Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Best of ‘22 - Running a global beauty brand and what to do when Mr. BOSS comes knocking, Aisha Fatima Dozie from Bossy Cosmetics tells all (Part 1)

Transcript

Best of ‘22 - Running a global beauty brand and what to do when Mr. BOSS comes knocking, Aisha Fatima Dozie from Bossy Cosmetics tells all (Part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

0:00
Hi, it's just me popping in with a quick message to wish you and your loved ones a beautiful break this festive season. I hope you're able to take some time for yourself to recharge and reset and come back full of energy in 2023.
0:15
Over the next few weeks, our team will all be taking a much-needed break, and you'll be hearing the best episodes from 2022. When I look back over this year, there were just so many amazing episodes. It was near impossible to choose just one handful, but we did, and they're amazing, and I'm sure you're going to love them.
0:34
For now, I'm off to spend some quality time with my mom and my family in Queensland after three whole years of not seeing her. Can you believe it? Three years. Oh my gosh. I'm going to be doing all the little things that are good for my soul over this period and dreaming up my goals for 2023, which you're going to hear about when I come back in January. I'm so looking forward to reconnecting with you in the new year and bringing you more of the good stuff with Female Startup Club.
1:04
This is Aisha Fatima Dozier for Female Startup Club. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the show. It's Dune here, your host and a hype girl. Today on the show, we're learning from Aisha. She is the founder of Bossy Cosmetics. And boy, oh boy, has she been on the journey.
1:33
This conversation is just so good and sprinkled with so many learnings. After a successful 20-year career in the corporate finance industry, Aisha was diagnosed with severe hypertension and felt completely burnt out. She dreamed of creating a beloved beauty brand that cared about how women felt starting from the inside and moving outward.
1:55
Bossy Cosmetics is a mission-driven color cosmetics brand committed to empowering ambitious women to feel, look, and do good with a line of ethically made lipsticks, eyeshadows, and eyeliners. And if you're like me and you're wondering how she managed to trademark the name Bossy Cosmetics, get ready for a wild ride she's going to tell us all in the next episode. And while I've got you here, I have a quick favor for you.
2:21
If you're on your phone right now, please take a screenshot in your podcast app and share this episode on Instagram stories, tagging me or Female Startup Club. It helps me know that A, you really love the show, B, it helps other ears find us, and C, it also shows you are part of our club. Let's get into this episode. This is Aisha for Female Startup Club.
2:48
Aisha, hi. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Dune. It's a pleasure to meet you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to meet you too, and it's definitely a pleasure to be here. I'm going to tell everyone that we have just been laughing to the point of tears because of your headphone situation right now. I know. If anyone's on YouTube checking this out, there's some interesting headphones in the mix that I'm
3:18
I like yours. I mean, see, if I had to wear headphones, I'd want to wear bedazzled headphones, not my 12 year old son's gaming headphones. But you know what? Technical issues be damned. I've got my lipstick on, my eyeliner on. I'm ready. And we're all about getting things done. So whether it doesn't complement my outfit or not, we move forward.
3:40
I'm into it. I'm into the clash and you do absolutely look fantastic. Would you like to give us a little bit of introduction to who you are, what your brand is and the ethos behind it? Absolutely. So as you said, my name is Aisha Tufati Maddozie. Everybody calls me Aisha. I am founder and CEO of Bossy Cosmetics, which is one of the great honors of my life to get to work on something that sits at the intersection of
4:07
my own purpose and my passion. Prior to starting Bossy Cosmetics, I think it's important to say this and then it'll tell you really why the company exists. I was a 20-year veteran as an investment banker and people think, okay, investment banking, she's a woman of privilege, but not at all. That is not how...
4:25
My life started not at all. Actually, I was raised with very meager means, but through a series of luck and hard work and tenacity and grit and resilience and all of those good things, you know, had this career but burnt out at the end of it. I'm also a mom of three sons. And one of the key lessons I learned along that 20-some-odd-year journey of trying to multitask and really climb this ladder of accomplishment was that, you know,
4:51
Most of the things that you need are self-built there. You are enough. And many times as women, we feel like we need just that one extra class, that one extra job, that one extra referral before we're ready. And my one of my biggest learnings is that, you know what, you're enough.
5:06
You know, when we're 50% of the way, we're actually probably 100% of the way already. And so one of my biggest lessons learned over my career is that confidence hacks are super critical in getting you to get the confidence to do what you need to do. And one of my biggest ways of building confidence was actually wearing lipstick. It was my thing where I would hide behind a color.
5:28
And that would be my thing. I'd wear a bold red when I had a customer meeting because I wanted people to really notice me when I was speaking or I would like have a smoky eye. It was always my thing. And I called it war paint, putting on war paint that kind of let me know, OK, game on, let's go.
