Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Selling a $2,500 beauty product organically endorsed by Kim Kardashian with LYMA founder Lucy Goff (part 1)

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Selling a $2,500 beauty product organically endorsed by Kim Kardashian with LYMA founder Lucy Goff (part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Lucy Goff for Female Startup Club. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today on the show, we're learning from Lucy Goff, the founder of Lima.
• 0:23
  If you haven't heard of Lima before, it was started in 2018 as a powerful supplement specifically created to change people's lives by re-engineering nature to create products that actually live up to the promise and improve your health. Lima fuses together wellness and technology to lead the new well-tech category. Lucy started this business after suffering serious health issues and meeting a scientist just by chance who helped change the course of her life.
• 0:52
  we talk through what they've been able to create together, how she garnered a 5,000-person wait list before launching, creating a product that is so good it's organically endorsed by celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Hailey Bieber, and what approach they take to marketing high-ticket items.
• 1:12
  If you get something out of this episode, and I'm sure you will, please do share it on your Instagram stories and tag us at Female Startup Club. It makes me so happy when you do that. Let's get straight into this episode. This is Lucy for Female Startup Club.
• 1:29
  Lucy, hi. Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Oh, lovely to see you. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to talk to you today about your incredible brand, Lima. Do you want to give us first a little bit of an introduction just to who you are and what the brand is? Yeah, my name is Lucy Goff and I founded a company called Lima
• 1:53
  that in an industry, in a supplement industry, where over 90% of ingredients are not proven to work at all, Lima is different. We're the only medical grade supplement in the industry. We're proven to work in peer-reviewed studies, and that is the difference between Lima and the rest of the market.
• 2:15
  When you say medical grade studies, what does that actually mean, medical grade studies? So it's interesting because if you were to take a pharmaceutical drug, so if you take the COVID vaccine, for example, you wouldn't trust Pfizer or AstraZeneca to say, oh, it's safe, it works, you know, this is the dose and everything like that, because they are going to financially benefit from selling that product to you.
• 2:45
  So you wait for the peer reviewed evidence to come in. So for the trials to have been deemed robust enough, to be safe enough, to be non-toxic, to every single parameter that you would expect as a consumer for them to be reviewed and published by doctors and scientists that have got no financial benefit to that drug being brought to market. And by the same token,
• 3:14
  the supplement industry, because it has no regulation in place and you can put out a crushed up herb and sell it to a consumer, by the same token, you would surely expect if you are taking a supplement to have a health benefit that the ingredients have gone through the same rigorous process and have been proven at specific dosages to work and provide a health benefit.
• 3:43
  that particular brand of ingredient. And that is where Lima differs from the rest of the market in that every single one of our ingredients is patented and has got published peer reviewed evidence to prove that it's not toxic, that it's stable in your body, that it's bioavailable, that it works
• 4:05
  the length of time you should take it for. All these different parameters have been tested and not just validated by the company that made the ingredients. Of course, they're going to say it works, but actually by a team of non-biased doctors, which is the level of evidence and trust that a consumer should really be looking for.
• 4:29
  And I imagine, you know, the way that I feel about supplements is you take a supplement and you don't really know if it works or if it doesn't. And it could be that placebo effect or it could actually be helping, but you don't really see the difference necessarily. So there's a lot of education and trust that needs to be instilled in a consumer. So having that piece of the puzzle as well also shows someone, oh, yes, like I can trust this brand versus like getting a vitamin D tablet off the shelf. Yeah. Yeah.
• 4:59
  I think there's a lot of misconceptions about supplements. And the irony is that, you know, if you eat a really good balanced diet, a healthy balanced diet, you can get your A to Z of vitamins from your diet and your best place to do that. Because the body has been designed, you know, if you were to eat an apple, you would get far more nutrients and benefits from that process of eating an apple or eating an orange or,
• 5:29
  or eating a piece of fish than actually taking the nutrients in a supplement form. So, you know, there are a few vitamins and minerals that you can't get in effective doses through food. And that's like vitamin K2, vitamin D3. So there are certain nutrients that you do need to supplement with. However, the true premise of the supplement is to supplement with nutrients that you cannot get in effective doses through food.
