💸 Funding opportunities, Alo Yoga's tech stack, how this founder hit $60k in daily sales

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🎟️ BIG NEWS: Our Business Bestie membership is open

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 🛒 9 ecommerce tools powering Alo Yoga's $200M revenue

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

• 🚀 How to plan a $13k launch day with Melanie Masarin, founder of Ghia

• 👀 How Iskra Lawrence launched a body care brand making up to $60,000 daily

📓 Resource roundup

• This simple tool lets you repurpose and distribute video and audio content from one platform to another. Manually turning your TikToks into YouTube Shorts is over. 🔗 Tell me more

• Beverage brands, the Distill Ventures pre-accelerator is awarding early-stage drinks businesses up to $500,000 and 6-9 months of hands-on support. 🔗 Tell me more

• Join Female Founder World's group business coaching call on Dec 1 at 6pm ET with Sabeena Ladha, the founder of Deux, a raw cookie dough that's vegan, gluten-free, and all over TikTok. Ask her about appearing on Shark Tank, scaling a food business, how to win on TikTok, and whatever else is on your mind. 🔗 Tell me more

• It's all happening in our community home this month. Drop in on Dec 6 at 6pm ET for a group coaching call with Jaclyn Fu, founder of Pepper. Jaclyn launched her brand with a Kickstarter campaign and went on to sell over 1 million bras. Come ask her your biz questions! 🔗 Tell me more

🎟️ BIG NEWS: Our Business Bestie membership is here

The most common piece of advice we hear from founders at the top is this: Find a community of entrepreneurial baddies to support you as you build your biz. And because we want you to win—and win big—we worked with our community to create the exact membership every female founder needs on her way up.

Join the shiny new Business Bestie membership to access live classes including: mentorship sessions and workshops with founders leading multi-million dollar companies; peer mentorship sessions; mental health moments like meditation and manifestation classes crafted for founders in partnership with a crew of wellness experts; the exact templates, email copy, and decks that founders are using right now to start and scale their companies, and first dibs on the networking events Female Founder World is kinda famous for.

Become a Business Bestie subscriber and for $9 a month (cancel any time) receive:

• First dibs on all free Female Founder World IRL events, which typically hit registration capacity in under a day and attract a waitlist of hundreds of people. Subscribers are invited to register for events 48 hours before everyone else.

• 20% discount on all Female Founder World ticketed events.

• Access to a minimum of one Female Founder World live virtual group business coaching call with one of our favorite founders every month. Receive intimate mentorship from successful brand builders and experts in entrepreneurship. Click here and scroll to the calendar to find out what sessions are coming up!

• Live virtual workshops. These tactical online sessions are led by founders or experts and teach a specific skill or strategy that’s driving their business forward right now. Click here and scroll to the calendar find out what workshops are coming up!

• Access to the workshop recording library with sessions led by Nisha Dua (BBG Ventures), Ali Kriegsman (Bulletin), and more entrepreneurial baddies.

• Fast-tracked access to the Female Founder World free online community home—it’s the best place to meet your business besties online. Connect with and tap the knowledge of hundreds of dope people building businesses right now and get answers to the questions you just can’t Google.

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$9 per month is... frankly kind of crazy. The opportunity to lock in at this rate will only be available for a very limited time—don't sleep on it.

🗞️ Skim the headlines

FUNDRAISING: Olamide Olowe became the youngest Black woman to raise $10M this month. Her business, Topicals, is a Gen Z-focused, inclusive brand making "skincare for flare-ups" and just closed a $10 million Series A led by CAVU Consumer Partners, bringing its total funding to $12.6 million. Other investors include Kelly Rowland, Gabrielle Union, Hannah Bronfman, and Jay Z's Marcy Venture Fund. In just two years, Topicals' milestones include: 675% year over year revenue growth; fastest growing skincare brand in Sephora; one product sold every minute this year; and $100,000 donated to mental health organizations. Get it, Olamide. ❤️‍🔥

LAUNCHES: The team behind Gen Z acne brand Starface just launched a new beauty business—Futurewise—featuring a skincare 'slugging system'. Not a skincare girlie? We'll explain: Slugging's a beauty trend that involves slathering your skin in a rich layer like Vaseline to lock in moisture. It's dominated beauty circles for a couple of years, and on TikTok the hashtag has over 500 million views. Another new beauty brand, Brillo Beauty, just launched to offer skin and body-care for pregnancy and the fourth trimester. One of the cofounders is Leigh Campbell, an Australian beauty editor with more than 20 years of experience and a beauty podcast that spends a lot of time a the top of the poddy charts.

BLACK FRIDAY: It turns out we didn't need to stress over how inflation would impact Black Friday sales this year. 😅 Friday's sales raked in a record $9.12 billion from online shoppers last week—up from $8.92 billion in 2021. Huge congrats to Shopify merchants, who broke sales records to hit $3.36 billion in revenue, a 17% growth in sales from last year. 📈 We hope this includes you, bestie.

