🪐 Another female founder cancellation, $10k grant, what to pay yourself

☁️ Hi Business Bestie. We’re back this week to share new grants, unpack the Matilda Djerf cancellation drama, and share a clever community marketing idea from cocokind. ☁️

• Resource roundup

• Inside cocokind’s viral community trip

• Skim the headlines

• On the Female Founder World podcast: Unpacking the Matilda Djerf cancellation drama, Gloria Shito’s wholesale strategy & the celeb marketing tactic behind Fazit’s viral growth

• Enrollment for Female Founder World’s Retail Bootcamp is open! Save your spot—class starts 6 January. 🔗Tell me more

• This expert shared how she would grow her Instagram from zero and it’s gold. 🔗Tell me more

• BIPOC founders are eligible for a $10,000 grant and mentorship. Go get it! 🔗Tell me more

• This creative director found the tool behind those scroll-stopping AI videos you’re always seeing on IG. 🔗Tell me more

• This founder ran an ad on Love Island and was blown away by the results. 🔗Tell me more

• Get your application in for Beauty Independent and True Beauty Venture’s accelerator program. 🔗Tell me more

• A former CPG editor launched a gifting suite for influencers, editors and CPG investors to discover news brands. 🔗Tell me more

Influencer Trips Are Out, Community Brand Trips Are In

2024 is the year brands truly started treating our communities like influencers. It’s not that community replaced influencer marketing, but some of us definitely reallocated the budget that would normally go to kinda-famous creators, and put it towards delighting our actual customers.

I think this is smart for a few reasons: literally anyone can go viral at the whim of the algorithm, so it makes sense to acknowledge the viral potential of every customer; acquiring new customers is expensive as hell and it’s never been more important to invest in retention and loyalty; and I’d be willing to bet that for many brands the customers who are referred through word of mouth end up spending more and repeat purchasing more often. So, get that word of mouth marketing engine fired up.

This month, clean beauty brand cocokind rerouted its influencer mailer budget to kick off a brand trip to Napa. But instead of bringing editors or influencers on the trip, they’re inviting their actual community to apply with a video to join the trip.

We asked cocokind’s founder, Priscilla Tsai, what impact the campaign’s had so far and how they’re thinking about community marketing in 2025.

FFW: How many people have applied to join the trip?

PT: We’re blown away by the response to our customer brand trip! In the first week, we’ve reached over 153,000 people with 1.4MM impressions. It’s been picked up by media, and our creator and brand friends have been helping us spread the word. Super grateful for the outpouring of energy and excitement from our community, and it’s just getting started. 

FFW: How did you share the opportunity with your community? 

PT: We stay engaged with our community in social media comments, DMs, and emails every single day. We announced via those same channels and even used our invite-only community Slack channel to build hype and excitement with our most engaged customers! 

FFW: What shift in the marketing landscape made you want to take on this campaign? 

PT: Over the past few months, we’ve been laser-focused on deepening our connection to our customer community, listening to their feedback and weaving it into everything we do. We’re always transparent on social about how expensive traditional marketing, endorsements, and influencer mailers can be—regularly talking about this sparked an idea that we wanted to redirect that budget and invest it back into the people who are buying cocokind on the shelves and talking about us in their group chats with friends. We wanted our customers to have the full “influencer experience” because they are the true champions of our brand! 

FOUNDER SALARIES: Wondering how much to pay yourself from your business? Founder salaries are increasing in 2025, but there are also more of us who aren't paying ourself anything at all. That number’s up from 7% of founders not taking a salary last year, to 9% in 2024.

2025 TREND PREDICTIONS: Pinterest's annual trend predictions are here, and we’ve got the TLDR. Cherries, “aura makeup”, and mermaid aesthetics are said to be trending. Bows aren’t going anywhere, and the fisherman vibe is on the rise. 

WOMEN’S WEALTH TRANSFER: Bloomberg reported that by 2030, women in the US will control $34 trillion, or roughly 38%, of investable assets. That’s close to double last year’s total. It’s partially because women of the Baby Boomer generation outlive men by five years on average, so women are being left in sole control of their family fortunes.

FAZIT’S $40M YEAR: The biz behind the glitter freckle makeup patches you see on Instagram is on track to hit $40M in revenue in 2025, thanks to a major CVS deal and Taylor Swift wearing the brand. Watch a mini tutorial with cofounder Aliett Buttelman in the Female Founder World app.

SKI FASHION: Ski-wear is definitely trending this year. Zara launched a ski line this season, and SKIMS released a ski collection with Northface. 

TANGLE TEEZER ACQUISITION: Hair brand Tangle Teezer has been acquired by Bic for $210M. In 2021 they had a big investment from private equity, and since then has been doing $75M in annual revenue. 

JULIE SCHOTT’S NEW BIZ: Julie Schott, the co-founder of Starface, Futurewise, Julie, and Blip has launched her new biz. Overdrive Defence is a harm reduction company, making products like Fentanyl test kit more accessible.

🎧 P.S. I’m continuing to release new episodes of the Female Founder World podcast through the Christmas break. Listen where-ever you get podcasts. Happy Christmas! — Jasmine