• 5:59
  And that's why in Lima, we only formulate with ingredients that you can't find in a healthy, balanced diet, which is the true premise of a supplement. That is so interesting. What was getting you interested in supplements in the first place? And what was taking you down this pathway of starting this business?
• 6:23
  Well, I never even thought starting a business or running a business would ever be in my life path. After I had my daughter nine years ago, I was really ill after I had her. And I actually caught septicemia. I was in hospital for weeks while they battled to save my life. Fortunately, they did.
• 6:50
  But, you know, it came at a cost. I left hospital and I just couldn't function. I couldn't function as a person, let alone anybody that was now responsible for a baby. And I was going to all these, you know, these top Harley Street physicians, and I was saying, you know, I just feel wretched. I can't even lift, I don't even feel confident enough to lift my baby, you know.
• 7:18
  what can you do for me? And they were, you know, they looked at all my notes and, you know, they took bloods and they were saying, well, there's nothing wrong with you. You know, the infection's gone. And that was their benchmark for me being able to function that, you know, on paper, I looked healthy. I can tell you in reality, I could not function.
• 7:41
  And it was really when my mum took me to one of those, I was very lucky, she took me to a beautiful spa in Geneva to rest for a few days. And it was there that the spa didn't help me. I mean, you know, it was very nice to, you know, sit by the lake with a blanket over me.
• 8:11
  And that was bumping into one of the world's leading professors in the field of longevity and preventative disease, a guy called Dr. Paul Clayton, who happened to be there on the conference. And, you know, I was chatting to him about my story and he said, well, you know, I've got no time for the supplement market at all. It's a load of, you know, whatever.
• 8:37
  nothing really works. It doesn't, there's no legislation in place that means it has to work. It's full of factory floor scrape. I mean, it was just going on and on. And I was just thinking about my huge cupboard of supplements at home that was perhaps not doing what it needed to. And he explained there was a hidden category of nutrition, a hidden category of supplementation that actually was proven to work.
• 9:06
  But it was not available to consumers because it didn't fit in with the price structure, with the commercial structure of the supplement market. And he I don't know whether he just wanted to get rid of me or took pity on me. But he said, look, I'll send you some ingredients through the post and I know that you will get better. And I came back and every day I was waiting for these supplements to arrive and they didn't.
• 9:31
  And after a couple of weeks, they arrived. I took them and literally three or four weeks later, I was back at work. I just felt myself again. And that was really the light bulb moment where I realised that if I was suffering like this, there are millions of other people that would be suffering too, whereby the medical world wasn't able to help them because the pharmaceutical model is very much geared towards
• 10:00
  taking away a symptom once you get ill. It doesn't deal with preventative health at all. And it doesn't deal with kind of, you know, tonics that help you get better, help you feel better. And that was the moment where I asked for Clayton if he would consider coming in with me and we launch this medical grade supplement together.
• 10:26
  And after a lot of persuasion, he said yes. He was explaining it would be a very, very difficult road to bring this supplement to market. And he was totally right. But, you know, we did it. And four years later, we've got, you know, a successful global business.
• 10:48
  So what year are we talking about that you, is that 2017? Because I think you launched in 2018, right? We launched in 2018, started in February of 2018. But this was a conversation that I had with them a few years before. I mean, it took a year just to find a factory that would deal with this set of ingredients. You know, that in itself was a huge challenge because, you know,
• 11:17
  There are thousands of supplement factors and they're all very good. However, you can only work with the ingredients that they already work with, which are the cheap organic and generic ingredients that they bulk buy in from mainly China. And they're not proven to do anything, but that's where the markup is. So, for instance, turmeric in a organic,
• 11:46
  in a factory is like a pound a kilo. The medical grade turmeric that we use in Lima, which is hydrocurb, is nearly 300 pounds a kilo. So you see that it doesn't fit in with the commercial structure of the supplement market. And it's not really beneficial for supplement factories to deal with this set of ingredients because you can't make the same markup that you can
• 12:16
  from using cheap generic ingredients. But fundamentally, you know, the irony is that turmeric is actually placebo. You know, the turmeric market's worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but actually organic turmeric is a placebo. You'll never get an active level into your plasma to have an anti-inflammatory effect because your body can't absorb it. And then you get these huge, you know, you get these other water-soluble turmeric's, the patented water-soluble turmeric's,
• 12:46
  And what they fail to do, what consumers don't realise about those is that the majority of the ingredient is actually made up of the carrier system that makes it water soluble. So it leaves negligible amounts for the actual concuminoids. So there's only one turmeric extract in the market that actually is going to be affected. And that's the one that we use in Lima, because only 10% of the ingredient is accounted for by the carrier system. And therefore, you leave.
