Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / GEMS: "1% of Sephora Customers Bought Our Product" with Tower 28 Beauty founder Amy Liu

Transcript

GEMS: "1% of Sephora Customers Bought Our Product" with Tower 28 Beauty founder Amy Liu · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:08
  It worked out pretty well. I read that you guys are like ranked number seven in Sephora's. We're actually six right now.
• 0:17
  Six. That's amazing. And that's something like 1% of all Sephora customers in the world are buying your product, which is just so cool. And I want to talk more about this because I want to understand firstly, what actually goes into that? Like how do you actually become a bestseller? I'm sure it's, you know, a lot of hard work in the backend that people don't see, but how does someone become a bestseller at Sephora?
• 0:42
  I think one misnomer that people have when they work with retailers is that once you get into Sephora, once you get into Ulta, whoever your dream retailer is, is that that door opens and then all of a sudden the product just starts flying off the shelves. I think that's maybe that's true for some people. If you have like a built in.
• 1:04
  brand of influence. Like I'm not sure, I'm sure Fenty and Rare and these brands did a lot of work in addition to that, to be honest with you. But even if Rihanna did nothing but put product on the shelves, could she have sold some products? Probably, right? For a brand like ours. And I
• 1:29
  the competition has really never been, again, I've worked in the industry a long time. The competition has never been more fierce than it is today. There's just so, the barriers to entry are so low to get into the business. The margins are very attractive. So in terms of an industry, beauty is really hot. So I think the biggest misnomer is like, once that product gets in, you have, you have to sell it, whatever that means. Like whether you're, and I, and I,
• 1:57
  And to be honest, nowadays, it's not just one
• 2:00
  tactic. It can't just be, okay, then I think I'm going to be big on Instagram. It's like, you have to have multiple, like everything is on me. Like people talk about distribution and they say, you know, you have to, now it's not just about being like big on DTC. It's like, you have to be on your website. You have to be in retail. You have to be everywhere at the same time. It's the same. I think when it comes to marketing tactics, you can't just focus on one. You have to
• 2:30
  try everything a little bit, but you at the same time have to focus. Right. So it sounds crazy, right. But you, you almost have to do both. Like, and I guess the example of it is like social media, I would say for us, we've started Instagram as kind of the main place that we've tried to build our community, but we can't ignore TikTok.
• 2:53
  Right. That's a huge part of it for us. But like we had a conversation the other day as a team and we were like, do we do Pinterest? Do we do Twitter? Well, those are less of a priority. And I mostly because I have a really small team.
• 3:10
  So if you can only do so many things and do them well, pick a few, but you can't do social only. We still have to pay attention to what does our visual merchandising look like? What does sampling look like? We have to think about everything, but you have to prioritize almost the top ones in every bucket.
• 3:30
  Mm hmm. Yeah, that's definitely key. It can get overwhelming when you have to think about all the platforms and then you look at brands who have huge budgets and you're trying to compete with them and you're like, but I can't do everything good. I need to, you do need to focus and keep it to the channels that you think you can do well at and where you'll get the most impact, I think, before you start thinking about others.
• 3:52
  For sure. And I think what you said about comparison is such a good point, Dune, because it's so, and I've done it before too, it's so easy to be like, well, if I only had a little more money, you know, but I think for anyone who's listening, I hope that we can be a good partner.
• 4:10
  um, inspiration for the fact that I think you still can do it on a, um, with a little hustle, or actually I would say a lot of hustle. Um, I think it's all about having a great team, having a lot of authenticity and heart around it, but we don't have big budgets. I mean, all that is on a relative basis. I think somebody who raised, you know, 5,000 to start might think that, you know, we had a lot of money, but we certainly didn't have millions. Right. So it's
• 4:40
  Totally. Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:45
  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.
• 5:10
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• 5:32
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