🤝 We found you a mentor, Glossier grant program, TikTok's new app

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines  

• 💘 This TikTok strategy landed Basma Beauty $500k in sales

• 💻 COMING UP: Group mentorship with Aishwarya Iyer, founder of Brightland

• 🎧 New podcast ep: Beautyblender founder, Rea Ann Silva, bootstrapped her way to selling 50 Million+ units

📓 Resource roundup

• Get in with the Glossier leadership team and land $50,000 cash. Black-owned US-based beauty businesses can apply to Glossier’s 2023 Grant Program to get grant funding, a 1:1 with their CEO, and more support. 🔗 Tell me more

• If you've been focused on ecommerce but feel ready to look at retail, this ModernRetail article shares the tools companies like Brooklinen are using to make the same move. 🔗 Tell me more

• For brands looking to land stockists, tradeshows might be the move. We made a list of all the big ones across different categories coming up this year. It's exclusively available to Business Bestie subscribers and available now in your Besties folder. 🔗 Tell me more

• IFundWomen teamed up with Botox on a pitch comp open to US-based businesses in any industry. 20 founders will receive $25,000 grants and other prizes. 🔗 Tell me more

• Newbie food and beverage business owners, this conference (virtual and IRL) is a bootcamp to get you from idea stage to grocery store shelves. Whole Foods’ former CEO is a big fan. 🔗 Tell me more

• Hiring? Gen She is a community of 16,000 ambitious female designers, marketers, and engineers from top schools who wanna work for businesses like yours. If you're looking for someone special to join the team full time or as an intern, the founder of Gen She wants to hear from you: [email protected] is her email. 🔗 Tell me more

• Another great funding option for folks in the beauty biz: StitchCrew and BASF have put together an Inclusive Beauty Incubator. You’ll get $10,000 in funding plus mentorship and programming from top beauty executives. 🔗 Tell me more

• We made a spreadsheet with all of the top grants and pitch competitors for your biz. Download it ASAP because a ton of them close this month. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

SOCIAL MEDIA: Not to be dramatic, but we need you to immediately secure your handle on TikTok's new app, Lemon8. It's been around for a while overseas, but just rolled out in the US and UK (still nothing in Australia or Canada, sorry besties.) The app's very aesthetic—kind of like Pinterest meets Instagram—and an interesting move from TikTok's parent company, ByteDance. If you're using it already, hit reply to tell us your thoughts.

MONEY: Ok Fiona Chan, we see you!! The Youthforia founder just raised seed funding from True Beauty Ventures, Willow Growth Partners, and Shark Tank's Mark Cuban to fuel the growth of her TikTok-famous line of makeup that you can sleep in.

FASHION: Henning, the plus size fashion brand started by former fashion editor Lauren Chan, was just acquired by Universal Standard—and pretty sure this is the first independent plus size brand to make a successful exit? 🖐️🎤 Henning will fold into the larger direct-to-consumer brand and Lauren will stay on as head of brand partnerships.

CELEBS: Did you hear Jennifer Lopez launched a line of low-alc bottled cocktails? Of course, she has said in the past that she doesn't actually drink alcohol, so people are kind of confused about this one. It's called Delola and includes three cocktail flavors so far.

SEXUAL WELLNESS: Sexual wellness brands are hitting the mainstream and we’re stoked to see it. Dame and its founder (also one of the baddies in our Female Founder World online community home) Alexandra Fine just pulled off a launch into 300 Target stores and online.

In related news, sexual wellness brand Maude has dropped at Sephora. A few SKUs are now in 264 stores across the US as a part of Sephora's ‘Next Big Thing’ edit.

Over at CVS, Aura's line of supplement gummies for UTIs, PMS and menopause has landed. Founder Anna Turkisher hosted a group business coaching call in the Female Founder World community all about getting into retail—the recording's available now to Business Bestie members.

TIKTOK: The US Government’s least fave app, TikTok, is now also banned on work phones and other devices of government employees in Australia. So that makes Britain, Canada, Belgium, the UK, New Zealand, the US and more countries that have all made moves to restrict the app. 😬

RETAIL: Sephora's diving deeper into the world of ingestible wellness products (watch out Goop 👀)—Sarah Hyland’s chocolate supplement brand, Sourse, will be launching in Sephora nationwide on April 14th.

Our Aussie friends at frank body are celebrating 10 years with a super exciting announcement: they’re going into thousands of Walmart stores across the US. Hear from cofounder Jess Hatzis on the Female Founder World podcast.

💄 This TikTok strategy landed Basma Beauty $500k in sales

Parisa Durrani's beauty brand Basma Beauty has been used by the internet's most famous women, including Charli D'Amelio and Kourtney Kardashian.

But it didn't boost sales at all.

When they launched in 2021, Parisa and her cofounder Basma focused marketing efforts on Instagram. They direct messaged and gifted the brand's foundation sticks to makeup artists and quickly, Basma Beauty was being used on some very famous women.

Even with all the effort and celebrity alignment, Instagram was not driving sales. So Parisa switched the brand’s focus to TikTok. In a year, this switch brought in $500,000 in sales.

One key question shapes Basma Beauty's TikTok strategy: why would someone want to follow us? From that question, Parisa formed three pillars for how to show up on TikTok.

Pillar one: be super transparent. They share the cute stuff and the messy stuff about running a small business. And the content output isn’t super fancy, either. Often, these videos are simply Parisa or Basma just talking to the camera in their living room.

Pillar two: gift content creators aggressively. They send product to 100+ new content creators a month, and thousands of creators in total each month. They DMs creators (with any size of following, btw) saying they’d love to send products to try with no obligation to post about it.

“We let the product do the talking. We are confident that if someone tries the product and they love it, they'll post about it.”

Pillar three: address real pain points with your product and make content about it. For Basma Beauty, one of those pain points is finding foundation is a shade that perfectly matches your skin.

Listen to Parisa on the pod for more details on her TikTok strategy that generated $500,000 in sales over one year.

💻 COMING UP: Group mentorship with Aishwarya Iyer, founder of Brightland

🕒 19 April at 7pm ET

Finding mentors is hard. Let us find them for you :).

Jump into the Female Founder World online community home next week to ask Aishwarya Iyer your burning biz questions. She bootstrapped the launch of her pantry essentials brand, Brightland, in 2018. At launch, Brightland sold out of its inventory within a week and built a 1000-person waiting list. Now, she's become a kitchen staple of faves like Oprah and has gone on to raise VC money from big names to fuel her biz.

🎧 New podcast ep: Beautyblender founder, Rea Ann Silva, bootstrapped her way to selling 500 million+ units

Everything Rea Ann Silva knows about business, she taught herself—and uh she knows a lot: Rea Ann's sold more than 50 million units of her invention, Beautyblender!

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