🛁 SHANNON DAVENPORT // ESKER BEAUTY FOUNDER & CEO

0:00Shannon Davenport:I'm Sam Rose, and you're tuning in to Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for consumer brand founders who know that building a business is messier than the highlight reel shows. Your supplier just missed their deadline, your top product is out of stock, and your competitors somehow launched the same thing at half the price. Sound familiar? Every week, we dive into the real problems that keep founders up at night, from inventory disasters to supply chain nightmares, because surviving the chaos is what separates brands that fail from brands that scale. Well, Shannon, welcome to the podcast. We're so happy to have you here.

0:32Shannon, you and I have known each other for, I think, like years at this point. I'm a huge fan of your products and a customer. So I'm so excited to share the story of how you built this and hear maybe a little bit of the inside baseball on all of it. Because you spent 12 years, right? Trend forecasting and consulting for like really big brands in beauty, wellness, Royale, Unilever. And then you did the insane thing that we all do, which is you left it all to go bootstrap something. And that was in 2018, if I'm remembering right. Yeah. You started with just a couple of SKUs and this idea that body care was sort of like the afterthought.

1:14So I would love to just hear that story of like how you counter-positioned yourself and what about the trend forecasting that you were doing inside bigger corporations led you to this kind of like unique insight and and then you know the spontaneous combustion of esker right out of that yeah yeah um it's funny when you you probably look back at this but i look back at like when i started the boldness of what i was doing and i'm like wow that was really that was really ballsy of me to do at the time but yeah i i had a dream of becoming a trend forecaster which is a very unusual job and I'm aging myself but I after college I wanted to leave California and move to New York and I've read a book about fashion careers and in the book it was like here's a you know it was like it was literally like that was how I was doing research when I was in my you know teenage or early 20s years about how I wanted to what I wanted to do and I found of course I found an obscure career that was not very common and was like that's the one that I want to do.

2:19And so yeah, I, I had a very unusual career, because it's a very small niche. And it is exactly what I wanted to do, which is what I kind of think is like my people watching passion, like I'm just a people person. I'm not necessarily an extroverted person, but I'm a people person, like I'm interested in people. And so I always wanted to do trends, because I loved to see how just consumer, you know, I don't know, just consumers and how people come out and how that shows in how they make choices with what they wear and what they eat and what they drink. And that's kind of what led me to my original career of trend forecasting, which is a very unusual, but really fun career where I got to go do things like I got to go to Coachella every year for my job full time.

3:05Yeah, for work. I'm in the wrong industry. What have I done? Will you tell us about how trend forecasting works? Like, I think those two words together, we can all sort of like have some kind of intuition for you know seeing what's coming but how do you actually do that job what are the tools that you use yeah it's a really good question so basically you know there's like consumer insights which is kind of like where you're tracking like what's happening now you know like what what uh you know trends and you know food and beauty and beverage are happening right now you know like magnesium as an ingredient right it's like blowing up right now we know that but when you're trying to do bigger picture consumer forecasting trends which is more not what's happening next season or in you know two quarters but like what's happening in two and three years and how do you plan a product and an innovation pipeline that can keep up with the speed of trends which now you know has only in the last 10 years like accelerated like crazy you know especially with ai you can have a really great idea um in these trending categories like beauty and like food and now the infrastructure required to set up a business is so much smaller so we are seeing like brands moving at the speed of trends but for long term trend forecasting which is what I really used to do it's really like a one part art and one part science and a lot of it is looking at emerging brands kind of the outliers and now I think it's so much more about, you know, what's happening on social, like what's coming out in people's feeds.

4:39And now the trends move so much faster. But at the time, I think it's a lot of just like really perceiving people, perceiving customers as people and has having a lot of nuances in terms of, you know, the brands they pick and what they feel about their body and how they make choices as customers. Where does that perception take place? You are, is it like a always on social media kind of thing? Is there written content that you kind of, or other media that you consume as part of it? What, what are the specific kind of places or tools that were the most fruitful for you or that you found like kind of the most interesting or like surprising insights out of?

