♪ TikTok SEO tips, launch marketing ideas, inside a $15 mil eyeliner empire

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👇 Today we're covering

• 📓 Resource roundup

• 🗞️ Skim the headlines

• 🚀 AWKN's go-to-market strategy

• 🎁 Win a $2,000 beauty and wellness bundle!

• 🎉 Female Founder World x Shopify Brand Camp in LA: Party photos!

• 🎧 She turn a winged eyeliner stamp into a $15 million business

📓 Resource roundup

• Crown Affair is the clean haircare brand by female founder Dianna Cohen that you've seen lining the shelves in Sephora. The brand also runs an annual eight-week professional development and mentorship program, Seedling—and right now it's now open for applications. Dianna told Female Founder World that applicants can stand out by "sharing their passions and why they would love to be part of this now, and why the timing is right." Seedling is looking for both mentors and mentees. 🔗 Tell me more

• Search engine optimization is becoming increasingly important on TikTok. This quick video explains how to boost discoverability on TikTok with SEO. Hint: Use TikTok native text to include key SEO terms in your video. Also, try searching your niche on TikTok and use the resulting search terms as key words in your videos. 🔗 Tell me more

• An oldie but a goodie, this classic Gary Vaynerchuck tutorial explains how to create 64 pieces of content in a single day. 🔗 Tell me more

• What are the biggest beauty brand logo design trends right now? Beauty industry researcher, Jennifer Carlsson, studied over 1800 brands to find out. She found that Sans Serif fonts are big, bold is better, iconography is out and almost every beauty brand logo is uppercase at the moment. 🔗 Tell me more

• National days like International Women's Day can give brands endless content opportunities—as long as you remember to add them to your marketing calendar. This website lists all the national days in one handy place. 🔗 Tell me more

• Partner with brands like Cay Skin, Kopari, Odele, Poppi, Kosterina, Common Heir, Tower28 🤝 and more via Female Founder World's simple partnership platform, Kizmet. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Skim the headlines

ECONOMY: Walmart is planning to bring on fewer seasonal workers for the holiday rush than last year: 40,000 for 2022 vs 150,000 last year. Walmart's the biggest employer in the US, so its plan to be more cautious about hiring this year is a big deal. Consumer spending is expected to be lower this holiday period thanks to inflation forcing people to spend more on everyday essentials like rent and food. 💔

FUNDRAISING: It's a tough fundraising environment out there, and yet sexual wellness brand Dame has managed to close $7 million in new Series A funding from Amboy Street Ventures, Listen Ventures, Flybridge, Echo and Forest Road Company. Congrats, Alexandra Fine. Dame has doubled revenue, customers and employees each year for the past two years. In other fundraising news, Block Party, a female-founded app fighting against online harassment, closed a $4.8 million seed round. 

CELEBRITY FOUNDERS: This week we have not one but two new celebrity-founded beauty brands—and check out the prices: Brad Pitt's Le Domaine Skincare includes a $250 serum 😱 . Meanwhile Travis Barker's new line, Barker Wellness, uses a blend of cannabinoids to "reduce redness while keeping it high quality, clean, and cruelty-free." And TBH, a bodycare line, or tattoo-related business might have felt like a more natural alignment for Travis, but good for him.

SOCIAL MEDIA: TikTok is imitating BeReal, an app that's been around for two years and uses your phone’s front and rear cameras simultaneously to snap a daily photo. A new feature called TikTok Now gives users daily reminders to share candid photos or short videos, using the phone’s front and rear cameras. We know in the past that app algorithms have prioritized content that uses new features, so it might help boost visibility if you get onto this new feature early. Here's how to use it. Over at YouTube, the platform is starting to pay creators 45% of the ad money generated from YouTube Shorts in an attempt to attract creators away from TikTok. The new program is in addition to a $100 million fund that YouTube started for Shorts creators last year and that gives thousands of creators payments ranging from $100 to $10,000 based on viewership and engagement with their Shorts videos. As the social media app wars gear up, it's going to be interesting to watch as the power balance continues to shift from platforms and their algorithms to creators and their content.

REGULATION: Over in Australia, the country's consumer watchdog is cracking down on greenwashing by brands. The Australian Competition and Consumer Committee (ACCC) is doing an “internet sweep” to look for shady environmental claims made by brands doing business in Australia.

