🌵 We're coming to Austin, Kylie Cosmetics deep dive, getting to $1M without ads

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 👀 Benchmark your biz against Kylie Cosmetics

• 🌵 We're coming to Austin on 16 November!

• 🎁 Giveaway! Win a $1,000 back-to-business bundle

• 🗽 Meet your business besties IRL in New York: 8 November

• 🚀 Chunks founder Tiffany Ju bootstrapped to $1M in annual sales without paid ads

• 🔗 URL events: Join AMAs Tiffany Ju (Chunks) and Iris Smit (The Quick Flick)

• 🎧 New podcast episode: Get top tier press coverage without a PR agency

📓 Resource roundup

• Black Girl Ventures Next Gen applications are open now to current HBCU students with a business or business idea. Applications close 16 December. 🔗 Tell me more

• IFundWomen and Johnnie Walker are granting 10 groundbreaking women-owned businesses each with $10K. Applications close 31 December. 🔗 Tell me more

• Female Founder World is giving away a $1,000 back-to-business bundle including legal contract templates from Creators Legal, an Apple voucher, a generous ilovecreatives gift card, and more. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

FUNDRAISING: Bath and body care brand Nopalera just raised $2.7 million in seed funding to fulfill its mission of "making Latina aspirational". Mexican American founder Sandra Velasquez went from being $100,000 in debt to bootstrapping the launch of her own business, which is now tracking towards hitting $1 million sales this year, double its 2021 revenue. We love to see it, Sandra 👏. Meanwhile, Australian venture capital firm Blackbird has raised the country's first $1 billion VC fund. The new fund has already made 18 investments into startups from AI to manufacturing to e-commerce.

BRAND NEWS: Chrissy Teigan's Cravings brand released a line of premium cake kits this month. Cute, right? Only, the launch came weeks after Chrissy collaborated with an almost identical indie, female founded brand: The Caker. Jordan Rondel, founder of The Caker, called out the similarities between her products and the new Cravings line—both in concept and packaging design—and thanked her community on Instagram for supporting The Caker. We're talking about this in the Female Founder World community today—weigh in on what you would do in Jordan's position (every small business owner's nightmare 💔). In beauty news, Saie's team has been busy: Laney Crowell's beauty business united 35 beauty brands under an 'Every Body' campaign to champion reproductive justice and raise money for Sister Song, a national organization dedicated to abortion access. Glow Recipe, Kopari, Mented Cosmetics, Live Tinted and more brands have repackaged their best-selling products in limited-edition 'Every Body green' packaging, a nod to the color associated with abortion rights. All of the proceeds will support reproductive justice in partnership with SisterSong. In the same month, Saie just became Reformation's first beauty collaboration, launching a just-for-Ref liquid highlighter. Is this a sign Reformation might want to launch its own beauty line? Definitely maybe. 👀 Sadly, minimalist clean makeup brand Lilah B. has announced it will close by the end of 2022. When the brand launched in 2015 they were one of very few in the clean makeup space and a minimalist, modern aesthetic set them apart. Things have changed though: Today, clean formulas are tablestakes and the market feels more crowded than ever. In new stockist news, Undefined Beauty landed at Ulta, Etoile Collective's on Revolve, and Blume's superfood blends have arrived at Credo.

MARKETING: As it becomes more expensive than ever to reach new customers, one beauty brand, Athr, is giving away mascaras to new customers who pay $5 for shipping. Rather than spending money on digital ads, Athr Beauty has committed 5,000 to 10,000 units of mascara (RRP$28 each) to the campaign and hopes to acquire the same amount of new customers. Would you try this? We're talking about it in the Female Founder World community home.

SOCIAL MEDIA: Now's the time to secure your YouTube handle. YouTube has just introduced handles on channel pages and Shorts to make it easier for users to mention each other in comments, posts and descriptions. Over at Meta, Instagram is testing a new group feature that lets multiple users collaborate and share Stories, Feed posts, or Reels with group members. The test is only available to a small number of users in Canada for now.

AMAZON: Your Amazon customers will soon be able to make purchases via Venmo. By Black Friday, all US-based users on the Amazon will have access to Venmo payments.

👀 Benchmark your business against Kylie Cosmetics

We’ve pulled up some of Kylie Cosmetics’ key website stats so that ecommerce entrepreneurs can see where their brands stand against a category leader. Scroll on to peek at the tools bringing Kylie Cosmetics’ site to life and see what the homepage looked like at launch vs. today.

Total website visits in October: 776.8K visits in the last month

Where [brand’s] web traffic is coming from: United States (46.1%), Australia (5.44%), India (4.83%), United Kingdom (4.55%), Canada (4.53%)

Bounce Rate: 46.68%

Average visit duration: 2 minutes and 9 seconds

Average pages viewed per site visit: 3.8

Ecommerce tech stack: Klaviyo for email marketing, Afterpay for buy now and pay later, Attentive for SMS marketing, and Yotpo for customer reviews, Octane AI and Zoho Survey for quiz and survey tools, Smart Search and Instant Search for upselling and cross selling, Please Come Back for order recovery.

