← Coffee N° 5 with Lara Schmoisman
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- [00:00]
A
This is Coffee no. 5, your signature blend of strategy story and straight talk. I'm Lara Schmoizman, your host and founder of the Darl and every week I sit down with the operators, founders and creatives building brands worth talking about. No gurus, no five tips in a carousel. Just the conversations that move business forward. Pour yourself something good.
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B
Let's go.
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A
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Coffee number five. Is your coffee warm? Mine is and I'm ready to have another great conversation. So today I'm thinking and you know, you guys, I'm obsessed lately about how people buy and where they buy. And now we, we've been talking about AI tools and we getting a lot more information because people, the query has just change. People are not asking. I want the face serum. They tell you their problems, they want their solutions. So I want to bring you someone who has solutions for your problems. And it's been in business for a long time. I think that she's one of the pioneers creating a mark, a successful marketplace. So welcome. Jenny. Jeannie. Hi, welcome. I'm so happy that you are here. You are the creator of Beauty Heroes. So let's start there. How Beauty Heaters Hero came to, to life.
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B
Yeah, well, I, I started beauty heroes 12 years ago at launch. 12 years ago. So it's been a while now.
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A
And before that I had a whole
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B
career in hospitality management and specifically in spa management. So I was a spa director for luxury spas. I didn't come to this from beauty. I came as an outsider, which I think is always really fun and good and it helps you create things that you may not have created if you were inside the industry. Because there was so much that I didn't know when I started Beauty Heroes that helped shape what I think, you know, makes us really different and, and special. But I had a very specific, simple idea to help introduce people to the healthiest and most sustainable brands in the world in a focused, intentional, educational way. I had spent my whole career as a spa director navigating ingredients and wanting to really only put products on people that were really good for them and beneficial for them and free of anything that would be health harming. And so, you know, my experience of navigating ingredients as a spa director opened my eyes to how challenging that is. And when I worked with my first brand that really knew what they were making, had their hand in the formulas, had real purpose behind the brand, it really changed the way that I understood product. And I started wanting to work only with those types of brands, brands that were, you know, Purpose driven, focused on health, sustainability and you know, kind of a different model than conventional beauty. And I wanted to connect people to those brands. So I started Beauty Heroes, which was really launched as a discovery service. So we deliver a box featuring full size products from one brand every month. We've been doing this for 12 years with a lot of education. Everything meets our very stringent ingredient standard. Looking at the full life cycle of ingredients. So ingredients that are free of health harming, that are health harming, but also really looking at the biodegradability of ingredients. So no petrochemicals, dimethicone or silicones, petro derived acrylates, no synthetic fragrance at all. So that's a real distinction for Beauty Heroes. We grew into being a global online retailer which was really successful doing the same thing. And then six years ago we opened a brick and mortar store here in Northern California.
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A
I love that, I love that you come from the background of understanding the ingredients that and what works for one skin maybe doesn't work for everyone. Like how many times I, I've been with people say love this product. And it was like, really? For me it's not working. And so you need to understand skin. Everyone is different and everyone has different needs. But also I want to ask you because I love how you evolve and today you have, you go and I'm looking at the website. That's what I'm looking on the side. You guys, you can shop for products but you still have this discovery boxes. So how is for your brand to work with you?
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B
Yeah, so we collab. So first of all, you know, brands in order to be at Beauty Heroes need to meet our ingredient standards. So there's like this very obvious, very, you know, clear vetting process. So we first, you know, bring the brand on for retail and bring them on in the store. And then if we want to collaborate on a discovery, we work on curating. You know, I really want to deliver to our customers. The whole idea behind Beauty Heroes was to connect people to these brands by way of their hero product. The idea was if they love their hero product and then we also will put in like what we call a sidekick. When we started, people would get an idea about this brand. It's very intentional that the products are full size. So people really have them in their lives for a while. By the time you get to the bottom of the bottle and have immersed yourself, or in some cases several bottles, Right. This month's discovery from Ursa Major has two products. Next month's discovery is a hair care brand and it has three products by the time.
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A
I think that's so important because I honestly never got all the sample thing, the sampling that you get so little that you can in cosmetics. You need to try something for a long time to work.
