The Art of Building a Beauty Brand: Insights from Rosebud’s Founder, Christine Mason
Welcome to my latest blog post, where I’m thrilled to share the wisdom and journey of an incredible guest we had on the podcast, Christine Mason, the founder of Rosebud. Our conversation delved into the heart of what it takes to scale a beauty brand, the power of customer retention, and the transformative role of education in skincare. So, let’s dive into the world of Rosebud and uncover the lessons that any entrepreneur or beauty enthusiast can learn from Christine’s experience.
The Inception of Rosebud: A Story of Intimate Wellness
When I first came across Rosebud’s products, I was immediately struck by their beautiful packaging and the care that went into their presentation. It was a pleasure to ask Christine about the inception story of Rosebud and how she embarked on this entrepreneurial journey. She shared that Rosebud was born out of a need for organic, chemical-free intimate care products that didn’t compromise on aesthetics. Christine’s vision was to create products that women wouldn’t feel the need to hide away, leading to the creation of a new category in the market: intimate wellness.
Scaling the Brand: Financing and Customer Retention
Scaling a beauty brand is no small feat, and Christine highlighted the importance of access to financing as a key factor in Rosebud’s growth. Utilizing platforms like Shopify, which offer capital based on performance, allowed Rosebud to leverage debt financing effectively. But what truly stood out was the brand’s focus on customer retention, with over half of their sales coming from subscriptions or repeat customers. Low-cost customer acquisition strategies, such as sampling and referrals, played a crucial role in their expansion.
The Delicate Balance of Equity Investment
The topic of raising outside equity investment is a complex one, and Christine shared her cautious approach. While acknowledging the potential for growth, she also recognized the challenges it could bring, such as compromising the brand’s personal touch and commitment to aesthetics and sustainability. It’s a reminder that with any capital injection, there are trade-offs to consider.
Innovation and Risk-Taking
Christine’s experience with venture-backed companies taught her that too much accountability can stifle creativity. Rosebud’s ability to take micro risks and explore new product lines, like ingestible supplements, has been a testament to their innovative spirit. This approach has allowed them to stay aligned with customer needs and maintain their unique brand identity.
The Role of Education in Customer Retention
We discussed the significant impact of education on customer retention. Christine emphasized the importance of building trust and relationships with customers through consistent communication and authentic engagement. Educating customers about the value of Rosebud’s products has been crucial in driving repeat purchases and fostering a community of informed and empowered customers.
Embracing Every Stage of Life
One of the most profound insights from our conversation was the importance of embracing every stage of life. Christine shared her personal experience of finding freedom and expansion in midlife, challenging the cultural obsession with youth. She encouraged listeners to release the belief that younger is better and to discover the unique gifts of each age.
Entrepreneurial Wisdom: Building a Team and Managing Finances
Christine’s advice for early founders included the importance of building a committed team and the value of conducting thorough research. She also stressed the need for sufficient capital to sustain the business in its initial stages. Moreover, she shared a personal strategy that helped her maintain control over her career: living with lower expenses to have the freedom to be flexible and avoid unnecessary stress while building a business.
Fulfillment and Customer Service: The Heart of the Relationship
A critical piece of advice from Christine was the importance of fulfillment and customer service. She recounted the challenges of using a third-party logistics provider (3PL) and how bringing fulfillment in-house saved Rosebud a significant amount of sales and improved direct customer contact. This underscores the idea that every customer interaction, especially in the early stages, is vital in defining a brand’s reputation.
Final Thoughts
Our conversation with Christine Mason was a treasure trove of insights for anyone interested in the beauty industry, entrepreneurship, or personal growth. From the importance of customer education and retention to the nuances of financing and team building, Christine’s journey with Rosebud is a testament to the power of innovation, authenticity, and a deep understanding of customer needs.
Thank you, Christine, for sharing your story and wisdom with us. Your perspective on building a successful business while fostering a culture of self-love and embracing life’s various stages is truly inspiring. I’m looking forward to possibly having a part two of this enlightening conversation, where we can delve even deeper into the world of consumer packaged goods and the many facets of entrepreneurship.
Podcast Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00:04) – Christine Mason. Did I pronounce that correctly? Christine. Amazing. Well, nice. Nice to meet you. Thanks for joining us. Um, you’re the founder of Rosebud. Um, and I was just looking at the site, and you’ve got some beautiful photos here. Beautiful packaging, beautiful products, beautiful photos. So maybe, maybe a good way to start is like, what was the inception story? How did the brand start? How do you get started in this world? Tell us a little bit about it.
