☆ $1M+ biz grant, SET Active's new TikTok strategy, influencer trips are dead

☁️✫Hey, Business Besties™! Welcome to Female Founder World.✫☁️

Today’s lineup:

• Resource roundup

• Skim the headlines

• New IRL & URL events (you’re invited)

• Samantha Brett, the founder of Naked Sundays, is joining the Female Founder World community for a live Q&A tonight at 6pm ET. 🔗 Tell me more

• Beauty founders, there are 20 grants worth $10,000 up for grabs right now through L’Oreal’s Inclusive Beauty Fund. 🔗 Tell me more 

• Nancy Twine, the founder of Briogeo, started a $1M grant fund for BIPOC CPG founders. 🔗 Tell me more 

• Looking for a product idea? Shopify shared the top 20 trending products to sell online for 2024. 🔗 Tell me more 

• If your biz story is going to be an amazing book one day, this newsletter will teach you how to do it. 🔗 Tell me more

• 20 entrepreneurs will win one of these $25k grant. Let’s make one of them you. 🔗 Tell me more

• Inc Magazine and UPS are giving away $35,000 to small businesses. 🔗 Tell me more

• What happens after your first start-up? This newsletter by a former founder shares all the lessons and learnings. 🔗 Tell me more

• Y Combinator has opened applications for their summer 2024 cohort. 🔗 Tell me more

• This podcast gives an insider look at what top investors are thinking about rn. Tell us everything! 🔗 Tell me more

• Check out Female Founder World’s guide to the visual brand trends that are about to take over in 2024. 🔗 Tell me more

FOOD + BEV: Thrive Market is officially the first online-only retailer to be allowed by the USDA to accept SNAP EBT (food stamps). 👏

EVENTS: It’s conference snz and many of the best conversations to move your biz forward don’t happen at the conference itself, but at the side-events and after-parties. 

• If you’re at SXSW, here’s a list of all the events and after-parties. 

• At Natural Products Expo West this week? These guys host great events. This and this one looks like so much fun, too.

BEAUTY: Black-founded beauty brands have outperformed the rest of US prestige beauty for the last two years—the brand segment has been increasing at nearly 2x the rate of the rest of the category!

INFLUENCERS: New backlash on beauty brand Tarte makes it clear that consumers are getting sick of brands sending influencers on extravagant trips. Tarte sent invites out for their upcoming trip, and the invite boxes alone included thousands of dollars of branded product and tech. 

TikTok comments like “if this trip has done anything to me, it’s de-influencing” and “nothing makes me want to buy from a brand less” have thousands of likes, with the entire comment section on these videos sharing similar thoughts. 

Our take? Influencers are an important part of your marketing strategy, but consumer expectations have changed and brands need to take note.

CELEBS: Kylie Jenner launched an alcohol brand. Her new canned vodka soda line, Sprinter, will be hitting shelves later this month.

CAMPAIGNS WE LOVED:

• GAP teamed up with the music group Jungle on a really fun campaign for their linens line, after their song went viral.

• This small biz has gained over 100k followers on TikTok with a strategy by consistently showing behind-the-scenes insights into building the business. You can get their new business planner for $10 off using the code Planner10. 

• Shay Mitchell’s brand BEIS had a genius response to negative reviews.

• Saie Beauty always crushes their marketing. They sent these compostable balloons to influencers for an experiential unboxing moment. 

• Fishwife, the brand that made tinned fish cool, partnered up with Keystone Light on a snack and beer tacklebox. 

Do you feel like you’re trapped in your social media algorithm and keep seeing brands posting the same TikTok trends, viral songs, and content series? Same. We went looking to find two brands that are trying something new, cutting through the noise, and standing out in an interesting way this week.

👟 SET Active is the new-ish activewear brand loved by celebs like Hailey Beiber and Kylie Jenner. Cool social media content is in their DNA, but their latest strategy is particularly clever and original.

The strategy: It’s become the norm to have the founder of a brand being “the face” on social. What if you’re not great on camera? What if you’re too busy? SET recently brought on a new TikTok manager, TikTok personality Sam Vicchiollo. Sam has over 2M followers on TikTok, so he knows how to connect to the TikTok audience. The videos have been hilarious and the engagement on SET’s account has never been better. Brands have hired celebrities to be the face of their brands since forever—so why not hire an influencer to be the TikTok face of yours?

👛 Reformation, the sustainable fashion brand, has hit $300M+ in revenue. The brand is all over TikTok with creators posting outfit try ons, but their own channels are also performing really well, with 1M likes and nearly 200k followers.

The strategy: Instead of just posting overtly branded content ft their clothes that wouldn’t stand out in your feed, (think: try ons and aesthetic outfit videos), Ref gets creators to recreate viral videos for them to repost on their channels, but they dress them in Reformation. Here’s an example of a creator’s viral vid, and here’s their recreation for Ref. You could totally do this, too.

URL: Group Business Coaching Call with Naked Sundays Founder, Samantha Brett

♡🎧On The Pod: How Sienna Brown is building her bootstrapped beauty biz