Votary’s Founders Are On A Mission To Convert Customers Worldwide To Plant-Based Face Oils

Votary resulted from the pairing of beauty authority Arabella Preston, a London-based makeup artist whose client list includes Kate Middleton and Stella McCartney, and business brainiac Charlotte Semler, an entrepreneur with luxury companies crowding her resume and Preston’s former boss. As any leader of an emerging brand would understand, however, jobs aren’t so easily defined by backgrounds when a business is growing – and Preston and Semler have discovered their roles require both fluidity and rigidity. Preston largely takes care of communications and product development, and Semler handles the numbers, except for when those responsibilities aren’t so easily siloed. “Arabella brought what I knew she would bring. She’s an amazing skincare guru and great face of the brand. She’s brought a lot of intelligence to the whole thing, too,” says Semler. “We work really well together, but it was an interesting transition from boss and employee, even though that was a long time ago, to equal partners.” Beauty Independent asked the partners to elaborate on how they started Votary, breaking into the retailer Liberty, social media strategy, department store structures, the importance of direct consumers and difficulties entering the U.S. as a U.K. brand.

What was your path to launching Votary?

Preston: Charlotte and I have known each other for a long time. Charlotte is a brilliant businesswoman and serial entrepreneur. She founded a business called Myla in 2001, and I went to work there in PR and marketing. We were a small team. When we all moved on, I became a makeup artist. It was something I had always wanted to do. Charlotte went on to set up another business, and we stayed friends. We were having lunch as friends with some others, and people started asking me, “What’s the latest thing? What should I be using on my skin?” I said. “To be honest, I use an oil for my moisturizer and to take off my makeup, and my skin has never been happier.”

Semler: I had been wanting to do something in skincare, and hadn’t really found the angle and opportunity to do it. I knew Arabella had an amazing client list as a makeup artist, and any product that she was using on them was probably going to be good enough for the rest of us. I also knew Arabella could do PR and marketing because I employed her in that capacity. I figured that, with a successful product, which would obviously give clients results, and someone who is good at PR and marketing, we could launch a brand. I knew a manufacturer, which was part of what made me leap on it. That’s usually one of the challenges facing a business. I just felt the stars were in alignment.

How long did it take you to develop Votary?

Semler: It was relatively quick. I’m not a great believer in writing business plans. We had a single sheet of paper saying what we were going to do. We spent five minutes on what it was going to cost us, and Arabella started creating the products at her kitchen table. She did the formulations, which saved us a lot of time and trouble.

Why are you not a believer in business plans?

Semler: I think they are an activity for people who are not quite sure they want to launch a business. Don’t you know people who spend years talking about how they must do a business plan? They don’t ever do the plan. I’ve done a few businesses now, and I’ve learned that you never know what the business is going to be. There’s no point in spending days, weeks or months developing a business plan when, on day one of launch, none of it will be true anymore. I’m not a great fan of business school either. The only way to work out what your business is going to be is to start trading.

What was the cost of starting Votary?

Semler: We spent less than 100,000 [pounds]. We started with a small number of SKUs, and we didn’t have a lot of inventory to finance. We launched with just four with quantities of 300. We had bigger order quantities for packaging, and that’s where a lot of the cash got absorbed upfront.

What were the first products you released?

Preston: We launched with the original Cleansing Oil and three face oils. The Cleansing Oil was pretty much what I had been making for myself at home. I wanted a completely natural, plant-based cleansing oil. I don’t see the need for emulsifiers. There are three face oils because my skin changes seasonally and even daily. The face oil I use in the morning is different from the face oil I use at night. I made the face oils to suit different skin types and situations. Not all plant oils are the same. You can have a thick nourishing oil that’s great for dry skin, another oil that’s great for oily skin, and so on.

The price range for Votary’s products is mostly $72 to $118. How did you land on that?

Semler: It was all driven by product. Arabella had very strong views about what ingredients go into each product. There was really no shifting her on that. So, the pricing ended up being determined by what Arabella wanted in the bottle. We knew we were launching a luxury brand, so we never felt we needed to compromise on ingredients. We priced it according to what we needed to make money on those ingredients. If the customer likes it, she will buy it and, if she doesn’t like it, she won’t buy it, and the price is not the difference.

Having said that, we also felt quite strongly that we didn’t want to do crazy pricing. We both felt that we wanted to be able to go to dinner with our girlfriends, talk to them about the products and have them feel that they could buy them without being uncomfortable. We didn’t want to charge $1,000. We charged what we needed to get the best possible product without charging whatever we could.

Votary launched at Liberty right away. How did that happen?

Preston: In January 2015, about three months into working on the brand, I got a Facebook message from the buyer at Liberty saying, “I heard you are working on something, and I want to be the first one to see it.” We weren’t playing hard to get. I was about to email her. Votary is a high-end natural brand, and Liberty does brands like that very well. It’s also quite unique because they have a very strong edit in their beauty hall. It’s not the traditional beauty hall. If there’s one product from a brand that they love, that’s all they’ll take. I told them, “I’m not yet ready to come yet, but, yes please!” We had a branding presentation a couple of months later and tiny sample vials to get feedback on to make sure we weren’t making any awful mistakes. They said, “We love it. We want it in on the first of September.” This was in March. We said, “Great!” We had to make it work.

What do department stores need to do to make emerging brands thrive in their environment?

Semler: They need to support the brands, particularly from a staffing point of view. The one thing that young brands can’t do is provide staffing in stores. Certainly, they can’t do it and be profitable. Generally, in department stores in London, you’d be expected to provide some degree of staffing. Liberty didn’t demand that from us. They asked their team on the shop floor to support the brand. They did that partly with the understanding that Arabella and I would work very hard outside the store to market Votary to consumers, so consumers would walk into Liberty and ask for Votary. That’s a better way for us to spend our resources because that’s brand building rather than putting resources toward a member of the staff on the shop floor selling individual bottles.

