Glossier goss, air fryer influencers, NFT use cases

Hey, this is Female Founder World. We show you what will help you start and scale a consumer business this week. 

In this week's email:

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🤓 How to set up an email referral program

• ☕️ What went down at Glossier

• 💅 The Girlboss is dead. All hail the bimbo 

• 💡 Side hustle ideas: air fryer influencers, accessible hair tools, more

• 🖥 Join the 'NFT Use Cases for Consumer Brand Founders' workshop on 21 Feb

• 🎧 Pod ep 36: @CryptoWitchClub

• 👀 NEXT WEEK 💰 Introducing Let The Ca$h Flow: Founder Finance diaries

📓 Resource roundup

• This is the pitch deck that 24-year-old influencer Grace Beverly used to raise $5.7 million for her activewear startup, Tala. 🔗 Tell me more

• REPLAY: Missed out on our 'Intuitive Goal-Setting and Decision Making' Workshop hosted by Dana Childs? It was woo woo and wonderful, and it's now available to watch on-demand in the Hub. 🔗 Tell me more

• 64% of Gen Z consumers say brands don’t understand their demographic. This new WGSN report on Gen Z digital mindsets can help. 🔗 Tell me more

• PepTalkHer's 'Know Your Worth' free 5-day challenge kicks off 21 February, and you're invited. PepTalkHer’s Meggie Palmer created the program in partnership with a behavioral psychologist. It uses behavioral science, neuroscience and negotiation tactics to teach professional women how to know their value and ask for it. 🔗 Tell me more.

• Our friends at Crypto Witch Club have released a PDF guide called '16 Coins and Tokens for 2022'. Included in this guide are 16 crypto coins and tokens that they feel have major growth potential for 2022, along with 15 pages of need-to-know materials—from protocol explanations to coin and token identification, Bitcoin and Ethereum basics, where to buy, and more. 🔗 Tell me more

🤓 How to set up an email referral program

A referral program gives happy customers and community members a simple way to share your biz with their friends. We are all more likely to shop, click, subscribe or engage when a recommendation comes from a friend. There are many ways to use referral marketing (Email! Social media! Events!), but we are specifically teaching you how to use referrals to build an email list.

We won't waste your time explaining why you want an email list. You're here, you're smart, you know what's up. Instead, we will show you how to create a referral program that will help to build your list. 📈 

➡️ Decide on your rewards and milestones

The premise behind an email referral program is to build in rewards for your subscribers who hit pre-determined milestones (i.e. who refer a certain amount of people). You must decide what reward and milestones you want to offer. Here are some thought-starters:

• LIVELY, the underwear brand (and recent podcast guest), used a referral system before they launched to collect 133,000 email addresses in 48 hours. Under this program, more referrals = bigger rewards, and a huge list of potential customers for the brand to contact on launch day.

• Dropbox jumped from 100,000 subscribers to 4 million in 15 months due to its dual-sided rewards program. They gave 16GB free storage space to both the referrer and the referral recipient. When the referrer shared the code, they were essentially sending a gift, in the form of storage, to their friend. This is way more appealing than asking a friend to sign up to a newsletter list so that you can receive a gift for yourself.

• Evernote created a point system to incentivize people to follow through with specific actions, like referring their friends. The points gave people access to upgrades to their own Evernote account. 

➡️ Pick your platform

You can either manage a referral program in house, with the help of developers or with spreadsheets, or you can sign up to a platform. Save yourself the headache and use a platform. Consider the platform's cost (of course), scalability, and whether it is compatible with your email client. 

We're big fans of the Beehiiv referral system for newsletter and community-based businesses. It was built by the same team who created Morning Brew's referral program (responsible for well over 1,000,000 subscribers). If you use Beehiiv for your newsletter, the referral program can be easily integrated into your newsletter workflow. After signing up, follow the prompts on your dashboard to add rewards which are unlocked after an existing subscriber reaches a specific milestone. The software adds a dynamic referral message into your newsletter and sends automated emails when readers hit milestones. It's a straightforward and effective option, but you must be signed up to Beehiiv's 'Growth' program at $99 a month to access it.

We're using Beehiiv to email you rn! Scroll to the bottom of the newsletter for a real-life example—and real-life rewards 😉. 