BRAND GOSS: Closely following a $7 million Series A raise, Ayurvedic beauty brand AAVRANI launched its latest product, Moisturizing Hydra-Cream. In other beauty news, Divya Gugnani, founder of Wander Beauty, is starting a new fragrance business, 5 Sens.  Meanwhile Saie, the beauty brand launched by Laney Crowell, is growing up and filling out its c-suite team by hiring Lucia Perdomo-Ruehlemann (formerly global brand president of Drunk Elephant) as its new president. There's also an inclusive new haircare brand to know! Sisters-in-law Rina Gocaj-Bekiri and Floriye Elmazi were inspired by their visually impaired mothers to incorporate Braille and tactile imprinting on Sisterwould's shampoo and conditioner, plus different textures and smells to help guide people to the right products in the shower, even if they can't see them. In the wellness space, Womaness, the modern menopause brand stocked by Target, has kicked off a 'Menopositivity Tour'. The brand, founded by Sally Mueller (former Chief Brand Office at Clique Brands, the home of Byrdie and Who What Wear) will activate its customers IRL in LA, Chicago and Dallas with a lineup of expert speakers.

🚀 AWKN's go-to-market strategy

AWKN is the latest brand to join the sober-curious movement, offering a supplement that breaks down alcohol-induced toxins with natural extracts. Dive into the UK-based brand's recent launch with this founder Q&A.

Concept: Brighter mornings. We’re trying to transform how people care for their body while drinking. Instead of ‘curing’ a hangover once the symptoms are in place, we’ve developed a product which supports your body to process the alcohol. We considered different ways to take the product—gummies, gels, pills, powders and liquids. We settled on the liquid format because it achieved the best performance in terms of efficacy and portability. 

Founding team: Amabel Clark, Lucy Coddington, Nina Song, Soom Kim and Tess Ruch. 

Idea validation process: We were convinced of the product's efficacy based on the success of similar products in Korea, but we needed to test our concept in the European market. We essentially treated our friends as guinea pigs and would host events where we would test our product (as well as our Korean competitors’) on groups of friends. We had already done a lot of market research on what our consumers cared about in a product—factors like efficacy, taste, portability, no side effects and created a product that performed the best against this criteria. 

Funding: Bootstrapped.

Launch expenses: We spent roughly 65% of the total invested capital today on manufacturing and importing our product. This is comparably high as we really focused only on using natural ingredients, worked with the best manufacturer in Korea, and required our packaging to be environmentally friendly. We were very lucky to have one of our founders able to take the brand creation and design in house. The other 35% was spent on service providers such as market research, influencer marketing and accounting programs. Our running costs are very low as we're bootstrapped and extremely scrappy. 

Launch lessons: We have been running Facebook advertising campaigns and haven’t seen a lot of conversion. Getting up to speed with how Facebook advertising works is a bit of a mission. With our bootstrapped budget and the need for product education, it probably wasn’t the best way to get started and we should have focused on influencers to deliver the message. 

Branding process: We instinctively knew the product had to be more than just pretty and hip. We printed out hundreds of design variations, carried it around, and interacted with it in different surroundings. The design had to work in real-life messy and visually-crowded environments and not just on a computer. We presented the variations to different friends who have different backgrounds and lifestyles and asked them to choose one design as if they were shopping for it in real life.

This entire process strengthened the distinctiveness and robust delivery of the look and feel because we often see products that work well in social media images but fail to stand out in real-life scenarios.

When we looked at other supplement/food brands, most focused on ingredients or just colorful packaging. That’s when it clicked that we needed to make it about how people want to feel, and the refreshed feeling we get in the early moments of the morning. That is why we chose our color scheme inspired by the spectacle of the morning dawn and installed a font that reflected our Eastern roots.

Freelancer and agency recommendations: Stobbs, an Intellectual Property management company that helped us with our trademark issue. Trademark is very important when setting up your brand; it’s almost a must to hire a professional consultant.