• 13:15
  90% of the ingredients to feature the curcuminoids, which is what's going to have an anti-inflammatory effect. So there's loads of nuances in the industry that the consumer doesn't know because fundamentally it's a very political space. And it's crazy that the supplement market does not have robust legislation
• 13:45
  to really protect the consumer and to ensure that the consumer has a beneficial effect by taking them.
• 13:54
  Bloody hell. Bloody hell. It's tough out there with the supplement market. My goodness. It is tough out there. And it's so, you know, as you're explaining these things, these are words I've never heard of. I obviously didn't know this. It's really, it's crazy. I'm interested to know how did you actually get Dr. Paul Clayton to like say yes and be excited about building a supplement brand?
• 14:19
  that was so hard to do? I guess, you know, he's an academic and, you know, he's got a brilliant mind. He's a genius, but he just was, he's very much not anybody who is commercially driven. So, you know, the enticement of launching a brand just did not light his fire.
• 14:45
  But it was really the excitement of what we were doing, I guess, that, you know, we would be the first brand in the world to actually move the supplement industry on. And, you know, I spent months trying to convince him that, you know, you're you're in this fight, you know, against the supplement market. You can only start to change it if you're involved in something that actually is going to change the category.
• 15:13
  And by launching Lima, that's exactly what we've done.
• 15:18
  Wow, goodness. It sounds like this kind of business and this kind of business model obviously requires a lot of upfront capital, a lot of working capital, even just to get to the point of R&D and then through to minimum orders and production, packaging, et cetera. It's a high price point. It's a very luxury brand. I imagine all touch points are extremely beautiful and nice to look at, nice to touch.
• 15:45
  What's the money piece of the story and how were you approaching funding in the beginning, especially as someone who, you know, you said you had no idea about launching a business. You never had that in your kind of vision to being like, all right, well, what do we do now? How do we get this brand to life? So this was another big challenge. I have to be honest. It wasn't a small amount of money that we needed to launch Lima. I went out to a load of
• 16:15
  investment companies and it was very quickly you know a unanimous no from every one of them they did not have any confidence that the consumer would want to spend 150 pounds a month as opposed to say like 20 pounds a month on a on a supplement that worked and you know I think it's very
• 16:40
  It's very difficult when you're trying to start a business not to make spontaneous decisions when it comes to funding. You know, although every business, you know, needs money to get going, where you take that money from in the first instance is really important because it can have huge implications later down the line. You know, I was adamant that it wouldn't be, we wouldn't take money from crowdfunding and that, you know,
• 17:09
  you've always got that wealthy relation that you're really tempted to call that maybe I haven't spoken to for a long time. And lots of people do choose friends and family to raise the initial funds, but I'm very aware that that comes with a really big moral obligation, which can then be really challenging if things don't go well. You know, investing at an emotional level
• 17:36
  might not be the right thing moving forward. So myself and my husband, we took the huge risk. And it was not responsible of us at all. But we put everything on the line. We remortgaged everything. And we funded the business ourselves. And that could have been the daftest thing we ever did.
• 18:02
  But, you know, it paid off. Are you able to share how much? How much did you have to put in? Oh, I can't even, I can't share, but it wasn't a small amount of money. It really wasn't. But, you know, I think because it was everything that we had that was on the line, you know, we did our homework. You know, everybody starts with the intention that you're going to succeed. It will succeed.