5:44
And so why does Bossy Cosmetics exist? I wanted to share kind of the background because our unique insight is that we exist solely to ignite confidence in women who self-identify as being ambitious. And we do that through high-performance cosmetics. We are focused on high-performance women. And that's what we do. I saw that as a complete white space in the beauty industry where everybody was focused on just products, products, products, products, products. But I didn't feel like any single company spoke to the woman behind her face. Yeah.
6:14
And so that's what Bossy Cosmetics does. We make great products for your face, but we really want to engage and empower you to look good, to feel good and to do good. Amazing. I love it so much. I'm so excited to dig into the background of this story more. Take me back to pre-2018 before you launched and this moment of you kind of like feeling burnt out at work and like what the actual transition was there to starting an actual business.
6:40
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I burnt out and I was feeling ill. So it didn't happen. It wasn't one sort of grand day where I burnt out. I had been feeling ill, but I thought it was just, you know, busy, so many things. You kind of, again, as I said, I'm a mom of three kids. At the time, I was running investment banking for the West Africa region for the largest African bank.
7:01
So I was really busy and I was traveling all of the time. So I thought, you know, I'm just tired. I didn't really pay attention. And then one day I felt so ill, I rushed to the hospital. And my doctor basically said, listen, you have high blood pressure. You are severely hypertensive. And my father, years before that, had passed away from heart failure. And so for me, that was just like a come to Jesus moment of...
7:24
honey, this is, there's no job, there's no lifestyle, there's no amount of money worth running yourself to the ground. Who's going to raise your three babies? And so that was my moment of, okay, this is not just sort of grinding through being tired, which a lot of women do, right? We're feeling exhausted. We're feeling kind of ratty, but we just show up every day, show up every day for our family, for our kids, for work, for everything, but we forget ourselves.
7:54
I took a year off, moved to California, which is where I live now in Palo Alto. And I was very fortunate to be accepted to a fellowship at Stanford called the Distinguished Careers Institute. And I spent one year on Stanford's campus, really in the design school, unlearning, relearning, rethinking, reimagining.
8:16
my career, my life, like what I wanted my legacy to be, what success actually meant, and how you navigated from success to what I wanted to reimagine as a significant life as opposed to a successful life. And so that whole year, there was just so much thinking, so much thinking, so much immersion and so many different experiences. And one thing that's really great about being over 40 is that I got to do this with 18 year olds, 19 year olds, 20 year olds. So I got to just
8:46
really immerse myself in this sort of new Gen Z way of thinking. And I just, I really wanted to try something different. I wanted to rip up the script that had been given to me many years ago. And that's how Bossy started. I want to ask a little interjection question before we go on here. When you were going through this period and you were thinking about what means, you know, a significant life to you and like, what does success look like? What are some of those things? Like, what were you thinking? Yeah.
9:14
So I think when I graduated from undergrad, I was obviously not thinking about pursuing passion because I had hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans. So I was only thinking about finances. And one of the blessings of my life, then fast forward 20 years later, is that I didn't have student loans. I had a very different life from 20 years before. And so I wanted to not be focused entirely on money. And I wanna be careful how I say this because Bossy Cosmetics is not a nonprofit.
9:44
you know, it exists for profit. And I really do believe in capitalism, but I didn't want my sole purpose to be chasing money. And so the process was really, how do you do something that you think you are so unique for? So you know how we talk about product market fit? I wanted it to be founder market fit. I wanted it to be something that
10:07
When people who knew me, when I talked about what I was doing, it was like, oh, we can completely see. We know. We get it. We get it. We know it. We see it. Whether you agree with the business idea or not, it is so in line with who I am, with my struggles, with my challenges, with my successes, with my philosophy. Because what I wanted to do was to show up to work every day.
10:33
and be completely jazzed, be completely natural, be completely authentic. And you do that when you have such a strong fit with the product or the service or the business. Absolutely. So that was really what it was. It was this process of unlearning, relearning. Who is Aisha? Like, where do I exist in a state of flow? Like, when have I been working that I've been so like, I don't even know when hours have gone by. What are those things I was doing? So it's really kind of taking a cake
11:02
And deconstructing it to the ingredients and how you make it and how you bake it and all those things to get that beautiful cake. That was my one year of how do I deconstruct myself?
11:14
Wow, that's so powerful to like really, you know, look internally and do that deep searching to figure it out. And also having the courage to obviously go after it as well. That's a huge piece of the puzzle. Sometimes I say it's courage. Sometimes I say it's craziness. It's the CCs. Yes. What was the aha moment that you were like, it's going to be lipstick. It's going to be beauty. It's going to be cosmetics. What was the moment for you?