🛒 9 surprisingly affordable ecommerce tools powering Alo Yoga's $200M revenue

Alo Yoga's outrageously popular activewear line launched in LA during 2007 and today counts Gigi Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Taylor Swift as fans. The company is quiet when it comes to sharing revenue deets, but in a 2020 interview cofounder Danny Harris said Alo Yoga was doing around $200M annually. And while some of you might not quite be hitting hundreds-of-millions in yearly sales (yet, you'll get there bby), you can use the same affordable tech stack powering Alo Yoga's wild online growth. Scroll on to snoop how this industry leader is performing online, the apps and tools powering its online store, and to see how the online store has evolved.

Total website visits in August 2022: 2.1M (up 7.2%)

Bounce rate: 44.96%

Average visit duration: 2 min, 24 sec

Average pages viewed per site visit: 5.22

Ecommerce tech stack: Afterpay for buy now and pay later, Builder.io for site customization, Yotpo for customer reviews, Pixlee for UGC management, Heroku for app development and scaling, AdRoll for email marketing, Back in Stock for order recovery, Route for order tracking, Smart Search & Instant Search for upselling and cross-selling.

Instagram insights: 3 million followers. Averages 5,100 likes per post and 80 comments per post.

TikTok insights: 311,000 followers.

Homepage evolution:

🎁 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 legal templates and contracts from Creators Legal, a daily planner, and more prizes!

🚀 How to plan a $13k launch day with Melanie Masarin, founder of Ghia

Ghia founder Melanie Masarin was the head of Retail and Offline Experiences for Glossier when she found herself cutting back on alcohol. One day she woke up and never drank again, but felt constantly frustrated by the lack of non-alcoholic options.

Melanie dreamed up her own solution—a non-alcoholic aperitif—and set about formulating a recipe with the help of a food scientist. After using her savings to try 55 formulations, she finally landed on a recipe for Ghia's first product.

With some small angel investments from folks like Emily Weiss at Glossier, Melanie launched Ghia in June 2020. Given the timing, she had to quickly rethink a launch strategy that focused on IRL and restaurants, and pivot to an online-first approach.

"It was the most horrible time to launch. You wouldn't in your right mind want to launch your company then, you know, that was. If we had known better, we probably wouldn't have either. But we had made this product and we didn't know how long it lasted yet. And here I am with like all of my savings, and now some of my old bosses money is in those 1,200 bottles of red liquid."

Getting press coverage in June 2020 was almost impossible, but Melanie had 1,200 bottles ready to sell. She set a target of $7,000 for launch day sales and went out to friends and family to spread the word. Vogue included Ghia in a small piece of coverage, and both this coverage and community support helped Ghia sell $13,000 on day one.

Two years into business, Ghia is almost 50/50 split between ecommerce and retail distribution through small businesses and restaurants. Post- peak pandemic, offline marketing and community-building through events have been driving the brand's growth. Melanie prioritizes events for Ghia's customer community, not just press and influencers.

Want more mentorship from Melanie Masarin? Check out ep. 102 of the Female Founder World podcast for the full interview.

👀 How Iskra Lawrence launched a body care brand selling up to $60,000 daily

Iskra Lawrence is a model and body image activist who built a 5 million-strong Instagram following before launching an inclusive body care brand, Saltair.

Iskra partnered with The Center, a brand incubator, to launch Saltair. She tapped their expert team to help launch and scale the business without hiring a full team.

Without the incubator, Iskra thinks it would have taken her 5x as long to hit the brand's current 20-60k in daily sales revenue—a number they have hit within just 11 months in business.

Saltair launched with an influencer campaign, gifting 200-300 packages to influencers of all sizes. Shipments were timed strategically so that influencers received product on the same day the product went live online—and the team continues to use this approach when rolling out new products.

Iskra hit some bumps during the launch, literally. Once the first customers received their orders, Saltair discovered an issue: its sustainability-minded aluminum packaging was becoming dented during the shipping process 😰. Instead wasting cash and resources resending new products, Iskra and her team decided to double down on the brand mission and own the imperfections.

"We decided to come up with bottle positivity, and just like the way I embrace my dimples and cellulite, we're gonna embrace it on our bottles because it's more important that your bottle is sustainably made with aluminum than [for it to] look perfect."

Saltair leans into paid digital advertising as a marketing tactic and recommends whitelisting to other brands, a strategy that involves an influencer giving a brand advertising permissions to their social media account, so the brand can boost a piece of content directly from the influencer's page rather than reposting it to the brand account.

"Our results have shown that when we get a creator who's talking about her general shower routine, and who includes not just Saltair but other brands, and we whitelist that, it performs the best."

Want to learn more about Iskra's journey with Saltair? Check out her episode on the Female Founder World podcast for the full interview.