Clubhouse — Future of Makeup Post COVID 💄💃🏽💥⚡️✨
Following our FaB Conversation (FaB Fashion and BeautyTech ClubHouse👋) Sharing takeaways from our discussion with 5 makeup brand founders and industry experts on the challenges their makeup business faced during COVID and their outlook of the post-pandemic world. Joined by Jaleh Bisharat, from NakedPoppy, Mariya Nurislamova, CEO & Co-Founder at Scentbird & Deck of Scarlet, professional makeup artist Latia Curtis, Shalini Vadhera, Founder & CEO of Ready Set Jet, and Malinda Ballesteros, Vice President of Antonym Cosmetics.
About our event’s host Anastasia Bezrukova — founder of Minori — a purpose driven conscious beauty brand. Anastasia is a certified Marie Kondo consultant and beauty industry veteran who found that many women felt overwhelmed by the volume of things in their lives, especially the beauty products they own, yet rarely use. In June, she is launching Minori, a minimalism-inspired beauty brand whose mission is to promote mindful consumption as a path to sustainability. Minori uses only clean, vegan, and cruelty-free ingredients to develop everyday essential makeup products, suited to every skin tone. By prioritizing inclusion, transparency, and sustainability, Minori takes the guesswork out of beauty.
Biggest impacts of COVID on your makeup business. Growth of online first businesses 📈and conscious consumption 💙♻️
Companies already designed to be online first, like personalization-based online clean beauty retailer NakedPoppy, were well set up to take advantage to the shift to online shopping. “In addition to people not wanting to buy makeup in stores, the social justice climate and BLM movement created an even greater shift towards conscious consumption. Our customers had the desire to support brands that matched their values!” — Jaleh Bisharat, NakedPoppy co-founder and CEO of NakedPoppy, a clean beauty startup at www.nakedpoppy.com which helps you find and shop personalized clean beauty recommendations. She formerly served as CMO/VP marketing at Amazon, OpenTable, Upwork and Eventbrite. She earned an AB from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Cost and time efficiencies with digital PR events 📊
Mariya Nurislamova, CEO & Co-Founder at Scentbird & Deck of Scarlet, switched all their high budget in-person PR events and desk-sides to virtual meetings, resulting in both time and cost efficiencies. Group desksides where she could speak to 5–10 journalists at a time replaced the 1-on-1s pre-COVID meeting format: “We frankly got a lot more coverage out of that and had to spend a lot less time and money. PR events can be very expensive, especially if you’re having to wine and dine people or fly them out to exotic locations. Those budgets can really go up very quickly. We’ve perfected the PR playbook with the shift to digital PR events and desk-sides!” Mariya says that they have strategically reallocated the PR cost savings to build much stronger and more long term partnerships with influencers or spokespersons. — Mariya Nurislamova, CEO & Co-Founder at Scentbird & Deck of Scarlet — Mariya is the founder of 5 beauty brands including makeup brand Deck of Scarlet and subscription based fragrance company Scentbird which has raised over $28M in funding and is a leader in DTC online fragrance discovery.
Using store closures to refocus on product development 🛍
When most of their retail partners closed their stores, Malinda Ballesteros, Vice President of Antonym Cosmetics explains : “We shifted our energy to working on new product development. We were positive that we were going to come out on the other side of this and that we need to set everything up in such a way that we’re ready to go when the time is right.” — Malinda Ballesteros has built a successful career as a Film and Television Makeup Artist. Now Vice President of Antonym Cosmetics, she is determined to share her love of clean beauty with the world.
Brand positioning and impact mission pivots ✨🌱🙏🏾
Ready Set Jet launched right after lockdowns began. The brand was initially created for millennial travel enthusiasts, and with travel gone, they had to pivot. They repositioned themselves as the Marie Kondo of beauty to help women simplify their beauty routines as they are working from home and doing their zoom meetings. In addition to a brand positioning change, Shalini adjusted her company’s social impact mission. The goal for Ready Set Jet was always to be a positive impact brand and to use a portion of the proceeds to help underprivileged girls in India. During COVID she discovered that she can help even more women, because so many in her community experienced layoffs, depression, and self-esteem issues. Shalini created Ready Set Jet Academy as part of her beauty brand’s community platform with the goal to support to women all over the world during this difficult time.- Shalini Vadhera is a mission driven award-winning entrepreneur who believes confident women can change the world. She is the founder of Ready Set Jet, a socially responsible beauty brand with a mission to positively impact women with compact and effective beauty and lifestyle products that fit their lifestyle, all while impacting change in the lives of economically challenged girls and women.
Excitement on the rise as women are getting ready to wear makeup out of the home again. 💋
Increased support for indie beauty and BIPOC owned brands 💪🏾✨
Anastasia, founder of Minori, thinks that women are excited to wear makeup again. “After 14 months of being cooped up at home, decluttering and getting rid of things that you clearly know you’re not going to use, you might actually be excited to add newness to your collection. I do think that customers will be more intentional about their post-Covid beauty buys, and maybe perhaps make a transition to clean beauty or try something more sustainable. I think a lot of customers have been doing a lot of soul-searching of who they actually want to support.” Makeup artist Latia Curtis says that she sees a shift in indie beauty interest stemming from the social justice movement: “If before they weren’t as interested in brands whose names they did not recognize, now they are being really intentional about buying from indie brands, buying from black-owned brands, buying from woman-owned indie brands that aren’t part of some big conglomerate.” — Latia Curtis is a makeup artist & session hair stylist based out of South Carolina and serves the entire Atlantic seaboard. She is also the owner of LC Production Group, LLC: a boutique production & consulting company placing emphasis on Inclusion Education & Casting.
Buy Fewer, Better things. 💚
Jaleh from NakedPoppy says that COVID has given us time to learn some important lessons. “We don’t need to be so rushed. We don’t need to consume so much. We don’t need to beautify ourselves for other people. We should be doing it for ourselves. We can buy fewer, better, more consciously-made things, and that includes our makeup and skincare. I think we’re going to look back on this period and realize that we elevated our values in a very positive way during this really tough year.” — Jaleh Bisharat
Will clean beauty be more accessible post-pandemic? 🌱💚💚
Latia brought up the interesting topic of clean beauty, and how some perceive it as not always being very accessible, based on its high price point and where it is sold, particularly the type of demographic that tends to shop at clean beauty retailers. “I feel like the imagery of clean beauty for a long time has been like very thin, very Caucasian, very blonde. Do you foresee that changing at all? Will these clean beauty brands be a little bit more accessible from a price point perspective but also in their branding?” — Latia Curtis
Anastasia, founder of Minori, mentioned her belief in a big shift in how we democratize this space: “Clean beauty brands that will resonate with customers in the post-COVID world are those who will focus on not only on marketing themselves as “clean”, but focus more on ingredient transparency and inclusivity across all aspects of their business — from being more inclusive with the influencers they work with, to models used in campaign photography, to developing more inclusive shade ranges. By doing all these steps, we are hopefully going to democratize this category and make it feel less exclusive, less intimidating.”
Thank you 🙏 Anastasia Bezrukova, Jaleh Bisharat, Mariya Nurislamova, Shalini Vadhera, Latia Curtis, Malinda Ballesteros.
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