Transcript
Lara Schmoisman (0:00)
Foreign. This is Coffee Number Five. I'm your host, Lara Schmoisman. Hi guys. Welcome back to Coffee Number Five. Today I have real, a real trip and someone really hard to pin down because he's all over the world and. But it's such a big supporter of indie beauty in the brands that they're growing. And I will say probably started with the indie beauty and he will really explain that to us. But I think that now he's an industry supporter most than anything. So. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Nader, thank you so much for being here.
Nader (0:42)
Hi Laura, how are you? I mean, you got a whole different Persona when the, when the camera goes live. I mean, the shyness is gone. Yeah, great.
Lara Schmoisman (0:51)
Well, it happens. It's years of experience. Nader, tell us, how did you start? I mean you, everyone knows you in the industry, but I want, want to. Yes, they do. But I want them to know how this started as indie beauty. Now it became beauty independent. Then you have bite, you have deal maker. There is so much going on. I want to understand how this evolved.
Nader (1:15)
Thank you for having me on. I honestly, I'm not used to being on the other side of the microphone, so it's odd answering questions versus asking the questions. But the truth is it was completely by accident entered this industry back in 2015 because a friend of mine at the time who was a very well regarded New York esthetician by the name of Gillian Wright, she had built a very successful aesthetic spa clinic. I was one of her clients. And in 2014 she had started her own brand called Gillian Rice Skincare. It was a indie brand. And one of the challenges she found was that there was nowhere for her to showcase her product to the right retailers and press media. Traditional trade shows were too big for her, MERs markets were irrelevant. So she had this idea for an indie beauty expo and she asked me to help her. So I said sure. And we ended UP doing a one day event in New York in August of 2015, which is almost exactly 10 years ago at this point. And to tell you how little faith I had in the project, we did it in August because it's the cheapest time to get space in New York and you know, like, you know, 20,000 bucks, you know, we'll see what happens to it. I wanted to really help my friend. And what happened was it was a huge success. We had anticipated 20 to 30 exhibitors. We ended up with 85 brands like Tata Harper exhibited, Yojio brands that are today, you know, have exited. And then instead of about 100 attendees. We had over 500 attendees. There was a big line going around the block to get into the event at Chelsea and we had no idea what we were doing. I'd never done a trade show. I'd never done a professional event. It was, I was printing badges at home and putting them into full, you know, plastic covers by hand. My dad was helping me. It was really a complete amateur hour, but we survived it and we made an impression. And what I realized at that time was that this industry was going through a once in a lifetime disruption where in terms of where innovation was happening, who was building the brands, how they were being sold, their value proposition, all of that was changing. And at the forefront of all this was the beauty entrepreneur. The person, typically a woman, who decided that she's had enough of whatever garbage she was buying before, or maybe that just wasn't what she wanted and so she was going to make it herself. And whether it was in skincare, hair care, every, every conceivable category, entrepreneurs were disrupting the market. And we decided to help them. We expanded Indie Beauty Expo to a two day event. We launched it in Los Angeles in 16, Dallas in 17, London in 18, and Berlin in 19. So by the end of 2019, we had five, five, two day events. We had over a thousand brands exhibit with us, and we became the center of the independent beauty movement. And through that journey, we met so many amazing people. For example, Hero Cosmetics launched at ibe. They met Target at ibe. You can literally go around asking folks that are now big brands. Many of them at some point either attended or exhibited IBM. And while we were doing that, I had nothing to read because I was new to the industry. So I looked around and everything that I saw was mostly focused in terms of trade publications focused on fashion. And when they covered beauty, they were covering Estee and Unilever. And yet I could see in front of me these amazing founders with incredible brands, such great stories that needed to be told. So in 2017, I approached Rachel Brown, who had just left women's wear. And I said, I'm thinking of starting a newsletter, maybe a publication focused on beauty entrepreneurs called Beauty Independent. And she said, I'm in. I never forget. It was March of 2017. It was a rainy day in New York when we spoke. And by August of that year, we had also launched Beauty Independent. So that's how Beauty Independent came to be really my start in the industry. And finally, as we were building all this, I realized there was no education for entrepreneurs. So we started a thought leadership Series called Beauty X Summits that we would do before Indie Beauty Expo. In New York it was Beauty X Capital. In Dallas it was Beauty X Retail in LA was Beauty X demand generation. And there we developed the 360 curriculum to educate beauty entrepreneurs on those topics. And all of these were the precursors to what we have today because you know, as all good things, it came to an end. Covid essentially destroyed that business. And the only thing left was Beauty independent.
