Tiffany Masterson was a stay at home mom who wanted to help out the family. With grit and a willingness to be different she built an empire.

Dave Young:

Welcome to The Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom-and-pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

[AirVantage Heating & Cooling Ad]

Dave Young:

Welcome back to The Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young. Stephen Semple is here with another just enticing story of someone who’s built an empire, mostly sold it. Sometimes they’re still running it. And today he told me we’re sticking our toe back in the cosmetics industry.

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

And then he named a company that I’ve never heard of. If you told me the name of it, I wouldn’t have guessed it was cosmetics.

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Dave Young:

Elephant what? Elephant. Drunk Elephant.

Stephen Semple:

Drunk Elephant.

Dave Young:

Drunk Elephant.

Stephen Semple:

And you think of it. It’s a crazy name for anything in cosmetics because it’s not like-

Dave Young:

I mean, it’s a crazy name for anything.

Stephen Semple:

It’s not like you aspire to have skin like an elephant.

Dave Young:

Especially a drunk one.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Drunk Elephant. It was started by Tiffany Masterson in 2013. And six years later, it sold for $845 million to the Japanese company, Shiseido.

Dave Young:

Dang, Tiffany. Way to go.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Right? Crazy, right? And so she’s a 40-year-old stay-at-home mom of four and her brother-in-law got involved in the business and she had no background in skincare business, didn’t have anybody around her in the skincare business. And it was like really her brother-in-law who gave her the seed money. And again, when I came across this and was like, “What the heck does elephants or drunk have anything to do with skincare?” Because elephants are wrinkly.

Dave Young:

Well, and so may I take a detour?

Stephen Semple:

Absolutely.

Dave Young:

I love that kind of a name. The worst, in my opinion, which is correct.

Stephen Semple:

If you do say so yourself.

Dave Young:

If I do say so myself, in my humbly correct opinion, the most intriguing business names are not descriptive names.

Stephen Semple:

Correct.

Dave Young:

They’re names that make you stop and snap your head around and go, “Wait, what?” And descriptive names are okay if you’re just counting on people searching in Google for whatever it is your business describes.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, but I’d even argue-

Dave Young:

But even then-

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

Yeah. We could go on this one for a long time, but I love the name and I love that it’s not Drunk Elephant lipstick. I mean, maybe it is. I don’t even know. It’s skincare.

Stephen Semple:

Everybody around her tried to talk her out of the name and she was like, “No, I’m sticking with this name.” And there’s a little bit of a reason for the name. But coming back to your point, when we go out and take a look at successful businesses. Your very, very, very hard press to find successful businesses where the name is descriptive. And even the ones that are descriptive, we do not even refer to them that way. Case in point, we do not call General Motors General Motors, we call them GM. We do not call General Electric General Electric, we call it GE. There’s Ford. There’s Chrysler, there’s Tesla.

Dave Young:

There’s International Business Machines.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah, which we do not refer to them as I refer to them as IBM. Apple. Microsoft. Now, Microsoft is slightly descriptive, but not at the same time.

Dave Young:

But I love names like Drunk Elephant, Caterpillar.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

Yeah. I love it.

Stephen Semple:

Absolutely. So back to Tiffany. So back to Tiffany. So Tiffany grew up in Houston. Her dad was actually a quarterback. She was not a good student, couldn’t focus in school. She did okay in college. What she really wanted to be, she wanted to be a mom. She wanted to be a mom. She wanted to get married. She wanted to have babies. And she met her husband when she was 30 and was on a blind date and they got married pretty quickly and had babies pretty quickly. And her husband, Charles, was at Enron. Had two kids from a previous message. And when Enron failed, he went on to find a job at Texas Commercial Energy, which then also ended up failing with a bunch of things going on.

But she was happy being at home raising kids. And she had four babies under four years old, but she wanted to do something creative, especially with all these things going on with her husband. She wanted to be able to contribute to the family. And so when she started off with the idea of wanting to do a catering company, and her idea was she was going to sell stuff from Frozen, but she couldn’t make the numbers work. She looked at it and looked at...