• 18:29
  But, you know, I think you've got to just really be honest about your chances of success and never answer the questions that, you know, always only answer the difficult questions. Can you answer the difficult questions? Forget every single positive associated with that business and only focus on the negatives, which is what we did. Which is what's an example of that? Like what's a difficult question?
• 18:57
  Well, you know, why would somebody spend £150 a month on a supplement that was going to work? You know, they never have done before. It's a totally new proposition. How are you going to change a global market that has existed at a certain price point for decades, you know, with something that's different?
• 19:19
  I think, you know, knowing what customer we were going to get, our route to market, how we were going to become profitable, how we were going to secure our first 1,000 customers, you know, these all had to be watertight. And we felt that they were watertight. And that's why we did it. I was always fascinated by what Jo Malone did, where she, a commodity, there was a candle that everybody got from the supermarket.
• 19:49
  she repackaged it and charged a different price point, made it into a luxury lifestyle statement for the home. And by the same token, I felt that there was a huge opportunity in the world of supplements to do that. You know, a great idea is not good enough. If you can't sell it, it's pointless. So all these, and then, you know, after we launched and we sold out within two weeks. So, you know, we knew that,
• 20:20
  you know, we were onto a winner. The irony was all those investment companies that turned me down in the first place then came back and went, oh, see, you've launched now, you know, can we invest in it? And it was like, no, because if you've doubted me once, something will go wrong down the line and you will doubt me again. So actually when we got our first round of investment from a VCT, it was a VCT that we had never spoken to
• 20:49
  in the past. So we're all about a fresh page. When you say VCT, what is that? I haven't heard the T. Oh, Venture Capital Trust. Trust. Got it. Okay. Right. New for me. Haven't heard that one.
• 21:07
  I'd love to circle back to, you were just saying a moment ago that you needed to get your marketing plan to get your first 1,000 customers. Obviously, then you sell out within two weeks. And I think I read you had a waitlist of about 5,000 people even before launching. I'd love to kind of deep dive into what you were doing to build that waitlist. What was the blueprint of getting to your first 1,000 customers? So getting to the first 1,000 customers, my background was
• 21:38
  PR. So that was my career. I was a journalist first, then I spent a good few years in PR. So I made it all very PR focused before we launched. We got one celebrity to post something on their social channels. And when you look at Lima and the hammered copper vessel, you don't instantly know what it was. And we had like a solid copper members card,
• 22:07
  It all looked very kind of innocuous. And it's amazing once one person posts something and it looks a bit different, that you start to get interest from other people. And people didn't really know what Lima was. We had one celebrity that contacted us asking if they could join our poncierge. Nobody really knew what it was. And we kept it quite vague.
• 22:35
  So in the first instance, it was really kind of we created that FOMO whereby people wanted to know what we were launching. And we got some two really, really big PR hits and it kind of took off from there. And from the first two big PR hits, we got our first thousand customers.
• 23:05
  Wow, that's so crazy because PR can go kind of two ways. It can either totally hit and totally work or just I've heard so many times on the show it does nothing. Yeah. So I guess there must be a secret formula there. Well, there is a formula and it was only because I was in PR that I knew what the formula was. You know, you've got to – I think because I was a journalist before I went into PR, I knew what the newspaper –
• 23:33
  would want, I always gave them the full story. So it needs to have every single piece of the pie. It's got to have something new, had celebrity, it had case study, you know, it kind of had every single element. If you just have like product PR, whereby it's just a picture on a page of the product, then nobody really knows much about it when it's not a commodity.
• 24:01
  So obviously, if it's something like a lipstick or a bag or a jacket, then all you really need to do is see the picture of that commodity. When something's not a commodity, so with something like Lima, where you're buying into a health benefit that you can't see on the page, can't see what eight hours sleep looks like on the page. You can't see what increased focus looks like on the page. Can't
• 24:30
  You can't see increased immunity. All these things have to be explained through trusted case studies, through a trusted media outlet. So it's not just the case of just getting the product on a page. It's got to tell the whole story.
• 24:46
  Mm hmm. Yeah, that's so true. Now that I think about when you when you sum it up like that, I'm like, oh, yeah, that does make a lot of sense to do it that way. That is correct. So in that first year, you have the two, you know, first hits of PR goes really well, it gets the ball rolling. What happens next? What does that next year in business look like from, you know, to keep the momentum going?
