Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / The dyslexic female founder who started her business with $50 is now a B-corp 8 figure nail polish brand, with Kester Black’s Anna Ross (part 1)

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The dyslexic female founder who started her business with $50 is now a B-corp 8 figure nail polish brand, with Kester Black’s Anna Ross (part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Anna Ross for Female Startup Club. Hello and welcome back to the show. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today on the show, we're learning from Anna Ross, who is the founder of Kesta Black. We're chatting through some of the pivots she made early on when she saw traction in a totally different space.
• 0:27
  how she deals with shipping dangerous goods, her thoughts on circular packaging, and some key pieces of advice for entrepreneurs. The real key part of this episode is in the last 10 minutes when she goes through her six quick questions. So take note and make sure you tune into that bit because it is not to be missed.
• 0:47
  Now, before we get into this episode, as you most probably know, I am shouting very, very loudly about my first book that comes out at the end of Feb, featuring the stories and learnings from 51 of the most mind-blowing women from the first year on the show. And I am just so excited to share it with you. It's the perfect book to pick up, flip to any page, and get a dose of inspiration and learnings from female founders who have been there and done that.
• 1:16
  It's the kind of book you can scribble in. You can put post-it notes in there. You can highlight it. It's the kind of book you can read if you're an entrepreneur, a future entrepreneur, or just someone interested in the stories behind the brands we know and love and buy.
• 1:31
  And right now, I am looking for different folks who might be able to support the book, like freelance PR people, influencers, or people who have communities. So if you're someone who might be able to help me get the word out, or you know someone who might be able to help me get the word out, I would love to meet you. Please do slide into my Instagram DMs so we can chat.
• 1:55
  If we aren't friends already, well, we bloody should be. And you can find me at Doon Roisin, which is D-O-O-N-E-R-O-I-S-I-N. Okay, that's enough of me. Let's get into it. This is Anna for Female Startup Club.
• 2:12
  Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast, take two. I'm so happy to be here again. Anna, hello. Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast, take two. I'm so happy to be here again.
• 2:27
  I'm happy for you to be here. You're all set up for everyone listening. Anna has just moved to Estonia and we tried to connect last week. We had a couple of tech issues, but now we're on the home stretch. Yeah, awesome. I'm so excited. I've been excited since the last time we tried to connect, so I'm even more excited for this version.
• 2:49
  Love that for me and for you and for the listeners. Do you want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and what your business is for those who might not yet know? Yeah, cool. My name is Anna Ross. I'm originally from New Zealand, but spent 11 and a half years living in Melbourne. So when I started my business, Kester Black, it's sort of an Australian business, but then we sort of took it back to New Zealand and now we're in Europe setting it up here.
• 3:19
  So Kester Black is an ethical, sustainable cosmetics brand that specializes in color cosmetics. So we make nail polish, lipstick and eyeliner at the moment, but we will be launching it into a full beauty brand. And the key differences with Kester Black and most other brands on the market are,
• 3:38
  is that it's cruelty-free vegan B Corp. We were the first company in the world, first cosmetics company in the world to get B Corp certified. And everything that we do is based around this, like, how can I do it better? How is it better for the environment? How can we set ourselves apart? So it's awesome that these days, because Kester Black is almost 10 years old, that's standard. And if it's a new brand, you should be doing that anyway. So I think that's the most exciting sort of thing that I've seen in the last 10 years of running my little business. Yeah.
• 4:09
  Yeah, I love that. It's pretty wild to me that you're the first, like, cosmetics company to get a B Corp certification. Like, I would have just thought that that was kind of like, yeah, the norm, I guess. It wasn't. It wasn't 10 years ago. And so when I started, yeah, it was 2012 that I started KISS. Actually, it was 2009. Yeah.
• 4:30
  So it's quite a long time ago, but 2012. So firstly, it started as a, because I studied fashion in New Zealand, and I really love working with my hands. So it started as a fashion label, then it became a jewellery label.
