The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
What began as a humble, brown paper bag of ground coffee beans is now a 20 million dollar global beauty brand.
When Frank Body co-founders Jess Hatzis and Bree Johnson met as university students, they had no ambitions to work in beauty.
“It was not for any reason other than I just hadn’t thought of it,” Jess confirms.
“I thought I wanted to be political correspondent working in political theory,” Bree agrees. “That was, until I started studying politics.”
While they were working part time jobs at Red Bull in 2011, Jess and Bree co-founded what is now their content creation agency Willow & Blake. “Willow & Blake actually started out as a blog,” Jess explains of the business. For us it was an outlet to write. We were all very passionate writers, but any publications we’d written for would edit our work within an inch of its life. There was no soul left in it. We really wanted to write about the people behind the ideas that we loved.”
Very few platforms of this nature existed during Willow & Blake’s infancy, so after taking 12 months to grow a readership, the team turned the blog into a bonafide business. “There was a real gap in the market for an agency that focuses on the written word. We asked ‘How can we pivot this into a business idea?’ Jumping into a full time job was a decision made out of youthful naivety. We had nothing to lose.”
“We’ve always had quite a conversational tone,” Bree explains when asked what the Willow & Blake point of difference was, and still is. “Businesses were looking for that but there wasn’t anything like that out there.” Bree and Jess still sit at the helm of Willow & Blake, despite the monumental growth of their other company- Frank Body.
“Adding Frank into the mix was a huge challenge,” says Jess. “It’s still a challenge to this day.”
“It was the meeting of many moments that created Frank,” Jess explains of the 2013 launch of their now multi-million dollar skincare brand. “Bree and I had really wanted the opportunity to build a brand from beginning to end. We watched a lot of our [Willoe & Blake] clients become risk adverse. We saw a lot of value in being able to rethink the mould and do something different, but we couldn’t always do that with our clients. The four of us [Jess, Bree and Frank co-founders Steve Rowley and Alex Boffa] really wanted to create a product. We really saw an opportunity to create a product and use social media to market it, specifically to people who were just like us- millennial who were interested in natural skincare and cruelty free products.”
Despite their ambition, the team didn’t have a physical product to market until a chance encounter in a cafe Steve owned. “Steve had two women who would consistently come into the cafe and ask for old coffee grinds,” Bree explains. “He asked them what they were using it for, they told him they were using it as a body exfoliator. It was one of those old wives tales- people were doing it and DIYing, but no one was marketing it.”
“All the lightbulbs went off and we thought ‘This is the one,'” confirms Jess.
“We made all the products by hand for the first six months,” Bree tells me of a time during which the co-founders would spend nights hand packing their products at the kitchen table. “We were coming up to Christmas and we realised ‘We actually can’t keep up with the demand. We won’t survive unless we find a manufacturer before Christmas.’ We looked all over the world [to find a manufacturer] but the quality wasn’t there, so we were really lucky that we were able to find a local manufacturer that we still work with today. They’re only 25 minutes away, so we can do a lot more quality control than we could if they were located elsewhere.”
Natural ingredients have always sat at the core of the Frank brand, but despite their aversion to toxins, Frank have never engaged in the fear mongering that has become widely used as a marketing tactic by other natural companies. “When we started Frank we didn’t want to be a brand that was really jargon heavy,” says Jess. “It was about simplifying it for a consumer who was consuming everything digitally and had been let down by the beauty industry. She wanted something honest, that cut right to the chase.” Hence the name- Frank.
Frank has taken on a life, and a personality, of his own thanks almost entirely to social media and the team’s clever use of a cheeky online alter ego. “Content has always been our strong point. It’s what we knew would resonate and it’s what we invested in,” says Bree of the brand’s digital success. When it comes to social, there’s no magic formula.”
“When we looked at what was happening in the beauty industry,” adds Jess, “there was a real disconnect between what was happening with companies and consumers. It was very corporate language and there was a very clear “us” and “them.” When we knew we would be using social media to talk to our consumers, that was the catalyst for us to look at the way we spoke in an entirely different way. There weren’t many brands playing in that space, so we needed to do it in a way that consumers were used to- so in the same way they would communicate with their friends. That’s where the character of Frank came from.”
Launching an entire brand with just one product demonstrates a great deal of confidence in that product, but after developing something of a cult following, the Frank team knew it was time to expand.
“We never really planned beyond the first scrub because, for us, it was always really a test case. We thought ‘We have an amazing product, but who knows where this will go?’ I like to be really frank about that. We had no idea what we were doing at the start.”
It was the Coconut Scrub that followed, then the Bod Balm, then a complete facial skincare collection, but no product has quite reached the virality of the Shimmer Scrub- a product that had a wait list of 55,000 people prior to launching.
Sold exclusively online until late 2016, the brand is now stocked globally and sold in over 141 countries. “We took so many learnings from those first through years of having complete control,” says Bree of the decision to stay online for so many years. “We learned what did and didn’t resonate with our customers and we could position the brand exactly how we wanted, so letting go of that control was really hard. It was only after meeting Jo [Horgan, Mecca founder and CEO] that we felt comfortable, because we knew they would represent our brand in the way we wanted it to be represented. Now the challenge is making sure that representation is consistent across the world.”
With a Forbes 30 Under 30 listing and Veuve Cliquot New Generation award under their belt, Jess and Bree have a wealth of wisdom to offer aspiring entrepreneurs and burgeoning business owners. “It was Jess’ grandpa who said ‘You are worth whatever price you put on yourself,” shares Bree.
“My advice,” she adds, “Is always to think about the execution. It’s easy to have an idea, but making that idea come to life is another thing entirely.”
“One piece of advice that has always stuck with me is ‘assume positive intent,'” Jess says. “It can be so easy, in a demanding business environment, to assume the worst. It needs to be a collaborative environment to make the best end product, and that means taking on feedback. Sometimes that feedback is constructive and critical, so you need to assume that the person giving you that feedback is doing it for the benefit of the entire team.”
The duo agree that their community, comprising of friends, family and devoted social media fans, are integral to the brand’s success. “When we first started Willow & Blake,” explains Bree, “we would send out an email saying “Coffee Writing?” and we would ask to take them for a coffee and tell them about what we did.”
“So many people refer to it as “hustling,” but to us it’s Business 101,” says Jess.
You cannot expect to grow a startup without reaching out to everyone in your community.”
For Frank and the beauty industry, it’s all up from here. “We’re seeing a shift towards diversity and inclusivity in the beauty space,” Jess believes. “That’s really important. The unfortunate thing is that there’s two sides to that, and a lot of the time it can be a bit of a marketing ploy. At least the fact that the conversation is happening is really positive.”
“It’s not as much about impressing beauty editors any more,” says Bree. “It’s about empowering your customers.”
To listen to the full interview with Jess and Bree, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify.