• 25:11
  Well, you know, I guess we launched exclusively on our website, so at Lima.life. And the next stage, after we initially launched, we had all these people contact us from all over the world. We were only launching in the UK to start off with. So the next piece in the puzzle was to get international shipping sorted. So we quickly scaled our business in a matter of weeks.
• 25:41
  to launch global shipping from our website, and that takes you to a global audience. The next stage was to agree on what retailers we were going to work with. We were only ever going to work with a few global halo retailers, because we launched primarily as a D2C business, and that business model still stands today. So we're with a few halo retailers globally, such as Net-A-Porter,
• 26:10
  Harrods, Harvey Nichols. But, you know, the reality is that we don't make a huge markup on our supplement. And the margins don't really work for us wholesale. So we knew that the Halo accounts that we got had to really be the ultimate ones. And that's why we went with Net-A-Porter for our first year
• 26:39
  global partner. And that really takes you to a different audience. And, you know, it's quite a big step going to, um, into retail because, you know, you very much protected your brand on your website. It's like, it's like having a baby, you know, you just want to spend time with that baby for the first few weeks, first few months. Um, and then you've kind of got to cast the net open and they go to school.
• 27:07
  by the same token, you know, you have to kind of go to retailers and work with retailers and trust them with your product. So we went with Netterporter first, and then we went in the UK with Harvey Nichols, and in the US we went with Bergdorf Goodman and Sachs. And we then got our proper first round of funding from Pembroke VCT in the December. So we
• 27:37
  From launching in the February to the December, we kind of went on a huge lifetime journey that actually was only a few months from launching to getting our funding in.
• 27:51
  And then you get, then you've got a new set of challenges and that, you know, you've got to recruit and, you know, move from a kitchen table, which is, you know, the kitchen table that I'm on now, into an office and start scaling up. And with that comes a different set of challenges.
• 28:14
  Yeah, absolutely. And since then, you've obviously started to launch a number of different products, including your kind of most recent product, the Lima Laser. The Laser, yeah. The high price point laser. I'd love to get into, again, the marketing of that, how you kind of, you know, approached something that required FDA approvals and medical grade technology and all these other challenges that you must have been facing. Yeah.
• 28:44
  Yeah, I think, you know, the Lima supplement disrupted the supplement sector with a category of supplementation that worked. And by the same token, we knew that our next product had to be another category disrupting moment. And, you know, we work with over 20 scientists now globally who are all coming back with the latest and greatest scientific developments in different fields.
• 29:13
  And everything was really exciting, but nothing felt like really spine-tinglingly incredible. I love that, spine-tingly. Really incredible. You can tell that, yeah...
• 29:27
  English wasn't one of my strong points at school. No, I love it. Sorry, go on. So yeah, Dr. Paul Clayton was in Germany and he was looking at a 62 year old man's knees that had been treated with low level laser therapy to rebuild cartilage in one of his knees. And there's this huge team of doctors that were looking at all the different parameters, all the different benefits. And he just had like a real light bulb moment in that
• 29:57
  He thought, well, forget what's going on inside the knee. The skin on the knee that had been treated looked about 20 years younger than the skin on his other knee. And he then realized that the at-home cosmetic light device industry was heavily based around LED. And LED only came after low-level laser therapy. It was only developed because low-level laser therapy was not allowed to be used at home.
