👀 Big TikTok news, a killer pitch deck template, 2023 brand trends at Wholefoods

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 🎨 Inside the Wooden Spoon Herbs rebrand: What it cost, who they worked with

• 🔗 URL events: Join AMAs with Fiona Co Chan (Youthforia), Tiffany Chu (Chunks), and Iris Smit (The Quick Flick)

• 🎧 New podcast episode: How Karen Danudjaja bootstrapped her superfood latte biz to $7.5 million in sales

📓 Resource roundup

• Look what we found! The deck that Karen Danudjaja, founder of superfood latte brand Blume, used to raise $2.5 million in five weeks is now available to members in our Female Founder World community home. This is a small taste of something ⭐new and shiny⭐ coming soon to Female Founder World. We can't wait to show you the magic we've been making over here. 🔗 Tell me more

• Tech entrepreneur and investor Alex Iskold's blog, Startup Hacks, covers everything from raising money at all stages of startups to managing investors, getting introduced to VCs, marketing, productivity, and more. This advice is gold—and it's free. 🔗 Tell me more

• We found a new app to level up your Hot Girl Walk. Snipd lets you take notes and save highlights directly from a podcast you're listening to (Female Founder World, ofc) in one click, plus add AI-generated titles and summaries to your highlights. 🔗 Tell me more

• Figuring out your influencer marketing budget? Download Aspire’s Influencer Budget Calculator for Google Sheets to quickly plan and calculate your influencer spend. 🔗 Tell me more

• Foodie founders, Shopify put together a step-by-step guide to selling food online that's perfect for beginners. 🔗 Tell me more

• Another resource for food and beverage brands: Stacy's Pita Chips and Hello Alice are partnering to offer women with businesses doing between $25,000 and $1 million in annualized sales a $15,000 grant 💸. You'll need to move quickly if you want to be considered—applications close October 21 at 6 pm ET. 🔗 Tell me more

• Three ecommerce experts are coming together for an online panel about productivity and scalability hacks next week. It's free to join. 🔗 Tell me more

• Pre-writing customer service scripts gives your team the answers they need to questions that customers commonly ask. In this handy guide, you'll get 29 customer service scripts inspired by top ecommerce brands. Forward this to your customer service lead. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

TIKTOK DELIVERY: Is TikTok launching delivery and fulfillment? 👀 It sure looks likely! New job listings from TikTok suggest the social media platform is building its own product fulfillment centers that could possibly tap its #businesstiktok community and expand the platform's e-commerce features to compete against Amazon. One Seattle-based job listing reads: “By providing warehousing, delivery, and customer service returns, our mission is to help sellers improve their operational capability and efficiency, provide buyers a satisfying shopping experience and ensure fast and sustainable growth of TikTok Shop." If they can pull it off, this will be a game-changer for brands.

CELEBRITY STARTUPS: Jared Leto is the latest famous human to want in on the beauty industry, launching a new beauty and lifestyle brand, Twentynine Palms, despite admitting to being "never really interested in beauty products" in an interview. The new brand includes an 11-piece range of gender-neutral skin care, body care, and hair care products. Good for him, I guess, but have surely we've reached peak celeb skincare brands? Perhaps more celebrities can take cues from Bella Hadid, who joined Kin Euphorics in 2021 as cofounder, and lend their influence to an existing independent entrepreneur who is doing interesting work in a fast-growing category.

ECOMMERCE TECH: Squarespace added some major updates to its online selling tools. Called 'Squarespace Refresh', the update includes some shiny new tools like Printful, a print-on-demand service for custom merch, an updated app that lets you run your business more easily on your phone, new ways to connect product inventory directly to other platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and ecommerce updates that let stores upgrade their product reviews, display related items in customer carts, and streamline shipping with order status pages. Over at Klarna, the business known for buy now, pay later is getting into the creator space with a new Klarna Creator app for retailers and influencers to collab on brand campaigns. In a massive product update this week, Klarna also rolled out a new search and price comparison tool, shoppable video content, and some climate-friendly features. One last thing: did you catch the PayPal drama last week? The fintech company attracted a lot of hate when it published an update to its user policy that included $2,500 fines for merchants spreading misinformation. People were not happy: PayPal’s share price dropped 6% and folks got very vocal online. PayPal's former president David Marcus tweeted: "A private company now gets to decide to take your money if you say something they disagree with. Insanity" and even Elon Musk spoke out against the policy. PayPal backtracked pretty quickly, saying the update was “incorrect” and they won’t be fining people for misinformation. Like we said—drama!—but it looks like the news cycle has moved on.

FOOD TRENDS: Every year Wholefoods predicts the next big food trends for the year ahead, and this week we got a peek at the 2023 list. It includes: Yaupon, a holly bush that’s North America’s only known native caffeinated plant; food brands up-cycling manufacturing by-products like oat, soy and almond pulp into new types of flours, sweets and baking mixes; a new wave of plant-based pasta alternatives; date-based snacks and baking ingredients; better welfare conditions for poultry💔; kelp-based foods; brands calling out their climate-contribution more clearly on packaging; retro comfort meals; more premium pet foods; and more.

BRAND GOSS: Clean beauty retailer Credo acquired clean beauty brand Follain, but they kept details of the deal, including Follain's valuation, a secret. This news has founders talking about how the clean beauty retail space seems to be consolidating–probably because competition is fierce and retail sales are slumping, so it makes sense for brands and retailers to join forces. In launch news, Chillhouse released On the Mend, a new nail care treatment and Wooden Spoon Herbs had a makeover (more on that below!).