11:44
So I was on a walk. Crazy. It doesn't make any sense, honestly. I was on a walk. It really doesn't make any sense because I was almost like I always say I have these two women who live in my body. One's name is Beyonce. The other one's name is Rachel. And Beyonce is like my hype woman. And Rachel's like the negative Nelly. She's always telling me, like, you can't do this. That doesn't make any sense. So I'm on this walk and Beyonce, Rachel and I are having this chat.
12:12
And I'm like, Beyonce is like, forget money. What is it that you love, right? Like if you had to, if you say that you want to sit at the intersection of your purpose and your passion, let's talk about purpose. What do you think your purpose is? And I felt like my purpose was to really dig into money.
12:30
Like helping women believe that they are fire, like helping women understand what the pay equity gap is and how do we close it and believing that you do deserve to be paid exactly what a man is being paid. I just wanted to spend time.
12:46
with women, encouraging women, but ambitious women and pushing them to even own that moniker. Like a lot of women find calling themselves ambitious to be negative. So that was what I was like, this is my purpose is to really coach, inspire, help women to aspire to just the next thing for themselves and to collaborate with one another, not to compete. So when I dug into it, that was the stuff that I really enjoyed.
13:11
And then when I thought about my passion, the first thing, if you can see, is color, right? Like, I am super colorful. Like, if you see me in all black, like, check if everything's okay. I love... You're my kind of woman. I love color. Like, if you go to my living room downstairs, there are massive paintings, every color in the rainbow. Color just makes me feel alive. It wakes me up. It's just... And I love wearing color. It helps me kind of, as I said, the war paint, right?
13:40
Mm hmm. Me too. And so when I thought intersection of purpose, working with women, passion, colorful, I was like, what's the most colorful thing you have? And it just hit me lipstick on my walk.
13:54
Right. And that was when I was like and honestly, when I when I came up with this aha moment, it wasn't I'm going to create a billion dollar brand that sells lipsticks. It wasn't. It was I'm going to do a project around getting women to ignite confidence in themselves through lipstick. Right.
14:13
That's all I'm going to do. It was just, I'm going to have fun. I'm not even thinking about a business, not thinking about a brand, not thinking about big, big, big. I'm just going to go out there and do what I think is my purpose, which is to inspire women and get women to see the magic within themselves. And I'm going to do it through lipstick, which is why my lipsticks have like the lipstick I'm wearing now is called Focused. Or like we have names called Inspiring, Ambitious, Chirping.
14:36
driven. Like all of our products are literally odes to power women and the essential products that she needs in her life. Oh my gosh. I just feel it. I feel it in everything that you're saying. I'm so inspired. Holy moly. So cool. That's the point. That's the job. I love it. I love it so much. I want to understand this early phase of you deciding to start this business. What is going on? Like how do you create a lipstick brand? What are the steps?
15:05
Yeah. So I definitely stumbled into all of that. Like I said, I mean, I didn't sit down and do like detailed market research and analysis and all this stuff to get to lipsticks. I just realized, listen, I love lipsticks. I know a lot of women love lipsticks. The beauty industry is a $750 billion growing industry. I don't think women are ever going to stop wearing makeup. And in fact, many men are wearing makeup now. And so I think the industry is growing.
15:31
And then I realized also just from my own user habits and talking to a lot of people holding focus groups that, you know, lipstick is the category that women are most willing to try out new brands. They won't for complexion, for like they have that foundation, that's their thing. They have that blush, that's their thing. They have that mascara, that's their thing. But like lipstick, a woman will have like 10 different brands in her drawer and they're all red, but she like has a whole bunch. Yeah.
15:58
So I was like, that's the place you need to start where customer loyalty is super low because that's where I'm not an influencer. I'm not a celebrity. That's where the average woman is going to be willing to give you a chance. That is so cool. What a great little pearl of wisdom there. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. It was a little bit of intuition, personal interest with that whole fit notion with where do you think strategically you can start to kind of chip away, right? Yeah.
16:27
Given what you don't have, which is I didn't have a massive budget. I didn't have influencer status or celebrity or access to any of those things. But social media is free, right? So I was like, OK, let's just start small. And like I said, it wasn't a goal to build this amazing brand at the time. It was just what can you do? Like when you actually try this purpose meets passion, where do you get that?
16:52
That is so cool. And so what is happening in the beginning? How do you develop a lipstick company? Like what are those early kind of tactical steps to bringing this brand up until the point of launch? Yeah. So I think a couple of things which are obvious and a couple of things which were not obvious that I lived to regret. Love the not obvious. Yes, yes. Which I'm like, please don't make the same mistake I did.