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B
Yeah, well, I think also as a spa director, I was really spoiled. When a brand wants to get into your spa or when they want to get into your retail store, they do a really beautiful presentation. They always give you full size product, they never give you samples because they really want you to have the full experience of the product. They want you to use it. And so the idea behind Beauty Years was really to kind of create that experience for customers. Samples for me really fall flat. I feel like they are just kind of, you know, stuff in my bathroom. Whereas a beautiful product, I can really, you know, savor it, experience it and, and decide if it's really working for my skin or my hair or my body.
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A
Absolutely. So brands today, they can work with you in what? First of all, let's talk about the ingredients list. Are we talking about cradle clean, European clean? What are your standards?
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B
Yeah, so our standard is, you know, ingredients are black and white. Right. Because we either allow these ingredients or not. So we go beyond any other standards because we're, as far as I know, really the only retailer that's looking at that biodegradability of ingredients. So for example, phenoxyethanol, it's a very common, very effective preservative. But it's a petroleum derived ingredient. It's also an ethoxylated ingredient. It's so common even in clean beauty. We don't allow it at Beauty Heroes because of those reasons. And so if, you know, and, and it's, it, like I said, it's very, very. We love preservatives, we love, well preserved products. But that particular preservative, which is, like I said, quite common, is.
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A
What's, what's the name again? For people to know?
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B
Phenoxyethanol.
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A
Okay. And it's not because, for example, credo, the standard of that, it has to be lower than one.
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B
We don't allow it at all.
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A
Nice.
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B
Phenoxyethanol is pretty much always used below 1% because you just need a little bit. It's a very effective preservative. So the fact that it's below 1% to me is, you know, not a very interesting fact. And you know, it's just, it's not super relevant to, I mean, if you're using, you know, I use a lot of products and if I'm layering on several products with phenoxy ethanol. I'm getting a good amount of it, you know, delivered all over me. So anyway, you don't need it. There are more, there are different preservative systems happens to be very effective. We just don't allow it. At Beauty Heroes.
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A
That's a good one to know because a lot of brands, I mean, if you're a brand owner out there, you really need to understand who is your consumer and where are you going to want to have your product. If you are intentionally thinking about having your product at Beauty Heroes, just make sure that your ingredients will comply. You need to think about your marketing and marketplaces before you start production of products.
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B
Yeah, it's true.
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A
So let's talk about a little bit about the consumers because how people, how you seen this evolve in 12 years because you were in a really great timing when you started this marketplace by coincidence, but there wasn't much out there. So how you see, seen the marketplace evolve and what tools you had to do to evolve as a marketplace, I
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B
think, well, what I will say is Beauty Heroes is very focused on content and education. And I, you know, our community, our customers, you know, for 12 years who've been with us, they like the way that we present product, they like the way that we talk about it. However, beauty consumption and is and marketing is there. It's so just omnipresent, ubiquitous. It's everywhere. And you know, for women who are the main beauty consumers, they are thinking about themselves. They're thinking about their teenagers, they're thinking about their babies, they're thinking about their husbands. They really are purchasing for a lot of people in their lives and making a lot of those purchasing decisions. So they are sort of being bombarded by everything. Like I have a teenage son. He is getting marketed to and asking me questions and I am, you know, or he's going to Target and seeing things on the shelf or he'll, you know, go to school and see things from his friends. They'll talk about something. Ads will pop up on their Instagram or their TikTok based on what they've been talking about. So it's just such a, it's such a. I, you know, such a wild thing. One of the things that I think is so funny to watch is, you know, if you have a brick and mortar store like we do is that customers will, if there's a product that they see on the shelf, they will be like, oh, I want to buy this, you know, this RMS lip oil. And they'll they'll look it up on their phone and make sure that they can't get it at a better price somewhere else.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
Do that right there. So, you know, the consumer is fairly fickle. They definitely, definitely can be very value driven. But they're also like, they might, you know, their daughter might want to go to Sephora. So they might have to take their daughter to Sephora. Right. Because that's what you do. And even though they might not shop at Sephora, but they might see something at Sephora that they're like, oh, this kind of looks good. And they'll buy it there. Say, you know, and. And that's just all over the place. So I feel like the consumers just constantly navigating and, you know, and I think they really are, you know, we are being. I think one of the things that's interesting is our algorithms on our feeds are becoming more entertaining. And so ads are entertaining. We're watching ads like we're watching reels from our friends.
