The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview with Bybi Beauty founders Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic now on iTunes and Spotify.
GLOW JOURNAL: You both grew up interested in beauty, but in different ways. Elsie, you’ve spoken before about how makeup became a part of your outfit pretty much as soon as you were allowed to wear it, whereas Dominika, your interest was more on the skin side of things- doing DIY spa days at home (which I can absolutely relate to). But I’d like to start be rewinding about as far as we can possibly go… What are you very first memories of beauty?
ELSIE: This is a funny one actually, because I just saw that Lancôme have just relaunched their Juicy Tube lip glosses. They’ve just relaunched them, which I just feel is nostalgia at its best. Those lip glosses would definitely up there in my earliest memories of beauty- going to school with every, colour and shade of them, the bright red, the orange. They always smelled amazing. You were just walking around with these really quite… not that practical sticky lips, with your hair sticking to them.
Rewinding the clock back even further, one of my earliest memories of beauty is hair mascara. I used to do the two front bits of my hair. This is when I was young, like primary school, in various colours. Usually they’d be quite garish and not particularly attractive greens and blues. So that, for me, was about experimenting with quite cheap and random, but quite vibrant, different bits of makeup at school with all my mates. I think that was beginnings of beauty.
DOMINIKA: I think my first lip gloss was The Body Shop- those pots, the heavily fragranced ones. That was my year six, just dousing my lips in those and getting all my hair stuck in them and not being very cool.
I would say my first makeup memory was… I grew up in Australia, so I remember sitting on the floor of Target in front of all of the Maybelline counters, and then covering my hands in foundation trying to find my shade and just getting it horrifically wrong. I had incredible skin when I was 14. I don’t know why on earth I thought I needed a full face of foundation.
I remember that excitement of buying my first makeup bits, trying everything on and feeling really grown up. I think I’ve always loved beauty but, for me, it was the spa things. Even in lockdown I thought “You know what? I’m going to get back to my roots and give myself a pedicure.” So I got a little kit off Amazon. I’m going to do all the cuticles and the buffing. I used to love that when I was younger, and I would spend Sundays just giving myself a pedicure.
When did you leave Australia?
DOMINIKA: I left after year 12.
So you would have been here when the Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse was the one big foundation.
DOMINIKA: Yes! That pot!
It was impossible to colour match. They had every shade, but not one person was wearing the correct one.
ELSIE: That wasn’t just in Australia guys, that was international. It was big here in the UK. A kind of muddy, stony colour I think I went for, with a line around the chin.
Well I’m thrilled that I’m not alone in that. Your professional background, both of you, is in advertising- but when you were younger, what did you think you would be when you grew up.
ELSIE: We both have pretty clear ideas on this. I thought it was going to be an actress, which then, with sales and becoming an entrepreneur, I feel like I act like pretty regularly! You put on a front the whole time basically.
I thought I was going to go to RADA and I was going to be big. Then I studied it at uni and decided that my fellow classes were a bunch of…. I’ll take that offline. I thought they were all over the top thespians, and it wasn’t a world I wanted to be in- and I wanted to make money, so I figured it probably wasn’t the right course for me.
DOMINIKA: I wanted to be a journalist, and similarly realised that it was really badly paid, so I pivoted and worked in book publishing- also really badly paid. Then I went into sales as well. I was always writing. I loved English. I was always about reading and all that kind of stuff. So for me, when I was in high school, I was committed to being a journalist. It didn’t quite pan out that way!
But you know, we both have good skills, good foundation skills!
If my research serves me, you met each other around 2012, 2013 when you were working in ad sales. While we’re on skills, I imagine the skillset necessary for a role in that world would come in very handy when launching a brand. Are there any specific lessons that you took from that time that you find you are still applying to your work with Bybi now?
ELSIE: Definitely. We both went into sales quite early once we’d lost the pipe dream of the acting and the journalism. We both kind of pivoted quite hard, like age 21, and got into call centre kind of sales. We’ve done some pretty dirty sales! By the time we met, we had upgraded slightly to ad sales. We weren’t in the call centre any more!
DOMINIKA: It goes call centres, recruitment, then ad sales. It’s the hierarchy of sales.
ELSIE: No, wait. Estate agents are in there somewhere!
But skills. Loads. Even working in call centres, the tenacity, the commitment and the persuasion that you need to close a deal over a phone and persuade that person to give you their bank details over the phone was mastery! That stuck with us. We’re constantly pitching. We’re on pitch mode all the time when running a business. Once we’d met each other, immediately we were running big pitch meetings and pitching for pretty big ad spends as well to some large advertisers internationally. I think those skills of being able to hold your own in a meeting and, again, being able to be persuasive and close a deal has been so useful.
We meet founders all the time who have got the flare for product and they’ve got this amazing idea, but when it comes to being able to sell yourself and sell your idea, they really fall down. We were lucky, coming from that background. It’s definitely served us well, and it means that we can comfortably walk into a room with an investor or a retailer or a perspective candidate that we want to hire, and we’re able to quite comfortably sell the idea of the business. That’s been very, very useful.
On meeting, you connected over the wellness movement that was really just beginning to gain a bit of traction at that time- but I feel like it’s one thing to have this mutual interest, but it’s another thing entirely to think “We could potentially start working on something together.” So what do you think it was about one another that really drew you together beyond just being workplace friends?
DOMINIKA: I think we’ve always been super ambitious, so I think in the back of each of our minds we’ve always wanted to start our own venture and be entrepreneurs. I think working in sales is very entrepreneurial. You were kind of in charge of your own patch and you’re in charge of your own revenue. It’s very similar to owning a business in a certain way. So I think that, because we were successful at that, we thought “Can we take this to the next level and actually think about running a business?”
