get back to it. But my life has changed a lot with my daughter's a lot older now. So she's not necessarily in bed at seven or eight o'clock at night, as much as I would like her to be. So it is a bit more challenging to get on the live. But I did find as well, it worked particularly well in lockdown because people were just at home on their phones 24-7.
• 15:12
  I don't know that it would have the same results as it did back then. I do really believe as well I got very lucky with Right Product, Right Time, which has then cataclyled it into where it is today.
• 15:23
  Totally. So you're still working full time at your job at this point. At what kind of moment do you think, Hey, I should quit my job and go full time. And did you like have a number of revenue you wanted to get to or a number where you could be like, okay, I can pay myself. Or what was your kind of like caveat to being like, okay, now I'm going to go all in. So I had to for three months. So I originally, once it got really full on
• 15:50
  I put my hand up because I was a mortgage advisor, which is quite stressful, but you've got to be, you know, it's a full-on job. Great job, absolutely loved it. I do miss it a lot, to be honest, and I did that for nearly 20 years. But I got to the point where I had to say to my boss, my little hobby side business is actually impacting my ability to do this job as well as I should be doing it. And before I make a mistake or start to lose my focus,
• 16:19
  I really need to take some time away from work. So I was fortunate that I had all my, you know, I had annual leave, I had long service leave and things like that up my sleeve. So I actually started with taking a three-month long service. I used three months of my long service leave so I could really give the business all my attention. And in those three months, that's when I seen, okay,
• 16:50
  cover my wage, but then have that, obviously I've got to reinvest quite a bit of that back into the business, but I can still pay the mortgage and pay the bills. I'm not going to be able to be out there buying lots of the fancy things that I used to like to buy when I was working full time, but that's a sacrifice I made that I would, the money I would have been spending on stuff. I've invested back in the business and I just kept working on it and working on it. And then at the end of the three months, my boss rang me and said, what are you going to do? And I said,
• 17:19
  I'm actually not going to come back. I'm going to take a career break. So I did do a career break. I'm still actually on a career break. Like I'm technically, you have to resign from your role. But because I'd been there for so many years, if anything did happen with my business that it turns out, you know, in 12 months time, this has all been great. But it ends up something happens and nobody wants any more Bondi Blades.
• 17:41
  I would have that option of not necessarily my job but taking a placement for six weeks within that organisation and be able to go back to work. I didn't want to just completely resign because then I also would lose all the benefits too. So I always made sure that that was my backup plan. I said to my husband I'm not going to completely absolve myself from responsibility of a job because to give up such a great career
• 18:11
  take a punt on something is very scary. And especially when you've done that your whole life, you don't know anything different. You've not come from a, you know, a business background to be doing, going from mortgages to running an e-commerce business is two completely different worlds. So that's what I did. And here I am. And when was that, that you kind of took the career break at the end of that three months? What, when does that fit in the timeline? That was, uh,
• 18:40
  March last year. All right. Coming up a year. Okay. So let's talk about the last year, I guess. I want to know, like, you know, what does your day-to-day look like, especially when you were kind of, you know, starting to figure things out, you start, you just started working full time. Like what were the areas of the business that you were focusing on just day-to-day besides, of course, the social media aspect? Yeah.
• 19:06
  So for me, in the beginning, it was I'd have, you know, sort of a routine every morning. Before I started business stuff, I would still have to get up and go for my walk every morning, listen to a podcast or some music or something because I couldn't function and have, you know, my day laid out. I like to be very organised. So, you know, I would start the day with a walk, come home, make a cup of tea, then I would sit down.
• 19:29
  I'd check what orders have come through. Then I would go into the Australia Post app, generate all the labels, print out from the Dymo, all the streams of labels, and there'd be times where you could see piles of Dymo labels on the floor and having to, you know, chop up all the labels and then just, you know, spend time packing orders.
• 19:48
  Then, you know, I have this set routine where, you know, they're just little things but, you know, I still have them on my whiteboard next to me here. But they're just basic things, checklist things that I do daily, weekly, monthly for like every day I will get up and, you know, once I've checked what orders have come through, you know, you check the emails and respond to anything. Then I go to Google and then I type in the business name, then I hit news, images and shopping.