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A
Absolutely. So we were talking before we started the recording today about how your personal brand also evolved and your personal voice that you feel like you have a lot more to say. This is, you think is something because of the evolution of yourself as a person on also the technology that now is and the feedback that you get from people that it gives you a lot more ideas of what to say.
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B
Yeah, I think that was a very hard thing for me to come into at Beauty Heroes because I really feel like our mission is to connect people to our brands. Not to me, that really is our mission. I want people to know about the people behind our brands, why they created them. I honestly didn't feel like I had anybody should care what I have to say. And through the years, I think we just got the feedback that people wanted to hear. You know, they wanted to hear me present these brands. They. And they wanted to hear me talk about them. And I think one thing, you know, it is easier to talk about somebody else else than it is to talk about yourself. So it's a joy for me to talk about these brands. And so I think that also comes through and I get to share things, share about these brands in a really, I would say, sincere, heartfelt way. These are, you know, what I believe and know to be the healthiest and most sustainable brands in the world. And I want people to know about them. I want to know how hard it is to craft these products and how it is to. How hard it is to source these ingredients and how hard it is to navigate the packaging landscape. And that they do a lot of hard work to bring better products to market. So I'm very passionate about that and I think that has come through in like the content that I've done, like our Instagram lives. I started writing these letters once a month. It's called the Sunday read at Beauty Heroes. And I wrote, it's a bit, it's kind of like a love letter to the brand that's in our discovery every month. And I started it from like really an authentic place. The first Sunday read I wrote, I was like, I feel like I need to write a letter about this product because if I don't write how I'm using it, I feel like people will miss the, the benefits of this product. So I wrote that letter from a very authentic place. I was like, I just feel like I want to write about a letter about this product. And we got so, so much feedback that I started doing that every month for our brands and, and it's been such a fun, fun thing for me to do. And it's, I'm able to talk about these brands in a really authentic way and a little more long form way. So it has been like a bit of a process of me finding my voice and finding my confidence that people even care what I have to say. I noticed, you know, I think that is. Doesn't come naturally to me.
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A
I have another question for you. Because it's hard having a marketplace and having so many products that they are competing with each other basically. So how are you fair with for all the products in your marketplace to highlight them?
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B
You know, what I will say is it is fair. Any brand that is at Beauty Heroes that wants to collaborate with us, we collaborate with them. We are, you know, we, we're. I think brands have different levels of engagement, but the brands that want to engage have our full attention. So it is, you know, I will say, you know, we, there's certain things that we do for every product that launches at Beauty Hero is it gets featured in our monthly new in the future beauty store email. We take a photograph of it, we write about it, we do all our own photography at Beauty Heroes. It's part of our communication. Form of communication is the visual style at Beauty Heroes. So what I will say, it's like totally fair. Like for all of our brands, you want to do an event in store, you want to do, you know, something together, we're excited to do it. So that's how we, that's just how we are. It's cultural.
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A
And do you feel like what Partnership you need from a brand to be successful in your platform. Because I think a lot of brands that they're excited that they get the market price or they get whatever, Ulta, Sephora, Nordstrom, doesn't matter where they get so excited, say, okay, we did it, we're in the work, maybe slow down for us. And I always say, no, it's the opposite now you have a different kind of work that is supported. Totally your partner.
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B
Yeah. I would say that brands, the brands that are most successful at Beauty Heroes, we have one brand that has done the most discoveries with us at Beauty Hero and they are the most successful brand because they have invested in help, in helping people discover their brand. So I would say, you know, the more you engage, the more the business grows. It's very, it does, you know, and it. Consistency, right. Just like anything in business. I think that's one of the things that's hardest in business is consistency.
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Very, very, very hard.
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But the brands that are consistent and really, you know, sort of thinking about engagement in that way. What I will say is like to any brand, don't launch in a retailer unless you can support them consistently because you're going to be disappointed, you know, and it's just, it's a constant nurturing we're playing, you know, I just really believe in the long game.
