🤝 Scale brand-to-brand partnerships, Glow Recipe's biz tips, trademarking workshop

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 👏 They said her biz idea was impossible, now she manages a 25-person team

• 🚀 Launch lab: Selfmade

• 🎧 On the podcast: Glow Recipe's founders turned $50k into a $100 million business

📓 Resource roundup

• Simplify and scale brand-to-brand partnerships 🤝. Apply to join kizmet and leverage the audiences of the world's buzziest brands that actually drive sales. This invite-only platform is now open to the Female Founder World community 🤫. 🔗 Tell me more

• These grants 💸 and accelerator programs for Black-owned businesses are open now. 🔗 Tell me more

• Join our free workshop: Trademarks and protecting your business. Our Female Founder World workshop host Nicole Swartz is an attorney and the founder of Sprout Law, a law firm helping women protect their brands. You've seen her in Forbes, the Washington Post, Girlboss, and speaking at events like Alt Summit, Craftcation, and South by Southwest. (Yep, she knows her stuff.) 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

SHOPIFY COLLABS: This probably hasn't been a good week for Grin. Shopify launched Shopify Collabs, a new app allowing merchants to discover, build and manage a community of creators—all within the Shopify ecosystem. It's free to install and lets merchants search a database of millions of creators and sync your product catalogue with Shopify Collabs to send gifts and samples, where creators can pick their size and preferences directly. You can also create custom discount codes and referral links to track affiliate sales and figure out which creators are driving sales, and track and pay commissions in one place. 

RETAIL: Americans are still spending more cautiously, it seems. Retail sales were flat in July, even though economists had expected a slight increase. Gas prices were down, allowing folks to spend a little more elsewhere—building supplies, electronics and garden equipment sales were stable. However, spending slumped 0.5% at department stores and 0.6% at clothing stores. Compared with this time last year, overall retail sales rose 10.3% in July.

FEMALE FOUNDERS: Can we have a round of applause for Michelle Cordeiro Grant please? 👏  She has stepped down from the CEO role at Lively, the lingerie company she started in 2015. Michelle stayed on as CEO after Wacoal acquired the business in 2019 for $105 million. She’s handing over the top position to a senior marketing exec at Wacoal and will continue with the brand until March 2023 to make sure the transition goes smoothly.

INFLATION: Yikes, UK inflation passed 10% for the first time since 1982! Food prices are particularly bad: up 12.7% since July 2021 and now at the highest level in 14 years. This increase is higher than many experts expected.

FUNDRAISING: Andreessen Horowitz invested $350 million in Flow, WeWork founder Adam Neumann's new real estate company. The funding round values Flow at over $1 billion—before it even starts operating. “We love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned,” Andreessen wrote in a blog post. 🙃 We can't. 

👏 "They said my biz idea was impossible, now I manage a 25-person team"

Stephanie Hon, founder of Cadence

It took two years and hundreds of prototypes to develop the product. I wanted to create products everyone else thinks are too difficult to make, so you can bring your skincare and more with you with peace of mind and respect for the environment. I spent 2 years on hundreds of prototypes before landing on one. [Hexagons that build product systems linked by magnets]

I didn't come from a world where raising money from friends and family was possible. I invested my life savings—$50,000. Half the launch budget went to inventory. Then we spent on design and website. I later raised $400,000 from angels. I didn't raise from friends and family—so many people told me to do this, but I don't come from a universe where that's possible. It's important to mention because I want people to know it's achievable.

I am really passionate about founders feeling like they can build businesses even though they haven't come from the prior startup space. When you haven't done something before it requires two things: the awareness that you don't know everything; and the skill to pull in and tap the right people.

I invested my life savings to launch Cadence. Three weeks later the pandemic hit. Interesting timing! I wanted to be really conservative so I didn't take a salary for that entire year. Looking back on this time, it was a positive thing: We’re great for travel, but we’re a company for home and away. The pandemic pushed us to really talk about that.

Google search has been huge for us. The travel bottle isn't a new concept, but we've completely reimagined it. And so we've been able to scale Google Search in a massive way, which has been an exciting surprise for us. We work with an amazing agency, Barry Boost, who scales this program.

Consumer brand partnerships and corporate clients helped Cadence grow. We do a lot of partnerships with other consumer brands. That's something that works really well for us. From the corporate side, we get a lot of amazing large businesses reaching out to us, wanting to bring that sustainability to their team who travels a ton.

