Interview | Adore Beauty Founder Kate Morris

The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify. 

Adore Beauty CEO and founder Kate Morris had four jobs before starting her own business- and she was fired from two of them.

“I worked in a pharmacy, which I got fired from,” Kate tells me. “I’ve been fired twice in my career- out of the four jobs I’ve had in my career before this, I’ve been fired from half of them! I’m unemployable!” she laughs. “I actually know lots of entrepreneurs who’ve been fired. I think it’s just people who have their own ideas and like to solve their own problems- they tend not to fit in to most workplaces.”

One such workplace saw Kate manning the Clarins cosmetics counter at a department store, despite growing up with no intention to work in the beauty industry. “I always thought I’d be either a journalist or a lawyer,” she explains. “Fortunately, I came to my senses.”

With a goal to become what she describes as a “corporate high flyer- someone who works in the city and wears a suit,” Kate enrolled in a law degree at university. “I did a whole week of Law, then I dropped out,” she explains. “I floated around in an Arts degree for a while and I did some business subjects, which I really enjoyed. I’d never thought of starting my own business though. I never put that on the mental map of what my life might look like.”

It was during Kate’s time working for Clarins and simultaneously studying business that the idea for Adore Beauty came to be. “I had this part time job on the Clarins counter and started to see how many women found that experience quite unpleasant,” she tells me. “It was daunting and intimidating, and beauty is not supposed to be that way. It’s supposed to be fun. You should be able to put on your new lippie in the morning and feel a million bucks, like you can take on the world- but the shopping experience was making people feel the exact opposite. When I found out about online shopping, I thought ‘That’s a no brainer for beauty.’ People would love the chance to not have to go into a department store. You can shop at 10 o’clock at night in your pyjamas!”

In 1999, at age 21, and with no money, Kate wrote a list of what she would need in order to bring Adore Beauty to life. “I had no money and no clue what to do. No connections, no networks, no experience, nothing. Sometimes what you don’t know is a bit of an asset, because you’re not frightened. You should be, but you’re not! I thought ‘I’ve worked in the beauty industry, I get how it works.’ No. I didn’t.”

“I started by putting one foot in front of the other. I thought ‘What am I going to need if I want to start a website that sells beauty products? I need a website, and I need some beauty products,'” Kate explains of her process. “Back in 1999 I had to go through the actual Yellow Pages. It was a matter of physically flipping through the pages. There were places that did web design, but to have an e-commerce website built was very different. Even trying to find a bank that accepted credit cards online- there was only one. These aren’t factors now, but they were at the time.”

With a basic website setup and a payment system, Kate’s next step was to convince local beauty brands that online shopping was, indeed, the next big thing. “It’s fair to say the beauty industry was really not ready to be disrupted, in any way, because all of the brands were very much used to controlling every aspect of the customer experience,” Kate tells me of her struggle to persuade brands to get “online” before the turn of the century. “Even the way that those individual counters are set up is a way to stop people from comparing one brand to another and cherry picking this from that. They’ve deliberately made it difficult. Were they ready for beauty to be completely democratised and to empower their customers? No. No they were not.”

“There were heaps of brands that just wouldn’t even take my calls. It wasn’t a conversation that I could start. There were enough, I guess, that were willing to at least listen. Once I’d actually proven that I was going to do it and I’d had a website built with these two teeny tiny brands, at least I had a website to show them.” From there, Kate was able to onboard five more companies, then present the naysayers with a website featuring seven brands. “Then it was rinse and repeat for the next 14 years.”

One such company was Estée Lauder who really did say “no” for a full 14 years. “They said yes eventually!” Kate laughs. “But it’s like being punched. That feeling of telling you not just ‘no’, but that you’re an idiot. I don’t know what kept me going from that. I’m not really an especially spiritual person, but when you really put your heart into something and go all in and that’s what you’re putting out into the universe, even if it comes back with a slap in the face there’s usually enough of a hint of something… maybe you’ll get a horrible ‘no’ one day, but the next day someone says ‘Sure, I’ll take your meeting.’ You do have to learn that resilience over time. Now, that ‘no’ doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I think ‘Well this is the first no, and then we’re going to talk some more and we’ll work through to the second no, and you’ll say yes eventually.'”

“It’s a character trait slash character flaw,” says Kate. “It’s become a core skill of mine.”

Today, e-commerce is a tried and tested sales platform- however some beauty brands are still reluctant to embrace the web. “There are still some brands that are struggling with customers being empowered the way that they are now,” explains Kate. “For a lot of brands, that’s still very difficult- the idea that you can’t control every image that might be on the web, because people are allowed to take their own photos and put them up on Instagram. Even the idea that people can say what they want to about a product. I still have brands who say ‘Well, what if you get a negative review? Will you publish it?’ If the customer has given their opinion rationally and reasonably then yes, that’s important. If you had a lot of negative reviews for your product, wouldn’t you want to know? If all of these people are paying $80 for your serum and they’re hating it, is that not valuable for you? If you believe in your product, then you don’t have anything to worry about. That’s been my philosophy as far as Adore Beauty goes. We encourage our customers to review publicly because if we’re doing something wrong, I want to know. If it’s helpful for customers then I think people need to know.”