Speaker 2 (00:00:32) – Yeah I mean Rosebud as your the packaging that you’re talking about is no accident. I wanted to make something that was really beautiful and resonant, look like a perfume packaging, you know, evocative, but it’s intimate care. So I started it because I was looking for vulvar care arousal stuff that wasn’t. Full of gunk and chemical things as organic and gorgeous, and would treat the intimate parts of my body the same way I would treat my face. And I couldn’t find it, and I’d already fallen in love with plants and herbalism.
Speaker 2 (00:01:03) – And so I started formulating things in the house that created a new category called Intimate Wellness, that treats your sexual essential parts as if they were part of body care. And that was the, you know, the essence of the origin. I didn’t, like, just put all my life savings into doing something off of my own hunch. I talked about 3000 women in various survey forms and found out what their needs were, and then went out and formulated for that and put it in packaging that you could leave on your nightstand. You didn’t have to hide in your dresser drawer.
Speaker 1 (00:01:36) – It’s beautiful.
Speaker 2 (00:01:38) – It’s very. Now it’s all body care. And it’s also like candles and lifestyle and books and it’s really grown from there. But that was the origin.
Speaker 1 (00:01:47) – How long ago was that?
Speaker 2 (00:01:49) – Six years ago.
Speaker 1 (00:01:51) – Oh, wow. Amazing. One of the things that we see a lot in, especially in the beauty, is that you have this sort of extinction event as brands grow. So you have a ton of beauty brands being started, and they get a little bit of funding or they kind of bootstrap and then they grow to a certain point.
Speaker 1 (00:02:08) – And when it’s time to really scale, there is this like section in the middle where a lot of them really struggle, either because they don’t have outside financing, so they cannot buy inventory, they cannot develop new products, or they can not put the money into marketing and growth. And so some of them are, you know, managed it over time. Some of them become very viral because of the product, but others start to kind of fade down, um, in that, that middle, middle of the growth, um, curve. Why do you think, I mean, what do you think is necessary to get past that? It seems like you have. How do you manage to do it?
Speaker 2 (00:02:43) – There are a couple of things that are are really critical for that. One is we’re at a point in time that, uh, with financing that wasn’t available at all five years ago, this new intersection of your shopping data by Shopify and other capital platforms like that, where they extend you capital based on your actual performance, and then they repay that out of daily sales.
Speaker 2 (00:03:07) – That model meant that we had access to basically debt financing that you would not have had before. No bank would finance or give you a line of credit as a startup. But these platforms have direct information about how you’re doing. And so we leveraged a lot of that to do ongoing inventory production. So we’re a little bit ahead with our, uh, with our lines of credit on production capital. So that’s that’s very wonderful. Um, another thing is we really focus a lot on repeat customers. So once we get our customer, we do a lot on subscription. We do a lot on how do we delight them, how do we find other things that we can push through the channel that would delight them? And so over half of our sales are on subscription or repeat customers. And wow, we dialed in acquiring customers at a low cost through sampling and postcards and referrals. And that has has meant that we are profitable. And because we’re profitable, we can continue to grow. We can’t grow at the scale that we want to grow.
Speaker 2 (00:04:08) – Like I would consider doing an outside equity investment, but that has other associated challenges. Um, one, if you lose a little less of the personal touch and, you know, we have such a high value on aesthetics and narrative and production value, sustainability, those kinds of things that often that can get compromised in scale. So we’re actually having those conversations. Should we raise money? Should we? What should we do to grow to the next level?
Speaker 1 (00:04:34) – Well, one of the things that I’ve observed is once you start raising money, the dynamics of the business change slightly, right? Because you have an accountable set of partners that now are looking for a conversion event of some sort. They’re looking for the company to get acquired. They want the company to grow fast. They want, you know, investors have their own cycles of how to deploy and return capital. And so, you know, I guess over the last few years, we’ve sort of grown more organically and naturally at the pace that a brand should really grow.
Speaker 1 (00:05:05) – And then if you inject capital is almost like injecting jet fuel into a car, right? You get to start sprinting. So do you ever think about what the I guess the unintended consequences of, of a capital injection could be in terms of the brand, and you’re going to growth that you have and the very careful growth that you have. From what I can.
Speaker 2 (00:05:22) – See, you are hitting something that is so near and dear to my heart. You know, I’ve done six other companies and they were all venture backed. So this is the first one that’s not venture backed. And you really become a good venture partner. Will see your vision, will help you support the vision will help you build in that direction. And they’re invaluable. And then there are other venture partners who are really about the exit. And they want to understand who you’re building it for. And and that means who would you acquire your building for? How will you fit into their portfolio? Or are you building it for IPO? And it does change things significantly.