 Launch marketing plan: The challenge of marketing our product is that the product category hangover prevention doesn’t exist in the UK and Europe. Most of us are used to ‘curing’ a hangover with electrolytes or pizza the next day rather than supporting our body to prevent the hangover in the first place. That means that we’ve had to be thoughtful in explaining the product rather than blindly doing advertising or sharing samples.

We’ve relied heavily on influencers to explain how the product works, how to take the product (i.e. while you drink vs the morning after), and speak to the efficacy. We also really try to vet our influencers before using them—we send them samples of the product first and ask them only to share a story about AWKN if they believe in the results and at no cost. From there and depending on the results of the story, we’ll consider doing a paid partnership. 

Offline, we’ve found health and wellness festivals to be a great place to educate retail buyers and individuals.

While manufacturing AWKN, we wanted to get a headstart on our marketing and created 3D-rendered content. Although it was pretty and well done, it did not resonate with our customers as much as we thought. Content created in a physical photoshoot and user-generated content always wins.

We also submitted our images to very renowned design forums where they had a huge audience base who appreciated good design and aesthetics. We had good support and responses and got to be featured on many of them for free. It was very rewarding, as these forums are where all designers go to look at the best works in the industry and where Soom went to be inspired when she started her career. We’ve been able to gain exposure via these publications at relatively low cost. 

Resource recommendation: The Female Founder World podcast episode with Hally Hair that dives into using gaming platforms for digital marketing is really novel and interesting.

🎁 Giveaway: $2,000 beauty and wellness bundle

Enter the Female Founder World beauty and wellness bundle giveaway, valued at $2,000, for your chance to win skincare, makeup and wellness products, including a Beachwaver!

🎉 Female Founder World x Shopify in LA: Party photos!

Female Founder World and Shopify hosted a party and panel for consumer brand builders in Los Angeles last week. We had a glitter bomb bar by Art of Sucre, Female Founder World market featuring Kiramoon, Ceremonia, Chunks, Bala, Tower28, and Rizos Curls, and a great crowd 😎. Our panelists were total stars, too—Amy Liu, founder of Tower28, Natalie Holloway, founder of Bala, and Julissa Prado, founder of Rizos Curls.

Party photos are now live in the Female Founder World private community. See you at the next one—we'll be announcing it on TikTok this week. 👋

🎧 She turned a winged eyeliner stamp into a $15 million empire

In 2017 Iris Smit was an architecture student in Perth, Australia and she was also bad at doing her makeup—particularly winged eyeliner. Eventually she had the thought, “Maybe it's not me that's bad. Maybe it's just the tools that I'm using could be improved.” 

She tapped into her design training and worked on a concept to make winged eyeliner easier. While sitting at her dining room table, Iris came up with the idea for a stamp eyeliner applicator: The Quick Flick.

Iris kept working on The Quick Flick while studying, focusing on Instagram and direct messaging influencers to organize gifting. Eventually Huda Kattan, the founder of Huda Beauty, shared Iris's invention with 25 million followers.

Next came the press hits: “I think the first one we got was a Daily Mail article. I remember the title, it was like ‘Woman launches a stamp that promises the perfect cat eye.’”

Just a few months later in 2018, Iris went on Shark Tank and turned down a $300,000 investment offer. Once the show aired, sales sky-rocketed and she made months worth of sales in a few days.

At around the same time Priceline spotted The Quick Flick on Instagram and soon Iris’s product landed in one of Australia’s largest retailers. 250 doors—just months after the business started. 

The Quick Flick built out a full beauty line focused on solving a particular problem to make the application easier and quicker—all while bootstrapping. Within 12 months, she reportedly turned over $10 million in sales.

The marketing landscape shifted and Iris had to get more thoughtful about influencer marketing, adding personalized notes to influencer packages and introducing affiliate partnerships using Affiliatly. She boosted average order value by using the Zip Shopify app and offering a discount to encourage customers to add an additional product to their cart after checking out—it converts for Iris around 20% of the time. 

Building brand influence, rather than relying solely on influencers, is also a new approach Iris adopted. This means putting herself forward as the founder and face of her business on TikTok and Instagram. 

The year The Quick Flick launched a new SPF product into a major Australian supermarket chain, Coles–and they’re still fully bootstrapped. Some reports peg her revenue at around $15 million, but this is unconfirmed.

Snaps, Iris.