17:16
So I think the first thing was just naming the company for me. And as I said, this happened on a walk and I just kind of plugged into, um, I always love to kind of be a little cheeky because I feel like if you, if you kind of like poke people and makes them think. And so I had always been called bossy when I was young, cause I was always chitter chattering and always had something to say. And, you know, just always wanted my voice to be heard. And, you know, just always wanted my
17:42
I've always known that for young girls, you know, when young women are vocal about things, you know, we're called aggressive, we're called annoying, we're called, you know, we can be called emotional, we're called bossy. But if it's a if it's a young man, oh, he's assertive, he's a go getter, he's a natural leader. And so I wanted to kind of, again, be cheeky and like reclaim that word and say, listen, this is a call to arms, babes. Like if you have been called bossy, let's have a chat about.
18:09
you, something was seen in you very early and I want you to reclaim and own that voice. And so I picked the name, did no research. I was like, okay, calling the thing Balsy Cosmetics. I have so many questions on this, by the way. I hope you're going there. Yes. That's where I'm going because I did not do any searches for other people who have the name. I did not do any trademark work. I did nothing. I literally very naive on the walk, picked the name.
18:37
and then did an online competition. I think it costs like $99 to design the logo. Our first logo was super, super ugly, super ugly. But I've always loved the color rose gold. So I knew it had to have rose gold in it. So that was the only guidance I gave. And it kind of had like a lip in it because I knew it was going to be lipstick. So I mean, super ugly maybe is an exaggeration. That's not fair. It wasn't very nice. Let's put it that way. You've evolved. I've evolved, yes.
19:06
So I did this cheap sort of, you know, make a logo, name a company. And then I was like, OK, where are we going to get the lipsticks from, the actual product? And so I joined a bunch of I started talking to people about, do you know any of the industry groups that one needs to be a part of? So I joined Cosmetic Executive Women's Group. I joined a bunch of different trade groups and started going to trade shows and then just started connecting with people and learned about a private label manufacturer here in California.
19:33
So our first collection and one of the things that was very important to me was obviously that they were cruelty free. I wanted to have clean products. And then I also wanted to be because I am a black woman and in America, there is this general assumption that if you are a black woman, you only make products for other black women.
19:54
And it's something that I've talked about a lot. Super frustrating. I don't like it, but, you know, unconscious bias exists. But I wanted to create a range that was truly inclusive, where you could find colors that you loved. And every woman between you and I, I wanted the brand to defy ethnicity, to defy hue, to defy undertones. I wanted it to be truly, truly welcoming because the definition of an ambitious woman defies all of those things.
20:21
And so I needed to find a private label manufacturer that had that range. And so I found one. And honestly, Dune, like, this is it. Like, I literally was like, okay, you make these products. He's probably like, sign this contract. Let's go. I had my logo, slapped the logo on it, set up a bunch of social media accounts, you know, Twitter, Instagram, all that stuff. And I got to work. And I just started working.
20:48
That's the beautiful thing about social media. And I was very insecure. I have to say my life as an investment banker, I was never called to be a marketer, right? Like you don't do B to C marketing. You're dealing directly with super large corporations. So the marketing muscle is very different. So I took Google Analytics courses online. I took Google marketing courses. I took Facebook marketing courses, digital marketing courses online. I was teaching myself everything. Yeah.
21:17
And so I would honestly, I was just learning as I was going along. I really don't want this to seem like I had a I did not have a business plan or anything. I think my first order of products, once I found the company that I said made the clean products and had the.
21:33
You know, I got to pick the range of colors that I liked. We started with liquid lipsticks, lip glosses and lip liners. Once I found the range that I liked, we had the logo. I set up a company called Bossy Cosmetics to own the trademark and all of the, well, to own the brand and all of these things. And then I set up social media pages and just kind of started saying, you know, speaking to the message, right? Like the product, but also the message.
22:00
And what I found was people were like, this is cool. We love it. This is cool. We love it. We love the products. The products are great. They're high performing. They're beautiful. Like white women, Asian women, Indian women, black women, different women. Like it started to, you know, the market testing. I always tell people like, don't spend too much time thinking because go out there. The market will teach you. And the market was telling me, this is really interesting. We like this. We like that. Have you made these types of products or they, and, and,
22:28
And people started telling me, oh, your logo, you know, can't really see the logo on this. And one person who ended up becoming my lead designer now sent me an email and said, your logo is ugly. It is not befitting. Literally ugly? Literally. She's a French woman.
22:45
who is now like one of my best friends, sent me an email through cosmetic executive women. She's like, I've heard about your brand. Oh, my God, I love what you're building. I think that's such a wide space in the beauty industry. Nobody thinks about how to bring ambitious women together through products. I love what you're doing. She had worked for about 15 years at that time between Chopard and Givenchy and Lancôme. And she's like, but your design aesthetic is awful.