Speaker 2 (00:06:02) – I mean, because I’ve had that experience, we run our metrics and we run our finances in a way that would be easily read by a potential partner. But I do notice that the companies that have entered my space since we started are much more tightly honed and focused on a very traditional marketing strategy. Like we go for this customer, we sell them this product, this is our price point, this is our channel, and that’s all it classical business logic. But it sort of eliminates the opportunity for emergent magic. You know, you’re like, following, like the pulse of what’s on, what wants to be creative, created next and taking that risk. So I had the opportunity without those accountabilities to take some micro risks. Like, you know, you can do a lot of things topically in beauty. And you’ve heard a lot about Ingestible beauty over the last few years. So we wanted to launch, um, a test line of ingestible and pathogens, because which are substances that make your heart feel open and make you feel really relaxed and less anxiety, because the women in our customer base were saying that one of the biggest problems for them and being able to have sensual and sexual experiences was they couldn’t relax.
Speaker 2 (00:07:18) – So we found a bunch of plants that allow you to drop into your heart. And we tested a line of gummies and people love them. And I was thinking like, if I had to sell that to a board, you know, would I be able to sell a whole. It’s a whole different set of metrics and benchmarks for injectables than it is for topical, but they go really well together for our customer. So I hope that answers your question.
Speaker 1 (00:07:43) – I think it does. I think, you know, I really I love to expand on that point around, um, returning customers and just lifetime value because one of the, you know, one of the things that we understand that we see a lot of is, um, just return rates are very, very difficult for, you know, topical products that don’t have a kind of an application pattern that, that that predicts that sort of return. It’s not like buying, you know, toilet paper. It’s not like buying olive oil. It’s not like these are things that people kind of buy and let sparse.
Speaker 1 (00:08:13) – And sometimes they use them more, sometimes using less. So how have you managed to create a journey for a customer after they make their first purchase? That just keeps them coming back? Like, what are some of those magic moments they were referring to?
Speaker 2 (00:08:27) – For example, our main product is an everyday balm and it’s for the vulva. It’s intimate moisturizer. And when women hit perimenopause and menopause, that’s a real challenge. So if you use it every day, then you have no discomfort. So first of all, it’s it’s solving a problem that you immediately notice if you stop using it. And then the second one is creating rituals around. The body oil, for example. Yes, it does things for scarring and yes, it does things for rebuilding the body, uh, the skin’s density and resilience. But we use it with a ritual of self-love that says when you wake up in the morning after you showered and you’ve scrubbed your body and gotten your lymph moving, then you anoint yourself from head to toe with the ritual of saying, I see my feet, I love them, I thank you legs, thank you hips, thank you ass, thank you breasts.
Speaker 2 (00:09:19) – You know, like you oil yourself from head to toe and you make it this self-recognition practice. And then we say, how do you feel after six weeks of doing that? Please continue. Because how you feel is like really deep in your body and appreciative of your body. And the subscription practice helps. Like because people are getting it in the mail every month or every three months, depending on the pacing of their subscription. Then they’re reminded to use it more, and they also get a better price point for subscribing. So those are some things. And we also send out a lot of education on how to use it, when to use it. Uh, that’s reminders to people who purchase the product. Yeah, those are some ways.
Speaker 1 (00:10:02) – I love that. Recently we we saw a brand that one of the strategies they had was around, um, really, really heavy on free education for their customers. Um, and so they were kind of picking up the, the problem statement. Uh, the problem area, they were providing a ton of education around it, really like helping clients see, uh, why their product was valuable, why their solution was valuable, and they spend a ton of money upfront.
Speaker 1 (00:10:30) – You know, the beginning is interesting because they spend all this money on creating the content, and then they didn’t see it in the results. And as they as they plateau in terms of like an ongoing investment, they started to see all these returning customers that now had to spend some time learning about this. And this is specifically for, uh, skin conditions. And they just kept coming back. And now they have this predictable customer base that every month, every two months, we just buy their products because they were so informed about the the value. But it was it was non-obvious at first. Right? It wasn’t like they took $50,000 invested into Facebook ads, saw the performance, and then sort of looked at the ROI and invested more or less. It’s like it was sort of like they invest all this money completely blind. And then it took it took a while.
Speaker 2 (00:11:17) – You’re getting it like a a quality of relation building, relationship building. Like you wouldn’t go into a party and just like make a big splash and expect to have a relationship you have and you make an impression.
Speaker 2 (00:11:28) – But over I guess my long my oldest customers, five years, four and a half years old, um, with us and you know, she’s now been in relationship with my with the weekly podcast, with our weekly newsletters, with our education campaigns, has seen multiple product introductions, knows what she can expect from us, trust the brand. We listen to what the customer needs, and then we’re in conversation with them. And so that piece of of I, I, I had so many surprises when we started, like I thought it was going to be an urban thing, but there are customers in all 50 states. I thought it was going to be a liberal, open minded thing, but there are customers with every religious background and every spiritual background because it’s like a sexual essential thing. The need is universal. So now I really know to speak to people’s needs, to create education that speaks to the inner unlocking of thought process around your body. I know to speak to things about plants and toxicity and how to stay healthy, and so they know what to expect from us.