We were always comfortable with the idea of doing it together because we had worked together, so we were able to assess each other’s work ethic and work with each other in a professional environment. We were colleagues and we respected each other from a work perspective, so I think that built a really good foundation for a business partnership.
The idea, in terms of building a business, evolved really naturally. When we started Clean Beauty Insiders back in 2015 it was really unique, and the market in the UK was so dire that we were like “Let’s just see what we can do.” At that point, you know, no one was really making natural beauty cool. It was very nuts and berries and granola. No mainstream beauty consumer would ever consider using natural products in the shape or form that they were being presented.
We were 20 somethings living in London and looking for great skincare. We thought “If we are interested in this movement, could we share content that would appeal to people like us?” It wasn’t necessarily like “Oh, we’re going to launch a skincare brand in three years.” It was more like “Hey, let’s start an Instagram and just start sharing content and see where it goes.”
It picked up really quickly. We were really excited about the traction. We started generating revenue, from a content perspective, quite early on. We were always experimenting with different things. We always had different ideas about how we could monetise on the content that we were producing, and it started to work. Then, we had built up enough of a following that we were able to attract a literary agent and a book deal. At that point we were like “Okay, this is actually a business now. We can justifiably say that there’s commercial value in what we’re doing- so let’s continue. Let’s devote more of our time our energy and see where it goes.”
That’s such good advice, to actually take the time and look at what you’re doing before you say “Okay, this is a business. This has got legs.” I feel like there’s so much out there that says “If you’ve got an idea, go for it.” That’s all well and good, but there’s so much more to it beyond just having the idea.
DOMINIKA: Yes, and we started the blog in early 2015 and we didn’t launch Bybi until August 2017. So two and a half years later was when we actually launched our brand. We didn’t quit our jobs until the end of 2016, so we weren’t in a rush, but equally, we weren’t dilly dallying. We both made a decision and kind of said “Let’s go for it.” But that was after a good year and a half and a book deal with Penguin. It wasn’t like we just kind of took the leap. It was quite a calculated leap at that point.
So you launched Clean Beauty Insiders in 2015. Talk me through the lead up to that launch. At what point did you start pouring over cosmetics labels together and start putting in the groundwork?
ELSIE: It came from food. It was something that we were kind of naturally already doing in food. I know that it’s a bit of a weird thing to bond over, but the UK is quite far behind other countries when it comes to this kind of thing. It was quite novel and quite interesting watching quite a healthy movement really take hold of the mainstream, and a movement that was being championed by bloggers. It was when Instagram was still in its early days. It was so interesting for us, working in advertising, to see people who actually didn’t have a background or any kind of experience in what they were talking about. They were simply sharing their own journeys and building up huge followings. And then bam, they’d launch their book, or they’d launch their protein bar or their cafe or their deli. We found that super interesting.
We equally recognised that that market was becoming saturated quite quickly, and whilst we enjoyed making the odd sweet potato brownie and sharing a recipe, it was neither of our true passion point. We were just interested in it.
Naturally, being the sort of entrepreneurial spirits that we were, we were looking at other industries and made this connection between beauty and food, and the kind of natural progression that if you started to think about what you’re eating, you then start to think about what you’re putting on your skin. Us pouring over cosmetic level labels at the beginning was very much an extension of pouring over food labels.
Bringing it together, talking more about it and creating the beginnings of what then turned into the blog was really in the same way that you share your beauty secrets and you swap your hair mascaras back at school, we were exchanging recipes, ideas and knowledge- like “Hey, did you know that this cream contains this?” Or “Did you know this eye cream that we’ve been using for years is mainly full of water?” We were both super interested in it, and not coming from backgrounds in it meant it was all new to us. It was a completely new kind of industry. It started as talking about what was happening over our weekends, like “Oh, I just made this bath soap and it was so easy, why isn’t anyone doing this? Why hasn’t anybody thought of doing this before?” The only thing that existed was, like we’ve said, very nuts and berries- it was not speaking to us as mainstream, millennial beauty consumers.
That gradually grew. WhatsApps turned into Saturday morning brunches, and maybe after our yoga class, we’d have an avo toast and talk about a body butter that we could make. And then we started making it together. It was a hobby.
It was humble, as well. I think we were very open and honest with ourselves and then our followers later on in that it was new to us and we were new to the industry and we would make mistakes. I think that was what connected with people- this transparency in what we were doing. That, to us, has been really important. We’ve kept that, all the way through to starting Bybi- this level of transperancy and honest and not preaching. We started to share that on the blog with our community and that really resonated as well and grew from there.
That really does come across as a consumer. It all feels so honest and so transparent, which is very, very refreshing in this industry.
ELSIE: I think in the wellness industry as well, there was this sort of holier than thou, slightly preachy vibe that went on. There was also this uber glossy, not particularly real or authentic version of people’s lives, which neither of us bought into because neither of us are like that. We don’t live like that. We really appreciated valued what that kind of influencer or blogger were building out, but equally we wanted to build something that was made a bit more relatable. That, again, has stuck through with Bybi as well. For us, the brand should be relatable. We say it’s inspirational, not aspirational. We want to empower and inspire people. We don’t want to be like something that they wish that they could be, but know that they never could.
You’ve mentioned that you started making your own soaps and body butters. You launched the blog in 2015 I know that at some point you both studied formulation. When did that come into it? Did you start experimenting with things at home and then look to build on that? Or was it something you’d already looked in?