5:20I am always like, I've always been a one part quantitative, one part qualitative person. Like when I think about trends or I think about the market I think that like for me for example for my business I'll give you like an example of a trend that we so like bath and body was a trend that I saw coming like 10 plus years ago because I think at that time it was really clear that there was a and some people in trends like get really specific and cyclical I don't think that exists this way anymore because of TikTok and the internet but it used to be that like you know color cycles would change every seven years and there was like some predictability to that and you know you could like there were like big shifts of consumer you know consumer mindset shifts like I think the big consumer mindset shift that we've experienced over the last 10 years is like the move to better for you products and wellness like that's not a trend that's like a consumer shift that happens like every some of the trend theorist people would tell you like you know these big big shifts happen every 15 to 20 years obviously I don't think that happens now in the 2026 era of doing business and consumer but because obviously like you know things are changing every month in our industry but yeah I think uh it's it's kind of like from what I was saying with my business is like bath and body to me is not a trend it's a it's a shift it's a consumer perception that understanding that like consumers have really fully bought into wellness.

6:51And so now that the consumer has changed, right? It's like, I almost think more now about my customers as like just a wellness, a wellness generation, as opposed to an age, you know? So then I think when you're looking through that trend lines and you know, okay, well people have really bought into like wellness. And finally this, you know, better for you movement is really, really mainstream. And then you look at okay now what within the market still has been untapped now that you know that this belief has become pretty locked in yeah um for us it's like like the thing the trend that i think is interesting that i think is going to be part of the next big thing but i'm working my way around it is lymphatic drainage and lymphatic health i think that's like the future of bath and body care yeah and so it's something that I've been thinking about in terms of health and wellness trends a lot just because I think with bath and body you start to merge into like you know you know women's health and fitness and like all these holistic other industries and so anyway I think lymphatic health is really interesting and in the past I think it would have much moved much more slowly but now in the tiktok era like when something hits it hits fast and you have to react quickly and that's where the trend brain needs to turn on is there like a simple lymphatic drainage thing we should do right now while we're talking yeah like yeah there is you want to know what it is um well so we designed this these patches for this so these are our lymphatic drainage patches we designed like the first ever like lymphatic drainage patch and it's based on this five minute ritual that you can do at your desk we won't we don't need to do the whole thing but I'll show you like the so you stick the matches um on basically lymphatic massage is really like basic lymphatic massage and lymphatic health just relies on like a couple key lymphatic drainage points on your body and once you know how to kind of like touch them, then you can sort of unlock the lymphatic vessels.

8:58And then it's just kind of good for your body overall. So and we like to say now the thing that we're saying in the way that we're kind of attaching ourselves to this trend is like glow begins with flow. So like the skin on your body. Yeah, the skin on your body, right can only like you're we all know this like the skin on our body is topical, but there's lymph nodes below it and right and and muscle and all of these things and so really to me like the future of body care is a mix of like just the skin level deep part but also like below the skin level deep part um and so basically you you take these little patches and there is a a little map on the on the package and then what you do is there's six of them but it only takes like five minutes actually here I'll put them on while we fun okay this is great this is dinner and a show yeah we're gonna do a demo while we're here okay why not right um everybody loves lymphatic drainage i'm telling you it's like the you know i think there's some aspect of like there's like a like a renaissance-ness to it like you know like there's a curiosity element to it i also think the word is just kind of funny and fascinating sounding and the spelling of it for people is like one of those things that kind of gets like Like, you know, it just stops people.

10:19Really? Say more about that. What do you mean by the spelling and the word? I always like to think about that. Like what word choice we use as brands. Yeah. Well, I, well, I think that, I think that the sounds and the shapes of these letters, I have like background in English and linguistics. And so certain, certain formations and then also certain letter formations as you're reading will basically like make you feel a certain way. and so the word lymph has this sound that is like very health kind of feeling and oriented and then it's also kind of like really really like an odd sound for us yeah as opposed to something like like the word nike a k in the middle of a word is like triggers your memory and so lymph uh triggers this emotion of like like interest or curiosity so i feel like the word itself is doing a lot of work and then of course like we know that it has to do with like some organ or thing in your body but it's like right that we don't have yeah so i think i think that there's like a curiosity factor to it that probably is like really useful in marketing well and the other thing too and kind of the reason we made this product is it's an invisible system right and so what we want to try to do for our customers is just demystify wellness stuff and because i mean in my life like you know I just I want to know like I want to know like tell me the way to do it you know I want the five minute version of lymphatic massage I want to know how to do it the right way from the beginning you know what I mean yeah I just want to like of draining and you're like I'm draining it into myself and like then what yeah yeah you know it's it just it comes out it comes out in like your pee and sweat and it just kind of like comes out because your skin is not just a one-way thing you know your skin is a two-way it is a two-way tourist street hopefully not a lot like a street hopefully more like a meadow okay let's do it i'm really excited okay so we'll just do i'll just give you like the first three steps so that we don't have to stand up from our chairs and do the whole thing but so what you do is and you can do this at your desk So these are our patches.