Speaker 2 (00:12:34) – It’s the same people behind it. So the tonality is consistent and authentic for us. And that’s that’s very different than thinking about it like an ROI standpoint.
Speaker 1 (00:12:45) – Completely no good.
Speaker 2 (00:12:47) – Good relationships take time. And. It’s no different in this in the brand situation.
Speaker 1 (00:12:53) – Yeah. The same way you learn about somebody, you learn about a brand and their values and what they stand for and what problem we’re trying to solve. It’s interesting because especially, you know, I can speak from the male population. You know, more and more men are now, you know, using skincare and like taking a proactive approach towards taking care of themselves in a more sort of mindful way. And one of the things that I see, there’s a huge educational gap, um, of, you know, what, what are these products for? Like what what do I what should I be paying attention to? Right. And a lot of the times, um, by the time they do, it’s sort of like already when they see a problem happen, you know, they see a skin condition and they see like, you know, time reflected.
Speaker 1 (00:13:36) – Right. And so, um, it’s yeah, it’s interesting that that educational gap that exists even today. And the idea that that’s.
Speaker 2 (00:13:45) – A perfect example, like remedial skincare education for men, like girls grow up with that and they don’t need so much of it. Um, so do you respond to that when someone educates you, do you buy more of their products?
Speaker 1 (00:13:57) – 100%, I think. I think for me, I’m a I like to be an educated buyer. So, you know, I take action once I understand the problem. Um, and so I, I think there is a, I think there’s a big, big portion of, um, I would say the adult male that probably feels that way. They wonder they want to understand what they’re buying. They want to understand why they’re buying it. Um, and I can tell you from my own experience, there aren’t a ton of resources out there designed to educate us, um, on on why we should be doing buy when, you know, you’re 20, when you’re 30, when you’re 40.
Speaker 1 (00:14:32) – Like, you know what should you be paying attention to? What? Science. Um, and so sometimes I find myself longing for that source of information. And, you know, we were talking about the value of a podcast. A lot of the times is that we bring a lot of male founders, um, that, you know, have built skincare products like challenger for men or different skin lines and other sort of care products. Um, and it’s starting to happen. It’s starting to happen for sure. Way more. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:15:02) – I think that you anyway. So I do notice that at my age, you know, like like the men look about 30 years older than the women of the same. It’s true, they did. But you know what? It doesn’t matter because they just look like rugged cowboys. You know? Nobody cares. You’re like. You’re totally different. Beauty standard. You’re like a silver fox. You’ve got some wrinkles in some spots. Who cares, you know. So I think you got you got a little.
Speaker 2 (00:15:28) – You don’t have to worry. You’re also so cute. You got. We got.
Speaker 1 (00:15:31) – Some time. You know, it’s it’s interesting. I, I feel like, you know, you’ve lived in Los Angeles. I feel like this is the city where nobody wants to grow up. So if there’s anywhere that people are aware of, that stuff is is definitely here. I think they want to. A lot of people want to stay young, young forever in L.A. so maybe, maybe in the right words now it’s a little different. You see that and then you know that. But I’m down here is there’s a lot of optionality.
Speaker 2 (00:15:59) – Well, there is I mean, that’s a much larger conversation on mortality. Like, are you comfortable with growing old? Are you comfortable with like being wise and wizened to separate things, you know, are you comfortable with, um, the arc of your life, like following through with, uh, stabilizing and having children, if you choose, but at the very least, having places where you do service and where you create beauty and you land and give back, or is it always like the perpetual party, or can you enjoy every stage of your life and your existence and embrace it? Um, so that’s actually a challenge for any kind of beauty brand is how to teach you self-love, uh, without insisting that you stay perpetually 30.
Speaker 2 (00:16:45) – You know, it’s not a it’s not a healthy way to live well.
Speaker 1 (00:16:50) – So tell me more about that balance, right. Because I see I see a dichotomy there where you have, you know, wellness brands, let’s just call it wellness, beauty and wellness brands. Um, designed to help you, I guess. I don’t know if I would say age slower, but take care of yourself better, right. Extend extend sort of the the the, you know, the youthful aspects of of your body and how your body expresses itself for a longer period of time. And then on the other side, you have the acceptance that, you know, time goes by and we all age and, you know, I’m European and I feel like, in a way, in Mediterranean Europe, people embrace aging, uh, to a degree that it’s it’s sort of like, you know, this is the passive life and these are the different faces, and this is what you’re supposed to do at every stage. And, um, how do you balance that between trying to counteract something that is naturally happening and, uh, versus like embrace every step that you get and every step that you face?