DOMINIKA: I think we had started experimenting, really enjoyed it and thought “Can we develop our knowledge in order to make more sophisticated things?” Cosmetic chemistry is hugely complex, and neither of us come from science backgrounds so our understanding of things was quite limited. But we found a real flare for it, so we thought we could continue researching and discovering. We found a great online community where we were able to obtain a diploma- Formula Botanica, and they focus on organic and natural skincare formulation but in a very classically trained way. We look at preservatives and emulsifiers and stabilisers and testing. It’s not your DIY hobbyist community. It’s very professional. That was really important to us as well because we were trying to give this movement legitimacy. We wanted to do a qualification and share information that was really legitimate and safe as well, which is so important.
It kind of happened alongside the blog building. I think we did it in late 2015, so prior to writing the book because obviously the recipes in the book are still very basic, but they needed to be thoroughly researched, thoroughly safe and thoroughly usable. While we don’t formulate now (we have a Bybi NPD team, we have a chemist in house who’s a classically trained cosmetic chemist), we speak the lingo, we understand ingredients, we understand the process of building a formula and I think that’s really important as a founder. Even if you’re not directly involved in that, you can have those conversations and understand the technical side of the business as well. Similarly, we have no experience in accounting or finance, but you pick up that understanding and it’s really important as a founder that you can kind of grasp those concepts.
From a formulation perspective, it was just super important for us because product is everything. If you don’t have great products, you’re nothing. No matter how great your brand is, no matter how many followers you have on Instagram. We always knew that whatever we did with product, it had to be excellent and superior. For us, that meant having that knowledge.
You’ve used the phrase DIY hobbyist in there, which I think is worth touching on. You’ve mentioned on your own podcast how, at the time, the bulk DIY beauty content was coming at it from one of two angles. There was that hobbyist way, like “Ooh, look what I can do,” and it’s not really doing a whole lot. I think the example you used was when you’re kid and you put some flowers in water and go “Taadaa, rose perfume. Look what I’ve done!” So there’s that side of it. And then there’s the thrifty budget version of it- “You can create a budget version of this product at home.” You weren’t coming at it from either of those angles and you’re still not. It was just out of curiosity and a wish for better products. I think with that though, whenever you do something that is truly new, it’s wonderful to identify that gap but it can take the public a little bit of time to come around to newness. How was the public response?
ELSIE: It’s interesting the views of DIY. It was definitely either very juvenile or very Etsy. Or, I think another perception of DIY beauty is around safety as well. A lot of the stick that it gets can be around people sharing information and recipes for products that aren’t safe because they haven’t been preserved properly. So there was a big pre reputation that we had to tackle as well coming into it. Going back to what I said earlier about our approach to the way that we were sharing our information and our content, made a massive difference in how people then engage with it. We were taking this fairly laid back, very honest and open, informative but not preachy approach to what we were sharing, and really owning up to when we made mistakes as well. When we were experimenting and made something horrible, that smelt disgusting, we would tell everyone about it. We weren’t hiding behind anything. I think that really helped to shift people’s perceptions around what they may have thought DIY beauty meant. Also, if you then look to the way we branded things, looking at our book, I think our book has also stood the test of time.
It still looks really beautiful and a lot of thought went into the branding and visual identity of what wasn’t even a brand back then. It was our own kind of personal blog, but again, that was very different. It was modern. It was fresh, it was vibrant. It looked more like a beauty book and less like a kind of a wholesome Whole Foods style book. I think that really resonated with people.
Ultimately, and this is still true now with Bybi, but I think the real thing that really sets you apart and helps the customer is performance. What we were saying is “We’re not doing this for cost, although you can have cost savings, we’re not doing this for sustainability, although it is a much for sustainable practise. We’re doing this because we’ve seen like a true difference and transformation in our skin. Here’s what that journey looks like, and here are some of the things that we were suffering from and we don’t suffer from anymore.” Anybody engaging with any kind of beauty content does it because they want good skin, right? We do it because it’s ultimately driven by some form of vanity. That’s the industry that we’re in. And if you can convince people that what you’re talking about will work, then they’ll buy into it. I think perhaps where people have gone wrong in the past with DIY beauty was not focusing at all on performance. Some people might have thought “That’s nice, that’s cute, but it’s not going to work. It’s not going to make a difference to my skin.” And what we were saying was “Guys, this really will make a difference to your skin.”
It’s the same with Bybi today. Less so now, but there was always a bit of a conception around natural and clean. For us, the performance first message is what we lead with. This is going to work. We believe it’s going to work because we use great natural ingredients, and any messaging underneath that, around being vegan, clean and sustainable, is kind of secondary because first and foremost, you want to believe that it works. I think we did a good job of convincing people that what we found was great natural ingredients that lead to better skin.
Well convince them you did, because Clean Beauty Insiders did gain something of a cult following- pun absolutely intended. I’d love to hear more about Clean Cult, your beauty festival When and how did that come to be?
DOMINIKA: Yeah, that was a really interesting endeavour. That was very much part of us experimenting and building the brand. There were so many beauty festivals going on in London and there was just nothing that catered towards this movement that we were building. So we thought “Let’s create it ourselves,” as we often do. We actually joined forces with another pair of bloggers to run the event, and it was hugely successful. We ran three in the end, and each of them were sell outs and had amazing feedback. I think the only thing that held us back from scaling that was just that events are so time intensive and really, really difficult to run when you’re doing everything yourself. So we decided to hit pause on that and focus on Bybi, which was just about to launch, and that’s been our focus ever since.
