Aes

When thinking about the first retail partner for Of Other Worlds, founder Simedar Jackson wanted one that aligned with the brand’s ethos (“young and kind of edgy,” she says) and current status (the brand just celebrated its one year anniversary in June).

Jackson adds, “We want to toe that line between a retail partner that’s going to help us build brand awareness, that’s going to help us reach new customers, but also one that we can reasonably meet in terms of their requirements and what the expectations are.”

Urban Outfitters ended up ticking all the boxes. The skincare brand will be launching online this week with its $68 Light Beams Barrier Treatment. The fact that Of Other Worlds is a one product brand at the moment also factored into Jackson’s decision. “Having one SKU on Urban Outfitters isn’t as, I would say, detrimental to your overall sales numbers as if you were to launch on an Ulta or a Sephora with one SKU and not necessarily be able to follow that up pretty immediately with an additional one and to build out your assortment,” she says.

The Urban Outfitters team doesn’t provide much marketing or promotion support, according to Jackson, so its up to brands to pull the marketing content and press levers. She plans on blasting the news to Of Other World’s nearly 900 newsletter subscribers as well as posting videos on Instagram and boosting posts that link to the Urban Outfitters product page once it’s live. Jackson says, “It definitely is a little bit daunting, but because we’re starting off at that more manageable place in general, I feel confident that we will be able to really hit the ground running and make sure that we’re making this partnership successful because we’re not trying to sell through 3,000 units, which would be terrifying if there was no support from the other side.”

Of Other Worlds was part of Sephora’s 2023 accelerate class and although it’s not guaranteed that the brands that graduate will be stocked at the specialty retailer, Jackson has hopes to be on its shelves one day. One thing she took away from the accelerate experience is you only launch in Sephora once and she wants to make sure she has a healthy e-commerce business and builds out Of Other Worlds’ SKU count first.

Of Other Worlds founder Simedar Jackson

“It doesn’t really make sense to launch Sephora small, you either do it big or don’t do it at all,” she says, adding, “I also don’t want to bite off more than we can chew. I know that sometimes you can’t be too precious about your baby, but I don’t want to be in a situation where you jump in before you’re quite ready and then you start to be underwater.” Of Other Worlds is stocked in the spa at Soho House in Chicago as well as several North Medical Spa locations in Canada. Jackson, who is a licensed esthetician, landed the brand there through networking.

Jackson invested $20,000 from her personal savings to get Of Other Worlds off the ground and launched a Kickstarter campaign, which brought in just over $10,000, in 2021 to restart the production of Light Beams. The brand was one of six to take home $50,000 as part of Glossier’s Grant Program in 2023 which has been sustaining the company so far. Jackson is a semi-finalist for the Black Ambition Grant and applied for Glossier’s alumni grant.

She’s open to outside funding but notes, “There’s just not as much money being readily given in general, particularly to beauty brands, and then even more so to beauty brands that are quite new.” She continues, “We have not met the revenue threshold that is typical for any type of institutional capital kind of investment firm or partner to really be ready to jump in. so we’re still in that space of angel investors, individual people with equity or with high wealth, high earners.” Jackson plans on continuing to lean on grants and thinking about ways to increase sales. “We might not have a lot of resources, but we have product and that’s potential profit,” she says.

Of Other Worlds launched in 2023 with one SKU, its Light Beams Barrier Treatment.

To help get on more stable financial footing personally—as well as stave off burnout—Jackson took on a full-time job earlier this year. She’d been working on Of Other Worlds full-time for the last three years and living off of savings coupled with the occasional freelance and part-time esthetician work.

“Eventually it got to the point where I was like, I am absolutely running out of money and I don’t have any other choice,” she shares, adding that she was tired of feeling like everything depended on the brand doing well. “If we’re having a good week or a bad week, that would determine if I was having a good week or a bad week, and the tie was too much from an emotional and mental health standpoint,” she says. “I really needed to feel like I had some independent security so I could make decisions.”

Jackson brought on two part-time employees in June. Prior, she says, “everything was being completed by me so I had to know a little bit of everything and there was a lot that I didn’t know.” She hopes to get to a place where she can focus on her favorite aspect of the business: formulating new products, which, in addition to partnerships, will help bring the brand to the next level. “Diehard fans have been waiting for the next formula and I think a lot of people who are interested in us but haven’t pulled the trigger for whatever reason would just be more enticed by something else,” she says. “We have a lot of the eyes and we’re just trying to find ways to bring more conversions.”