• 30:25
  because obviously laser is a potentially dangerous light source. You can't start bringing a powerful laser into the home. It was not legal, which is why the LED market boomed, because it was a cheap technology and it was safe to use at home. And he realised that actually if we could engineer this technology into an equally powerful laser that was being used in the hospital
• 30:55
  then this technology is 100 times more powerful than LED. It would totally change the face of the at-home cosmetic market. So the next challenge was engineering this device into a little portable laser that you could use at home, which took some time. And then getting FDA approval took,
• 31:25
  just as long a time because, you know, the irony is actually the FDA for supplements, you know, you can be FDA approved for your supplement by literally just submitting the supplement label to the FDA. And if they don't get back to you in 21 days, it means it's FDA approved. So there's very little you need to do to get a supplement approved by the FDA. However, for at-home cosmetic devices,
• 31:54
  It is totally another game. They are so hot to trot on safety. It's like the tests that you need to do for the FDA are on another level to any test that you need to do for the rest of the world. Like what? What do you have to do? So one of the tests that we, I mean, it's all around safety and obviously working with a 500 milliwatt near infrared laser,
• 32:24
  where the previous legal limit for at-home lasers was between 5 and 20 milliwatts. Oh, wow. No, this is like a whole new category. And that's why the Lima laser is the first FDA-cleared clinic-grade laser to be approved for use at home. So it really is a whole new category. One of the tests we had to do was, if you put the Lima laser in a microwave, what
• 32:51
  temperature did the battery blow up I mean like you have to cover you have to know um at what point does it not work if you run it over I mean like I'm telling you the Lima laser will not work if you run it over you know you probably you could kill yourself if you run yourself you know if you get run over it's not been it's not been designed to um run over anything
• 33:17
  But no, it was a very, very difficult process. But, you know, it was just the world's most incredible day when we actually got the approval through because it is such a revolutionary piece of technology. It is the only laser that you can use at home that does not damage any cell in the process of renewal. It works off a totally different premise to every other technology that's out there.
• 33:47
  And that's why it's the first laser that can be used on all skin types and tones, which is, you know, which is a first for inclusive beauty. Goodness, it sounds amazing. No, it is amazing.
• 34:03
  I'm interested to know about the marketing strategy for this. And if you followed the same kind of approach, kind of leading with PR, or if you, you know, went down the route of more specific celebrities or influencer marketing or paid advertising or what the kind of approach was to get the word outside of your existing customer base. I think, you know, if you look at marketing historically, it was relatively simple. You know, you advertise, people see it, and then they buy it.
• 34:34
  But now marketing is much more complicated. It's really awareness that's the key to have success long term. If nobody knows about your brand, they won't know about your products. And I guess, unfortunately, as good as all the digital channels are to access customers, it's a really, really crowded space because it all goes through the same social channels who are targeting the same audience.
• 35:01
  So you're kind of like a tiny, tiny dot in a massive world of big money chasing the same customer. And so this is why you need to do something different. When we launched Lima with the supplement, we didn't have a database. We were unknown and we got our first thousand customers through PR. PR is still a very important piece in Lima's marketing mix today. But, you know, when we launched a laser, we obviously had a database of,
• 35:30
  supplement customers who were spending £1,800 a year on the supplement. So we had a robust database of customers who will be interested in the laser. But what kind of really works for us is a blend of different activity that targets customers on the different channels. So it's not one thing that works on its own. It's a really complex collection of balanced activities
• 35:59
  where you understand the customer's needs and the purchasing processes. And for that, you need a complex method of communication with the different customers. So it's really by kind of only understanding what doesn't work and making those mistakes will help you come up with what works, you know, ultimately. Do you have an example of what didn't work for you or something that you tried that was a fail?
• 36:28
  Yeah, so it's what I go back to before. Seeing the beautiful copper vessel on its own with the beautiful copper pill, people assume that you're just paying all the money for the beautiful copper vessel, when in reality, you're actually paying for the ingredients that go inside the pill. You get a lot of bang for your buck with copper. It's not gold, it's copper, but it looks beautiful, but you're seriously not paying
• 36:58
  for the copper vessel, you're paying for the ingredients that go inside the capsule. You know, if you were to buy the ingredients in Lima separately from a reputable retailer, you'd pay a hell of a lot more than you would by buying Lima. And by the same token, when you look at the Lima laser, it just looks like a black torch. Can't see the huge, hugely powerful feat of engineering that's gone inside that to bring a clinic grade laser.
• 37:28
  into the home. So it's really about telling a story for us. It's about telling case studies. It's about engaging with audiences whereby they have got an issue that you can resolve. So it could be people that can't sleep.