But the roots of that festival were really relevant and the consumers loved it too- we still get people asking us when the next Clean Cult is, so we might have to bring it back! But I think again, it was just a validating. It was like “Can we take this offline, bring loads of brands together and create an experience where people really understand that natural beauty is about performance?” You could come get your nails done and get a facial and try loads of great products like you would do if you were going to a Glamour beauty festival or BeautyCon, but in an environment which obviously catered more towards the brands that were there and the experience that we were trying to deliver. But it was a great experiment for us to show, again, that there was an appetite for what we were doing.
So at this point you’re working full time, you’re running Clean Beauty Insiders, you’re hosting these Clean Cult events, and then you start to write the book that you’ve mentioned- Clean Beauty, 100 Recipes for the Skin, Body and Hair. Just a casual 100 recipes, and published by Penguin no less. Talk me through this time, because it’s a lot.
ELSIE: Yeah, it was a lot actually! Not that things have gotten any easier- we’ve still got this much on our plate. But we get asked a lot about this- when’s the right time to quit your job? I’d say the build up to this was a good sign post for both of us that we were gearing up to the right time to quit our jobs, because it was just becoming unmanageable. I think what we tend to say is that the realisation moment was that we were doing a pretty awful job. Not an awful job. We were doing a good job, we’re beating ourselves up a bit here, but we were struggling to do the best job that we could across our full time jobs and everything that was going on in Clean Beauty. Something had to give.
I was working at Facebook at the time, which was really full on, and Dom was pretty much leading the European office of an ad tech startup. Our day jobs weren’t light. We weren’t rolling in and doing half a day here or there. It was pretty intense. And we were writing a book on top of that as well. A hundred recipes! We did really set ourselves up there. A hundred recipes is tough because we had to make them all as well, try them all, and thoroughly test them all. It was a challenging time. I think we learnt a lot. It set us up for the beginnings- a flavour or a taste of entrepreneurship and what was to come. It helped us decipher the point of being able to feel comfortable quitting the day job.
I would say to anybody that’s thinking about it, you kind of need to get to that point to feel like there is enough work to do. And obviously, aside from it being financially stable, we were kind of proving to ourselves and to each other that this was a business and that there was enough going on.
We were running workshops at the weekends, then we’d do a Clean Cult on a Sunday, which we were tidying up until 11pm, and then straight into work the next day. And we were not really allowed to talk about it with our employers because it’s kind of a bit of a conflict of interest. It was a hectic, hectic time, and actually quite physically hectic as well because we were running these events and we’d be the ones like running up and down stairs with boxes and stuff. But we needed all of that. It really set us up to understand what we were getting ourselves into and to say “Right, let’s do this. We can’t go on like this. Now’s the time to quit the day job.”
I also heard that every single publisher that you pitched the book to placed a bid. That must have been a nice indicator of “Oh, okay, people like what we’re doing.”
ELSIE: That helped. It went to auction!
So the book was published in January of 2017. A very, very big year for you both, given that later that year you officially launched Bybi- although, when I was doing a deep dive… am I right in saying that there might have been an earlier iteration, to the tune of a Fuss Free Moisturiser, with labels designed on Keynote?
DOMINIKA: Stop digging! You’re uncovering all of our buried secrets that we pretend didn’t happen!
But yes, we were like “Hey let’s just launch products.” We actually took our favourite recipes from the workshops and the book, the ones that people absolutely loved. Actually we’ve missed part of this, which was the markets!
On top of everything else we were doing, over kind of like a six week period, we decided to pitch up a big market in London and sell our wares. We had our pots of Fuss Free and our beauty products that we had handmade and we were selling them, which did really well. It’s just all about these really small points of validation. It’s not about going out and raising 2 million pounds on a pre-seed, on an idea. It’s about hustling at a market and being like “Is someone going to pay 15 quid for my pot?” VCs will give you money, but will that person fork over 15 quid? That is the best proof of concept test.
So yes, we did have an early iteration. We did sell it on the Clean Beauty Insiders website. But for us, there was always a bit of a muddy between are we building a product brand on Clean Beauty Insiders, or are we building a content platform? And I think for us, launching Bybi was… we wanted to shake the shackles of what we had built with Clean Beauty Insiders in a way, which was DIY, it was a little bit more basic, it was very centred around natural and making things yourself. We wanted to pivot because what we discovered was a real gap in the market. At that point, after being in the market for a number of years, there was no one really doing natural, ethical skincare, but focusing on performance and delivering it in a way that felt accessible. Even the early stuff with Clean Beauty Insiders wasn’t there yet. It was still very minimalist. It was still very white. What we wanted to do was create a mainstream beauty brand, but underpin it with ethics. Everything we had done up until that point was very much leading up to that light bulb moment of being like “Okay, we know that clean beauty insiders works really well, but bringing products into the mix is probably too confusing- so let’s launch a skincare brand.” And this was in the time when Glossier was booming, it was Glossier’s moment. It was mid 2017, and we were like “Why is no one else doing that kind of like really cool, affordable, accessible skincare, but still maintaining the ethical perspective on it?” because we knew that there was an appetite for that. There were loads of indie brands, and there are many more now, but there was still quite a few in 2017. Deciem was doing really well. You have loads of brands popping up on Instagram, but none of them really catered towards a more natural audience. Drunk Elephant wasn’t massive, but it was getting there, so clean was becoming a little bit more well known and a little bit more universally accepted as delivering on performance. So we just thought “We have all this experience in natural, let’s build a skincare brand.”