• 4:46
  And as I grew and became more hungry and learning more skills, it then turned into this cosmetics business. So that was actually, we launched the first six colors in August 2012. So back then, there was only one nail polish brand on the market in Australia that had both cruelty-free and vegan certification. And that was it. One. One.
• 5:13
  Wow, that's crazy. You know what I love is that instead of like closing the business and starting the new one with the new direction, you just pivoted it like a couple of times. You iterated from fashion to jewelry to nail polish to full cosmetics. It's so interesting to me that, you know, that idea of like just –
• 5:34
  iterating and quickly going around to find what you're happy with versus like stopping and starting again from scratch and like just building on what you'd already built. It wasn't what I would call a business back then, which is the beauty of it. So I finished my degree and I asked my mom for $30,000 to start a fashion label. And she said, no, Anna, you are going overseas to get some experience. So I moved to Melbourne. Heartbroken. You're going over heartbroken. Yeah.
• 6:02
  So I moved to Melbourne and I ended up getting a job in retail. And it was hard to come from New Zealand to get a job in the fashion industry in Australia because the Australian market didn't understand how excellent the New Zealand degree was. And in Australia you either studied design or...
• 6:20
  or construction and manufacturing, whereas in New Zealand we got both of those sets of skills in the one degree. So actually I was highly skilled as a graduate because I'd also been running like my little fashion label and making clothes for three years the entire time I was at school as well.
• 6:37
  And so it was like it was just a creative outlet when I first got there alongside my full time job. So I just used to make jewelry on the weekends. And the only reason why I didn't end up doing Kester Black, the fashion label in Australia, was because it was too expensive to bring my sewing machine from New Zealand. So it was just a fun little project to create a brand and see if I could sell it. The turning point was, though, when I did work.
• 7:02
  translate it from jewelry into nail polish. I actually got a job in the fashion industry as the product development manager at a really big Australian fashion label. And the job was paying $90,000 a year. And I thought, wow, that's, you know, I think I was on 35 or something back then. As a design assistant, I managed to get a job in the industry.
• 7:24
  And I thought, actually, I reckon I've put in too much effort to little Kester Black and I would really like to see how far it goes. So I turned down the job, quit my job in fashion, and then went and took a job working for an optometrist association so I could do Kester Black part time. And it was at that point that we launched the nail polish colors. And then within the first three months of launching nail polish colors, the business tripled revenue within three months.
• 7:51
  What was the, just to paint a picture, are you able to share, like, what the revenue was when you tripled it? It was $30,000. And then within three months we were turning over $90,000. And then. That's a lot of nail polish for, like, you know, a new business. Yeah, it was. It was just this, like.
• 8:10
  And so we think of it as pivoting, but really it was me getting bored and wanting to do something new and it was a hobby. So it wasn't a risk or it was back then because I think the invoice for $2,000 to make the first batch of nail polishes would have bankrupt me almost. So it was risky in that sense, but it's not like I didn't have a job. So I could just not do the project and I could just keep going to work and getting paid and paying my rent, if that makes sense.
• 8:37
  Yeah, you've got the safety net. I love it. I have a few different questions on this. First of all is like you've decided to switch from jewelry to nail polish. Why? Like what was the ink? What was the like little tiny glimmer that you were like, oh, it's going to be nail polish. That's what I'm going to switch to. That's the first question. And the second question is like, why do you think it resonated so much with the audience that you were targeting? Like how did you triple your revenue like in a tactical, you know,
• 9:06
  way? So the first part of the first question was I was making sterling silver jewelry and I got bored of working with just one color. I felt like I think I'd been doing it three or four years at that point. And I felt like the creative outlet was becoming really stagnant. And I've always been really interested in color, which is funny because I always only wear black and white.
• 9:31
  But I love colourful stuff and I love shiny things and, you know, like opals and diamonds. But so I wanted to see if I could. Speaking my language. Same. I wanted to see if I could colour the sterling silver. And I thought, oh, I'm pretty sure you could do it with enamel paint.
• 9:48
  So, and I thought, what's an easy way to get enamel paint? And I thought, I'm pretty sure nail polish is enamel paint. So I went and bought a nail polish and I was like, oh, this is fun. I was actually shopping for a dress and a handbag and I couldn't afford it.