12:31They're actually infused with magnesium and green tea, like a wearable wellness patch. The key to lymphatic drainage is to hit these points here. So you always want to stop. I mean, sorry. You always want to start here at the top. And so right here, if you ever get sick, do you ever get your kids ever get... Yeah, where you can kind of feel your lymph nodes like a little small. Yeah, that's where that is. your lymphatic system doesn't really technically need anything to move it's just that now we are so much more sedentary than we used to be and so for your lymphatic you know because we sit all day and all of these things there are things that we can do with massage and movement to help boost our lymphatic system okay so so you see this trend of lymphatic drainage how long does it take for you to turn that trend insight into a product like on on average oh that is probably something very weird about me that I can turn a trend insight into a product really quickly because I'm just a trend lady at the end of the day you know I did it for I mean I can't tell you how many mood boards and trend boards and how are we going to interpret this you know for the toilet market You know, that's what I used to, you know, I used to work with like American standard, you know, and it'd be like, how are we going to interpret wellness for the toilet market?

13:56You know, what's, is it bidets are the answer or is there something we're missing? I think there's probably all, I don't know. I'm not, I could have told you 10 years ago what the, I see. I'm not, I don't work in it anymore, but I would imagine that it's bidets and Japanese toilets and, right. Like just all the same wellness stuff. So it is kind of, to your point, it's like, that's kind of like what I love about that industry is, or what about doing trends is, I usually can find a trend and figure out how it works with my brand pretty quickly. And that's why I was good at what I did. And then I think also like from the manufacturing side of things, to your point, which I know you know very well, right?

14:38I know I have a lot of products that are really hard to manufacture and it takes me like two or three, you know, years to bring them to market. And then I have stuff like when I discover a new category, like patches, which is like my new favorite category. These are basically just a print job. You print. That's so different than like, you know, some of our like body. We have a formulation and we test and we go through years of like testing this stuff. So there are some trends that you can just like hop on to really quickly.

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15:53Shannon Davenport:Ready to ditch the chaos? Visit endlesscommerce.com, mention commerce as chaos when you reach out, and get three months free. Because your op stack should be your competitive advantage, not your biggest headache. Okay, we're back after these brief messages from our sponsors. Brief slides. So, OK, I want to know how trend forecasting is different for you when you're doing it for yourself, for your own like, you know, own brand, bootstrapped or not, because I think that's an interesting inflection, too, of like how much money do I have to play with when I'm using these tools? But just more sentimentally first, like how is this different doing it for yourself versus doing it for a large corporation?

16:33I think, you know, the thing with trends and chasing trends and like I think the difference between a product that's like really innovative and exciting and a product that's just like, you know, there's lots of products, fun products. Yeah, that we buy on Amazon and all of these things all the time. But they're there. You know what I mean? They might not be a product from a brand. They might be like a trend driven product, like like like in lymphatic drainage, right? Like vibration plates. Like that's a big trend right now, but Esker is not going to make vibration plates. Like we don't make electronics.

17:08We don't do things that plug in. We don't, you know, we're, we're kind of, so I think like for, for me, my Esker is like a, I think I'm a pretty good reflection of my customer just as a person or try to be. And so for us, I think like I, you know, I see lymphatic drainage and I'm like, I think Mike, I want to know about this. I think my customer wants to know about this. Esker is not going to start making vibration plates, but what can we do that, you know, is a product that can bring the customer into our world? And I just have a good sense of what our brand is and isn't, you know, like we don't make things that are electronic.

17:45Do you make, you know, we use we try to use classic materials, you know, wood, marble, metal. So I try to kind of, you know, look at a trend that might be relevant to my customer, but it has to really live inside our brand world. And it has to, yeah, I think actually being bootstrapped is even more important because like I was saying, you know, with these drainage dots that we did, like. It's a product that we can use to get onto lymphatic drainage trend, but it's not breaking the bank because it's a product that we can manufacture quickly and has good margins and all of those fun stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's such a clever strategy, right?

18:25You don't have to be, you know, you don't have to spend money in the way that big corporations spend money to be relevant to today's customer. And in fact, I think that like that discipline makes it easy to be more relevant more quickly. And it's good forcing mechanism for, you know, the micro innovations within the business. Yeah, totally. That's my most I mean, that's what I love doing the most. It's just I think that's what I love about beauty in particular as a it's true of all consumer trends. or consumer, you know, brands and categories to some extent, but beauty really moves so quickly in terms of like ingredients and innovation and format.