Everything that we had done, particularly from a product perspective, was building up to that moment. Bybi when it launched was very different to Clean Beauty Insiders, and that was very calculated from our perspective.
So the launch was 2017, but that light bulb moment that you’ve just talked me through, when was that? How far in advance did did that happen?
DOMENIKA: It probably happened towards the end of 2016. Then we spent the early part of 2017 building Bybi. We went through a few different naming stages, we thought about products, we thought about manufacturing, we thought about packaging. We kind of soft launched a couple of products to test the market, and then we officially launched in August 2017. Then we went live on ASOS that same months. So that was a moment where, you know, Bybi had come to town. People really started to recognise the fact that we were building something quite separate to Clean Beauty Insiders.
It’s not a quick process. And to be honest, I feel like the brand has been in development for years, and we’re only now just getting to the point where I personally feel the brand is almost in its finished form. It’s not easy building a brand. It takes a really long time. And actually being in market and being able to iterate is a really important part of that process, because you never quite know how things are going to go down until the product is in people’s hands and people give you feedback on the packaging and the way that it looks and the way that it feels.
So in late 2016, where did you start? You already had a really deep understanding of formulation science, but how did you settle on which specific products you would develop and launch with?How did you find a manufacturer and a chemist and decide on the packaging?
ELSIE: It was difficult to know where to start. I think we just started to reach out to everybody and anybody that we knew that might remotely be able to help us, and ended up getting connections and introductions to various people in the industry that could then guide us and point us in the right direction of a great manufacturer or great packaging supplier or somebody that could look at our branding.
It’s quite difficult to find things like manufacturers as a small brand because you go out thinking that you’re now the client. We’re the ones being sold to. But actually, when you’re that size, a lot of manufacturers won’t even look at you. It’s not worth their time unless you can promise them that you’re going to be doing a large volume of units. It’s not that interesting to them. So in actual fact, and we kind of learned this the hard way in going into meetings with manufacturers- it was us having to do the pitching again. It wasn’t the other way around. We kind of got lucky and got an in, where a lot of manufacturers weren’t even responding to our emails. Somebody made an introduction to somebody who’s now still a partner today and who’s been really supportive in our growth and happy to take a chance on a budding young brands that showed promise, and kind bought into the dream of “We’re going to be big one day!” We’re only just moving into being one of their biggest clients, and that taken years to develop.
It’s the same across the board. We were doing small runs, we were looking for small quantities of things, so there was a lot of selling in the dream and saying “This might be small now guys, but it will get bigger. We promise!” Luckily enough, we got back to our sales and persuasion skills and people did buy into it. And also because we were doing something different, we had a different vision. We were trying to be a little bit disruptive and a lot of people were excited by that, particularly in an industry that doesn’t change that often- or hadn’t changed that often up until that. People were willing to give us a chance. So we spent a long time mapping it out, working with manufacturers and mapping out what the range would look like.
We didn’t go straight into launching a five skew range. We realised quite quickly that that would take a lot longer than we thought. At the very beginning, somebody said to us “It will take you about nine months to get out product on the shelves.” And we were like “No, it won’t. That’s rubbish.” But it actually did. So in the interim, we launched a hero skew- Babe Balm, which is still alive and kicking today. It’s a little pot of miracle balm that actually was an iteration of the Fuss Free Moisturiser that you so rightly referred to. It’s a multipurpose balm, and we actually hand made that the very beginning. So the first samples that anybody saw, including the likes of Asos, were handmade by us with labels that we had printed by a really small local company and jars that we’d sourced by ourselves. And obviously we had a very secure, hygienic, lab in East London- it was all legit. But again, a testament to how we’ve always been a bit like roll your sleeves up and kind of get on with it, because we could see that nine months was probably a little bit too long for us to be able to wait without any kind of revenue coming in. So we continued the workshops. We obviously had the book, and then we were like, let’s just get something to market. Let’s just get it into people’s hands, see what people think and pitch it to retailers. It makes such a difference going to a retail meeting with at least something in front of you, rather than just mockups of products. That got us a really long way. People loved it. People still love it. The name was fun. We launched it with a biodegradable glitter campaign that we sent out to a load of journalists and got probably the biggest amount of coverage we’ve ever got for a launch. The budget was… well there wasn’t a budget. It was tiny, but it was just like “Add some sparkle to your day with biodegradable glitter,” and people loved it.
We don’t rush things, we do think things through. We’re very measured in our approach but, equally, we don’t believe in sitting and waiting around for something to be perfect. You just don’t grow and you don’t learn that way. Even if it’s wrong, and even if you make a mistake, that is how you develop and evolve as a brand and equally as a team and equally as an individual who’s running a business. That was a real early days example of just doing something. Just get it, get it done, do it, see what happens. Then realise the challenges along the way. Iy wasn’t perfect, but we learned loads.
So that was the early days- 2016 and 2017. While we’re on the early days, there’s a really, really great episode of your podcast in which you talk about getting funding, which I really encourage everyone to listen to because it’s a fascinating listen. But you raised pre-seed funding of something to the tune of 150k. Now, obviously you have gone into detail on this elsewhere, so in as little detail as you wish- how?!
DOMINIKA: I don’t even know! It’s, again, sales skills. We spent probably the summer of 2017 fundraising. I think every fund raise gets slightly easier. The first one was horrific. We took so many meetings and we had so many people rejecting us, rejecting us, rejecting us. We were at the very, very, very early stage and we had a lot to show for what we had done, but in terms of numbers on the paper, we were essentially a prelaunch business. A lot of investors aren’t ready for that. You need to find a select group of people that will invest that early on. It was mainly through networks to be honest. I know that’s the cliche. Every entrepreneur will say “Value your network.