Social media insights: 25.9 million Instagram followers and 3.3 million TikTok followers

Homepage evolution:

🌵 Female Founder World is coming to Austin!

Female Founder World is throwing a party for our business besties in Austin on November 16, in partnership with Gorgias, the ecommerce helpdesk that turns your customer service into a profit center.

There will be drinks, a great crowd, and a female founder panel featuring:

☆ Lindsey Martin, founder of Kiramoon

☆ Allison Ellsworth, founder of Poppi

☆ One more special guest speaker to be announced 👀

☆ Moderated by Jasmine Garnsworthy, creator of Female Founder World

Tickets are free but space is super limited—register now, we'd hate for you to miss out.💔

🎁 Giveaway! Win a $1,000 back-to-business bundle

Enter for your chance to win a $500 Apple voucher, a $200 gift card to use with ilovecreatives, an obé Fitness annual subscription valued at $169.99, an annual subscription to Creators Legal valued at $108, a daily planner, and more prizes!

🎉 Female Founder World New York Presented by Gorgias

We're hosting a party for our business besties in New York at The Malin Williamsburg!

It's a Female Founder World Community Hang Presented by Gorgias, the ecommerce helpdesk that turns your customer service into a profit center.

There will be drinks, dope people, and a fireside chat with Jilly Hendrix, founder of BODY and Olivia Landau, founder of The Clear Cut, moderated by the creator of Female Founder World, Jasmine Garnsworthy.

Tickets are free but space is very limited. You know what to do ⬇️.

🚀 Chunks founder Tiffany Ju bootstrapped to $1M in annual sales without paid ads

Tiffany Ju’s bootstrapped hair accessory brand, Chunks, hit $40k in sales in her first year, $500k in year two, and in her third year, 2021, made over $1 million in sales—all without paid ads. She started Chunks after her first biz closed, leaving her with $15,000 debt.

After being let go from her first 9-5 job in 2012, Tiffany began building her first business. She started dying tights in her kitchen and selling them on Etsy, which immediately went viral. She quickly discovered hand-dying tights wasn't a scalable business, and sales declined over time as the trend faded.

"[The business] was doing well but it was a trend that popped off in 2012. Every year it kind of went down and my I didn't know how to manage my finances."

Tiffany eventually closed her tights business and took a year off in 2018 to create art and explore her interests. She found a gap in the market for unique, high-quality hair clips, and Chunks was born. Things lined up: Tiffany already had experience manufacturing, the margins looked great, and there wasn’t much competition in the space at the time.

"When I have a business idea, it's really important for me to put it through the wringer and make sure that from a practical standpoint, everything works."

Her tights business left Tiffany in debt, so she knew she had to bootstrap and be extremely resourceful this time around. Tiffany worked with manufacturers who accepted small orders, created her own website, invested in photography, and began testing the market.

Chunks began primarily selling via wholesale since Tiffany was able to tap into her existing network from her first business. From there, the online orders began trickling in.

In 2020 with stores closing and wholesale slowing down, Tiffany continued developing her customer base online and saw ecommerce taking off.

Today, Chunks' business is split about 40% ecommerce and 60% wholesale. The business is doing over a $1 million in annual revenue and manages a team of 14.

"I knew I needed to hire because I was shipping everything myself. And it was taking up more than half my time. Anytime you're doing something, and it's taking more than 40% of your time, and it's not like lighting you up, that's usually the thing you need to hire for."

While Tiffany has prioritized hiring, she's refocused herself into a marketing director role, deciding that it's too early to bring on someone externally for that position.

"So much of the brand is me, my values, and what I care about. If we hired someone outside of the company, it would have shifted the messaging too much."

Keen to learn more about Tiffany's story? Check out ep. 99 of the Female Founder World podcast for of all her business learnings—and come to Tiffany's AMA in the Female Founder World online community this Thursday to ask her questions.

🔗 URL events: AMAs with Tiffany Ju (Chunks) 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 few weeks. (Yep, you're invited!)

✨ AMA with Tiffany Ju, founder of Chunks (3 Nov at 6pm ET)

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

🎧 New podcast episode: How she landed 50 press articles about her brand—without a PR agency

We have Squigs founder Nikita Charuzo on the Female Founder World podcast. Before launching her Ayurvedic haircare brand, Nikita was a fashion editor. And, in the six months since her brand launched, Nikita landed more than 50 press articles about Squigs, including in Vogue, Byrdie, Allure, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Nylon, and more publishers—all without working with a PR agency. Learn her method for pitching and securing press in this week's episode of the Female Founder World podcast.