Speaker 2 (00:17:52) – I’m gonna I’d like to speak to it personally and then maybe collectively, like what we’ve learned from our customers.
Speaker 2 (00:17:59) – Uh, so personally. Um, have a very deep, um, love of being in the body. So yoga and dancing and moving and skiing and swimming and being active are really important part of my life. And they create a virtuous cycle of being. I do more with my body, and so I can do more with my body, and my energy is really high as a result. And so what can happen in midlife is you’re just actually not living a lifestyle that keeps your energy high, like you’re sitting at a desk, you’re commuting, you’re get kind of beaten down and worn down. So the number one thing for me is I’d like to stay fully alive and embodied mind until I’m 90. I was lucky, I love also like like you like my, my I’m European by descent, my mother’s German, and I knew my great grandmother, who lived to 96, and she was up every day, you know. Doing her thing. Gardens and painting and cooking and, and, you know, getting dressed to the lace up shoes and putting a marcel wave in her hair and shirtwaist dress with a buckle and going off to market at sunrise, you know, like she was the she was living.
Speaker 2 (00:19:15) – She wasn’t like. It wasn’t like there was an arc of like, you peak and then you decline and it’s a slow decline. She was fully living until she was dead. And so that model is really living in me. So embodiment and staying active. I also eat like. For energy and deliciousness. But I never smoked. And I don’t drink, and I eat organic food. And I that is really easy to do to keep your energy high and take all the supplements. So I would say those two things and then positive thought like, I have my children super young, like when I was in college and they’re all adults now. And from that meant that from like 45 on, I had this freedom of midlife. And right now that’s a time when a lot of people’s children are just in high school because of the delay and having kids. But after the kids leave, instead of it being like this depressing empty nest period, it became a period of total expansion. Like, I can travel again, I can write books.
Speaker 2 (00:20:15) – I went back and got a PhD like these. These. This period of life has become what I call the free period. You’re literally free of periods if you’re a woman, but you’re also like free of a lot of the responsibilities that you know, unless you have internalized them to the sense that you you have no choice, but you have to be a certain kind of social person. So position somewhere in the hierarchy in a certain way, have to have these many possessions to show off your worth. If you can drop all of that. This period of life is so free. And you. And so I would say from my perspective, it’s the best period of life that it had. And collectively, as a culture, uh, we have the opportunity to do that. And part of it is releasing the belief that younger is better, that each age has its gift, and finding what you truly desire, like it’s finally the period where you can throw away the expectations of your parents and of the culture and do what you want.
Speaker 2 (00:21:13) – And that is very energizing.
Speaker 1 (00:21:17) – I love this. I’m getting goosebumps. I’m so inspired by what you said.
Speaker 2 (00:21:24) – And.
Speaker 1 (00:21:25) – You know, it’s like it speaks to what I wanted to ask you, which is, you know, you seem to have this incredible energy that, um, has driven you to not just start multiple companies, but also do other, you know, you were mentioning other many other things. So what is that? Where does that come from? Is that something that you you feel you’ve always been this way? Does it come from knowing what you want and what you want to do or like? What are the sources of this?
Speaker 2 (00:21:53) – Well, number one, it builds on itself like every other thing you do. You take a little step and you learn something, and then it accumulates. And one thing I learned early on, if you look around your room and whether it’s, you know, a supplement or a piece of jewelry or, you know, artwork or whatever, somebody made that, somebody created it, that the creative pulse that lives inside of you, that makes you want to make something.
Speaker 2 (00:22:15) – It’s the creative pulse of nature. It’s the creative pulse of the universe. And once you start tapping into that, like you realize that whatever you see was an idea in the mind of someone or an idea in the mind of creation, and it had to be brought through hands and been manifest. And if it’s been done, it’s possible. And why not you? And so the idea there was a really wonderful I think Tom waits originally said that the songwriter, Tom Wright said that, you know, he got so accustomed to pulling down ideas from the cloud that he would be driving down the Pacific Coast Highway and a song would come to him, and he wouldn’t have anything to write it down with. And so he would say, God, can’t you hear me? I’m driving. Take this song to somebody else who can write it down, that his model of it was that ideas were looking for you as much as you were looking for ideas that you never have an idea. An idea has you. And if you become really good at turning that idea into reality, then more ideas will come to you.
Speaker 2 (00:23:15) – And so you kind of build it over time. The skill of translating the impetus, vision, inspiration into material reality. So what you get good at is. Being discerning about which ones are yours to do and what resources it would take to do those things, and making the decision, uh, on what not to do becomes as important as making the decision on what to do. So that’s very energizing. Um, and I would say so that’s one thing let’s say. The other thing is I did have a death experience. I died about six years ago. I coded out and, um, it was incredibly beautiful to be, like, not in the body, but it was also, uh, like a decision to come back. It was. I was kind of floating out there in the ether and I said, but I love life so much. And then when I said that, I was back in my body and my son was sitting next to me and the room, my kids were in the room and some friends were in the room.