Your network is the most important thing. You’ve always got to be networking.” We hate networking. We are literally the two people standing in the corner of the room, whispering in each other’s ears and snickering. We hate networking, but it’s a necessary evil when you’re fundraising. The more people you know, the more people that you meet with, the more conversations you have, the more you learn and the more you have the chance to succeed. It’s all a numbers game. It’s sales. It’s literally sales 101, which is why I genuinely think we’ve been able to jump these massive hurdles.
We were two female entrepreneurs. You know that the level of female funding globally is like 2.5%, so we’re already in this tiny minority of women that get funding. Not only that, we had no experience in what we were doing. We had no financial background. Our financial forecast was horrendous. They were literally done in like a Google sheet. But we were able to convince someone that no matter what we lacked in terms of practical experience with skills, we made up for in hard work and passion, and that we were going to find a way to be successful. We had already forged that path for ourselves.
We met our lead investor for our seed raise through a connection. We met her, I think we had spoken an event. She heard us speak, got in touch, took a meeting. Obviously we’re in challenging times at the moment, but there are angel communities and there are a lot of people with money who want to support small businesses, and ex entrepreneurs or people that have made their money get a buzz off working with young entrepreneurs. So there’s always people that will invest and take a chance. You just need to spend the time finding the right people, and you have to take a lot of our meetings. You have to kiss a few frogs!
We did raise 150k, which at the time felt like the most amount of money. It’s a huge amount of money to invest into a pre-revenue, early stage businesses, but a huge amount of money that doesn’t last us very long. But with that we were able to start to build out our team. We took on a great branding agency. We were able to pay for our first manufacturing run. We were able to get off the ground. Beauty is a very capital intensive business to grow. Even the bigger you get, the more capital intensive it becomes to be honest. Funding is really quite an essential part of building a successful big beauty business. It’s something that we were aware of from very early on. So we successfully closed that round and it was a great moment, and then we were able to just forge on ahead.
And that you did! You’re very open and honest about how long that process took and also how long it was before you could actually pay yourself wages. Can you talk a little bit more about that time and any big learnings you took from that first, quite lean, period?
ELSIE: There were a lot of learnings from both personal finance as well as the business finance. We came into it with a mutual agreement on the amount of money that we were both willing to put aside. So it was essentially our investment into the business, although it stayed in our bank accounts. It funded us for the first year while we didn’t take a salary. Coming from sales roles where we were on decent commission checks, that’s what sales is all about, right? So it was a big lifestyle change for us and a big shift. But what we did back then, and perhaps didn’t even appreciate what we were doing, was be open and honest with each other about talking very specifically about amounts and what we thought that we needed to live off. I think that is really important, because if you are open and saying “okay, I’m not going to take a salary for a while,” you need to be very realistic about how viable that is live on, because it will get very stressful if it’s not. We came into it sensibly. We talked earlier about knowing the right time to quit, and a huge part of that decision making process was both feeling comfortable that we had enough money to live on. You cannot underestimate that. You won’t make money overnight. You’ve got to be really, really comfortable knowing that you can live or that you’ll be supported or whatever shape or form that will take. You need to enter into it not feeling the strains of personal finances, because that will put very different pressures on the business- particularly if you’re entering into it as a partnership and particularly if your situations might be different as well.
From the personal side, I’d say a learning was that we were thoughtful and thorough in making sure that we were comfortable from a business perspective. We learnt so much.
Key learnings would probably be… I would probably bring in external finance help earlier than you think you need it. We weren’t talking about hiring a finance director from day one, but actually it probably would have made both of our lives a bit easier if we had had somebody in the business that could have helped and supported on that side of things. So even if it’s running it by a friend or somebody that has experience, or even bringing somebody in on a part time basis, looking for external financial help or financial support when you are fundraising is useful.
I would say that we learnt a lot about running the business in a lean way. Which is good, actually, bootstrapping is good. But, equally, I would say you always need to fundraise sooner than you think. So whilst we learnt a hell of a lot about bootstrapping the business, there were very tense times where the bootstrap was incredibly thin. If we’d started maybe a couple of months earlier, it probably would have been slightly less stressful. And we’ve learned that now. We’re going into our fourth fundraise pretty soon, and we’re both just like “Start now. Just do it now.” Don’t fundraise when you need to, because it becomes stressful if you’re running out of money. And people smell desperation! It’s a bit like when you’re dating and you’re desperate for a boyfriend. It’s like the investors just know, and you start making some pretty poor decisions. Not that we made any bad decisions, but you can see how people get themselves into bad situations.
So, Babe Balm was kind of the soft launch. It’s mind blowing to be picked up by ASOS straight away. Which products came next?
DOMINIKA: We launched a facial exfoliator that is now called Smooth and Soothe Scrub. Then we launched a trio of products, one of which is Mega Mist, which is still a huge best seller for us, then we launched Supercharge Serum, and then we launched a product called Detox Dust which we have now discontinued, which we have now discontinued, which was our powder face mask. It was a great product, but maybe just too early for its time. Actually if we launched now, it would have done really well.
So we had quite a capsule collection. It was very much additional products- it wasn’t going after your core cleanser and moisturising segment. That was quite a challenge for a young brand to steal those really kind of core essentials from someone’s bathroom shelf, so we wanted to bring people into Bybi in a softer manner. We continued to do things like that, through the Boosters and through great price points. We bring people into the fold, and then we convince them that Bybi is great through efficacy, performance and quality, and then they buy our cleansers and our moisturisers. That’s a strategy that’s always worked really well for us.
