📓 Beauty school's open, get mentored by Lo Bosworth, how to gift Kendall Jenner

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines  

• 👙 How Erin Deering got Kendall Jenner to post about her bikini brand

• 📍 COMING UP IRL: Network and Chill, Morning Mentoring with Lo Bosworth

• 🔗 COMING UP URL: Group Business Coaching with Lindsay Holden, Founder of Odele

• 🎧 New podcast ep: Six months post-launch with Leigh Campbell, cofounder of Brillo

• Forbes 30 Under 30 is now doing 'Local Lists' for specific cities—and nominations are open. If you’re a young founder in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Puerto Rico, Seattle or Toronto, you should apply! 🔗 Tell me more 

• This newsletter is essentially the playbook for fundraising, written by a venture capital investor. (Brightland founder Aishwarya Iyer recommended it in our Group Business Coaching call last month.) 🔗 Tell me more

• Want to become an investor? Backstage Capital is taking applications for their investor apprenticeship program. This is a pretty incredible opportunity to join the next generation of influential investors. 🔗 Tell me more

• Beauty founders, listen up: Tower28 is taking applications for their annual Clean Beauty Summer School. This is a 10-week virtual development program for BIPOC-owned clean beauty brands. 🔗 Tell me more

FASHION: Not sure who signed off on this, but the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is back after a four year break—only this time, it's a feature length movie. The show will drop in September and feature designers from different cities, plus a Victoria's Secret collection.

FOOD AND BEV: There's been some very niche industry ✨dramaaa✨ this week. Here's what happened: Andrew Benin sells olive oil in a squeezy bottle at his biz, Graza. Then, Brightland (the original cool olive oil brand), launched a pizza sauce... Also in a squeezy bottle. Andrew went viral in foodie circles last week for calling Brightland a copycat, but has since apologized after the industry rightly pointed out that Brightland kind of pioneered the refreshed olive oil sauce category, squeezy bottles have been used by chefs foreverrrr, and actually Graza's products and Brightland's new pizza sauce look totally different.

MONEY: Cure Hydration, a fan-fave functional hydration brand, raised $5.6 million. Cure has been doing really well, and growing 230% growth year-over-year. We’re stoked for CEO and founder Lauren Piccasso and the whole team on this major W.

BEAUTY: More beauty brands are getting into slugging, the beauty trend where you slather your face in petroleum jelly overnight. A few months ago Starface cofounder Julie Schott launched slugging brand Futurewise and this month Experiment, founded by Lisa Guerrera, launched their own “micro-slugging” oil gel. Looks cute, too.

CELEB: Priyanka Chopra Jonas' haircare brand Anomaly is doing incredibly well—we’re talking $500M+ in revenue, surpassing pretty much every other celeb brand, (yes, even Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty and Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics). Her products start at $6, and it sounds like the affordability has been a major part of her strategy and success. Anomoly launched with Target in the US in 2021, and in India in 2022.

MARKETING: Pimple patch brand Hero Cosmetics is all grown up and hitting the mainstream. Founder Ju Rhyu just launched Hero's first ever national TV campaign. The whole thing was kicked off, created and executed in just three months. And we’ve got to say, it’s good.

TARGET: Names are in for the Target Takeoff Food & Beverage Program 2023 cohort. The group of brands in Target's six-week food and bev accelerator includes 10 newbies—big congrats to Mocktail Club, Bumpin Blends, Brooklyn Tea, Honeycut Kitchen, Better Chew, Homiah, glonuts, resist, Immorrel, and Soldadera! 

MOTHER'S DAY: Orange Theory’s founder, Ellen Latham announced the fitness business is giving all moms on the team the Monday following Mother’s Day off from work. She's calling on other founders to do the same. WDYT? Should we give moms a day off for Mother's Day?

