Glow Recipe, Asutra And Golde On External Funding, Retail Distribution, Manufacturing And Merchandise

In today’s crowded market, beauty and wellness entrepreneurs face steep challenges, including establishing compelling brand identities, building awareness and managing resources. For those seeking to reinvent or reenergize a category, the challenges can be even steeper.

For last Wednesday’s In Conversation webinar, Beauty Independent tapped Christine Chang and Sarah Lee, co-founders and co-CEOs of Glow Recipe, Trinity Mouzon Wofford, co-founder and CEO of Golde, and Stephanie Morimoto, CEO of Asutra, to discuss how they’ve navigated the tricky market. They weighed in on the right time to raise funds, retailer and vendor relationships that have changed their businesses for the better, and merchandise strategies that set their brands apart.

EXTERNAL FUNDING

Golde co-founders Trinity Mouzon Wofford and Issy Kabori strove to keep the ingestible wellness brand bootstrapped for as long as they felt was possible. Although multiple investors came calling, it stayed bootstrapped for over three years encompassing supercharged sales and a Sephora launch. Mouzon Wofford said, “We really personally enjoyed those first couple early years of being able to create in our own world.” She added, “If you have self-funded your business to start, it’s hard to step into that growth-heavy world.”

In 2020, Golde raised what Mouzon Wofford described as “a fairly small round” from angel investors. The amount totaled less than 10% of the brand’s total revenue that year. Golde needed resources to enlarge its team. “We couldn’t continue to go forward in this scrappy way that we loved,” said Mouzon Wofford. “I feel that we made that decision at the right time when we were a few years into things.”

Mouzon Wofford acknowledged the external funding Golde has raised can occasionally impact business decision-making at the brand. She said, “When you don’t have the capital, you just make everything work, and you’re scrappy, and you make a lot out of a little, but when you do have capital suddenly there’s this new thought process like, ‘How are we going to be really thoughtful about where to spend this?'”

Lee and Chang, previously colleagues at L’Oréal, launched Glow Recipe as a K-Beauty e-tailer with third-party brands in 2014 with a combined $50,000 from their personal savings. They introduced Glow Recipe’s fruit-forward skincare line in 2017, and it’s reached $100 million in sales. Glow Recipe sought funding when it wasn’t a necessity for its business, giving Chang and Lee the ability to consider options carefully.

Glow Recipe’s first capital infusion was a minority investment from North Castle Partners in October 2021. “We were cash-flow positive from a very early stage, accelerating and growing rapidly in the triple digits, so we wanted to make sure that it was a strategic partnership that could help grow our network, help us with hiring, and help us expand internationally,” said Lee. “Now at this point, every decision we make has such a huge impact on the business.”

Asutra landing page
Tennis champion Venus Williams, chief brand officer at Asutra, has helped boost the wellness and self-care brand’s sales in the absence of capital investment.

Asutra hasn’t raised outside funding to date. “We manage the budget down to the last dollar, for sure. We want to see if we can grow this sustainably in a bootstrapped way, and it really forces us to make tough decisions,” said Morimoto. “Where is that $1,000 or $5,000 of marketing spend going to work best for us? We’ve been really, really lucky to have incredible partners like our contract manufacturer, our retail reps and even some of our marketing agency supports. They’ve been super flexible with us, especially on payment terms.”

Venus Williams has been chief brand officer at Asutra since 2019. She’s a sweat equity partner who’s been integral to boosting sales in lieu of funding. Morimoto said, “When she does a press interview about a new product launch, that’s what really drives a spike in traffic and sales as well as brand awareness.”

RETAIL PARTNERSHIPS

Golde, a participant in Target Takeoff’s accelerator program in 2020, launched last year in 460 Target doors with an exclusive line of affordably-priced superfood powders called Super-Ades. “We felt ready to be in a major retailer, but we also felt ready to expand our product line,” said Mouzon Wofford. “So, to us, it was like, OK who’s the right retail partner for that, and also what’s the right product newness roadmap? Ultimately, what’s always been the goal with Golde is to take the space of superfoods and wellness and make it really approachable, friendly and fun. We knew the bigger opportunity was in mass market.”

Super-Ades offerings are priced at $14.99 each, while the prices of the rest of Golde’s selection fall between $25 and $29. Target carries eight other non-exclusive stockkeeping units from the brand. “If you are launching newness for a retailer, it’s important that it feels very true to the brand regardless,” said Mouzon Wofford. “It should feel like something that you want to put out there and not just capture revenue share with.”

Sephora has played a pivotal role in the evolution of Glow Recipe. When it was a K-Beauty e-commerce destination, Glow Recipe assisted the beauty specialty retailer with K-Beauty education. Then, once Lee and Chang began to formulate products for Glow Recipe, Sephora’s input was key. “Sephora is such an amazing partner when it comes to incubating indie brands. They were very involved from the very early stages of Glow Recipe skincare,” said Chang. “They saw the iteration of our Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask when it was in a tiny lab sample jar. They tested it, and loved the texture and the experience.”

Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask was released as a Sephora exclusive and became an instant hit, selling out eight times. “We were scrambling to get stock to our customers. We had wait lists of several thousand people,” said Chang. “That was truly a humbling moment that wouldn’t have been possible without that partnership because it wasn’t just about the product or the approach we had brought to the market, it was also the education around that approach, which was more holistic than anything out there.”

Golde landed on Target shelves in early 2021 with exclusive line of dissolvable fruit-flavored powders called Super-Ades. ISSEY_KOBORI

MANUFACTURING RELATIONSHIPS

When Watermelon Glow Sleeping Mask sold out, Lee and Chang flew out to meet Glow Recipe’s Korean manufacturer in person to ensure its production was prioritized. “With Korean partners, you do have to spend face to face time, and have meals. We understood those nuances because that’s our heritage,” said Lee. “So, we did that while at the same time making sure that Sephora was very, very clear and concrete with our timelines and what to expect. Communication was really important in order to have everyone on the same page so there were no surprises.”

Still, as a young company, Glow Recipe wasn’t prepared for inventory struggles and grappled with demand. “It was our first ever namesake brand launch, so we didn’t know what to expect. It was a great problem to have, but it was also frustrating for some of the customers waiting for their product to ship. We asked for their patience, and we told them exactly what was going on,” said Lee. “I think our community is so tight because we always gave them more insight than a traditional brand would.” Glow Recipe currently formulates and packages its products in the United States. “That was really important for us,” said Lee. “It’s saved us a lot of time, energy and efficiency.”

As Asutra expanded retail distribution, Morimoto quickly realized that in-house manufacturing wasn’t sustainable. “We have to be able to ramp up production pretty quickly for retail opportunities,” she said. “We just couldn’t keep doing it internally without completely reinventing our operations and logistics. So, we decided to outsource manufacturing.”

A chance meeting at a trade show with a Hungarian contract manufacturer changed the brand’s course. “We actually sampled some products that he had that were amazing. We did some test runs at those with our Magnesium Body Butter and CBD pain relief cream, and they sold out immediately,” recounted Morimoto.

She flew out to Hungary to formalize the relationship in early 2020, and the brand’s entire assortment is presently produced in Europe. Morimoto said, “It was honestly a bit of luck that we sealed the deal right before COVID hit because they were able to stay open and produce and ship for us throughout the pandemic.”

Glow Recipe Watermelon Glow Sleep Mask
Glow Recipe’s aim is to develop products that co-founder and co-CEO Sarah Lee describes as “scroll-stopping.”

MERCHANDISE DIFFERENTATION

At Glow Recipe, crafting go-to-market strategies is interwoven with developing merchandise. Lee and Chang map out the entire customer journey during the product concept phase to yield products that customers want to buy and use as well as talk about online. “We think about the go-to market strategy in a big-picture way even before the development stage,” said Lee. “So, at a concept stage, we’re thinking about how it’s going to look online, especially on social media, because that’s the main channel for us to communicate about with our community.”

Glow Recipe aims to launch products Lee referred to as “scroll-stopping.” “They make the customer stop mid-scroll and take notice. This is no small feat considering the average online attention span is about eight seconds,” said Lee. “However, it isn’t just about looks, it’s also about the experience that keeps customers coming back…We want you to have a luxurious experience that feels like a mini vacation even for just a few seconds of your day.”

After Morimoto bought Asutra from its previous owner in 2018, the brand went through a major relaunch to give it vibrant packaging and an enhanced sensorial experience. “Most things in our category look very clinical and medicinal. It’s these bold fonts in all caps yelling at you. It’s very masculine even though a lot of pain and sleep shoppers are women, especially at Target,” said Morimoto. “If you look at our packaging, it is very bright and colorful. It brings you a sense of joy to look at, but the product also feels really good going on, it absorbs well, and it actually works. It doesn’t smell like your grandma.”

Before Golde launched in 2017, merchandise in the wellness category didn’t appeal to Mouzon Wofford. “You either had the crunchy granola stuff from the health food store that I had grown up with or this new wave of brands and products that are more prestige. As a young person of color, I didn’t see myself in any of those offerings,” she said. “So, I thought there was this opportunity to bring something new to the space. To communicate not only through brand language and product assortment, but also through the packaging, this sense of approachability, warmth, and friendliness.”

Mouzon Wofford and Kabori created fun and colorful packaging for Golde to invite customers into the brand’s lifestyle. “That’s really how you get people to buy into your brand for the long haul,” said Mouzon Wofford. “It’s not just the product itself, but it’s how they feel having it in their routine. That’s where the magic happens.”

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