We had a tiny product range, and with that product range. We built a business off of those products. We didn’t have a massive assortment. We went into a number of retailers with those products and tarted to build a business, which was really exciting.
On those retailers, you are stocked all over the world now- aside from ASOS, you’re in Sephora Australia, Revolve, Boots… Has having these huge international stockists changed the way that you operate and how you develop products at all?
ELSIE: I think we’re quite unusual in the way that we develop products because we own it all in house. We’ve got a chemist. We have our own lab which, for a brand of our size, is actually quite unusual. That process is really important to us. We get hugely excited about being involved in that process. We sign off everything on our NPD calendar. Every single formula. We will not sign off anything that we don’t believe is of the standard that we believe will change skin. So that process is quite unique as it is, and we’re very proud of that. So we wouldn’t for example, work on collaborations with retails were they were coming up with the formulation or anything like that, and equally we don’t formulate for our retailers- we formulate for our customers. I think that is a cycle that brands can get stuck in.
It’s a tricky balance, because on the flip side of that their experience and data behind what the customer wants is also hugely valuable. So what we try and do is work really openly and collaboratively with them. We’ve got some great contacts and some great buyers at a lot of our accounts who we can run ideas past- you know, “What do you think about this?” or “What do you think about launching an eye cream in July versus October?” That kind of thing. But the process is very much ours.
I would say that the main thing that they have really helped us to get us into better practice and better discipline with is forecasting our NPD calendar further out. We’re not working month on month now. We’re working year on year, which is much better. And that’s not just working with retailers. That’s us growing as a business. That’s us building our own NPD team. We’ve got a fantastic NPD manager. But a lot of these retailers will have quite long lead times, particularly if we’re looking at, say, Sephora Australia, where we’ve got to get it over there as well. It’s forced us to get into the habit of building out longer pipelines and thinking much further ahead, which is always a good thing to think about.
But, you know, on the flip side, we’re still very reactive and we still can get stuff to market quite quickly if there’s something that we truly believe in. Our CBD Booster, for example, we got to market in six weeks. It was an ingredient that we were like “This is outstanding for the skin,” and we could turn it around really quickly. I think working with larger retailers, you just have to get into more disciplined ways of working which can be a little bit alarming and difficult as a startup in the early days, because you’re kind of chaotic and all over the place. But, working with them from quite early on gets you into those rhythms, whether is be operationally, logistically, from an NPD perspective, that can set you up to be a better and more operationally sound business.
I would love to hear a bit more about that product development process. How long does it take from conceptualisation through to the product being ready for consumers?
DOMINIKA: It really depends on the product. There are some products that we can launch really, really quickly. We’ve just launched an antibacterial hand spray which is really timely and relevant. That took us four and a half weeks, which is an insane time frame to launch a product in. The stars have to align for something like that to happen. So that’s the fastest end of the scale, and when we want to do something we can move supremely quickly.
On the flipside, we’re going to launch an SPF in the next month, and that has taken us a year and a half. There’s such a variety between the complexity of the products. Sometimes we know a formula from day dot, and we can put it straight into testing. Sometimes the formula just doesn’t want to play ball and we have to keep working on it and working on it and scrap it and start again. It really depends.
I think the advantage that we have is that we really control that process. Through our sustainability efforts, we handle most of the procurement of our raw materials and our packaging, so when you look at the entire picture of bringing products to market, we have a lot of control over that process. And that’s what the key is, in order to be quick to market. If you’re working consistently through third parties that purchase on your behalf or do things on your behalf, you’re not going to get that speed because they don’t have the impetus. They tend to be a large organisation that has processes, whereas we’re a lot smaller so we can just make things happen really quickly. That is our advantage, for sure. Being a smaller business. And I hope we never lose that essence, because there is something magical about just seeing a product that needs to come to market and is really relevant, and being able to do that in a matter of weeks rather than months.
You’ve just touched on sustainability there that I think it’s super important that we talk about it because it does really sit at the core of Bybi. Can you talk us through some of the sustainability initiatives that you currently have in place?
ELSIE: Definitely. We’ve actually just done a big review of our sustainability endeavours. Sustainability has always been a huge core to the brand. We started out just trying to do better, whether that be through packaging choices or ingredient sourcing. But the more that we’ve learn about being in the industry and about the processes, more that we’ve been able to really build out a robust sustainability strategy and a beacon that we can operate around as a business.
We look at three key areas of our supply chain- so we don’t just focus on packaging, like a lot of beauty brands do at the moment. A lot of the conversations are focused around packaging right now, and we just don’t believe that’s right. There’s a huge and complex supply chain when it comes to beauty, we should all be looking at the entire thing.
We look at our sustainability from seed to shell. We look at ingredients, we look at the products are manufactured and processed, and we look at the materials that we use for our packaging each as important as one another. The kind of centrepiece between those three pillars is carbon emissions. We truly believe that the biggest change that we can make to have the biggest and most positive impact on our planet, and to really help the climate crisis, is to lower CO2 emissions. Ultimately, that is the biggest thing that we can do as a business. So when choosing an ingredient, when choosing a material for packaging, when deciding how we produce our products, it all comes back to what is the carbon footprint of that. Whether it be the carbon footprint of the way that an ingredient is harvested, whether it be how it’s got to us (we produce everything here in the UK, so does it need to fly, in which case we won’t use it), whether it be a carbon neutral sugarcane material that we use for all of our tubes- every single decision that we make is centred around carbon emissions. Our ultimate goal for 2020 is to get to net carbon zero, and then 2021 and beyond we will be putting in some targets around significantly reducing our actual carbon. To get to net carbon zero, a lot of that will be kind of retrospectively offsetting some of the carbon that’s already happened.