• 10:04
  And then I bought this $14 nail polish and I was like, wow, I feel like amazing. It gave me this complete satisfaction of having bought something new, like it was a new outfit, but only for $14. And I thought, that's really cool. So I thought I would make colored jewelry and then matching nail polish. And the technical reason behind that was because, so the colored jewelry didn't work.
• 10:27
  But then I thought I would just launch the nail polish anyway because I wanted to create an add-on sale. If you've ever worked in retail, it's just like a small item that you add onto the sale to increase the value of the order. The upsell. Yep.
• 10:42
  And I thought, and I was like, oh, that's going to be cool. I could increase it by, you know, $15, I think it was back then, or $16 with every ring that I sold. And so that was kind of like the tactical decision to do it. And because I'm developing something with color and it was really fun and new, it felt satisfying. And then when I did launch it into the market to answer your second question,
• 11:08
  The reason why it went so well, I think, was because the bottle was designed really nicely. And if you can remember back 10 years ago, the main nail polish brand on the market was OPI. And for anybody who likes a neat bathroom counter, those silly round bottles just drive me up the wall because you can never get the label facing the front.
• 11:30
  So I made it in a square bottle. I put the brand name on the front and I put all of the other rubbish information that nobody really cares about on the back, like the mills. And I think we're probably like one of the first brands in the world to do it. I didn't even know if it was because I didn't know about global compliance regulations back then. I don't know if it was illegal to do that. But now knowing the regulations...
• 11:52
  They don't have to be on the front of the bottle. They just have to be on the bottle somewhere. And so I was wondering why. I took this product that was mass market. I made interesting colors and then I made it a design forward. I thought about the design first. I developed this mass market product with design as the core principle. That's so cool and so interesting.
• 12:16
  It's sort of, it all just happened because I didn't have anything to lose and it was interesting and it was a process. So the early days of Kester Black was rough and ready, I would say. We've probably done about three brand design. You know, we've had three logos or four logos over the time, but it just grew naturally and I never had any money to put into it. I started with $50 and then I...
• 12:43
  grew the business step by step from the $50. So there hadn't been any investment up until last year.
• 12:51
  Wow. That's so crazy. And I think I read you're like an eight figure business now. Yeah. That's like so impressive. When you think about the last decade, obviously there's a lot that happens in a decade and it's hard to remember it all. But if you were to kind of like piece down on the milestones that got you to where you are today, what are those key milestones within the
• 13:21
  Cool. So pivoting to nail polish was in 2012. And then within the next two years, I had grown the range from six nail polish colors to 60. So it was the expansion of the color range. Jesus. That's a lot. Yeah. And then probably within the first three years, 2015...
• 13:42
  We had 500 wholesale stockists in Australia. And so I would not recommend that in today's landscape. Wholesale is a really different business. It's a different ballgame. But e-commerce was still fresh back then. And I don't even know if Shopify was around. But anyway, we made our first website on WordPress and it was rubbish. The person I was working with wasn't that good and the functionality of WordPress wasn't as good. And so...
• 14:11
  You know, it's sort of all developed by now. And then it would have been probably getting into Liberties in London. So our first massive international department store, which was really exciting.
• 14:24
  And then sort of like the most memorable thing recently was in 2021 March coronavirus. We, all of our wholesale stores in Australia got shut down because of the lockdowns, but we had just redone our website. And it was at that point that we started Facebook advertising as well.
• 14:49
  And it blew up essentially because our website was ready to go. There was a demand from the customer because people were at home and really looking to buy online. And our Facebook ads account really started to gain some traction. We'd probably started Facebook advertising a year before and really started to scale at that point. But there's so many ins and outs with Facebook advertising. And what we've learned from that is that we need to do it in-house and the agencies can't help.
• 15:17
  We'd tried to do it for a number of years before 2020, but it didn't really work because we kept trying to outsource it because we were a small team. And we kept trying to spend $1,000 a month. And now we spend, you know, back in 2020, we were putting $20,000 a month into it. And until you can afford to do that, it's almost, in my opinion, not worth it.