Speaker 2 (00:24:19) – And he said to me later that the first thing you said when you came awake was, but I love life so much, and that since that moment, like I’ve physically and emotionally chosen to be here, and since choosing actively, it’s been even easier to create, co-create and. Yeah. I’m very happy to be alive and don’t take it for granted, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:24:43) – That’s incredible. Your speech is very contagious. Um, I was as you were talking.
Speaker 2 (00:24:49) – I was kind of.
Speaker 1 (00:24:49) – Like doing a quick inventory of my life and thinking, okay, how do I. How do I start doing this more? I think, you know, the the.
Speaker 2 (00:24:58) – First you follow the impulse of your desire. What is your true desire? Like what does your body want? Like what is your right to this moment? You know, I want to get up and move. So let’s talk.
Speaker 1 (00:25:07) – Let’s talk more about that. So the first the first aspect of what you said was, um, focusing on or choosing the right idea.
Speaker 1 (00:25:14) – What are the what are the variables of the mechanics that go into actually understanding that, you know, today we live in a world that is flooded with opportunity, with options, with, you know, how many people do you want to date on Tinder? You know how many people like, there’s all this like optionality everywhere. And it’s almost like decision paralysis. Sometimes it’s like, I don’t know what. I don’t know what I want to do. So what is your framework or mental model to be able to identify when something is worth pursuing?
Speaker 2 (00:25:41) – Well, the first thing is everything that you craft is a 3 to 5 year project. Like you just have to know like that. That for me is you have to imagine yourself doing it for five years. You’re going to start a podcast. Oh, imagine doing it for five years. Are you going to like that every week? What’s it really like? Is it uniquely yours to do? Um, or could a hundred people do it? I ask myself questions like that, but a lot of it is listening to your body, you know, what’s the what’s the gut if it has a panicky feeling.
Speaker 2 (00:26:15) – But yeah, I got to do this, you know, or if it has a sort of a slow dread, if it has a feeling that you’re doing it to please your father, I don’t know. There are a lot of feelings. Like, you just want to notice that. What is the subtle quality of the impulse to do this thing? And unless it’s an impulse that feels like sparkling light that’s coming from inside of you, it’s probably not yours. I don’t know exactly how to communicate that. Um, for me, it’s been really important to have spaciousness around this time to decide. So I do a lot of walks in nature. Um, a lot of time and meditation when I’m in the process of making a decision, sometimes 72 straight hours of silence and no contact with anyone, or picking up the phone and just allowing the question to percolate in me. And if it’s not clear, then I’m okay being ambivalent, being in the ambiguity, being confused, being undecided that being curious is a fine place to be.
Speaker 2 (00:27:18) – I don’t have to have a clear answer, and that until I have a clear answer, I don’t move. So the paralysis is not always a bad thing. The decision paralysis can be an indicator that you haven’t yet found the right answer for you. Um, but in order to get there for me, you have to remove inputs, not add more. Do you know what I’m saying? Like, if you’re getting inputs all the time, it’s like you’re constantly getting Instagram and TikTok and the New York Times and some alarmist news from around the world about some other disaster. If your nervous system is being attacked all the time by external information, how would you ever touch the inner core of knowing what you truly desire or what’s yours to do? And so the discipline of disconnection is probably the most important thing to know. When a paralysis is a wise paralysis, or whether it’s blocking you from like getting your true desire.
Speaker 1 (00:28:20) – That is so wise. It’s something like that. It is. It is so true.
Speaker 1 (00:28:25) – I mean, look, it is. I feel like it’s more difficult than ever to to get to that point of disconnection. Um, you know, we sleep with our phones next to our bed. Uh, we open, you know, now our computer, we have 25 different tabs open. We’re never doing just one thing at a time. And so I think it takes discipline. You know, you’re mentioning walking for me, walking to, like, I go out and, you know, just off Laurel here. And I go to find him Canyon and I’ll go for a walk and and think and have some clarity of thought. Um, without all those, all those different inputs, um, that compete for my attention. I mean, that it’s, you know, it’s.
Speaker 2 (00:29:06) – Your your walk is okay. There’s some. Isn’t it ironic that there’s like a re grounding movement or an earthing movement? They have to write books about going outside in your bare feet, or touching the trees and breathing with the air like you you’re touching on.