• 37:48
  So you're targeting people that can't sleep, a known audience of people that can't sleep with a solution that will give you eight hours sleep, targeting stressed people with a proven solution that will bring down your cortisol levels. So it's about telling multiple different stories to an audience that it would resonate with. It's not about one. It's not about just one element of that. You've really got to give
• 38:17
  the full 360 tail, you've got to have the beginning, the middle and the end. The hooks. Yeah, that's what's going to resonate with people.
• 38:28
  I saw when I was looking through your Instagram, you've partnered with people like Hayley Bieber and Kiara Ferrani, which is obviously, you know, huge celebrities. When you, for example, work with someone like Kiara Ferrani, who's using your product in a video, are you approaching them to build a paid partnership or are you sending it as a gift or have they discovered it through another means? Yeah.
• 38:52
  through your marketing? No, we're not officially working with any of these people. These are just people that have got a laser. You know, Hayley Bieber was introduced to the laser through a facial with Joanna Cech. Joanna Cech was using the laser. So Lima is a very, very organic brand. You know, it creates authentic conversations that spread.
• 39:19
  It's not, we don't pay these people to work with us. It's not, that's not the strategy that we have. Wow, that is just amazing. And so for someone like Kiara, do you know how she came across the product? Just through a friend of hers.
• 39:38
  Gosh, isn't that the dream? My goodness. Yeah, and I guess that speaks for itself. It does. You know, if you see somebody, I know I've done it, you know, I do it myself. You know, if you see somebody and they look great, you know, you go, oh my God, you know, you're looking amazing. Have you had any work done? You know, and if somebody says, no, but I've just been using the Lima laser and you can actually see a visible difference, then, you know,
• 40:07
  friends want to help friends and likewise if you can't sleep and your friend can't sleep or your friend is suffering from the menopause or you know some any any form of suffering and you find something that helps you want to share it with your friend you know you want her to feel great too so it really does go organically viral within communities and
• 40:34
  What advice can you leave us for founders who are kind of wanting to launch products in that high ticket space? Well, the irony is that, you know, Lima is more expensive than other brands, but it actually offers great value. You know, if you went to the doctor and you couldn't sleep and you asked for a sleeping tablet and they said, well, I can't give you a sleeping tablet, but I can give you this patch.
• 41:04
  and you put it on your skin, and it will give you eight hours sleep every night, and it costs £5 a day to rent that patch. You would rent that patch for £5 a day, and Lima costs £5 a day. You know, it was always something that I was very committed to, that I wanted Lima to be affordable for the majority of people. And, you know,
• 41:32
  The majority of people in the UK and the US, they've got five pounds a day that they might spend on a coffee, on buying lunch that they could make at home. You know, it was don't buy that expensive bottle of wine in the restaurant. Don't buy that jumper that you don't really need. You know, sleep, stress, focus, performance, energy. These are all fundamentals to your life, you know.
• 41:59
  It's something that you deserve to invest in yourself. And by the same token, the laser, yes, it is £2,000. However, how many people get Botox, spend £500 every three months on Botox? You know, if you had to make a choice, would you prefer to invest your money in something that you could use every day at home or spend £2,000
• 42:27
  500 pounds every three months on Botox, you know, if you can do both. But you know, there are always ways that you can trade off as to whether you can make the investment to purchase the two products that we have in the email. Absolutely. And so I guess for anyone listening who is in that space of higher ticket, it's around really showing the value and showing
• 42:56
  the storytelling. Yeah, and also, you know, it's not, as I say, it's not that we're making a huge markup. Our products don't work on a traditional wholesale model. You know, these are really expensive products for us to produce. And, you know, even as products have all gone up over the past few years, 20%, whatever, I can assure you that what we've done is try and make sure that our
• 43:26
  products do not go up in value at all. And we've managed to retain the price that we did when we launched four years ago. And that's literally by having, you know, more people that are buying the product. So we've managed to negotiate better terms with our suppliers. So, you know, that's kind of our commitment, I guess, to our customers. That's amazing. Wow. Really impressive. Yeah.
• 43:57
  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.
• 44:21
  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.
• 44:44
  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. Thank you.
• 45:01
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 45:25
  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.
• 45:48
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.