How Tiffany Ju Made Chunks A Stronger Business While Fighting Breast Cancer

Chunks has big business news: The hair accessories brand is launching on Sephora’s website at the end of next month, and it’s expanded its presence at Nordstrom to 40 doors. This article, though, mostly isn’t about business news—or, at the very least, if it’s about business news, it’s about how a personal crisis can instantaneously and unexpectedly make it not matter much.

Less than a year ago, Chunks founder Tiffany Ju was diagnosed with breast cancer. The diagnosis forced her to prioritize herself over sales. Perhaps counterintuitively, that prioritization ended up strengthening Chunks’ structure as Ju dug into the bones of the business rather than push it to spike sales.

Ju isn’t afraid of being contrarian. She’s the rare beauty brand founder who proudly shouts that her products are made in China. She willingly discusses mistakes and even sells imperfect items at discounted prices on Chunks’ site in a section called Oopsies. From a product development perspective, the Parsons School of Design graduate often prefers to zig when competitors zag.

“If everyone is looking in one direction, I find an opportunity to look in another,” she says. “Culture is always on a pendulum swing, so if you’re able to see opportunity in a place no one is looking, there’s a good chance you’ll be ahead of the curve.”

Below, Ju tells Beauty Independent what it was like to battle cancer and tighten her brand’s bottom line to help keep it a step ahead:

Exactly a year ago, in April, I split up with my husband of 10 years. We have a kid, so that was a really sad thing. Right after that, we had a house fire. A week later, I moved out into an apartment, and then about a month after that I got my breast cancer diagnosis. The week I got that diagnosis was also the week my operations director at Chunks left. It was a wild time for me personally and a pivotal time for the business, too, because I was looking to fundraise.

We had put a deck together and were starting to talk to investors. I had decided to fundraise because Chunks was doing well, but had plateaued a bit. During the pandemic, a lot of small businesses grew like crazy, and we were definitely one of them. There’s a point a lot of small businesses get to after that initial wave of organic growth where then they might have to upshift a little, experiment with paid marketing and start building operations and a team. Getting to that next level quickly was my reason for wanting to fundraise, but that effort got stopped in its tracks.

I had to lean on my team heavily to maintain the day-to-day operations while I was going through all of these challenges. I made the difficult decision to put growth in the backseat. On days where I had to deal with personal stuff, I just had to take the day off. On days I could show up, it was all about supporting my team and making sure they were good.

The hard thing about cancer, even harder than the chemo, is the unknown. As soon as you get the diagnosis, it’s uncertain from beginning to end. You don’t know how serious it is, you don’t know what stage it is. Once you know what stage it is, you don’t know what the treatment is going to be like, and the doctors don’t want to tell you because it’s really different for everyone. Even day to day, my symptoms would be so different.

Some days were really rough, and I had to let them be rough. The next day I would feel much better, and I’d do a little work. It was honestly nice to think about something other than cancer. Even on good days, I could go into work for a couple hours and then be wiped out. It was a difficult lesson to learn that you have to let it be. You have to rest.

When I first got my cancer diagnosis, our team was the biggest it had ever been. There were about 15 people, but with the departure of my ops director, I got back into the operations role. It was a blessing in disguise. I realized we were going off course when it came to our finances and payroll. I was going through chemotherapy, and I was also really stressed about our finances.

Those first few years of my business, we had a lot of cash, and we had a very cushy team. With everything going on, I had to get down to brass tacks and think critically about our approach to money, ops, payroll, ROI. It was a good lesson to learn.

Now, our team is a little smaller. We have 10 people. Half of that is shipping because we still do our own fulfillment, and then there are five core team members. We outsource accounting and bookkeeping, and we work with an ad agency for paid advertising. We also work with some creatives on a freelance basis, and everything else we do in-house: all of our content, creative direction, product design and operations.

“Going through such a difficult personal and professional year was a good reminder to me that there’s actually no rush to get anywhere.”

After my chemotherapy treatments finished in October, I got a partial mastectomy surgery around the end of the year. Then, I did radiation for a few weeks and finished on April 12th of this year. On April 13th, I flew to China for two weeks to go visit my factory.

Radiation definitely affects your energy levels, but it was such a lovely trip. I got to meet all my manufacturers, and we’ve been working on a lot of exciting things with them in the past couple months. We’re just excited about spending the rest of this year getting back to what we do well.

Nobody in this company claims to know what they’re doing, including me. I had a business before this, but I was a maker. I was making my own accessories, which was a really great, interesting learning experience. I went viral with that first business, too. If you Google “ombre tights,” you can find them. It was a whole thing in 2012, but I didn’t have any experience working at a big company, growing a team and managing people.

I’m grateful for another opportunity to experiment, and I think that’s where so much of our magic comes from and why we feel so relatable to our customers. We’re not experienced at this. We’re not a startup with a veteran founder. There’s a lot of magic in Chunks I think a lot of bigger brands can’t replicate because we’re just making things we like.

If the right investment opportunity comes, it’ll come, but I’m not actively looking at that for now. Our distribution has always been strong. We have more than 200 small retailers around the world, and 65% of our business is direct-to-consumer. Our repeat customer rate is around 45%. We have a strong e-commerce business and a growing fulfillment business.

We haven’t had to do a lot of proactive sales. I’ve always seen it as my lane to build a great brand that attracts retailers and customers because I hate chasing accounts. I would much rather have fun with the creative and then whoever likes it, likes it. Our North Star is, “How do we keep the magic alive?” I think a big reason why that magic stays alive is the balance we keep in our lives. We can’t only be productive all the time. You have to allow room for life to happen.

Going through such a difficult personal and professional year was a good reminder to me that there’s actually no rush to get anywhere. As a founder, I can be impatient. I want to grow quickly, I want to achieve and get results, but there’s a balance. Of course, I want to accomplish big things, but not at the expense of my happiness and enjoying the journey.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.