Speaker 2 (00:29:22) – This is a core way to re access your body. Like I want you to think about your little your little body in the context of all of human history, just for one minute that you lived with 150 people that you all knew you trusted, you leaned into each other, you got their bio rhythms, you had similar rituals and all of that stuff. And the nervous system hits you get would be like, 1 in 1000 would be a difficult thing. Like there’s a mammoth coming at you, or there’s an earthquake or there’s a fire, but you wouldn’t get them all at once. You know, you wouldn’t be competing with 5 billion other people for the attention of every of of the universe. You you wouldn’t be getting, uh, school shootings twice a week and earthquakes and fires that are coming from halfway. And this you would. And your beautiful, intelligent body was not built to take all that. And so this epidemic of anxiety and attention deficit is literally the overriding of your physicality. So instead of trying to muscle through it, do yourself a favor and let the trees love you and let the air breathe you and take some space.
Speaker 2 (00:30:34) – Take your take your body back. You know.
Speaker 1 (00:30:42) – God. We don’t. We don’t hear that very often. It’s felt like it feels very primal. It feels like that’s where. That’s the way we were. We were supposed to live. And that’s the way we’re meant to live. And for some reason, we dis allocate ourselves. But you know, it is. Especially in somewhere like Los Angeles you have. You can totally redesign it, right? It’s all about.
Speaker 2 (00:31:05) – Intention. Los Angeles, I bet you can find, particularly in Laurel Canyon. I bet you can find ten buddies right off the bat who are just like, hey, do you want to be my hiking and not talking too much, buddy? Uh, or do you want to be the person that is, like, beating a drum and dancing? Once a month? I mean, you know, you’ll find those people because everybody’s looking for it.
Speaker 1 (00:31:30) – And then I got in my neighbor and said, you ought to be by not talking too much.
Speaker 2 (00:31:33) – Hiking, hiking, buddy. You’re running on my toes.
Speaker 1 (00:31:41) – You’re gonna be like, oh no, another another crazy person in this in this little neighborhood is coming to it. No, I think it’s super interesting. I, I am intentional about doing those things as much as I possibly can, but, um, you know, if you had to. So let me ask you something as a ways of kind of giving us your wisdom and your advice if, if, if you were starting again in that five year journey. Now, if you’re an early founder, someone was thinking about launching a product they feel passionate about. What advice? What is one piece of advice you would have for them? What should they be thinking about?
Speaker 2 (00:32:21) – I. Started the business with myself and a few trusted people. That helped me part time. And very quickly I got this lieutenant, a woman who ran sales for me, and she’s still there. Uh, we hit our stride when we had five committed people who were humming really well together.
Speaker 2 (00:32:43) – And it’s the same five people now, plus a few additional people in packaging and people in the warehouse and things like that customer service. But I also wrote a book in 2019 around how great Activists. Were able to do their work before a thing became mainstream. And again, in that book, they all had pods of 5 to 6 people. Uh, when you learn that you can’t do anything alone. So the critical thing is to find the 5 or 6 people who can do the real roles in a company, even if they’re part time in the beginning, but that they’re committed to your long arc mission and all be pulling together on the same storyline. Uh, so I would say that’s number one. Um, number two is ask a lot of questions and do a lot of research on the fundamentals of your business. Like how will you create something that will stay differentiated? You know, who are the best in your field? Like, I don’t know how to create a shelf stable formulation. I know how to research herbs and how they function and how to ask questions.
Speaker 2 (00:33:52) – So when it came time to get my formulations, I networked myself to find the absolute best chemist in organic product and went with that, you know, or when I needed to find a beautiful packaging and I wanted to come in cost effective and know that it was going to be on time. I use my network to do that, and that ability to create relationships, to create connections with other people, to ask them questions and to build a tight team. You could spend the whole first year doing that, and then when you finally launch something, it’ll have this depth behind it that will make it easier to do. That’s one. And then the other one is that they have at least six months of capital. You know, I know that doesn’t sound like a lot if you’re a big corporation, but have at least six months of capital. One thing that I learned from my other ventures, um, I had really had a big downturn after the 2002 dotcom crash, and I learned how to live on nothing.
Speaker 2 (00:34:51) – And when I started making money again, I didn’t start spending it so that I really put a cushion in place so that I could have walk away money and that I could control and decide my own career, and that that choice to live on a personal level with lower expenses so that you have the freedom to move and be flexible, was a really big decision, so that I wouldn’t have the unnecessary stress of making a big, like having a big personal nut while I was building a business, and that that’s a little bit of sacrificial, but it takes the daily stress away. So know that if you’re going to start something, it’s possible that you will take a lower lifestyle personally for a while until you’re generating profit. And if you can’t do that, you probably should stay in your day job. You know, you should probably not be an entrepreneur. It’s a very. Being an entrepreneur is like you kind of throwing everything on the line. And if you’re not willing to do that, if you’re too attached to your lifestyle or whatever and it’s going to cause you stress, then maybe don’t do it.