• 15:41
  Yeah, and I think as well, like the thing about Facebook ads, especially in today's landscape since the iOS changes, is like you need to have so much foundational, you know, things in place before you should even start to consider ads. You need to have like what you were saying, your website needs to be optimized and ready for those ads. You need to be able to produce content, especially now more than ever. You need to be able to produce content at scale that's engaging, that's incredible and
• 16:08
  that's going to hook this person in when they're scrolling through a saturated social news feed. There's just so much that you should be doing before you even, you know, go into that space. And that's, I think, what I see a lot of small businesses trying to jump the gun. They want to go straight from, I've launched a brand, now I need to launch ads. And it's like, there's actually so many steps in between those two phases. Yeah, absolutely. And the key thing to remember with
• 16:36
  And that's how to get new customers to your brand. But if you're not, if you haven't already set up your emails and your nurture flow and your website's not optimized, there's no point in spending that. It's just money down the drain. So we did a little test, which was really exciting. We use Shopify now and we have an Australian website. And that was the original one that we jumped onto about three or four years ago when we made the switch. That was probably a key milestone too, because Shopify has got fantastic reporting and
• 17:06
  Yes, it's more restricted. So, yeah, it's the best. I would absolutely recommend it. And then we set up a New Zealand website a year and a half to two years ago. And we got that kind of all right in that market. And then we launched into the market.
• 17:24
  And our conversion rate on our New Zealand website is about 9%. And on the Australian website, it's about 5%. So it's really interesting to see if you get all those steps right and then launch into a market and you do it successfully, you get this awesome optimisation. But, of course, the Australian markets where we've made all of our mistakes, lots of people saw us and...
• 17:50
  Whole food stores or at the moment we're having problems in Australia with our warehouse packaging the items really nicely. So in New Zealand, we seem to have got it right. And we've got that running in the first year. I think we'd started at $6,000 a month in New Zealand. And then.
• 18:09
  Within eight or nine months, we were doing $90,000 a month in New Zealand a month. So it was really easy to scale that market quickly because we'd made all these mistakes in Australia. We knew what to do. So we're hoping that when we scale Europe, it goes smoothly while we're over here. Yeah.
• 18:31
  Third time around, you're going to breeze through it. Hopefully. And what I also, I just want to, you know, circle back for one second to anyone listening who is a small business owner. The reason why, you know, it's not sustainable to acquire every customer for the first time if you don't have all of your funnels and everything set up is because…
• 18:49
  well, I've said it the wrong way around. It's not sustainable. If you have to acquire everyone and then you lose them as a customer, what you want to be doing is making sure that that customer has a long lifetime with you and you're able to capitalize on acquiring them that first time. So you only pay for them once and then you're able to kind of
• 19:06
  build on that relationship and offer them new products through your email series and things like that. So for anyone listening who's wanting to just have the magic pill and jumping into ads, there's more to consider. It's like, that's so funny because that's exactly how it was for us. I don't know, Kista Black officially started in 2014 when we registered as a company and not just me playing around on the side. Yeah.
• 19:30
  But it's taken a long time. And for the first probably five years, it was all word of mouth and free PR. So built the brand with no marketing spend whatsoever. And we had like a 90% return customer rate, which was amazing. And so it wasn't until we'd sort of got all of that, then it was worth even bothering to start spending money on marketing. Yeah.
• 19:55
  Unless you have a couple of million dollars to start with and you can afford to do it. But even then, you can burn that money quickly. Yes, unless you've got the working capital.
• 20:07
  And I think as well, the reality is that today we're in such a unique position right now with the way that Instagram Reels and TikTok are, you know, really taking small businesses to the next level. Everyone should be focusing their efforts on their content marketing strategy and their organic content marketing strategy because every video has the opportunity to go viral. You can reach people for free, essentially, just with time. I think it's such a cool, cool moment in the landscape of social media.