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Me too. I feel like brands, all those runs that they try to go viral in a minute and they, they might disappear because if you don't have the foundation and you're not built for the long game, you can be a minute run like one hit wonder.
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B
Yeah.
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Yeah. And nobody wants to be one hit wonder. So how can you think that the collaboration. Because I think over years and now with more AI social media. TikTok, TikTok shop. There is more than ever the need of collaborations between brands and marketplaces. What the brand needs to do to be successful in any marketplace.
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B
I honestly, I, you know, PD hears we're so locked into the way. I think the way that we market our brands is so different. It's so collaborative. So I can only really speak, you know, I think there's very simple things you can do. Send out your launches to your, to your, to your retailers as early as you have them get on their calendars. Find out how you can make sure that your new launch is featured and talked about and that happens through planning and really being intentional. Send them the product to test and fall in love with. If they love it, they will want to talk about it. And then, you know, I'm sure Every, every company has different ways to engage at PDRs. We have very specific ways that we can help our community discover those brands. You know, if you look at our homepage right now, their Ursa Major is covering the homepage. We change that homepage twice a month. The three tiles that are under it, they're very, they're curated. We place those products specifically. We have our discovery, we have, we have dedicated product launch emails, we have different aspects. We have a well within reach campaign, we have a teen spirit campaign that speaks about teens. We have, you know, different ways, you know, different promotionally of our gift with purchase campaigns. So there's so many different ways. I think it's different for every retailer and I'm not sure how that is for anybody else, but for us we have a lot of options.
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A
So how far in advance you work with your schedule and with your planning as a marketplace, to know what is going to go up, to have your social media, to have your banners, to have your email marketing in place, because this is not something you guys at work, we do overnight. There is this planning and scheduling and seasonality, but also their business decisions behind it.
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B
Yeah, I would say 90 days is like pretty much minimum. You know, we are writing our content, shooting our photography. So 90 days, that's, I think that's doable for most brands and you know, to have like a, at least a photography sample and even like maybe a not perfect sample of the product, 90 days out would be, is ideal. And if they have it, I mean some brands are working really far in advance like so that.
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A
Well, I mean if you're launching a product, going through an R and D, going through packaging and everything, you should have a very clear idea when you're gonna be launching, but it's all over the place.
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B
And I think the interesting thing is that the supply chain has been so wild that brands will say, hey, we are launching this product and they'll tell you nine months ahead of time. And then all of a sudden it comes two months before the launch and that it gets pushed another six months because of some sort of delay.
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A
That's true, that's true. And how you feel like, I mean we had the tariff problems we had now gas prices going up, how this is affecting your products and the pricing of products, the cost of products and what affects to the, how the affects final cost of the product.
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B
Yeah, I will say it's definitely been really challenging. Price increases have been rampant and consistent and very difficult. And I think it's, you know, affecting consumers and their spending Habits. I think it's affecting brands and their bottom lines. They don't want to raise their prices. They're trying to absorb as much as they can, and then at some point they can't. They are forced to raise the price. And. Yeah, it pretty much just sucks.
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A
It. It does, absolutely. Because I know the brands, they don't want to raise the prices. You don't want to raise the prices. But supply chain has affected everyone.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So what do you think that is, Cap? Because I see a huge trend including beauty and wellness. It's something that you are thinking of including as part of Beauty Heroes to get more into the. Well, or are you sticking to. To cosmetics and beauty?
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B
We have had wellness from the beginning, so wellness, you know, I think because I actually. It's a really embarrassing thing. I'll give you a little sound bite. When I started Beauty Heroes, the. The name of the company for the first year was not Beauty Heroes, it was Spa Heroes. And it got. It was very confusing to people because we weren't a spa, but because I came from the spa industry, it made sense to me. And I had trademarked the name Beauty Heroes, thinking that we would go more into makeup. I didn't start with makeup, but with wellness. We really. I think because I came from a wellness space, I'm going to tell you, honestly, I never really understood that we were in the beauty industry until like a little over a year. And then I just didn't even. I didn't even make that connection. I just had an idea for what I wanted to do, and it was for skin care in the. In the way of. Of just, you know, and brands that I loved. But wellness was always a part of our curation. We are. So what I will say is one of the interesting things. When people ask me for a product recommendation and they have a problem, I usually start with wellness, not with. With a topical product. Usually I'm just like, okay, let's. If it's really a problem.