• 20:16
  That's really important for me, especially now being in retail because sometimes people
• 20:22
  because my distributor is quite busy, sometimes a product might have gone and launched in a store or an e-tailer before. He's sent me an updated sales report of where stock's gone. So I sometimes actually get a nice little surprise and find it. Like, for example, when I found it on Woolworths online, that was just like, that was so exciting to go on there in my little check. Wow. And also I like to check not only news, but you can actually find
• 20:49
  articles about your business from Google Images. I've found quite a few organic articles that I didn't even know were getting written about either myself or my business from Images. So that's a really important check that I do every day as well. Obviously, you know, check the analytics on the socials, things like that. See if there's any content that we've been tagged in to reshare, save that. Then of a Sunday afternoon, I'll spend two hours on the content planner, just making sure all the
• 21:19
  organic content is planned out, things like that. Then, you know, a normal day can be like, for example, today, my husband and I spent five hours doing a stock take of what stock has been gone out, what's been invoiced for, how many units are on handle in the 3PL warehouse, things like that. You get a report. So it's got fiddly things, you know, reconciling your books. I do my zero accounting every day because otherwise,
• 21:45
  as I learned in the beginning, if you leave it for a week, it can take hours to go through it and check things off. So that's another daily thing. Gosh, so many different things. So many things, but another important thing I do every day is I will talk to one or two of my other friends who are in e-commerce that are working from home or working from their office, but they're on their own or don't have much staff around them because it can be quite
• 22:12
  lonely working on your own because all my staffing is outsourced. I don't have direct staff. That was one thing I actually didn't want to do when after being in the bank and having, you know, at one point I think when I was managing staff I had 12 people under me and 12 people reporting to every day is 12 different emotions and personalities and problems and I thought I don't want to deal with staffing issues so my business works well with things being outsourced.
• 22:42
  I'm actually the same. I also identified that within myself that I'm not someone that can manage a big team and I don't want to build my business like that. I have one core full-time staff member, but the rest are contractors and other kind of businesses that help me grow that way. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
• 23:00
  And I think that's an important thing to think about and audit yourself because especially when building a business, it can feel glamorous to be like, oh, I have this huge company and we've got, not huge at this point, but we've got five employees and it feels very exciting. But actually, if you look at the way that you operate and whether that works for you or not, it's an important thing to identify in yourself. Yeah, absolutely. It's not for everyone. Like, you know, I've got friends that have got in-house staff for graphic design or photography accounts.
• 23:30
  things like that. And, you know, that works for them, but it doesn't work for me. I rather have everything outsourced because I'm only paying for people for the time they work for me, like the photographer, for example. She just sends me a select amount of images for X amount of dollars and that's the end of the transaction. I'm not paying her full time to be sitting here taking product photos all day, things like that. Who else do you have on your kind of, you know, contractor team? I have payroll. I have a PR team.
• 23:59
  So I have a PR lady that works for me, Tess, on contracted hours. She does pitching to media and all those sorts of things, and I just bounce off things for her. Like, for example, I had to go and do a speech at a ladies' business dinner, and it was the first time I'd given a public speech about my business. So I'd written the speech out and, you know, send it to her to check it off, things like that.
• 24:22
  She does for me PR, photography, graphic designers, outsourced, distributor, which is great because while we're still learning the whole retail side of things, having a distributor while they take a fee out of the sales, it helps you learn the business and they do take care of a lot of things for you, especially negotiating with retailers, buyers, things like that, that could be quite daunting, I guess. Yeah, pitching yourself. Yeah.
• 24:52
  Yeah, that's all. Oh, and the accountants obviously outsourced as well. Yeah. I'd love to talk a little bit more about the distributor and that side of things and just kind of understand when you should look for a distributor. You know, is a distributor right for you as a small business owner? For those who are listening who are like, oh, I'd love to get a distributor. Like, what does it mean? How do you get started? All that kind of thing.
