Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Pro tips you need to know for retail expansion into stores like Target & Ulta, with Three Ships Co-Founder Connie Lo

Transcript

Pro tips you need to know for retail expansion into stores like Target & Ulta, with Three Ships Co-Founder Connie Lo · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Connie Lowe for Female Startup Club. Hey everyone, Doone here. Today's episode is brought to you by Klaviyo and today I'm joined by Connie Lowe, co-founder of Three Ships. Three Ships is an all-natural vegan skincare brand on a mission to make clean beauty accessible for all women. Thank you.
• 0:28
  The products are 100% plant-derived, certified cruelty-free, and best of all, forever under $40. Founded in 2017, Three Ships was founded by chemical engineer Laura and business grad Connie, after the two wondered why clean, vegan skincare costs so much.
• 0:46
  With only $3,300 USD in their bank accounts, these female founders started making their own formulations in Connie's apartment kitchen with the goal to create effective and affordable natural skincare products.
• 1:00
  This is a ridiculously insightful episode and you are going to come away with plenty of actionable tips for your business. We talk about pro tips for retail expansion and how to make a partnership successful. We talk about key moments of growth and how to be scrappy in the beginning and some of the key trade shows you might want to invest in.
• 1:20
  And we have a very special offer for this episode. Listeners for the Female Startup Club podcast can use the promo code STARTUPCLUB to get a free pina colada lip exfoliator with any purchase on the Three Ships website through December 31st, 2021.
• 1:38
  You can also catch this episode on our YouTube channel, find our private Facebook group, or chat with us in the DMs all found under Female Startup Club. And if you love this episode, please do share the good word and pass it on to women who would benefit or a cheeky mention on social media. I always love to see your creative posts and I'm so grateful when you share.
• 2:02
  That's a lot of info to remember, so it's all linked in the show notes as well. But let's jump into this episode. This is Connie for Female Startup Club. Connie, hi, hello. Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Me too. I'm so excited to be here chatting with you. Could you start by introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about your business and what it is?
• 2:26
  Yeah. So for those who don't know me, I'm Connie Lowe. I'm one of the co-founders of Three Ships. We're an all-natural vegan skincare company, really on a mission to be the most transparent natural beauty brand in the world. We started the brand four years ago with the equivalent of like $3,300 US dollars. So I can share lots of tips about how to bootstrap your business, literally started by hand-making products in my apartment kitchen. Today, you can find your skincare products at stores like Target and Whole Foods and Urban Outfitters.
• 2:54
  What a journey. That's so cool and such an accomplishment in four years. I feel like that's a really tight turn around there. I want to go to where your entrepreneurial story starts and what kind of gave you that light bulb moment to jump into making products in your kitchen.
• 3:09
  Yeah, it's been a long journey. So starting from the beginning, my dad is an entrepreneur. And I remember when I was young, I would always watch him at work, like working from home. He would bring me on business trips. And I remember I fell in love with the idea of starting my own company. But at the same time, you know, being a kid, you're like, I have no idea what I'm going to do with my life. Like, should I go to business school? Should I go into sciences? So I was inspired by my dad, followed his footsteps, went into business. When I was at university, I started to compare myself a lot to what my peers were doing.
• 3:39
  So for any of your listeners who are a little younger, maybe even in school still, what I recommend is just really listen to your gut and trust your intuition because that is what I did not do. And I regretted it. So I remember really comparing myself and being like, oh, wait, marketing and sales and entrepreneurship, like that's not where all the smart kids are going.
• 3:57
  You know, it's all about finance and accounting and banking. So I'm going to go down that route too. And even though my heart didn't lie in accounting, that's what I went into full time after I graduated. And I absolutely hated it. Like every day after work, and it was long hours, like working until midnight.
• 4:13
  or longer than that. And I would just come home and I would cry. And I'd be like, what am I doing with my life? Like, I felt like I could be doing so much more. And at the same time, like when I was in high school, I ran my own small businesses. And when I was at Queens University, where I went for business school, I did partake in entrepreneurial extracurriculars too. But it was just like, I completely ignored that side of me. And I was like, it's not what smart people do.
• 4:36
  So I worked in accounting for eight months. I absolutely hated it. So I decided to quit actually before writing my accounting exams to be a full-time chartered accountant. And I remember at the time people were like, oh my gosh, what are you doing? Like you're so close to getting those letters behind your name. And for me, what I thought was I don't see myself going into a career where having an accounting degree is going to help me. So why am I continuing to punish myself day over day for this?