23:10
You know, and it hurt because she was right. Right. Like I read that email and I was like, who the hell does this woman think she is? Yeah.
23:20
And then I went back and looked at everything and I was like, like, I have some of this stuff. And I'm like, maybe she's right. Not maybe. I was like, she is right. So I emailed her and I was like, all right, let's talk. And she's like, I'm in Paris. I'm like, I'll fly out. Let's meet. Oh my God. I love that. I have so many questions up until this point. So let's take a hot second to dig into a few things. Number one, bossy as a word in beauty, trademarking. Was it difficult? Yes.
23:47
So I'll make this without going because we can talk about this for 10 years. It was very difficult. And we've only just now gotten trademark approval on a trademark name that is Bossy by Aisha 2. So when I initially started, I tried to trademark Bossy by Aisha. That was my goal.
24:13
And we had gotten conditional approval. And at the very last minute, a woman owned company that uses the word bossy. Now, if you Google bossy in beauty, I mean, there's like 1000 companies. Be bossy, bossy, be bossy girl, bossy this. I mean, it's such a common word. Like I said, I didn't do any research. I just went ahead with it. It is so common in beauty. So another woman owned business, sadly, um,
24:37
sent me a cease and desist letter that she was going to challenge Bossy by Aisha. And I added by Aisha because I thought it would make it distinctive.
24:46
Anyway, so this is, I'm not going to go into the whole legal drama, but in the end, she dropped her lawsuit against us. And so we proceeded. I dropped Bossy by Aisha as a result of her attacking us. But she dropped her lawsuit. And so then I went back again to do Bossy by Aisha 2, which is my full name. But interestingly enough, in the UK, I applied for Bossy Cosmetics. I got it.
25:13
And then I proceeded to apply for bossy cosmetics in the EU, at which point Hugo Boss woke up and decided. This is where I was like, let's talk about Hugo Boss, because Hugo Boss is known to be a bloody hound with this word.
25:29
They are awful. They are awful. I'm currently still in negotiations with them. The good. So here's the bad thing. The good thing is I had the fright of I've never received a cease and desist letter. And I think when you watch the movies, you think it's like the end of the world when you get it. But in reality, it's not. It's an email.
25:50
You know what I mean? No, it's a six-page letter that's delivered to your house and a copy and email. And you think you're going to jail and you're like, you think all these negative things, like my house is going to be taken, my children be destitute and all these things. So when I got it, I was like weeping and crying. I was like, oh my God. And by the way, I will never forget the date. It was April 8th, 2020. So we are literally just in the beginning of the pandemic.
26:16
I have put every red cent of my savings into a whole new collection that was designed by this French woman I just told you. Like we took it up a thousand notches based on me now hiring her to redesign the logo. We got a design studio. Like we took the business up several notches. I put every last dollar into this whole redesign. Go to France and Italy, meet new supply chain. Everything is spent. And then the pandemic happens.
26:44
So my goods, and I mean, what are you going to do? Start calling people in Northern Italy when they're dying? No. Start calling people in China when China's shut down? No. So I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, new products, and I get the C-synthesis letter.
26:59
And I don't even know when those products are arriving because we're a pandemic. So I was beside myself. I can't begin to explain how devastating. I actually wrote this woman several letters asking her, please, let's have a negotiation. Let's have a conversation. If you and I speak woman to woman, we can definitely come to an understanding. She refused to speak to me. I mean, her lawyer was literally...
27:21
awful. I mean, he accused me of trying to destroy her business. He called me a fraud. Just all sorts of things. It was really, yeah, it was really awful. I even, and I remember it got to June during the whole George Floyd situation. And I wrote her another letter saying, listen, I'm a black mother. I'm dealing with a lot of stress right now.
27:40
I don't even have these products that you're telling me that I can't sell. You know, I am this company may be bankrupt at any moment. Like, can you just give me a minute? Let's have a conversation. Let's speak. She refused to speak to me. And I think what that did for me, and I want to send this message to any entrepreneur is sometimes you do have options because I think that her.
28:02
The meanness and the lack of empathy and the lack of soul in responding to me made me say, F this, I'm going to fight you. So I stopped deciding to change my name, right? Because I immediately capitulated. I was like, okay, I can't. The world is coming to an end. I'll change the company's name. But please give me two years to sell the existing inventory that hasn't even arrived. And she was saying no.
28:27
And so once we once I saw how awful she was, I was like, let's go to court. And each day we were supposed to show up to court. She never showed up.