What have you learned about selling beauty products at a department store?

Semler: I love to ask people for help and advice. I’m really shameless about emailing people and saying, “Hi, can I come see you?” There was one venture capitalist I went to see, and I asked her various questions. The one thing she said that stuck in my mind was, “Do not sell your brand into a retailer before you are ready yourself to sell every bottle that’s on the shelves there. The retailer is not going to do it. Your marketing is the thing that’s selling the product.” We really took that to heart.

Liberty is unique because they really supported us in store, which is why we remained exclusive to them for two years in the U.K. We felt strongly we didn’t want to go into other retailers until we had pent-up demand for the brand. When we launched in Space NK, we found that the brand performed well in Space NK even without staffing because the Space NK customer had been waiting for it for a while.

When did Votary become profitable?

Semler: We have been profitable since launch. We were really tight with money. Our website cost us $1,200. Don’t spend money that isn’t going to make a difference to your customers’ skin. All our money went into the product.

How big is the business in retail revenues?

Semler: We are growing at 100% a year. We will continue to do so and maybe more than that. In our financial year ended Oct. 17, our second year of trading, our turnover at retail was 500,000 [pounds].

What has helped drive growth?

Semler: One of the key things that has driven growth has been the U.S. press we’ve gotten even though we are a U.K. brand. We ship to the U.S. and about 40% of our sales are in the U.S. That was driven by a few stories in the press. There was one on The Cut that gave us a huge spike, and there was another in Yahoo. Caroline Hirons has also spiked sales.

Votary recently launched at Space NK in the U.S. What’s been your approach to the U.S. market?

Semler: It’s such a huge market and, as a U.K. brand, it can seem slightly daunting. It’s very difficult to get a sense of which retailers are the right retailers for you when you are not on the ground. We have adopted a philosophy of waiting for retailers to come to us. That also means we aren’t wasting resources on contacting retailers there.

What’s been the e-commerce strategy?

Semler: Our strategy is to do great marketing, ship orders worldwide with delivery within a couple of days, and to give great customer service. That’s how a repeat business is built. Last year, about 50% of our business was direct. It’s doubled every year, but it started with a small number of orders. In our first month, we took eight orders. In our second month, we took 16.

What has worked for Votary on social media?

Preston: I reply to customer feedback and, if bloggers take a picture of our products, I like it and comment on it. Social media is an interaction. If you are a brand that doesn’t interact, then you are not doing it right. We don’t have a huge number of followers, but, if I look at our engagement and interactions, it’s really quite high.

What’s been the biggest challenge in growing a beauty brand?

Semler: The biggest challenge for us has been working out how to make retail work and how to find the right retail partners. We were so lucky with Liberty, and I have a lot of experience building direct businesses. We are now very challenged by the question of how we grow in retail without damaging our brand and without adding substantial complexity to our business. How do we build another 10 relationships like Liberty and Space NK, which really work for us?

Is there outside agency or supplier you worked with that you couldn’t have executed the brand without?

Semler: John Maloney, who runs a design agency called Coosa in L.A. He’s the designer behind the packaging. Without John, the brand wouldn’t have been the same.

What sort of design did you want Votary to have?

Semler: We had a really tight brief, and that was one of the things that John liked about us. That might be why he was willing to work on this tiny project. We did a Pinterest board where we put objects, colors and typefaces that we wanted to incorporate. We were very clear.

Preston: I knew right away that I wanted to use green glass bottles. Lots of people were using brown bottles, but no one was using green. They’re beautiful, practical and sourced easily.

What’s a lesson you’ve learned about what it takes to make it as a beauty entrepreneur?

Preston: Being honest with the customer is something we have tried to do from the very beginning. We have nothing to hide. Our products are completely natural, and we publish our ingredient lists on the website. You would be amazed at how many websites don’t do that, and it’s not cool anymore. The internet has completely disrupted the industry, and customers are very informed now. They want to know what’s in their beauty products and whether your products are recyclable.

The beauty market is saturated with oils. What does that mean for your brand?

Preston: We set ourselves up as a natural oils brand, and that’s what we continue to do very well. People come to us for that. If you are a makeup brand that launches an oil, then maybe you [suffer as a result] of the saturation, but, when you are the oil specialist, that saturation doesn’t exist. People come to you for your expertise, and there’s a trust there.

Semler: We have one product in our range that’s not an oil, and it’s the product that sells the least. When we are doing new product development, oils are the right thing for us to do because that’s what we sell a lot of – and more every day. That is Votary’s story, not a market segment story.

What is Votary’s product launch cadence?

Semler: One a quarter feels right in terms of what we can do as a team, and it feels right in terms of the PR cycle. However much the beauty editor at Vogue loves talking to Arabella, she doesn’t want to talk to her every month. There’s no point in launching a new product if you can’t get the press to take your call about it.

What are some short-term goals for Votary?

Semler: They are doubling sales every year and keeping online at 50% of total revenue. We love the interaction with the direct customer. We love the immediacy of it from a brand, customer relationship and financial point of view. You get paid straight away, and that’s really important in business. You also own that customer. Retailers can change their minds, floor plans and buying teams. I’ve been around for a long time, and I’ve seen that happen. Because of that, we are a little bit obsessed with making money from the direct business and not being beholden to any one retailer.

What are long-term goals?

Semler: Finding the right retailers in key geographies to work with, and building a big, famous brand. Votary means devoted follower or advocate. A monk or nun is a votary of Christ. We are really on a mission to change how people look after their skin. We are on a mission to convert them to natural plant oils because we think they’re better for the skin and the world. Every individual we can persuade to stop using petrochemicals is a happy moment for us.