• 25:17
  Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me tell you, it's not as glamorous as everyone thinks. Like I actually, I didn't go looking for a distributor. Being in retail, it wasn't really even on my radar at that point in time. It was, I was in the gym and I got a phone call from some random guy saying that he wanted to distribute my product. And I said, oh, look, can you just send me an email to blah, blah, blah. I'm just in the gym at the moment and I'll come back to you. I didn't really grasp anything.
• 25:45
  the extent of what he was talking about. And then when I got home and seen his email and then had the Zoom with him and he said, look, you know, my wife actually has been using your product. She's ordered it from your store. And she asked me why it wasn't somewhere in the chemist or the supermarket that she could buy it. And that's so cool. I was like, what is the change? This is just like the universe sending this person to my life. And I kind of didn't realize how big it,
• 26:13
  that meant that a distributor had contacted me and believed in my brand. So, you know, we started working with him, but he changed the packaging because to get your product from e-commerce to retail, packaging has to be totally, you know, it has to be completely different. Basically, you've got to have barcodes. I didn't even know how to generate a barcode, which I've since learned. There's lots of things that retailers need on packaging. It has to be, you know, tamper-proof, especially because
• 26:38
  my product can be classified as a weapon or a shark. And when you actually go into the razor section of a supermarket, you do notice like all the shavers that have those security tags, things like that, because they're easy for people to steal. So we changed the packaging to be able to go on a hook and something like we had hang cells designed for stores, countertops, all these whole different things. And he then actually appointed a sub-distributor that we now no longer work with. They were charging a monthly fee.
• 27:07
  of you know six thousand dollars a month to work with them and it was good to begin with there was a lot of traction fast but then once they'd done the things that we needed them to you know it was no longer viable because you've got to understand some you know towards the end of our relationship with them we'd still we'd be paying six grand a month but they weren't selling six grand a month's worth products so
• 27:32
  You can't justify having someone as an expense in your business that isn't bringing in sales to cover their fee because what they will do is they will take that fee regardless. So having a big tip is only working with a distributor that's on a commission base because then they have to work harder to move your stock to get their commission. So if they don't move it, they don't get paid. Wow. Yeah, that's a really big investment. Now I know, you know, I read you're in about 1,000 stores in Australia. You're also in New Zealand. You're also in the U.S.,
• 28:02
  What's your, like, how does it work with a distributor? Is it just them going out and doing everything or you still need to do a lot on the retail side of things? So we still have to work closely with them because the retailers want a lot of marketing budgets as well. We were just going through our invoices the other day with a distributor and we'd spent last year on pharmacy, I think it was over $75,000.
• 28:26
  worth of marketing and that's for things like catalogues, online adverts, special in-store promotions. It's a really big expense and I guess you don't really understand that no one talks about it. I think for a lot of business owners and for me as well when I've seen other people going into retail I've seen people glamorizing it and making out like you know it was this you know it is a great achievement don't get me wrong.
• 28:54
  But nobody talks about the expense behind getting to those retailers. So that's something I like to talk about on my TikTok, that, you know, we have to spend money to make money. But sometimes you are spending with these retailers, but they might not necessarily be returning that in sales. And that's where you've got to go back to them and say, hey, look, we've got an agreement for an ad placement. Like it's a catalogue. It might be $4,000, but you've got to order that much stock at least
• 29:23
  for us to be meeting your marketing needs. So there's lots of costs in marketing and there's minimum expectations. So you've got to have a minimum of three catalogues per year with some pharmacy chains or every retailer has different expectations of marketing. And one, we were going to, I think they've actually changed it and we're looking at it again now, but at the time,
• 29:49
  we were looking at Mecca and they were looking to take our product, but they wanted it exclusively. And when we did the numbers on it, it actually was going to be worse off because for them to have exclusivity would have then meant we'd have to cut out all the existing stores that we'd worked hard to get into.