If you are already using Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or another email client, or you have a CPG business, Beehiiv may not be right for you. Check out a couple of tools that will integrate into an existing email platform:

• Viral Loops has easy-to-follow video tutorials, making it great for DIY-ers. It also integrates with all the major email platforms including Klaviyo and ConvertKit, and will also integrate with Zapier.

• Referral Rock offers a free trial and the ability to scale up as you build out a more sophisticated referral program that extends beyond email to social media and beyond.

You should keep an eye on your referral rate to see how the program is going, and change the milestones and rewards accordingly. Referral rate is a simple calculation. Referral rate = number of referred subscribers/number of total subscribers. You have a 10% referral rate if 10 in 100 subscribers happen through your referral program.

☕️ What went down at Glossier

And just like that, Glossier became a cautionary tale for the beauty and wellness industry. 

In July 2021, Glossier closed its $80 million Series E. Then on 26 January 2022, the brand laid off a third of its team—80 corporate staff members. In an email to staff obtained by Modern Retail, CEO Emily Weiss wrote that Glossier had "made some mistakes."

What are the lessons here for founders like us? 

If everyone's a tech company, no one's a tech company

Glossier's tech team was most impacted by the recent layoffs. This suggests that Glossier's shift to position itself as not just a beauty company, but a technology startup too, was a misstep.

"Over the past two years, we prioritized certain strategic projects that distracted us from the laser-focus we needed to have on our core business: scaling our beauty brand," Weiss said in the email. 

A leaked document, rumored to be a page from an internal slide deck outlining the company's future, reaffirms that Glossier is "not a tech company" but a "technology-enabled beauty company." 

The DTC fever dream is dead

The same document also hints at wholesale distribution—"we are not a DTC company," it reads, as well as, "we are expanding distribution channels... believing in retail and entering wholesale." 

It's one thing to launch a DTC brand in 2014 when attention could be cheaply bought online. But, as paid social strategies become increasingly expensive, more beauty brands are launching with an omnichannel distribution approach. Landing shelving space at Target or Sephora is sexier than ever.

Branding won't save you

Glossier launched in 2014, tapping Into the Gloss's influence to pioneer a minimalist aesthetic and jargon-free tone that felt revolutionary at the time. It was revolutionary at the time! Glossier became a universal hallmark of modern, millennial branding. Frenzy took hold, and they grew. Quickly. By 2018, a tube of Boy Brow was selling every 32 seconds. 

But the world's moved on. Slick branding isn't a selling point anymore, it's table stakes. And without product innovation, brand alone isn't cutting it for consumers. Refinery29 reports that even OG Glossier fans are looking at more companies focused on ingredients and formulas that feel ahead of the curve, and that also deliver an aesthetic like Nécessaire, Skin Proud, The Inkey List, and Byoma.

Mo Money Mo Problems

In her statement about the recent layoffs, Weiss also noted they “got ahead of ourselves on hiring.” 

And you know what, if we raised $265 million and had a valuation higher than Ariana Grande's pony, we’d probably feel some pressure to grow, too. Maybe we’d do some wild shit to make that happen, like hire a big tech team to sell skincare. Maybe we would launch a makeup brand that was the exact opposite of our everything our brand was known for (RIP Glossier Play). Maybe we’d open a bunch of bricks and mortar stores in the middle of a pandemic. 

And besties, we’re not Business Insider, but we know it takes e-commerce companies an average of five years to exit. Glossier's nearly eight years in with a $1.8 billion valuation. They're probs too big for Estee or L'oreal to acquire them and may be feeling some heat to IPO. That's gotta put some pressure on a founder to find new ways to add value, fast.

Gen Z changed the game

The generational divide between Gen Z and millennials has widened. The oldest millennials turned 40 last year and Gen Z's claiming their stake on the global economy. By 2030 Gen Z's collective income will hit $33 trillion, making them the largest demographic in the world economy. The mood's changed, and Glossier's millennial-pink aesthetic feels stagnant amidst a new wave of Gen Z maximalist self-expression.