28:37
So yeah, anyway, so that's how that went. Oh my God, I didn't realize that it actually ends in going to court. Like I just kind of thought it was all figured out over the internet. No, it was supposed to go to a tribunal. I wrote, I think she probably said, well, it's public record, so I won't talk about it. But I wrote a letter to the tribunal about how our brands have no overlap whatsoever. And of course, at this point now, as luck would have it, we are getting so much press.
29:05
We are getting so much press. Nobody is confusing our brands. I mean, if you visit her brand and my brand, you will never mistake us. Right. So her argument was laughable. And I put the laughability in a document and I filed it with the court. She never showed. The court gave her an additional 30 days. She didn't show.
29:25
So here's another message to female entrepreneurs. Women are not always going to be your partner. But guess what? Fight. If you believe in yourself, fight. And what I did at the time, we didn't have the capital to hire a big lawyer. I did this myself. Like that five-page document, I wrote it myself. I went and studied what are all the legal codes and everything. I did it myself.
29:50
Of course, now, December 24th, the day before Christmas comes, I get a letter from a law firm representing Hugo Boss. Now, you're not going to fight those guys that way. This was... That's a different fight. That's a different issue. And so at that point, why I brought up her case was...
30:06
I'd already cried all the tears. I'd already been so petrified of losing this business that it now felt like my fourth child that I had become so connected to that consumers were loving and that I was telling women to be confident, to go out and fight for themselves. And it kind of felt like I was in a fight for the brand. And so by the time I got Hugo Boss's letter, I was almost like, all right, let's go.
30:31
I didn't shed a single tear. And so we then went through a one year negotiation. Right. And they they I mean, they are they are heavy, as you know, they are they are mean. They are aggressive. I have to say that their lawyer that I worked with is actually a really wonderful person. He's actually really nice. Unfortunately, he's he's against me. But.
30:53
You know, and he's got to do his clients bidding. But I had all those negotiations by myself because, again, I did not have the capital to hire a fancy UK law firm. I hired French lawyers to change a lot of the filings in Europe. And I basically asked Hugo Boss, what do you need to be able to sleep at night where I get to keep bossy? Because you don't make color cosmetics. Like, I'm not hurting you. So what do we need? So we ended up agreeing on going back to Bossy by Aisha to.
31:23
And if I had that as distinctive, they felt that it wouldn't, you know, infringe upon their boss. And they told me that they were very concerned around fragrances. That was really their business. And I said, fine, I'll never make a fragrance that uses the word boss. Yeah.
31:39
And so I ended up trademarking my name, Aisha 2, in Europe, in the UK and in the US. And then I ended up applying for the trademark of Bossy by Aisha 2. And so now I own Bossy by Aisha 2 and Aisha 2 in Europe, in the UK. In the US, I own Aisha 2 and Bossy by Aisha 2. I should get it by the end of this year. It's now been approved and we're using it on our new packaging. And so it has been...
32:09
the most expensive, heart-wrenching,
32:14
anxiety riddle journey of my life. You know, just last week, I got an email from the Hugo Boss lawyer and I had such a bad day. Like whenever I see his name in my mailbox, it sends me into a tizzy. Do I think it was worth it? I don't know. I think what I will tell founders is don't do something as stupid as I did, which is, you know, just go for a walk and come with a name, incorporate the company and get going. You know, but like I said, I didn't think...
32:41
I wasn't thinking that far. I was just like, this will be fun. Let's see how it goes. And then as it started to go, I was like, oh, we're going to build a billion dollar brand. Let's go. And then I was like, oh, so let's trademark it really quickly. And then I thought, I realized, oh, it doesn't work that way. So we kind of patched our way into it. And I'm just grateful now that we have the Posse by Aisha 2 brand. And I feel like, yes, it is distinctive. We also have the Aisha 2 brand. So we'll play around with how we use that.
33:10
But I feel super powerful that I fought these two people. Yeah, that's crazy. That is so impressive. Like, so impressive. I don't know. And when you saw me crying, you wouldn't have been impressed. There were a lot of tears. Lots and lots and lots. Lots of tears. Yeah.
33:31
But you just must know so much about like this side of business now. Like this must also just be a huge learning growth point for you too as a person. Yeah. Yeah. It almost feels like one of the things that it's done is like really increased my faith because –
33:54
Again, I felt like I was in the David and Goliath battle. Like, I mean, Hugo Boss' goal, I read the other day, is to get to revenues of four and a half billion pounds. I mean, I'm the rounding error of Hugo Boss, OK? I'm literally, I don't know how I could even be on their screen and for them to have this kind of, you know, focus on destroying me. And so it almost felt...
