✨ Glossier's ecomm tech stack, $10k cash grants, join our community home!

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 👀 Glossier's ecommerce tech stack

• 🎉 You're invited: AMA with Fiona Co Chan, founder of Youthforia + more events

• 🎧 How Sundae Body landed 1,200 stockists before it even launched

• 🚀 How Knix pulled off the largest exit by a female founder in Canadian history

📓 Resource roundup

• Female Founder World is the place to meet your business besties online and IRL—and now you can connect with our entrepreneurial fam, crowdsource advice from successful founders, and join our famous workshops all in the community home. 🔗 Tell me more

• Daniella Pierson, the founder of Newsette, a media business with a $200 million+ valuation, has committed to personally investing $100,000 in businesses founded by women of color by the end of the year. We stan 💕. To apply for $10k or $25k investments, shoot your shot at [email protected]. 🔗 Tell me more

• A new grant program will give 50 small business owners $10,000 in cash grants, up to $5,000 in logistics support, and strategic business guidance. You'll need to have a physical product that's on the market right now, or be able to launch within six months. 🔗 Tell me more

• Not sure whether your biz is priced correctly? Read this guide to 14 product pricing strategies for retail. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

AMAZON: Reports show that customers are already starting to shop for the holidays, and Amazon's making the most of the trend with a second Prime Day event scheduled for 11 and 12 October. During the sale, Amazon will release a top 100 list of "the season's most popular and giftable items". The second Prime Day could give a boost to independent businesses selling on Amazon—during July's annual Prime Day event nearly 2 million small and mid-size businesses participated, bringing in $3 billion in sales. 

FUNDRAISING: Woah, Liquid Death, the water startup with beer branding, just raised a $70 million round at a $700 million valuation 🤯. There's also fundraising news this week from The Lip Bar, Melissa Butler's beauty business: the company just closed a $6.7 million fundraise. The cash will be used to expand distribution across both of Melissa's brands—The Lip Bar and Thread Beauty—and to launch a third beauty brand. 

SOCIAL MEDIA: TikTok has increased caption length from 300 to 2,200 characters, setting the stage for a big push towards video and text search and suggesting TikTok is leaning into its utility as a search engine. Google estimates "40% of young people don't use Google Search or Maps when looking for a place for lunch. They use TikTok or Instagram". 

BRAND GOSS: Shopbop launched Shopbop Beauty this week, curating beauty brands like Chillhouse, Ceremonia and Olaplex. In other beauty news, Bread landed at Ulta and a new bodycare line focused on the skin microbiome, iota, just launched. Meanwhile, the founders of Starface launched a Walmart-exclusive emergency contraceptive pill, re-branded for millennial and Gen Z women: Julie. Starface founders Julie Schott and Brian Bordainick teamed up with Amanda E.J. Morrison of Mented Cosmetics to break the stigma around the morning after pill with the new brand. There are more than 4,700 Walmarts in the US, immediately making Julie available to nearly all people in every part of the country. Cannabis brand Sackville and Co launched a loyalty program on former Outdoor Voices founder Ty Haney's web 3 platform, TYB—while crypto prices have plummeted, consumer brands are still getting into web 3. 

👀 Glossier's ecommerce tech stack

We've pulled up some of Glossier's key website stats to help ecommerce entrepreneurs benchmark their brands against a category leader. Keep scrolling for a peek at Glossier's homepage evolution and the tools and apps powering its ecommerce store.

Total website visits in July: 1.8 million 

Where Glossier's web traffic is coming from: United States (66.46%), United Kingdom (10.99%), Canada (5.92%)

Bouncerate: 49.3%

Average visit duration: 2 minutes and 54 seconds

Average pages viewed per site visit: 3.25

Ecommerce tech stack: Klaviyo for email marketing, Afterpay for buy now and pay later, Attentive for SMS marketing, and Kustomer for messaging and chat customer support.

Instagram insights: 2.6 million Instagram followers, averages 9,300 likes per post, averages 38 comments per post.

TikTok insights: 287,000 TikTok followers, 40.06% growth in followers over the past 12 months, 25.73% growth in followers over the past three months.

Digital ads insights: Glossier typically updates its ads every 3-9 days.