• 5:01
  So what I did is I looked back at my time at university and I looked at which classes I really enjoyed. And those were always like marketing, sales, entrepreneurship, negotiation. And so I was like, you know what? Let me just trust myself here and decide to go into this route. So I decided to switch completely and go into marketing and sales. And I loved my job there. It was also during that time that I met my co-founder, Laura. And so Laura was the one who had the initial idea for this natural makeup remover company.
• 5:29
  and she was looking for someone to just bounce ideas off of. And she was speaking with one of our mutual friends, and he was like, you know what? I went to elementary school with this girl, Connie, and I remember back then she loved making her own natural skincare products.
• 5:44
  So you should probably just talk to her and get some ideas. So we met and it was meant to be like a 30 minute dinner. It turned into this like four hour business meeting of the minds where we just like we're vibing off of each other. We realized we're complete opposites in terms of personality types and skill sets, but completely aligned in terms of values. And at the end of that four hour business meeting, Laura just asked me like, hey, do you want to be my co-founder on this? And that was how we started. So it was such a crazy story.
• 6:10
  And that was when we were 23 and we got started on the product literally the next day. And so for that first year and a half period, we would work our nine to fives and then meet up in the evenings and on weekends to work on our skincare company. Oh, my gosh. And so what were those initial products like? Like, what were you coming up with in the kitchen?
• 6:29
  So it was pretty rudimentary products initially because we weren't able to use like complex natural preservatives. So everything was done literally in like, you know, stainless steel cooking bowls and stuff. So what we were making were products that didn't require any natural preservatives. So these would be products that were oil-based. So our first product was a natural makeup remover using fractionated coconut oil. And it works so well removing even the toughest waterproof makeup. So you can give it a try.
• 6:55
  And then our second product line were our oil-based serums. And those are still some of our best-selling products. And then eventually we started to outsource manufacturing still within Canada. And that's when we started to use water-based formulas where you can use preservatives like white willow bark extract. And that works really well for things like cleansers or water-based serums. But initially it was all fairly simple products.
• 7:18
  Wow, that's incredible. I want to talk about what you used that initial $3,300 and how you kind of were able to bootstrap that in that early year, maybe the second year and that kind of thing to bring the brand to life.
• 7:33
  Yeah, having a small budget like $3,300 really makes you think carefully about where you're spending your money. So one of the first things that we spent on, which was like maybe $600 US, was applying for a trademark, but then also incorporating. So we didn't have a lawyer on our team.
• 7:51
  So we decided to write our application to incorporate ourselves. I remember filling out the forms and I was just like, I have no idea what this means. N-A, N-A, like not sure, not sure, signed at the bottom. Somehow that got through. So we incorporated the company that way. And that was really important for us because we didn't want to be personally liable for anything that our company would be responsible for. So by incorporating, you're making your company a separate entity.
• 8:16
  So that way, say someone, you know, sues your company, they're not able to go after your personal assets, which let's be real. At the time, Laura and I had very little personal assets, but still, we just want to set ourselves up for success. And then initially, we also spent on trademarking. So applying for the trademark process, which can take like two years to hear back from the Canadian U.S. government's
• 8:36
  regarding your trademark. So I highly recommend to your listeners, if they are starting a new business, first thing you should do is check out the trademarks for your name. See if there's any other companies that are similar in terms of naming. Because if that's the case, you might want to start with a different brand name and then also look into incorporating.
• 8:52
  Another thing that we spent on was the initial ingredients for our products. So we went to Whole Foods and got a couple of different ingredients to play around with just for the first batch of like minimum viable products or MVP. And then eventually we started to look for larger distributors of the ingredients.
• 9:07
  And then one final thing that I remember spending on was a $600 laser printer. And the reason that we spent on that is because we didn't want to buy custom labels for our product packaging because those require larger minimum order quantities or MOQs. And so most label printers were requiring at least a minimum order quantity of a thousand labels. And we just could not spend on that at the moment. So what we did was we bought a laser printer and then we bought custom label sheets and we print off our own labels at home.
• 9:36
  And this was great because when we would go and talk to customers at farmers markets or at trade shows, and they would look at our packaging, oftentimes they would be like, oh, you know, it'd be really cool if you guys put like a Made in Canada symbol on our label. We'd be like, oh yeah, great point. And then that night we would edit the label at home and print off the new round for the next batch. And so we were able to iterate on our product packaging really quickly.
• 9:58
  So again, highly recommend that for your listeners. Don't spend on things like labels and custom packaging at the beginning unless you're absolutely sure that that's going to be your final product for at least like six months to a year. Yeah, totally. And that customer feedback loop is so important to be able to implement what people actually want and get to that final label or final product.
• 10:18
  I'm interested to know about your efforts in the beginning to market and find the first customers who are going to become your loyal, true fans of the brand. Yeah. So what I did back then, because I managed marketing and sales at Three Ships, is I would spend hours.