34:19
deceitful for me not to have the fight. And I was prepared to lose the fight as well. But I mean, prepared, you don't have a choice if you lose it. But I thought, if this is what you really were talking about when you talked about the intersection of purpose and passion, and you talked about igniting confidence in women, and so you will ignite this confidence in yourself and you will fucking fight.
34:42
And if you lose, you will tell the story of your loss. Like as far as you have your body, your soul, your mental health, and you have your family, you have your children, you've got all the people who love you. You haven't lost like you, you fought valiantly and you move on to the next thing.
35:00
And I also think that these stories really, like, it becomes part of your journey and it becomes part of your, like, story that you put out into the world. You know, like, I've also heard of the founders of Midday Squares. They had an acquisition offer from Hershey's that they denied. And then 30 days later, or maybe a bit longer, a few months later, Hershey comes knocking on their door with a cease and desist. And it's like, you have to change your whole brand.
35:23
And like, they just turned it into such a positive because they were like, we're actually not going to fight it. We're going to absolutely use this as part of our story, part of our journey, document everything all online. And of course that makes people fall in love with them and away from the big guy. And it is a point of like difference to your story, like 100%. That is crazy, crazy stuff. Oh my God. Wow. Thank you for sharing. Um,
35:53
I want to go back to kind of that earlier piece of like you've launched, things are kind of taking off. You're getting a lot of great reception from everyone. I love to understand kind of A, the money piece, like how much you kind of invested to get the brand off the ground and like how you were thinking about financing the brand moving forward, knowing that building a CPG brand requires so much working capital. Oh, God, yes. So like I said, I started with just I think my first order was
36:20
was like $2,500, okay? That's what I ordered to start the company. So super, super, super small. Now we're in the hundreds of thousands, right? But we started with just, all right, let's buy 50 of this color, 25 of that color, like super, super small.
36:39
So that was manageable. And then, of course, I told you I meet my lead designer, Stephanie, and we go to Paris. And then she takes me to like lots of – we go and we visit all of the major primary packaging manufacturers in Europe. And I'm now just seeing – The dream is becoming a lot bigger. The dream is my ghost. I mean, literally the dream ballooned. And I was like –
37:01
Wait, we can do this, Stephanie. Like, we can do this. I can do this. Like, this is, again, igniting confidence. I started to say, why can L'Oreal do it? And I couldn't. Why could Louis Vuitton do it? And I couldn't. Why could Estée Lauder do it? And I couldn't. Like, shit, I can do this. Had no money to do it, but I still wasn't. And so I think it was just...
37:22
Stephanie believing in me and then meeting some of these amazing producers who produce for Givenchy, for Gucci, for Pat McGrath, for Charlotte, like the majors meeting with me and saying, OK, yeah, like we can work with you. You're an indie brand. You know, we don't produce such small quantities, you know, but we can work with you.
37:41
I was like, OK, it was almost like, you know what, Aisha, like, let it rip. Let's go for it. And so, like I said, I was ordering 50 sticks at this time. And these guys are telling me minimum order quantity is 10,000. Right. So I'm just thinking how. But this is, again, my point around faith. I was like, go big or go home.
38:05
And this is why I said I put every red cent that I had into the company. And then I also, what was really fortunate for me, and I am almost getting emotional saying this, is that I had friends start to call me up and say, I love what you're doing. Anything you want to do, I want to support you. What can I do? And so I had people saying, let me give you 5,000. Let me give you 10,000. Let me give you 25,000. And those thousands, they bloody add up.
38:33
And then a gentleman I respect greatly, he was a colleague of mine at Stanford. He sits on the board of many companies. He was the CEO of Jamba Juice, so he knows retail. He calls me up and he says, I believe you can build a billion dollar brand. I want to support you. Not only am I going to give you some capital, but I'll open doors for you. How can I help? I mean, Dune, you start getting those calls and you start feeling that the universe is working for you.
39:02
So I mean, that's obviously all before the pandemic crippled things. But so I put my money in and took some money from some friends and family. And I was like, let's go. And that's what ended up becoming. I'll show you the first new collection was we did this eyeshadow palette, which was our first foray into powders. And it's one of our best sellers. We did this.
39:28
We did our liquid lipsticks. Like I said, we were ordering 20, 50 pieces. We did 10,000 of these. This was unbelievable. And then we did this part. So these were the three first sort of level up products we did. This was one of the four that was selected on Oprah's Favorite Things.
39:45
Right. I mean, oh, my God. So it's crazy. Congratulations, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. Right. So it's almost this is a this is a story of craziness, grit, resilience, madness, volatility, luck, fucking balls. I mean, I'm back to crazy again. None of it made sense.
40:12
But I just was like, let's go. That is a wild journey. When you were like changing from ordering 50 of this, 50 of that to 10,000 of this, 10,000 of that, can you tell me how you're marketing and selling that many units and going from selling 50 to 10,000 of a skew? What's the marketing journey? Yeah.