Homepage evolution: Since 2017 (the earliest reference we could find) Glossier has added more categories, centered and used a bolder typeface on its main navigation bar, switched 'login' and 'shopping bag' links to icons, and made more changes across its homepage.

🎉 You're invited: Ask Me Anything with Fiona Co Chan, founder of Youthforia + more events

It's all happening in the Female Founder World community home, the place to meet your business besties online. This is what we have planned for you over the next few weeks:

✨ Monday Hour One Community Goal-Setting and Weekly Planning (10 Oct)

✨ Content Workflow Sprint: How to Manage Your Content Like a Media Biz (19 Oct)

✨ AMA with Fiona Co Chan, founder of Youthforia (27 Oct)

✨ AMA with Tiffany Chu, founder of Chunks (8 Nov)

🎧 How Sundae Body landed 1,200 stockists before it even launched

On the day Lizzie Waley launched the website for her beauty business Sundae Body, her product was already stocked in 1,200 stores. This is how she did it.

Lizzie was working in advertising when she had the idea to create a joyful body care brand, starting with a body wash in a whipped cream consistency. 

She used her branding skills and invested energy into creating a cute, shareable brand identity and icecream sundae packaging concept that leaned into the product's whipped cream texture. Once Lizzie had a small sample of the body wash, her manufacturer asked her to order 10,000 units before they would make the product. 

Before she committed to the order, Lizzie wanted to make sure she could actually sell 10,000 units. So, she put together a sleek brand deck explaining her body wash concept and the brand identity. In this document she included a 3D rendered illustration of what the packaging would eventually look like.

Lizzie took the deck and a small sample of the body wash formula in a plain white tube to a distributor and pitched them on her vision for Sundae Body. 

The distributor was so impressed with the concept that they agreed to introduce Lizzie to some of the biggest retail stockists in the world, who eventually ordered Sundae Body and launched it in 1,200 stores. Within the following two years, this distributor continued to land Sundae Body into major retailers across Australia and the United Kingdom.

But before you start Googling distributors, know this: Distributors will take a big cut of any orders they are able to line up with retailers—as in, 30-50%. 

Listen to episode 95 of the Female Founder World podcast for details on Sundae Body's distribution strategy.

🚀 How Knix pulled off the largest exit by a female founder in Canadian history

It’s 2012: ‘Gangnam Style’ is on repeat; Dan Humphrey is revealed as Gossip Girl; and Victoria’s Secret still dominates the intimates industry. At the same time Joanna Griffiths was earning her MBA and watching the lingerie giant lose steam.

She began surveying women about the underwear they wished they had and by 2013 launched Knix—a leakproof women’s intimates brand celebrating body diversity.

Joanna's business plan won a competition at her school, and she used the $20k prize to launch. Soon after she crowdfunded on Indiegogo. This is where Knix found its first 1,000 customers and got early feedback that shaped product styles, silhouettes and sizing. Joanna spent the first couple of years visiting tradeshows and focusing on wholesale.

In 2016, she decided to change directions, pulling her product from over 800 stores and repositioning as a DTC (direct-to-consumer)-first brand and sell exclusively on its own website and dedicated bricks and mortar Knix stores.

It was the right move: Knix took off, growing just under 4000% in the following three years.

Joanna pulled out of retail for two reasons: 

1. After holding another crowdfunding campaign and expanding into bras online, Knix sold $1.7 million in pre-sales—more in just 30 days than she had sold in the previous three years—giving Joanna the confidence that customers would shop intimates online. She says the campaign worked because she brought the existing Knix community that she had build on social media in to support the Kickstarter and get momentum from day one. She also focused on PR (pitching journalists herself) to get attention.

 2. She also wanted to champion size inclusivity and body positivity, but didn't see retail partners embracing her vision. After the DTC pivot, one of Knix's first marketing channels was Facebook ads, using videos that showed the problem with current underwear on the market, and then compared them with the solution Knix offered. Next came an ambassador program, more investment in PR and excellent customer service, and then TV advertising using a platform called Tatari.

Rather than using agencies for her creative and paid strategy, Knix taps consultants to instead train internal team-members to handle things other brands typically outsource.

In 2022 Knix surpassed 2 million customers and sold 80% of shares to Essity for $320 million USD at a $400 million valuation. Founder and President, Joanna Griffiths holds the remaining 20% share of Knix.