• 30:07
  It wasn't for us. That's really interesting because obviously they stock a lot of brands that aren't exclusive to Mecca. Yes, I understand that. But for some reason, at the time they wanted it as an exclusive online in-store product and we just said, look, and that was their condition of ranging us. So I guess they give different conditions to different brands. But, yeah, it just wasn't right for us. So there's, you know, lots of things like that can happen.
• 30:35
  It's a bit weird to me because you're a small business owner. Obviously, that isn't necessarily the best decision, especially if you're already stocked in a lot of retailers. It seems like a strange thing to try and put that, you know, it's not like you're a new brand just launching and you're kind of getting them as your first stockist with exclusivity for a year or something. It's you've already stocked everywhere. No, that's right. That was when we were in the infancy of getting it through the pharmacy chain. So I'm not sure.
• 31:04
  what that was, but anyway, it was a learning experience.
• 31:11
  I want to move on to talk a little bit about trade shows, specifically Cosmoprof. I watched a TikTok video that you were doing a bit of a breakdown and I thought this is so interesting. I'd love to talk about it and kind of understand when you did it in the journey, why you decided to do it in the journey, and, of course, all the costs. That's a three-part question. It's a lot. Well, to be honest, it wasn't even on my radar until my beautiful friend Theo had some friends do the Bologna one for their product.
• 31:41
  and they had given rave reviews about it and he rang me and he said, Ali, we've got to go to Cosmoprof. We've got to go to Cosmoprof. And I'm just like, I don't even think my product's ready to go to something like this, honestly. Like I was so overwhelmed. Like he's got, you know, over 40 different products. He's, you know, and I still, I've only had like, you know, three or four. I was like, I can't feel a stand at a booth. It just, to me, is overwhelming.
• 32:08
  But, you know, he walked me through it and said, look, you know, we'll do it together because we're with the same distributor. We'll do it with the distributor together. We'll split the costs and it'll be great. And I'm just like, okay, well, I guess. And I told my husband how much it was going to cost and he was like, like he was horrible. He was like, no, you can't spend that. He's really on to me what I'm spending. And he's like, you know, I don't know. And then, you know, he came around to it.
• 32:36
  After I booked the flight and said I'm going. So it's locked in now. It's locked in because I'm sorry to go. Sorry. Sorry I didn't consult you on that. That was really bad. But, you know, I just got wrapped up in it. Got intuition. You've got to follow it. Yeah, the intuition just said book the flight because I could see the flight prices going up and up and up because it was peak season. It was in July that we went. But all in all, Cosmoprof, I think I spent.
• 33:04
  And I only flew economy. I was going to, I was wanted to fly business class, but it was like only over $3,500 just for economy at that time. So I was like, no, I've got to be responsible. Don't go all out. The other day I was looking at the spreadsheet and it was just on just under $20,000 that it cost me to go for 10 days, including that was flights accommodation and the cost, sharing the cost of the booths.
• 33:30
  sharing the cost of the decorating of the booth, getting my products over there and, you know, give the products that I gave out to people. Yeah, so, yeah, it was. And what was the impact? How did it go? What happened at Cosmoprof? Well, it was so crazy. Like the first day there was so many people coming to our booth. Like we met so many buyers. Like because you get in front of the Ulta Beauty buyers, the Sally Beauty, all the big retailers in America were there.
• 33:58
  And lots from Australia as well, too, still for like, you know, the iconic and people like that were there. So you really get to show them how serious you are and how serious you want to take your business because you're obviously spending money to exhibit at this massive trade show. Sorry, just one question before we keep going. Do you have to reach out to all those buyers in advance or does the distributor handle kind of making sure that you attract those buyers to your store? Yes. Or is it just like they walk past?