🎨 Inside the Wooden Spoon Herbs rebrand: What it cost and who they worked with

Lauren Haynes bootstrapped her herbal brand Wooden Spoon Herbs to $600,000 in sales, a team of six and into stockists like Goop, Free People and Thrive Market. Now, it’s time for a brand refresh: ahead of a big partnership with Wholefoods coming in 2023, Wooden Spoon Herbs has just updated its visual identity. And tbh, they nailed it. Female Founder World asked Lauren to talk us through the rebrand, including who she worked with, what it costs, and why now’s the right time for an update.

How long the rebrand took: A little over a year.

Who they worked with: Gander, who are known for their award-winning CPG brands like Banza, Graza, Magic Spoon, Behave, and so many more. Would 10/10 recommend. Stellar crew.

The motivation: Our [original] branding was fantastic for DTC, where it lived in context, but as we look to expand into different channels, I realized the packaging needed more education on pack. We raised a seed round in 2021, and have big plans for the next 24 months, including our partnership with Whole Foods. We need packaging that can tell our story and sell itself, and this rebrand definitely hits that mark.

Rebrand goals: One major piece we wanted to bring in was connecting people to the plants they're taking. Each SKU features a stylized version of its hero ingredient front and center. Each SKU also now has its own tagline to communicate the product benefits in a succinct and fun way, for example "eases the mind and lifts the mood." We packed as much information on a 5" label that we could. Visually, we want to communicate that we are a traditional herbal brand, not a flash in the pan. We want people to feel connected to nature and cared for.

Lessons learned: A big lesson was that this is truly an investment, and that good design sells itself in so many ways. It was also a thrill experience what it's like working with people who are absolute experts and creative geniuses. It takes a TON of people coming together to really build a beautiful brand—copywriters, type designers, photographers, illustrators, project managers.

How the rebrand is being launched: Early access for SMS subscribers, a new Herbal Starter Kit that kickstarts your home apothecary, VERY cute merch (hi holiday shopping), a special kit with MINNA Goods and The Nap Ministry, a giveaway with East Fork Pottery and friends, educational classes, three new SKUs, and then an in-person activation for holiday shoppers at West Coast Craft in San Francisco in November.

What it costs to rebrand: $200,000 is a healthy budget, but there are many ways to structure that, and it's easy to spend much more than that.

🔗 URL events: AMAs with Tiffany Chu (Chunks), Fiona Co Chan (Youthforia) and Iris Smit (The Quick Flick)

It's all happening in the Female Founder World community home. Here are the online events we have coming up over the next month. (Yep, you're invited!)

✨ AMA with Fiona Co Chan, founder of Youthforia (27 Oct at 6pm ET)

✨ AMA with Tiffany Chu, founder of Chunks (8 Nov at 6pm ET)

✨ AMA with Iris Smit, founder of The Quick Flick (23 Nov at 9pm ET)

🎧 How Karen Danudjaja bootstrapped her superfood latte biz to $7.5 million in sales

Karen Danudjaja’s superfood latte business, Blume, hit $7.5 million in sales last year and has landed in more than 2000 stores, including Wholefoods and Nordstrom. And she landed those numbers while fully bootstrapped. 😎

The idea for a better-for-you latte line came to Karen in 2017 while working in corporate real estate, having multiple coffee meetings each day and then getting the caffeine jitters.

She started off working a full time nine-to-five and also running Blume at night. By the time Blume hit around $200,000 in sales, Karen went all in and quit her day job to grow the company.

“I felt like there was enough proof of concept, like returning customer feedback from retailers, that I was ready to go all in.”

At the beginning cafes were her biggest customer, with healthy spots adding Blume’s superfood lattes to the menu. But when lockdowns hit, 85% of Blume’s business was food service—and it all shut down over night. Karen quickly brushed up on digital marketing and pivoted the company to ecommerce.

“I took a digital marketing course March-April 2020 and then launched our first themed bundle for our ecommerce store in mid-April.”

After that, the business shifted to ecommerce-first during the height of the pandemic, before settling into a true omnichannel strategy that’s split 50% wholesale and 50% ecommerce and includes distribution across 2000 cafes, grocery, lifestyle stores, as well as the itsblume.com website.

When Karen needed to find a cost-effective way to scale sales without hiring a team, she came up with a smart solution: build a separate, password-gated Shopify store with minimum order sizes for cafes and independent retailers to place bulk orders.

“We duplicated our regular Shopify store, adjusted pricing and added a login. We have flows set up for them the same way we do for our DTC customers, targeting abandoned carts and returning customer, but set up specific for the needs of a retailer.”

When bigger retailers like Wholefoods and Nordstrom wanted to stock Blume, Karen then built out her sales team.

During all of this growth, Karen continued to bootstrap, which meant carefully managing cash flow was key. Her tip to other bootstrapped brands is to push back on retailers’ standard 90-day payment terms to make sure invoices are paid more quickly.

“We were really firm from the beginning with retailers that we couldn't do net 90 [to get paid for orders]. Because we were bootstrapped and we didn't have access [to cash], I just literally had to say no.”

This year, after ending 2021 with $7.5 million in sales, Blume raised its first round of money from investors, closing $2.5 million in five weeks.

Feeling inspired? We have the exact pitch deck Karen used to raise $2.5 million in five weeks available for you to download in the Female Founder World community home. We’ve shared this resource as a first look at something exciting ✨new and shiny✨ Female Founder World is launching for our besties later this year.