• 20:36
  And that is something that Kester Black has not done well. You know, we've done a traditional sort of, we were initially a wholesale, we're 80% wholesale, which means that say you have a product and it costs $5, then you double it to $10 and that's your wholesale price. And then you double that again to $20 and that's your retail price. So if you've got a $5 product, you're only making $5.
• 21:00
  like $5 on a wholesale item. But if you're selling it direct to consumer, you're making $15 for the same product. So it was in 2020, in January, March 2020, that we pretty much pivoted from, and organically, because of the situation, 80% wholesale to 10% wholesale, 90% online. And
• 21:25
  We had a bigger gross margin and we had way more money to spend on things. But then we spent that on Facebook ads. So we haven't actually done a really fantastic content marketing strategy, mainly because I found it really difficult to find people who are great at that. It's really interesting because, I mean, everybody's a native and everybody seems to be a social media marketing person. But content creation is so hard.
• 21:53
  Or it's hard to find great content creators who really understand the brand and create on-point content for our customers. So yeah.
• 22:02
  Yeah, it's because it's such a big mix of skills in there. You know, it's like graphic skills, copy skills, video making skills, editing, you know, styling. It's so broad. Someone who's actually been a long-term customer, who's kind of been with you on the journey for the last five to ten years, who is really passionate about what you're doing and gets it. That would be so cool. Yeah, so we're looking. If anybody's out there, please get in touch.
• 22:28
  Yeah, that would be so fun too. I wanted to ask you about shipping nail polish. Oh, don't. Oh, don't ask me. In my research, it was brought to my attention that shipping nail polish is shipping a dangerous good. And so I'm interested. I haven't spoken to anyone about that on the show before. So what's the lay of the land with nail polish? My advice to anybody listening is don't touch it.
• 22:57
  That was one of these big faux pas that I did from the start, which is probably my number one piece of advice is if you're going to create a product, check how you ship it. And one of the brands that I've seen do this really well was Frank Body from Australia.
• 23:13
  And they actually had their initial products, their coffee scrubs, in little bottles. But then they would have to send that as a parcel, which would have cost six or seven Australian dollars. So they redesigned the packaging so that it was a flat bag. And then they could put it through the post and it cost them a dollar per unit. So that is a really important consideration if you're at the start of making a brand.
• 23:38
  We, I made nail polish and sent it through the post for two years before I even understood that it was illegal to do so. And it wasn't until I had a big shipment going to a store and it must have got dropped by the postie and it got sent back. And it was just this mess of shattered nail polish bottles, essentially. And there was a note on it saying, you cannot be shipping this through the post. And I was like, oh, I wonder why.
• 24:06
  So I went online and looked it up and I found that you had to have a license to ship dangerous goods. Anything dangerous goods essentially means anything that is covered in the classes and the classes is like flammable goods, nuclear goods.
• 24:23
  nuclear items, explosives, batteries, you know, these times that, yeah, like biological virus samples that could wipe out the human population, they are considered dangerous goods. So I had to do this, get, do this test or do this course to get my license.
• 24:44
  And I thought, I'll do it online. How much does it cost? Maybe not very much, between, say, $300 and $500 or something. Not heaps. Right, right, right. But I did it online, and I had to learn how to ship all of those items to get it. And it took me seven months. It was the hardest thing I've ever done.
• 25:06
  It was so hard. Oh, my God. So anyway, I got the licence. And going forward, though, there means that there's a dangerous goods charge on every order sent. So, for example, when we were in Australia, we were trying to ship nail polish to New Zealand.
• 25:23
  And it would cost, say, $30 shipping with DHL because it can only go by DHL or FedEx, essentially, or an approved dangerous goods air carrier. So you cannot post dangerous goods using a postal system. It won't even get out of the border of the country. So it costs $30 then plus a DG surcharge of, say, $10. So then it takes your $30 shipping item to purchase.
• 25:47
  $40 and our nail polish at that time was $20. So it would cost twice as much to ship just the cost of one product.