While Gen Z beauty brands are being built using the Glossier blueprint, they're skipping the chapter on strict brand guidelines. This shift is summarized quite well in a quote by Lisa Guerrera, co-founder of Experiment, in Beauty Matter.

Want more Glossier goss? Beauty Matter has a great deep dive. For a snappier take, watch this TikTok clip by Michelle Pellizzon, the founder of Holisticism.

💅 Bimbos are cool now. Tell the others

Paris is an NFT expert, Britney's free, Lindsay's staging a comeback. If that wasn't a clue to millennials that a culture shift's going on, this recent story on Vice will fill you in. A sweeping reclamation of the word 'bimbo' is happening right now, and it's happening, of course, on TikTok. 

The bimbo trope has been used for years to position femininity and intelligence as antonyms. For decades it's been weaponized against young, culturally relevant women (Marilyn! Pamela! Paris! Britney!).

Enter bimbo Tok, here to reclaim the gendered slur. New age bimbos are "transgressive, feminist, radically left wing" figures, Vice writes. They've had enough of girlboss culture and its capitalist roots. "You don’t need to buy anything or look a certain way. You don’t need to run a business, be a good worker, or step on anyone in your journey to reach 'success' as a bimbo. Bimboism comes from within, and you can achieve it by being unapologetically yourself." 

Bimboification videos started showing up on TikTok during the early days of the pandemic, and exploded in 2021. Vice interviewed several bimbo creators on TikTok for their take.

Why are you seeing this story? Cultural shifts present new opportunities to reach hyper-niche audiences. They also represent a change in the way our marketing content may be perceived by our communities. As business owners, we gotta be across it.

Read the full story on Vice.

💡 Simple side hustle ideas

• Air fryer influencers. Air fryers are a hit. Searches for 'air fryer' on the Googs are up big time. The market size is set to reach $1,425.7 million by 2026. Great content creators and foodies looking for white space have an opportunity to build a niche audience and deliver them recipes, product comparisons, eBooks, a closed community... air-fryer spice mixes. Let's keep this brainstorm rolling in the Hub.

• Hair tools for people with arthritis. In the United States, 24% of all adults have arthritis. And they're not only grandmas: More than half of people with arthritis are 18-64 years old. UnbuckleMe created a top-ranking Amazon product that uses leverage to make car seat buckles easier for people with arthritic hands (and parents with long nails). How could this same concept be applied to hair tools?

• Audio astrology app. OK this is mostly because we want our favorite astrology app to read out our chart each morning. Someone tell Chani.

A study says 59% of Americans think they have an idea worthy of Shark Tank. We've shown you ours, now show us yours... (DMs are open.) 

🖥 Upcoming workshop: NFT Use Cases for Consumer Brands

 🗓 Monday, 21 February at 6:30pm - 7:15pm ET

We're back with another live virtual workshop—and it's freeeee! 

We're teaching everything you want to know about Web 3 as a business-owning baddie. How can the founders of consumer brands use NFTs as a marketing and community-building tool? How can you use them to generate revenue? Which brands are already doing this well? Who can help you get an NFT project off the ground?

Shirin Bucknam will lead the workshop. She's the co-creator of Crypto Witch Club, an inclusive and equitable space to learn about blockchain tech, and will walk founders through how NFTs can be used as a powerful tool in their business. This is an exclusive workshop for our Female Founder World coven. 😎

You will also hear from Emily Elyse Miller, founder of OffLimits (and OG Female Founder World pod guest). Emily will walk us through how she created an NFT project for her biz and what she learned in the process. Registration is essential and spots are limited.

🎧 Brush up on Web 3 basics ahead of the workshop with episode 36 of the Female Founder World podcast.

👀 Coming next week 

💰 Let The Ca$h Flow: Founder Finance Diaries. A juicy new series is coming to the Friday newsletter. Eyes peeled, besties bimbos.  👀

🎧 Podcast ep. 37 with Sugarbreak co-founder Scarlett Leung

🎧 Podcast ep. 38 with Chillhouse founder Cyndi Ramirez

🌀 The Body Doubling Portal is open every Tuesday from 4pm-5pm ET. Body doubling is when you do a task in the presence of another person. It helps you stay focused and on-track. Join us, go on mute, and get shit done. 🔗Register for the portal.

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