Fashion and BeautyTech Founders, let’s talk about #growth #community
FaB Fashion and Beautytech community has now 18 months, and 2500+ founders and funders share their learnings in local meetings, with 12+ chapters worldwide.
As a preview of mini videos featuring Odile Roujol and David Sanghera, Fab Co-creation Studio, soon to be released, let’s talk about Growth for Direct-to-consumer brands. A few insights shared by Odile, Founder of our fast growing FaB community.
Day 1, I would be obsessed by my future customers and first and foremost by my community.
As a founder you have a huge opportunity:
- You have a Purpose.You can express it by yourself, in an authentic way.
- You have Values.You embody them with your team.
- You have Believes.You can have commitments and make things happen, you can drive change.
- You have the ability to create an emotional connectionwith a community, to be the best at what you do, with a unique tone of voice.
The “Why” matters, what do you stand for? Why did you build this company? It comes before the “what”, what you’re trying to fix as a problem, the benefit of your products or services, and the “how”, the reason to believe you.
I would suggest in the first months that you learn from your community.Engaging with them means you don’t forget to meet them in real life, interacting in different channels is not enough!
Share things with them as a preview can create a lot of value as you make them participate to what you build. You will have the best customer experience at the end and have a Customer centric culture by DNA.
Best products ever.
I’m lucky enough to meet a lot of founders in LA SF and travel in Europe and Asia. Each of them is convinced to have the best products for their customers.
I don’t challenge the sincerity. I just ask a few questions as a good way to continue the conversation.
- If in the Beauty vertical, are you aware of the Ingredients, not only following the FDA Regulation but the European one that is more rigorous on banned ingredients, with the ambition to become a global brand
- What are the kind of Tests you have led or are about to. Safety test. Efficiency tests. Did you check they are better in results than one compelling existing product on the market (to be better than them in blind test).
- Have you visited they suppliers facilities and did you lead a due diligence with experts to check their process to produce, and their ability to scale later.
We are about conscious consumption, transparency. Building trust relationships with suppliers that treat everybody with respect and dignity is essential.
I encourage you to have a Rigorous method to develop products. It’s as important as building your platform.
Learn also to listen to your customers, including their complaints and dislikes which is the best way to have the best experience for your customers and keep them loyal.
Customer value of your customer matters. Making them happy too.
Yes, A fabulous Brand.
A brand begins by a credo, a manifesto. What do you stand for. How you connect with people and engage with your community.
It’s an experience and a look and feel, a story telling. You inspire peoplefirst who then will consider to purchase your products and services, and stay loyal to your brand.
Most founders have a clear vision, mission statement, and ambition. They can describe who they are in a very clear way. What matters is execution.
What do you do day after day, week after week, months after months to make it happen.
With your logo, site, Social media. The tone of voice. The visual content.
You need to be very consistent inall messages to grow faster.
There is no standard solution for that. It depends on the founder. Each of us is unique. To be surrounded by experts in their field, design, copy-writing, visuals helps for sure.
I would say it’s my super power: I use my experience as a multicultural leader to guide founders in their key decisions. I have ran a now 3 Billion dollar revenue luxury beauty brand in 135 markets in all continents. I’m also an advisor and investor having backed diverse profiles of founders in the last three years.
A global Brand is the dream of a creative mind becoming real for million of customers.
Growth!
We are in a very competitive environment. Just in clean beauty, some of the retailers I meet claim to receive 3 to 4 new brands per day. Same for sustainable fashion and new designers in jewelry.
Growing faster comes only with state-of -art-skills: a mix of content, influence, and ability to learning from the data.
You need to be at the same time a Marketing technologist obsessed by the performance, and making sure you don’t spend too much In cost of acquisition, iterating and improving.
And at the same time, a founder with an authentic voice, obsessed by user generated content, advocates, and virality.
David Sanghera is the other founding member of Fab. We have complementary skills and I’m humbled to learn from him every day. Never stopping to adapt to what’s next in a fast moving landscape.
In seed stage, it’s not only about money but having the right skills to learn faster and grow your brand. I’m about the brand, the business strategy, the customer. He’s a true growth hacker!
You need state-of-the-art growth skills to learn from your first 100 customers, then 1000, then 100 000. Growing an idea from zero to 100!
Advice to founders.
We have too many advice to give! Experiencing it by yourself is the best! Still, in early stage, I have seen that founders having mentors and advisors they trust move faster than the others. It prepares them to be challenged in a friendly way and create a long term relationship with their investors.
1-Be surrounded by people you enjoy to work with :
- Your team. Be self-aware, you need diverse talent around you to be at the best
- Your board and investors. An healthy dynamic of the board meeting helps you as guiding you in your key decisions. Again it’s not just a question of fundings but skills, and how to create value.
2-Be obsessed by the customers
- It begins by the community, having great products and services, and making sure you have happy customers about their experience
3-Don’t raise too much money
There’s is a lot of enthusiasm about beauty and luxury brands at the moment coming from investors.
Still, Inspiring role models such as Stitchfix,show that keeping the priority on your revenues and business model can help to build global companies.
Even if data and AI enable to scale faster, you need first and foremost to understand your customers well.
If you raise too much quickly, you will spend more time to launch new products and in the communication spending than being focus on your customer experience.
It’s tough to stay at the top for a long time. Raise what you need to be at the right pace.I believe the global championswill be the ones to have healthy fundamentals for sure.
Odile Roujol
FaB Fashion and BeautyTech community, Founders and funders sharing their learnings. Subscribe to our Fab newsletter 👉http://www.beautytechcommunity.com/ 🔥🔥🔥🔥
and D2C founders, if looking for fundings and skills in helping you to grow faster, contact us 👉 https://www.fabcocreationstudio.com 💄🧵✨