• 25:55
  And then, of course, you get into... So you obviously wouldn't ship it. Well, we did for like two years because we thought it would be better to retain those early customers from New Zealand than shut them off for two years until we could find another solution. It just means that it's really difficult to expand into new markets with it because to send a pallet of dangerous goods, that's a different shipping class to how we would normally send it if I was sending one to you.
• 26:24
  And then it's troublesome because then any warehouse that we get, like a third-party logistics pack and send dispatch warehouse, they need to have trained and approved staff. You need to be able to store a certain amount. So there's all these legalities around products like this, and they're very complex, and I can see why every other beauty brand, I thought Kester Black was all being smart and cool.
• 26:48
  by creating products that no other beauty brands were really focusing on. So there was a gap in the market. But I found out why there is a gap in the market, and it's because it's incredibly difficult. Yeah. Yeah, you've taken on that complex challenge of...
• 27:04
  Filling the gap in the market. And you can't manufacture it yourself. You can't fill it yourself. So, you know, if your factory is full, you can't then process any of that stock yourself because you would be usually able to buy in bulk and then pour. We've poured skincare into bottles before and that was easy. But my gosh, nail polish, no way.
• 27:24
  Is that why you decided to introduce the other cosmetics to kind of have things that were easier to ship? Yeah, it was part of it. But I guess my vision of Kester Black has always been
• 27:38
  centred around me, whatever products I would like, that that's what I want to make. And so my focus, I guess, in the early days, nail polish, Kess Blank started as like this cosmetics brand because I was really interested in sustainability and I wanted a new project to keep me interested. And I looked at nail polish and I thought, what a crappy product. This product is rubbish. It would be better off for everybody if we didn't have it. In fact, if nail polish didn't exist, that would be the best. Yeah.
• 28:06
  So actually I wanted to create nail polish because I was like, I wonder if you can do this in a positive way because people are not going to stop buying it, but there's no really great options on the market for people who really care about the environment. So why what's bad about it as a total noob? Yeah, well, it's a plastic film.
• 28:31
  So it's plastic because it's dangerous goods. It means until it's dry, it's toxic. So when you paint nail polish on, the fumes are bad, but then once it's dry, it's completely non-toxic, but it's plastic. Yeah.
• 28:47
  It's like the packaging is made up of a plastic lid and a plastic brush, and there's probably about four or five different types of plastic in that packaging, and then glass. And the problem with nail polish is that often you cannot clean the glass, so none of the glass is recycled. So there are lots of issues with...
• 29:05
  nail polish and then of course there are broader issues like a lot of the mica used in the in the cosmetics industry which is the gorgeous powder that gives things a tiny shine or an iridescent sort of
• 29:19
  look um it's so it's a rock but often that is mined by children and so it's using slave labor it's dangerous in the mines then it's like processed with other chemicals which are toxic so there's lots of things in the industry which are really really bad and I was like wow nobody's tried to make this any better I wonder if we can um
• 29:42
  So there are some things in the industry that we can't change, like, for example, the fact that you can't clean the glass bottles that easily because to clean them, you need industrial chemicals to do it. So then therefore, if we did manage to get the glass back and recycle it, you can do it easily at home. So you could clean your glass and recycle that glass. But as a brand, we can't do it on an industry scale at the moment.
• 30:09
  So to offset some of those things, we donate money back to charities and we are carbon neutral and we are a B Corp. So we focus on this broader aspect of sustainable business and ethical business, because initially my understanding of ethical and sustainable business was, you know, small business.
• 30:30
  And so I just thought that doing better would be making in small batches so there was no runoffs, no excess, and making it vegan because most nail polish has actually got animal ingredients in it.
• 30:44
  So it was just a few of those small things. And then as I've grown and sustainability has become more of an interest, there's just so many problems that I want to try and address. And one of the biggest ones is the packaging and the cosmetics industry is just, there's just so much. And main problem with it is that it's mixed material. So you can't recycle it unless you know how to recycle it. That is so interesting. Yeah. So it's complex. Yeah.