PRODUCT LAUNCHES: Jing Gao, the founder of tasty 'n' cute chili sauce brand Fly By Jing, is celebrating AAPI month by partnering with fast-casual Chinese food chain Panda Express on a signature dish with their Zhong Sauce. Meanwhile food brand Omsom is releasing Saucy Noodles in four flavors, and clean hair care brand Ceremonia has dropped a new fragrance.

ECONOMY: We all know the economy's not having a good time, but approximately none of us are cutting back on beauty spending. Over the last quarter the prestige beauty market (so, 💸 high end 💸 brands) saw major growth. Makeup grew 24%, fragrance by 15%, and skincare and hair by 11%.

Beauty brands in the 'mass market' category (referring to more affordable brands), did well, too: Makeup grew by 15%; skincare by 10%; fragrance by 13%; and hair by 7%. Reassuring news if you're thinking about starting or scaling a beauty brand but feel worried about the economy.

👙 Erin Deering started a multi million dollar 'it-girl' bikini brand in her 20s

Erin Deering cofounded Triangl, a bikini brand so cool, even Kendall Jenner asked for a pair. Three years after launch, Erin made the BRW Rich List in Australia and the company has reported selling around 45,000 bikinis a month. We asked Erin how she made that happen. Here's what you can learn from her story in 60 seconds. 

• Even big brands start super small: Triangl launched in January 2013. In the beginning it made just a few sales each week. But, they always had some growth—even if it was just one more sale each week.

• Always test new platforms: Instagram was new when Triangl launched and Erin went hard on this channel, and Triangl took off. This really shows that testing new platforms can change your business—particularly when you use them in a way no one else has tried yet. We're looking at you, Lemon 8.

• You can build a big business with a small team: Erin and her cofounder did everything at the start. When Erin left the business in 2018, it was hitting millions of dollars in sales, but Triangl still only had six people on the team.

• Try your weirdest and wildest marketing ideas: Influencer gifting was the marketing strategy driving Triangl's growth. Erin managed to get Kendall Jenner to post about the brand by following a wild strategy. Erin couldn't find a contact for Kendall, so instead gifted all of Kendall's friends with Triangl swimwear, hoping Kendall would get FOMO and reach out. It worked! Erin actually got an email from Kendall, sent her a bikini, and Kendall posted about the brand. That's when Triangl really started to grow.

Erin's on the Female Founder World podcast chatting through the lessons she's learned with Triangl. Listen in, business besties, this is a good one.

📍 Network and Chill IRL: Morning Mentoring with Lo Bosworth

🕒 12 May at 8:30am ET

Come hang at an intimate 'Network and Chill' (lololol) morning on Friday, 12 May for 45 Business Besties. The morning starts at 8:30 a.m., and we have Lo Bosworth, founder of Love Wellness, coming through to chat with you and host Jasmine Garnsworthy at 9 a.m. sharp in an intimate group business coaching session and fireside chat. The event will end at 10 a.m. The caffeinated drinks are on us! Registrations are essential for this one, as numbers are very limited. We will be checking names on the door, so keep your confirmation email handy.

🔗 Group Business Coaching with Lindsay Holden, Founder of Odele

Lindsay was a buyer at Target before starting her haircare brand, Odele, which is now stocked at Ulta and Target—so she's literally THE best person to ask about getting into retail. Bring your questions to this interactive live session! A recording of this video call will be available only to Business Bestie members.

🎧 New podcast ep: Six Months Post-Launch, Leigh Campbell's Building the Next Big Beauty Brand

Leigh is an OG beauty girlie. She hosts Australia’s largest beauty podcast called You Beauty, which also has a Facebook group with more than 75,000 members, was Beauty Director at Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia, then Head of Lifestyle at Huffington Post in Australia, and is now at Mamamia—a huge women’s publishing and podcasting brand in Australia.

Recently she cofounded a beauty brand called Brillo Beauty just five months ago, and we spend a lot of time in this ep talking about how she spotted a gap in the market in a very crowded beauty industry, finding a cofounder, overcoming her fear to start her own business, and how Brillo got traction.

Tune into this episode of the Female Founder World podcast to learn how she did it.