19:04And if you don't have your ear to the ground, you know, you have to, and it's hard for small brands because it doesn't mean you have to launch a whole new formula, right? Every, all the time, but you do have to find ways that you can bring in, you know, bring in whether it's like accessories or right, like basket add-ons or whatever so that you can try to bring some of the trend components or add-ons or whatever into the into the brand. Yeah that makes that makes a lot of sense. So we've been talking a lot about trends and trends influencing product development product strategy. Do you pay attention to go-to-market trends or like what ways of customer acquisition are also working?

19:47I'm guessing you have like some really interesting sort of instinct around that as well. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the only reason that we are still around. Okay. Tell me. I was just like, you know, again, I think like with beauty, beauty is a, yeah, and I know beauty the most. And I think when I say beauty now, I really do mean beauty and wellness together because I think they're moving at the speed of light together. And the part of beauty, the beauty industry that I think is more most interesting right now is where it crosses over with wellness, not so much just in the traditional categories, even though there's still great innovation in the traditional categories.

20:26But sorry, tether me back to the question again. Just that your ability to and your instinct

20:33Shannon Davenport:and special insights around trend forecasting probably clearly affect the product strategy, but they probably affect like your marketing, your customer acquisition strategy, decisions like, you know, everyone's spending a lot of money on paid media. Therefore, all paid media supply and demand gets more excited. So we do some other thing, right? Like that allows us to kind of gain an edge. And I'd love to hear if anything comes up for you around like things that you did that were maybe off trend on purpose to kind of distinguish yourself from the crowd in the go to market space. Yeah. Well, I think for us, like one of the things that I have been, I think, again, like some of the challenges of like being a brand that is an early adopter in trend spaces is that, you know, first mover advantage isn't always the easiest.

21:20You have to prove out the concept. And so one of the things that I'm still trying to navigate as a founder in this beauty and wellness world is like who even are our retail partners for beauty and wellness? Because, you know, these, you know, Ulta and Sephora and these retailers have been trying to wrap their heads or their their brands and their retail you know websites and the retail floor plans like around how do they integrate wellness and I think they're still figuring it out and so for us you know the conventional thinking I think was much more try to get into the beauty retailers and grow the business from there but now I think wellness is disrupting so much of what's going on with the beauty retailers that we've just been trying to really stay nimble so that we can figure out where is our customer actually even shopping right now?

22:13Because our customer is, you know, somewhat like I was saying, more of like a wellness customer than I think of as like an age group per se. But I do think that the big beauty retailers like Sephora and Ulta are going very young, very teen oriented, which is not my customer or me. so we've been trying to stay nimble I think in terms of like not putting all of our bags our eggs in the basket of like we're going to try to get in with Sephora and Ulta and we're just going to like figure it out in there and make wellness happen we're not going to be able to do that we're a small brand and so I think it's kind of come down to for us like at this point trying to stay nimble to figure out where the customer is like Amazon is giving both Sephora and Ulta run for their money for the beauty market now.

23:01So like two or three years ago, you know, maybe people weren't sure about being on Amazon, but we have wanted to be on Amazon, even though we are a prestige brand, because we are trying to figure out where, you know, the customer is. And I think the customer is just at a very fluid moment where, you know, it's not just, are you in this category? Go to the biggest retailer in the U.S. for that category. I think it's much more nuanced now with Amazon and experiential retail and D2C and then the beauty retailers and how you layer them in. So our strategy so far, I would say, has been very like as much as we can just trying to be nimble so that we can be on these different channels without putting all of our eggs into one basket.

23:45I think D2C is where we're putting most of our eggs. But aside from that, I think it's a lot of like trying to test and learn. And you make a good point that maybe this is a trend. prestige and convenience are no longer antithetical to each other like and and amazon is a really good kind of evidence of that like you you have a prestige brand and and many others are finding that the customer that has the wallet for that and you know and and and you've got their mind share like they still can want it to be easier and it's almost like the inverse of of what might have been traditionally characterized as like a convenience store where you're getting something kind of like inexpensive and on the corner, but these are like, you know, really upmarket brands that are finding that their customer does not necessarily need to like, you know, put on an outfit and go to the store to feel like they have an affinity to the brand.