Speaker 1 (00:36:02) – That’s definitely one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever had. Without a question.
Speaker 2 (00:36:10) – I think it says, why do I keep doing I don’t know, I’m doing another one now. I’m like, oh my God.
Speaker 1 (00:36:15) – This is weird.
Speaker 2 (00:36:16) – Because I love this brand so much. This brand has like I didn’t expect. So when I started this brand, I thought I was solving one problem intimate skincare. Feeling better organic. So I thought I was. But what I was really solving was the cultural wide problem of denying sexuality, sensuality, and women’s health education. But I didn’t know that until I was a year in and I started hearing from people that they didn’t even know the names of their own body parts and or that I was hearing from people that they never had been educated on the fact that they would ever have a difficult period or have like go into menopause. They didn’t even know what they were doing. And I was like, how could you not know this? This is what your body you’re born with.
Speaker 2 (00:36:57) – And and the mission evolved out of the doing, you know, so I think I think you can also invite that like put me on a path to being useful in the world and is my thing useful and will it do good? And that also seems to have a self-fulfilling expansion.
Speaker 1 (00:37:20) – Wow, Christine, I feel like we’ve condensed years of advice into 35 minutes.
Speaker 2 (00:37:27) – Becoming a CPG company. Okay, here’s my company. Focus on the reach our customers. Focus on your lifetime value. Focus and your cost to serve. Never use an outsourced fulfillment house. They will screw you over every single time. What else do? For all of you. My biggest point of suffering in building the entire business was using a three PL. Instead of shipping our own product, we used the three PL for the first couple of years and they made mistakes all the time. 90% of our complaints were shipping related, mis packing related, and then when we brought that in-house, we saved about 7% of sales, not 7% of shipping cost right out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (00:38:08) – And it really was like a linchpin of being able to have better direct contact with our customer. So I would say that does not get discussed enough when people are talking about building brands, but fulfillment and customer service is a critical part of the relationship.
Speaker 1 (00:38:22) – Well, especially early in the process where every interaction with the customer matters because it defines your brand, defines your reputation. So you can’t you can’t outsource credibility, especially at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (00:38:34) – Oh, that I’m going to put on a tile today. You can’t outsource credibility and I’ll credit you. Oh.
Speaker 1 (00:38:40) – Finally, one one wise thing in the entire conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:38:44) – I know you’ve been giving me an incredible platform to just talk. I don’t even know what I said, so I’m counting on you to do it.
Speaker 1 (00:38:51) – It’s been incredible advice. I can’t wait to transcribe it. And, um. Yeah. Christine, thank you so much for the time. I mean, this has been unbelievable. I feel like we need a version two. We need a we need a part of this of this conversation.
Speaker 1 (00:39:06) – Talk more about the CPG.
Speaker 2 (00:39:07) – Talk more about about anything you want to talk about, even what’s on my nightstand. I was looking at those questions and I was like, what’s on my nightstand? I sat down here and I was like, hmm, nothing interesting, you know?
Speaker 1 (00:39:19) – Well, you’d be surprised, I think sometimes. And, you know, sometimes people become people are more uncomfortable than they think in front of, in front of a camera. But, um, I think it was pretty clear to me when, when we started talking that, um, we were going to be fine. We could we could be off script.
Speaker 2 (00:39:39) – Um, here is what here is what’s on my nightstand. I’ll show you one. This is what I do when I get nervous. As I do these, I.
Speaker 1 (00:39:47) – You do that? Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:39:49) – I doodle, I doodle, and so you’ve got like, this is what’s on my skin.
Speaker 1 (00:39:53) – This is what this is. That, is that what you created while we’re talking?
Speaker 2 (00:39:57) – I created this on while we were talking.
Speaker 1 (00:40:00) – I love that, that’s amazing.
Speaker 3 (00:40:04) – When you can get your what, you can get.
Speaker 2 (00:40:05) – Your focus off of your, your goofy face in the camera. And you can just like put it on something else that, that like the tongue also moves more fluidly. So.
Speaker 1 (00:40:14) – You know, you can, um, you can hide your camera. It’s fascinating. I there’s a study done on zoom. No, there’s a study done on zoom conversations that said that about 30% of your attention span and energy goes into look into yourself in the camera. So when you remove yourself and you only look at the other person, you get back about 30% of your brain capacity. So I’ve been doing that ever since, and it’s incredible.
Speaker 2 (00:40:37) – Oh, I’m totally going to do that from now on. Thank you for that.
Speaker 1 (00:40:41) – Yeah, you should try it. It really is. It has a big effect. Try it for a couple of calls and let me know the results. It’s pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (00:40:47) – I will.
Speaker 2 (00:40:48) – I hope you have a great day.
Speaker 3 (00:40:50) – Is there anything? Thank you. Christine.