• 34:28
  Some just walked past, but there is actually a list of all the buyers that are attending the event. So my distributor had sent them all invitations to our stand. So they all knew that we were going to be there before. And a lot of them did come up and say, oh, you know, we got your invitation. So we've come to say hi. But there was still some there that just, you know, turned up that we weren't expecting, which were great surprises. And
• 34:49
  From that, I think we ended up with over 250 qualified leads of buyers and distributors to work in other networks and things. And since then we have now signed a distribution partner for Europe, UK, Middle East, South Africa, and we're just finalising the distribution partner for the US at the moment. Holy smokes. And we have minimum order quantities for international customers
• 35:19
  buyers because of the timeframes of shipping and manufacturing. So, yeah, we're definitely going to make our money back. Looking back in hindsight, do you have any kind of, you know, key pieces of advice, things you wish you knew beforehand or red flags or just anything that you can pass on to other small business owners who might be sitting here thinking like, holy shit, maybe that's an opportunity for me to take that leap and go and do a huge trade show like Cosmoprof.
• 35:49
  Yeah, absolutely. But I think if you're going to do something like the trade show, you need to have be stocked in some stores already because you need to show the retailers that there is the appetite for your product. If you were just taking it to market and you didn't have any retailers, it would probably be a lot more challenging because someone's got to take a punt on it. But
• 36:11
  I was fortunate that I had all the existing stockists and we had just gone into the big retail farmers in New Zealand as well, which everyone has heard of over there. So that was more leverage. You had proof points for your brand. Yeah, exactly. Validation, brand validation to show you in all these retailers and obviously some of the pharmacies in Australia that they're familiar with too. So I think if,
• 36:37
  you're a new business owner, I would probably start with working with a distributor to get your product ranged in some, you know, even smaller stores, e-tailers, like, you know, things that are credible for us too, like we're on sites like, you know, Glamrater, for example, that's a big beauty site that stock our products, Oz Hair and Beauty. They're big e-tailers and just get yourself moving with e-tailers even to begin with.
• 37:03
  And, you know, getting into a store is obviously the ultimate goal because it's the best feeling when you walk in and you see your product that you started from scratch on a shelf. But definitely for a trade show you need to have some existing stockers and data that you can show them as well because they will ask for forecasts from the retailers that are stocking your product, run sheets of sales, things like that.
• 37:30
  So you need to have a bit of data behind you as well. So I wouldn't recommend it cold turkey. I'd recommend starting with a – working with a local distributor and then going that way. But, yeah, it definitely was worth it for us.
• 37:45
  Wow, that is so cool. It sounds like the next 12 months are going to be such a huge time for growth and expansion. And I'm excited for you. Wow. Thank you. And yeah, I'm excited because I guess I can announce it on here because it's happening next week. We're going into all countdown stores in New Zealand, which is the Woolworths over there. So
• 38:09
  that's going to be huge for us. Congrats. That's so cool. Hopefully now we can nudge the buyer back here and say, come on, we'll leave Australia. You said no last at Christmas. We're now in New Zealand. It's time to be here. It's time. Massive. So I'm going over there. It takes about three weeks for them to send it from. So all the stock we've sent over there, it's all sitting there in New
• 38:33
  the warehouse but it takes about three weeks for Woolworths Distribution Centre to get it out to all their stores so I'm going over in October once it's in all the stores to have a little trip and do some filming and yeah see it in in farmers as well over there but yeah that's really exciting oh my gosh it's so exciting
• 38:51
  That is huge. Congratulations. Thank you. Gosh. Before we get into the six quick questions part of the episode, what is just one final piece of advice for small business owners and founders that you want to leave us with? It's probably just going to be cliche, but I guess it's just start. Like I had no idea what I was doing and you're going to make so many mistakes along the way. Like I still make mistakes every day and think, oh, my God, what am I doing?
• 39:19
  but you're learning from those mistakes. And, you know, everything's a lesson. It's, you know, you never treat it as a failure. Keep, you know, keep it as a lesson and just move on and just believe in what you're doing. And if you're, ultimately, if you're really passionate about it, that will come through in your content, in your branding. And when people want to talk to you about your product, especially when you get to the point of getting in front of buyers, they're going to see your eyes light up. They're going to,
• 39:47
  see how passionate you are about what you're doing and why you started it. And that's really something important. So, yeah, that's what I would say. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you.
• 40:01
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 40:26
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 40:48
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.
• 41:04
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 41:29
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 41:51
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show, and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.