40:34
So what's interesting, so I think I've realized, okay, when you're leveling up, you're leveling up in everything. You don't just level up in one bit, right? So you hire the firm who does the new logo. You have these new beautiful packaging. I mean, in the beginning, I was using my iPhone stuff.
40:50
four or 10 or whatever it was to take pictures in my garden and post on, on Instagram. I was like, okay, honey, like you need to get like a proper product photographer. Now you need to like, get proper, like you need some real stuff. This little chicken little thing you're doing is not going to work. So you begin to level up. Yeah.
41:08
And so that's what I started to do. I started to kind of look for studios that can do proper product photography. So, you know, of course, you look at what other brands are doing. You see their Instagram, you see their websites. It's like, oh, my God, guy like Aisha, you really need to take this up several notches because you are where you are. You now have this vision of where you want to be and you start looking at the various arcs to get there. And you're like, OK, what I'm doing now is not going to get me to sell 10,000 sticks.
41:36
So you start saying, OK, like, how do I level up? How do I level up? And that, first of all, was imagery. Like, how do we appear differently? How do we showcase our product differently? But for the most part, I want to say a lot didn't change. I have always been the chief marketing officer of this company. Every post you see on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok is me.
42:00
Right. So I a lot I mean, like I said, I don't design the products, although I work very close. I mean, nothing is designed in this company without me like looking at it 5000 times and making all of my changes. So my my fingerprint is all over the DNA of this brand. But the marketing has always been me. I just work with really amazing people. I work with great photographers, great stylists. Like we did a photo shoot a month or two ago with this really amazing Nigerian stylist. And it was just fantastic.
42:30
fucking otherworldly, like an amazing photographer. Just, I work with really amazing people to create really amazing visuals. And so that's kind of what we're doing is just, you know, leveling up. One of the things that I've always said is I don't want to just be, well, we're obviously no longer just a lipstick company, right? We have eyewear.
42:49
eyeliners now, eyeshadows, we're going into blush and highlighters. So we're doing full facial cosmetics as we go along. But I never want to just be about product. I want to talk about content. I want to create content that's super exciting for our audience. I want to create services. So one of the products we launched in 2020, which we're refreshing, is called Beauty Meets Wisdom.
43:10
where if you spend $50 on the site, we give you a free hour of executive coaching from a professional coach. And so really what we wanted to do is show our customers, we are partnering with you. When we say we want you to look good, feel good and do good, we mean it.
43:25
And so that's kind of we started to lean into things that other brands are not doing. I have a monthly bossy chats where I do an IG live with an amazing woman in business and we talk about the success. We talk about the failures, the challenges, kind of like what you and I are doing right now. You know, we do it on IG live and create sort of evergreen content. So...
43:47
That's what we're doing. I'm just I'm trying to walk to the beat of our own drum, listen to our customers, find out what they what they want, what they need. Sometimes you don't always ask someone what you need to kind of figure out from when they tell you what their problems are and you figure out what are the ones that you can use your market position to to support.
44:10
I mean, I am just like blown away from you and your energy and everything that you're saying. This is so cool. And I love it and I see it and I feel it. It's amazing. What is your key piece of advice for entrepreneurs who are going into the beauty industry in 2022? Oh, God. Apart from all the mistakes I made, please don't repeat them.
44:35
I just think stay consistent, stay focused, and many times put your blinders on, really know your why. I think, you know, if you follow so many other people on social media, you read all the press highlights, a lot of things can get depressing. Like this person raised $3 million, this person raised $20 million, this person got into Sephora. Like all the dreams you have for yourself, other people are living them. It can tend to be, you know...
45:01
it can tend to really get to you. And so I just, there's so many times in the journey of Bossy, like we're turning three years old in a week. And so we are still a young brand, but there's been some several times in the journey of this business where I've said, I can't do this. I'm shutting down. I just can't do this. Right. Especially during, during the trademark battles. And,
45:25
I'm so grateful that I didn't let those times break me. And so my advice would to you who's starting in the beauty industry is you will meet a lot of resistance. You will you will get a lot of negative feedback. You will get negative reviews. You will get so many no's.
45:42
You know, you may get a lawsuit like so many different things will come your way. It is actually part of the journey. It's not the message that tells you to quit. It's the message that tests to see whether you are made for this. And so don't interpret bad things happening as this isn't meant to be. I'm going to pack it up. Like people always say businesses don't fail because they run out of money. They fail because the founder gives up.
46:12
Wow. 100%. Great advice.
46:23
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.
46:47
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.
47:10
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.
47:25
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.
47:50
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.
48:13
As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favourite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.