But that’s not the solution. What we need to do, moving forward is significantly reduce what we’re actually emitting as a brand. It’s a very complex piece of work. I guess all the consumer needs to know when they’re buying Bybi is that we create beauty products that impact your skin, not your planet. Everything we do is about getting great skin with a minimal, minimal impact on planet. There’s so much that goes on beneath that. Some of it we talk about, some of we don’t.
But if you’re more interested, tune into our Susty Summits which we now hold remotely. Immerse yourself in the world of sustainability. For us, it’s a war on carbon. That’s the one thing that we can do as a brand to really help.
You’ve both been recognised as innovators and thought leaders in beauty, and obviously around sustainability as well, since 2015. Over the last five years, what are some of the biggest changes that you’ve seen within the beauty industry?
DOMINIKA: That’s a great question. There probably hasn’t been as many as you would think. I think the biggest changes that we’ve seen is a shift in attitudes towards packaging. We’re seeing… I wouldn’t say a lot less virgin plastic, there’s an immeasurable amount of Virgin plastic being still produced- un-recyclable virgin plastic. But there is a slightly more conscious shift away from those kinds of materials. People are looking towards more eco options. I think retailers are becoming more focused on that as well. Boots, our UK main partner, are very focused on sustainability which is great. So all of those initiatives are filtering down to brands. Some brands care more than others.
I think, hand in hand with that, the vegan and cruelty free messaging is becoming more prevalent. That isn’t necessarily directly linked to the environment as such, it doesn’t necessarily directly play into our carbon conversation, but I think what it does mean is there’s a general awareness around some of the bad practices in beauty and some of the unnecessary ones, for example, including animal byproducts in your beauty products. So I think there’s a general enhanced awareness around some ethical issues in beauty as well. A lot of people are aware of China, for example, now. A consumer would always say “Do you sell into China?” Because they know that if you do, you have to test on animals. And that’s something that has been a consumer awareness that has just peaked only recently. There’s really not enough change going on. Packaging is one small part of the puzzle.
In terms of manufacturing, looking at green energy, I think there’s only one or two manufacturers in the UK that use green energy to power their plants. If you think about the carbon emissions versus traditional fossil fuel powered energy, versus renewable green energy, it’s insane. A lot of manufacturers don’t have recycling policies or water usage policies or waste management policies. That’s really where things are going on at that industrial level. We think about air freighting and the amount of goods that are being airfreighted for, speed, for convenience, and for this kind of fast fashion mentality that beauty has. There is still a lot to do and there aren’t really any brands talking about anything beyond packaging. I would be hard pressed to find any brand that’s talking as far as sustainable procurement or how they power their manufacturing or what their carbon footprint is. So there is still a lot of work to do, but it is encouraging to see at least conversation starting to happen.
On that note, what are some of the big changes that you think we can expect to see from the beauty industry in the coming years?
ELSIE: I think the sustainability conversation will just continue on. It’s encouraging that the press have picked up, quite heavily, on calling out brands with bad practises. We’ve now got Instagram accounts dedicated entirely to picking up on brands doing things wrong. You can’t get away with bad practices as easily as you could now, and there’s a growing consumer awareness. I think that will only continue, which is exciting. For us it’s not a competitive advantage. It does work in that way at the moment, but we would much rather all of our peers are doing the same as us. We say carbon copy us. We dare you. We’re open to it. So the sustainability conversation will grow and will pick up momentum as consumers pick it up.
I think outside of sustainability, when it comes to performance and to ingredients in beauty, I think the gap between clean and science will continue to decrease. A couple of years ago, the conversation with natural and clean felt very far away from the sort scientific and clinical skincare that we’ve been very used to. I think that it will continue to become smaller and we’ll start to see a lot of overlap now in very science-based, natural and clean beauty, which I think is really exciting. I think it’s definitely where the natural and clean industry needed to go. It sort of bridges the performance question that I think was kind of held over the natural industry for a long time, in that natural can be advanced and innovative and scientific and clinical.
My final question- what is next for Bybi?
DOMINIKA: What isn’t next for Bybi?! We’ve got a lot of stuff to do. I think for us, we’re just continuing to focus on growth. We’re really excited about the future potential of the brand. It feels really relevant. The conversations we’re having are really timely. A lot of the conversations we’re having haven’t been had yet in beauty. But that excites us.
Of course we’re focused on delivering great skin care products, but constantly pushing the boundary of what we can achieve in natural. We’ve got a fantastic team that is working on our formulations, so first and foremost we want to continue to deliver best in skincare.
We’ve got a tonne of product launching. We’re going to have a really, really great assortment by the end of the year, and then continuing on into next year. We’re focused on expanding the brand. We’ve got great international retailers, and I think probably the US is going to be the next focus for 2021.
We’re just navigating the current climate. Corona and lockdown threw a lot of things at us, a lot of challenged, but as ever we’ve been able to be tenacious and veer through those challenges. So we’re going to come out of lockdown definitely a stronger business.
And then from there, we want to knock those unsustainable fast fashion brands off the shelves. We’re going to go and do that in mass retailers. So see you later. We’re replacing you with our more sustainable, better, more ethical products. Sorry!
To listen to the full interview with Bybi Beauty founders Elsie and Dominika, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify
