The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
“We were sporty- almost tomboys,” Sand & Sky co-founder Sarah Hamilton tells me of her and her twin sister, Emily’s, upbringing. “Our first bikes were BMXs. We didn’t much around with flowers on baskets.”
Sarah, having read Nancy Drew, grew up wanting to be a detective. Eventually her interests shifted to business management, working with her sister on a Year 10 Commerce project that her parents then turned into a functioning business.
“We started a home builders magazine, looking at everywhere that people were building houses and then helping them find trades,” Sarah explains. “From there, they went on to buy properties, develop them and then rent them out.”
Entrepreneurial from an early age, Sarah grew up surrounded by business owners. “At one point there were six of us, and no one was earning a salary,” she recalls. “We grew up with business around us. We were taught that you really had to make your own success, and that came from working hard, finding your niche and going in to business. It’s something we were never scared about.”
The years that followed their studies saw both Sarah and Emily move overseas (to the United States and Singapore, respectively) to take up corporate roles. With little time on their hands for shopping, and with minimal knowledge of beauty, the sisters found themselves making expensive, impulse cosmetic purchases- and so the idea for Bellabox, a subscription beauty box and their first joint business venture, was born.
“When we looked at Bellabox, we loved the idea that young, professional women could get into beauty. We were buying a lot of beauty products without much knowledge, so we were spending a lot of money without getting enough out of it. It was more the business side that brought us into beauty.
“We were inspired by Birch Box, which was the first box of its kind in the US. I was living in New York, and Emily came over from Singapore and said ‘Let’s do this. This is what every young, professional woman needs.’ From there, we went into the planning stage. We had to hire brand managers that knew how to pronounce all the brand names that we weren’t so good at, Emily designed the website, and I moved back to Australia to launch it.”
Launching Bellabox in 2011 saw the twins deepdive into the beauty industry through which they discovered that very few brands were celebrating and embracing Australian beauty and native ingredients. “We always wanted to create an Australian botanical brand,” Sarah tells me. “Growing up in the bush, the outdoors… we love Australia and we know how much Australia has to give. This idea was always seeded in what is unique about Australia, and how we can sell that to the world.”
In developing Sand & Sky’s now iconic Australian Pink Clay Mask, Sarah, Emily and their team trialled three different products before deciding what to launch the brand with. “We wanted a product that was multi purpose, that looked good and had instant results. The mask was it. It just killed the other two really quickly.”
“It was our impatience,” says of the choice to launch with a mask. “It was ‘If I’m going to wear this pink mask on my face for 10 minutes, I better wipe this thing off and feel and look amazing.’ I think that‘s why we chose a mask. Fortuitously, it was launched just as the black mask was really big. It was quite hard on the skin. The pink really stood out, as did those instant results. You can wear the mask, and then put mascara on and go out. That instant result made a big difference.”
The decision to highlight Australian Pink Clay was a relatively simple one. “[We chose] pink clay because of how it draws out impurities,” Sarah explains. “Our assumption, contention and what we’ve been able to prove is that because Australia has really pure ingredients, we feel they’re much more effective. There’s also French pink clay, and people have asked ‘What’s the difference between the two?’ and I think it’s totally the environment. In addition, all of the other ingredients that are in there are at a level that makes sure they’re effective. We wanted it to be soothing and we wanted it to be brightening, so everything about it had to do something. We learnt about ‘story’ ingredients- ingredients that look good on a list but do absolutely nothing.”
Having settled on a product with which to launch, a hero ingredient and a chemist (with the help of Bellabox’s Sam Taylor, who brought a deeper understanding of the mechanics of beauty to the team), Sarah and Emily began to build on the formula. “It almost helped that we’d never produced a beauty product before, because our expectation was all of those benefits, and we wanted all of the ingredients to be from Australia- which wasn’t typical for Australian beauty brands, which we found really strange,” Sarah tells me. “It’s still very rare, and it’s hard to make happen. From there, we thought ‘We want to sell in Europe,’ which meant we needed to do compliance. Everything was a new learning that we would see as a challenge, and then work out a way to overcome it. We did that with quite a small team. It was very much a step by step process.”
One such challenge was how insistent Sarah and Emily were that the percentage of Australian pink clay be higher than that of any other ingredient. If you look at any clay mask, worldwide, the first ingredient is typically water. Ours is clay,” says Sarah. “We’ve broken machines. When we were formulating, we kept going back and saying ‘We want more clay!’ There’s that drying effect, the immediate ‘pull’ of the impurities and the refining of the pores. The Kakadu Plum also helps with the brightening of the skin. One of the number one benefits is the sheer amount of pink clay that’s in that mask, but then all of the other ingredients are in there to soothe the skin and help brighten it and refine the pores. There’s also Vitamin A in there to help with pigmentation.”
It took a mere a year and a half to see the Sand & Sky Australian Pink Clay Mask through from conceptualisation to launch. “It happened relatively quickly, we’ve since found out.” Launching with one product, while risky, is a choice that Sarah looks on retrospectively as a positive. “The advantage is the ability to focus,” she explains. “Our big push was ‘We need to get this out there.’ We weren’t concerned about other products. I suppose a disadvantage is needing more products which, when we launched, we didn’t even think about. It took us about seven months before we had three seconds to think about what was next for us. People want to see a range. People ask us, time and time again, ‘I want a moisturiser, I want a serum, I want all of these products,’ because they love what we’ve been able to do. Maybe if we were more organised and backed by someone amazing we would have had everything there. But again, that sheer focus helped us launch the product.”
While they now have physical stockists, Sand & Sky began its life as a digital native brand- a move that allowed it to reach a global audience within days of launch. It was six weeks to two months,” Sarah says of the mask’s meteoric rise to viral status. “It was really quick. It was picked up without us knowing. Buzzfeed have this group of girls called Lady Like. I was on a call, and all of a sudden I could see the traffic on the site going crazy. I was trying to find out where it was coming from!” The mask had been reviewed by the Buzzfeed international team and, from there, the mask’s reach began to snowball. “Next, the Daily Mail in the UK picked it up. We couldn’t keep track of where all this traffic was coming from. We were also working with great influencers. We loved makeup tutorials, we went to amazing girls who only had around 1000 followers. We said ‘Can you put the mask on before you do your makeup?’ and they did it. That went really viral.”
That virality presented the brand with a new problem- staying in stock. “I distinctly remember being in Singapore,” Sarah recalls. “We flew back, which is a six hour flight, and we’d made a hundred sales the day before and we were only quite young, so we were really excited. We’d tripled that within the first few hours of the day, by the time we got off the plane. We sold out 60,000 units within eight to twelve weeks or something crazy. It was driven by the customers. As much as we were running around trying to talk about the product, they were talking about as well- on social media.”
In a sea of digital noise (and a heavily saturated beauty space), the Sand & Sky mask managed to cut through. How? “It’s definitely the best mask on the market,” answers Sarah. “When we first launched, there wasn’t a lot of stories behind the Insta-famous brands. We talk about the brand, we talk about what inspires us, when you visit the website you see a map of Australia, you can see where all the ingredients are from. We’re really about engaging with the customer authentically. When Aldi in the UK brings out a copy of our mask and you read the ingredients, you think ‘I know I don’t want to put that on my face.’ We’re always going to have a subset of customers who say ‘Actually I might give that a try,’ but it’s really about saying ‘If that’s where you want to get your skincare from, we can just keep telling you what our brand means and where our ingredients are from, because we know that will lead you back.’ We don’t see a lot of cannibalisation. For us, it’s about moving forward with what we’re trying to achieve.”
Two months post-launch (and fresh from selling 60,000 units), the mask was picked up by international retail giant Harvey Nichols. “We definitely saw that once we had that retailer, even though we are digitally native, it helped people- because people do want to touch and feel,” tells me of how a bricks and mortar retailer altered public perception of the brand. “70% of our business now is still direct to consumer, so it hasn’t stopped that- it’s only helped it.”
With Harvey Nichols in the United Kingdom and Sephora in the United States now stocking Sand & Sky, it feels safe to say that the rest of the world are, at last, embracing Australian beauty. “When we first looked at A-Beauty, we saw that there was a movement towards Australian fashion, Australian influencers and Australian design,” Sarah explains. “To us, it means a lifestyle. It means less time in the bathroom and more time outside. It means really effective products where you understand what the ingredients are and why they’re good for you. It’s this relaxed, fun lifestyle. We grew up outside in the bush- there was little time to put on a massive face of makeup, so it was all about skincare. For us, A-Beauty was about fuss-free, really good quality products and having something that can show off all that unique flora and fauna that Australia has. A-Beauty is the beach, it’s the bush, it’s the outdoors.
“With Sand & Sky, we’re saying ‘Everyone is beautiful in their own way.'”