While beauty brands were (and in some cases, still are) reluctant to embrace e-commerce, the rise in social media and digital popularity saw countless competitors emerge online. “That was difficult,” Kate shares. “When you initially start a business and your unique selling proposition is that you sell online, then obviously when everybody else starts doing the same you need to evolve. It helped that the core reason that I’d started Adore and the value that I wanted to deliver to customers hadn’t changed. What I still wanted to be able to do was help people to find the products that were going to be perfect for them and help them make that decision so that everybody got to feel fantastic as they walked out the door that morning and that nobody has that cosmetics graveyard of products under the bathroom sink of things you’ve been up-sold into. That core mission, that’s our north star. Even as technology changes and competitors come onboard, that reason persists. That allows you to evolve. Originally, when I started, I just wanted to sell Australian products because I felt that they represented great quality and value for money. What customers were eventually telling us was ‘I want you to have all of the things. Have all the great Aussie brands, but also have the international things that I’m struggling to get a hold of.’ If you listen to your customer, then evolving is not so challenging.”

E-commerce boom aside, the realm of digital in recent years has allowed Adore Beauty to create content and connect with customers in a way Kate had never dreamt of in 1999- through social media. “Consumers now have a voice that they can share with each other much more easily,” Kate tells me of how social media has changed the business. “They’re the ones with much more power in this whole beauty shopping journey. It’s fantastic. For us, it presents an opportunity not just to listen more, because we originally viewed social media as a bunch of more ears, but it also is a really fun opportunity for us to get more involved with consumers earlier in their shopping journey.”

Social media has also affected the way in which customers make their purchasing decisions. “When I was on the Clarins counter, the things that we would sell were the things in magazines,” Kate explains of the shift. “I don’t think many people are using those as their key source of influence any more. I really think social media has driven most of the changes. The way and the speed at which trends move… the sources of influence have really changed. It used to be very much a magazine driven industry, but social media has sped up the velocity at which a product can take off. All you need now is a Kardashian to post about something and all of a sudden it goes bonkers. We’ve seen categories take off out of nowhere. It was a couple of years ago that highlighters really went nuts within a couple of months. They’d existed forever, but all of a sudden the entire category just exploded and grew by 400% overnight. We’d not seen things like that before.”

The challenges Kate experienced in 1999 may not have persisted, however the struggle all online beauty retailers face is the lack of something tangible. While buying beauty online may feel like second nature to some, there are still customers who prefer being able to touch and feel a product before committing to the purchase. Ever the optimist, Kate and the Adore Beauty team believe that honest, authentic, transparent content is the solution. “People are really searching for and demanding authenticity, honesty and transparency in a way that they hadn’t before,” Kate explains. “I think that represents a huge opportunity for brands to really put their heart into it. You can almost do it better online than in store. If you were going to buy a hair treatment, for instance, how can you see [if it works?] Even if you were in a hair salon, how much can you tell from one use? You really don’t know until you’ve taken it home and tried it for a month. Our goal is always to make our shopping experience better than shopping in a store and to give you more. Online, we can story tell.”

At the time of our interview, Adore Beauty stocks upwards of 200 local and international brands. “We’re brand agnostic,” says Kate. “The way our business was built was for people searching for a particular brand that we stock, then they’d find us that way. We’re finding that, more and more, people are now exploring and are willing to try a product that they’ve never tried before. They’re not seeing online as just a replenishment channel. It actually is a full service where you can play, explore and try new things. The more we do to enrich that experience, the more we give our customers the confidence to try.”

There is much to learn from Kate’s business management style (Adore Beauty is currently worth over 30 million dollars, making Kate one of only 10 women on the AFR Young Rich List), but arguably more impressive is her commitment to gender equality.

“It was sort of an accident,” Kate says of her outspoken involvement in the equality movement. “It came from having a big mouth. I reached a point where I thought ‘I can’t deal with this any more.’ It happened when Donald Trump got elected. People could know all that they knew about him, to have heard the recordings and heard the way he talks about women, and then say ‘Oh that’s fine, he can still be president.’ I just lost it. It happened right after I’d been to a really awful awards night. Man after man after man won every single award, and the winners were getting a bottle of scotch. I thought I was in an episode of Mad Men. I thought ‘Right, I’m going to start speaking up about these things. I expect that that will have consequences, and I’m okay to wear that.’ For me, as a business owner, I can’t lose my job unless our customers decide en masse that they all hate us. The whole point of the business was to empower women, so it was easier for me to be the one to speak up about it. I thought ‘I can’t get fired at this point!'” It was that tenacity that saw Kate become the first ever female recipient of the Online Retailers Industry Recognition Award for her service to gender diversity. 

I expected a lot of blow back. When you put your full heart into something, and when you take that risk and do it anyway, I feel like the bad things that happen are outweighed by the good things that happen. If you can make a difference to even one person, then I think you should.”

“I feel like everybody has a responsibility,” she says. “Once they’ve reached a certain point in their career where they’ve had some success, they’ve got to try and pull a few more people up behind them. I do a lot of mentoring for other female business owners, and we have our female tech scholarship that we started here at Adore. That’s been really fantastic.”

Kate is also committed to empowering women within the workplace, advocating for paid domestic violence leave and equal paid parental leave, encouraging both the men and the women to take time out to be the primary carer.  “Building a successful business is great, but I don’t want to leave this world without having done something more. I’d like to be part of making a change.”