• 31:13
  What is your advice for small brands who want to go down the path of certifications? I know you have somewhere in the range of six different certifications like Cruelty Free and Vegan and B Corp. What's your advice for small businesses who want to go down that path? I imagine there's, you know, costs involved. I imagine there's a lot of time spent towards applications or things like that. What's your advice? It's a great question because...
• 31:41
  my advice is it's very hard to retrofit product and brand if you don't come up with these concepts initially. You don't have to pay the licensing fee and get the accreditation, but you need to understand the values of the certification when you're small. So, for example, we want to get clean certification for our products today.
• 32:06
  And that's complex because the word clean is not standard across the industry. So at the moment, it's considered a greenwashing term, but I don't think it will be in the future because there will be standards built out against this. You know, like vegan was a
• 32:23
  confusing term in cosmetics initially until there was a group of people who decided on what the definition of vegan in cosmetics means. So for example, with Cirque Clean, they actually have a list listed on their website of ingredients that are not clean. So for us, it's really easy because we can go onto their website, download their list and use their lists initially when we're doing all of our formulating.
• 32:51
  So that is a really important step for us to do in regards to ingredients. But if it's something like B Corp, B Corp is such an awesome one because their questionnaire is free and you can go on it and do it as many times as you like. And only until you would like to pay and go through the certification process, which you've done all of the hard work in the questionnaire before you even do that, like,
• 33:17
  That's an incredible tool. You just do it once. It'll take you two or three hours and it'll give you so many different things to think about that then you've got your roadmap of the next three years sort of working towards getting those things set up. So I would just do it early, use the free resources on their websites and just think about it as a brand.
• 33:39
  We're sort of going through this at the moment, developing, expanding our product range. And it's really hard to retrofit packaging. So an example of we've finalized our sustainability strategy. And one of the things that we want to do is circular packaging.
• 33:56
  But it was almost six years ago I started making a lipstick. It took three years of development and then we launched it three years ago. And only last year did we standardise what Kesterblatt meant in regards to sustainability. I can't say my S's today. It's so weird.
• 34:14
  Anyway, so I've written a design philosophy for all of our products moving forward. And the eyeliner products fell into that. So they're plastic free. The cap is recyclable and otherwise they're biodegradable.
• 34:30
  So they're an awesome product for sustainability, but the lipsticks aren't because they have a wand because they're a liquid lipstick. They have a wand which has a couple of different plastic materials in it. The first batch that we made wasn't in post-consumer recycled plastic. So we have updated the bottles and they are now post-consumer recycled plastic bottles. But for it to truly fit in our sustainability strategy moving forward,
• 35:00
  we would have to discontinue the product. We probably wouldn't have chosen that format for that product had I have understood what the design philosophy of all of Kester Black products was. And it's the same thing with the nail polish. So if we truly want to become clean and sustainable and circular, we would have to discontinue our lipsticks and our nail polishes. So just having a think about it in the first place is just important, I think.
• 35:28
  It's easy to be sustainable if you design it in. So really, really sustainability starts with the design. And following on from that, what is your general top piece of advice for entrepreneurs in 2022? Oh, that's a big question. That's too big a question. Yeah.
• 35:55
  What's the best piece of advice you were given from someone else or the worst so we can learn from it? I think one of the things that always pops up is start your business the way that you intend to run it. Because yes, you won't be able to do that from the get go. But to think about your little business and different stages of growth and how that's going to look. Because I got to about 2016 and I experienced, I got diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.
• 36:25
  And it was because I didn't have a clear vision of what I wanted Kesterback to look like. And so I was trying to do everything myself. And I wasn't accepting help from people. And we couldn't afford to pay people. And so it actually became really, really difficult. Where the one thing I have learned over the years is that hiring people who are way more experienced than yourself saves you money in the long run. We were always trying to hire juniors and train them. But they didn't come with enough experience.
• 36:55
  to be able to grow the business. So they sort of cost the business, but there wasn't a growth aspect to it. So yeah, start your business the way that you intend to run it, I think is important. That's great advice. I love that. Thanks.
• 37:15
  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.
• 37:39
  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.
• 38:02
  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.
• 38:19
  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.
• 38:43
  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.
• 39:06
  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.