24:40And I mean, even if our customer discovers us at say a Credo Beauty, right, we have a very limited selection at Credo. We want to be there because we want to be in person so that the customer can come in and look and feel and touch the product. I mean, it's a sensory product, but we're totally okay with it too. And love that if the customer just happens to discover us at Acredo and then they get their replenishments on Amazon, right? We want to make sure that we are all different. We're available for all of those different types of transactions. Do you think that the wellness space will establish like its own kind of retail presence or like zeitgeist almost.

25:22And I say I say that with the framing of like we've got the beauty stores and we've got grocery. Yeah. And then we've got like nutrition stores, which are sort of like the gym rat, you know, for most and most part is the gym rats. Is there space for something that really is wellness first in brick and mortar retail? Yeah, I think there I think that's like so I actually think it's a very interesting idea. We're still small. If I had like a$10 million budget, I would be like playing in all of these online offline concepts. But I definitely think experiential is just I mean, I'm sure that you have experienced this, but it's like, you know, adults now are doing like sauna birthday parties.

26:05Right. And like here in Austin, like there's a, you know, a new hot springs that's like an hour out of town. And it's just it's people really want these real life experiences. And then I think when you're in a category like beauty where there's a sensory element of it, you have to. I don't know. I think that the I think that there's going to be I actually I don't I want to know this answer, too, because I think that there's a really big opportunity for a retailer to think very to be very forward thinking. And I maybe it's not even, you know, the beauty retailers of the world, like maybe it's the equinoxes of the world, you know what I mean?

26:44who are providing like a new type of wellness experience that's that's a place where you can experience some of these things because wellness is a it's not a digital thing it's an experiential thing at the end of the day it has to do with our bodies right but then also have like the really good curated supplements and nutrients I mean in a way right it's what Gwyneth Paltrow has been doing from the beginning since Goop yeah it means she right like she kind of nailed all of this it's just that there's not a really a mainstream version of that yet. But yeah, I think it's going to be super interesting.

27:18I'm like always looking to see there's some really interesting new retailers in the UK that are really starting to actually like blend like real like kind of like high tech wellness and supplements and stuff with skincare, with beauty, it's, you know, fitness. But I think that that is really like there's a big hole in the market for that, honestly. And as that relates to sort of the world of funding and VC, it's been really interesting to kind of like ride these waves of, you know, I'm a consumer and so have you for a really long time. And, you know, VC kind of fueled a vintage of like really well-funded consumer brands from, I think, mostly from like 2015 to 2021, 22 or so.

28:05and then you see that drop off and then you see ai kind of rise up and then all of a sudden it's kind of it's kind of come back like the need to be in person the need to touch grass and touch our lymph nodes yeah yeah and smell and even smell things i mean i think that's like what's sent too like home fragrance is just like also but because i think people want to we want to come back to more of the sensory stuff like wellness is not we can market wellness behind the screen but wellness this is not an offline or, you know, not an online thing. It's an offline thing at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah.

28:43You have shared such wonderful insights and I'm so I could talk to you all day. It's been great. Can you leave us with one last maybe insight or thing that you're excited about that's coming around the corner, either for you personally, for Esther or for the world at large? I guess it kind of is a little bit. Well, I mean, I'm excited, honestly, just that customers, people like me, you know, I relate a lot to my customers. Like I have to like something for me to ever want to make it. And I'm excited to see especially women starting to really just really lean into self-care with no apologies, which is really what we want.

29:24We really want our customer to feel like self-care is not something they should ever feel guilty about. And so I love that. I think the wellness movement is like giving people finally, especially women, the agency to take care of themselves because women often put themselves last. happens all the time, especially working parents and all of the things. So I'm happy to see people start to really like embrace some of these wellness practices that just we need to do for ourselves as to just balance our bodies and our brains. And then for us, I'm really excited about just kind of leaning into what our consumers are excited about too, which is like these new areas of wellness like lymphatic drainage and perimenopause and menopause and sauna culture and bathing culture, right?

30:15And all of these kind of new, not new, they're actually really old modalities, but they're coming back again. And I think that is just a really refreshing, you know, shift finally. Thank you again. This has been so fun. And if you haven't tried Esker's lymphatic drainage thing. I highly recommend it.

30:35Shannon Davenport:It smells good now. It'll feel better. All right. Thanks, Shannon. Talk soon. Bye. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Commerce's Chaos. If you're listening, I have a feeling you know just how much good at leaving a five-star review can do for a team. Drop us a review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to Commerce's Chaos wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe to our sub stack, also called Commerce's Chaos, for more good stuff and actionable tools to build your business.