🗓️ Community Hang: New York event

Find your people IRL at the next Female Founder World Community Hang, hosted by Bala and presented by Mason Hub, the modern fulfillment platform for beauty, fashion and wellness.

We're doing drinks! Snacks! Mezcal tasting with Doce Mezcal! And a fireside chat with Bala founder Natalie Holloway and Female Founder World's Jasmine Garnsworthy.

Registration is free, but space is very limited. Don't miss out—RSVP now.

✩ See you there. ✩

🚀 Selfmade's launch playbook: Q&A with founder Stephanie Lee

Concept: selfmade is the first emotionally intelligent personal care brand born during the height of the pandemic. We built our brand and products with mental health experts to create psycho-dermatology skincare essentials to power self-exploration rituals.

Stockists: Urban Outfitters, Thirteen Lune, Revolve, and more.

Founder story: I started my career in politics and government. First working on the 2008 presidential campaign running a field office of hundreds of volunteers and then in the White House working under Michelle Obama.

Afterwards I returned to MAC Cosmetics, where I was once a makeup artist, and moved to NYC to work in global product development.

From these experiences, I learned how to mobilize folks around a vision and mission, how to create something where nothing existed before and how to develop products from an idea into launch. 

After a major mental health crisis in 2016, I was in intensive therapy for about 4 years where I learned the building blocks of how to recognize negative thought patterns, make sense of who I was, make choices of who I wanted to be, recognize my authentic needs, effectively express them in order to take care of myself.

Each one of these lived experiences were key to building selfmade.

Idea validation process: Initially I validated the idea while traveling around the world and speaking to folks about their lived experiences, relationship to self-worth and mental health.

When I came back to the US I went on a listening and validation tour first with about 20 mental health experts.

I then validated it commercially with folks in the consumer, BIPOC and Gen Z community to ensure that it was speaking directly and specifically to their needs in terms of a new wellness brand. I spent the first year after our pandemic launch in research and discovery with key stakeholders in order to continue pivoting and refining our positioning. 

I am not a Gen Z, so I formed a Junior Advisory Board before I launched in order to have them advise me on a brand they want to see in the world.  I continue to validate what we are doing with this Board.

Launch marketing plan: We launched one product at a time with about 3-4 months in between in order to learn, iterate and execute. 

Pre-brand launch activities: Penned an op-ed in Business Insider about fundraising a business on emotional wellbeing as a woman of color during a pandemic; community building with a virtual town hall on the politics of beauty to set the scene; accrued a waitlist of 4,000 for our first product; activated a Junior Advisory Board as consumer advocates; grassroots community building through events before each product launch; emotional wellbeing programming and partnering with community-based mental health and Gen Z organizations; brand mission storytelling; PR; organic social media.

Launch marketing that didn't work: Digital ads—the whole landscape had changed as we were releasing ads when iOS14 came about.

Launch lessons: Engaging a 3 month contract for freelancers is just enough time to make a decision if they are a right fit for the business ongoing: one month to onboard and outline expectations, one month to assess impact and feedback on deliverables as data points to decide, and one month to offboard and share gratitude if needed. It gives both parties enough time to make a decision without dragging it on or regretting the cost spent on diminishing returns. In start up land, hiring slow and fire fast isn’t something that can always happen.

Suggested budget for beauty launches: To launch a brand of this calibre, I guess at least $1.5M. I started bootstrapping in the beginning, moving into friends and family fundraising, and then with strategic angel investors.

This grassroots fundraising took time and is more authentic to how I am building the brand. My incredible team and I are scrappy AF. So this is part from choice, but also part of survival since as a person of color and female presenting we get less than 2% of venture capital funding.

Unfortunately, I’ve been asked to continually prove myself and my accomplishments in the same spaces that folks/men with much more privilege don’t have to answer to. To be honest there are few male investors that understand beauty, mental health and the Gen Z consumer. Whereas I launched early and during the pandemic as a necessity to show people what this business can do and join in on the movement.

Agency, freelancer and consultants I recommend: Garnish Studios for creative production; Holistic Beauty Group for product development; PoliSol Public Affairs for social impact based comms; Dreamday for performance PR; Lauren Flack Films for production; Savannah Ruedy for photography; Andrita Craft for hair; Sinikiwe Dihliwayo for video creative direction; Eileen Yoon, video coloring and director of photography; and Julia Ngeow, director.

Resource recommendation: The Female Founder World podcast episode with Nadya Okamoto.

🎧 Latest podcast episode: How Glow Recipe’s Co-CEOs Turned $50,000 Into A $100-Million Business