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A
That's a great answer, though. People are always trying to get the results from a topical.
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B
Yeah, I mean, topicals can only do so much, you know, to a real problem. Right. And I've just had real, you know, really great experiences personally with inflammation and hyperpigmentation through. Through wellness products. Not, you know, I think topically supports that. You kind of have to have everything going on inside aligned before the outside's actually going to work. The outside can only do. So.
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A
Yeah, it's both. It's outside and inside. It's a combination because it's the same like what we eat and how the, the weather, the, the wind, whatever it is, affects the air aspects our skin.
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B
Yeah. So I think one of the things with wellness at Beauty Heroes you'll see we have a really curated collection. First of all, you know, ingredients really matter in wellness as well. But also there's so many wellness brands. We've launched a few wellness brands at Beauty Heroes where we launched them, we love them, we support them and then all of a sudden they're in Target and that kind or Costco. And that's because they're great brands. So they grew up and then you know we're carrying the same thing that's available at Costco or at Target. So the brands that you'll find at Beauty Heroes were really, they're brands that you can't just find anywhere. Anima Mundi, Moon Juice, Juna. We just launched Ancient and Brave, you know, the four year sexual wellness products. So I would say just very curated and brands that you won't find anywhere else and brands that we feel like really close to the formulas and the,
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A
and the efficacy and let me ask you another question. How many do you have a schedule? How many brands you take every year? There is a limit. Brands you can take.
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B
No.
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A
And this is for the store and for online. Yeah.
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B
What I will say is like we're losing brands faster than we can add them.
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A
Why? Why is that?
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B
Like for example the Beauty Chef, which is a great wellness brand out of Australia, announced that they're pulling out of us Distribution brands are retiring and they, you know, brands, so brands have shut down, brands have pulled distribution or a brand is not performing. So that is, you know, I will say to get in the sort of barriers to getting into Beauty Heroes, just the boundary of getting over ingredient standard is so high that there's so little that we can really even consider. So we don't have like a limit to how many brands we want to find as many brands that we feel will do well here as we can. But we have the fewest number of brands than we, that we've had. I mean I think four years ago we had like 15 more brands than what we have now.
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A
Got it. So what do you think happening in the beauty wellness industry, how it will evolve from here? What changes do you see?
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B
I think, well, I think wellness is, I think there's a lot of innovation in wellness. I think people will, I guess I feel like people will invest a lot more in what they're in their wellness than they will in their topical products. I actually think it's a category that's going to grow, but I do think there will be a bit of a bubble burst because there's just too much, too many products sort of coming and trying to solve the same, same issues. But I do think it's exciting. You know, somebody who really loves to try new things that are going to improve my overall health, well being and certainly if it helps my skin, hair, nails, great, then I'm all for it. But longevity is definitely a big topic. There is a lot of innovation in that space and I think it's really exciting. I'm interested in it. And for products that really deliver, it's fun. It's fun to find something that's going to make you feel better. I'm all for it.
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A
Absolutely. Before we go, I have one more question for you.
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B
Yeah.
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A
How do you drink your coffee?
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B
I drink it black.
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A
Mm.
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B
I drink it black. I drink two cups every day in the morning.
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A
Short or long drape?
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B
Long. No. Long. No. My. My dad makes my coffee every morning. French press, a biodynamic demeter certified mold free bean that he grinds every bag before, you know, like fresh. And he makes my coffee every morning for me and I have two cups and that's it.
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A
Very lucky that your dad makes your coffee.
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B
Yeah, I'm very lucky.
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A
Thank you so much for being here. This was really fun.
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B
Yeah. Thank you. How do you drink your coffee?
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A
Oh, I drink my coffee in a variety, but right now it's a latte.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I love a latte.
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B
On a special occasion.
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A
Yes.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So thank you so much for being here and to you guys, I will see you next week with more coffee number five.
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B
Thank you.
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A
That's a wrap on this round of coffee number five. Now here's your homework. Take one thing from this episode and actually do something with it before the next one drops. That's how brands get built. Find me on LinkedIn at larashmoisman and thedorl.com if you want my team in your corner. I'll see you next cup.