3 Years Ago No One Knew Her Makeup Brand. Now 1 Eyeliner Sells Every 4 Minutes

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World Podcast. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show. I'm the person behind all things Female Founder World. And today I'm chatting with the founder of Kolfi Beauty, Pramika Ganju. Welcome. Hi, Jasmine. I'm so excited to be here. You guys have done a lot since launching in 2021. You're only a few years old. You're a Sephora bestseller. You have quite a big range of products now. Your content is absolutely killing it. You have this hardcore dedicated community. You've had press coverage everywhere. I'm just so interested in how you've made all of this happen in such a short amount of time.

0:39It's really impressive. And this podcast is all about learning from people who are like building right now, not people who maybe built 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So I want to get into some really like specific tactics and things that are working. Does that sound good to you? That sounds great. Okay. Let's start at the beginning, 2021. You've been working in the beauty industry. Why did you want to start this brand of your own? I always say it's wild to me that I have a beauty brand because growing up, I actually didn't wear makeup and I didn't really participate in beauty. It just never felt like something that I was given permission to participate in, quite literally, because my mom would tell me not to wear makeup.

1:14But also because I just didn't see people who look like me in like on the in the beauty campaigns, just being celebrated for our features. And so that's something that kind of stuck with me through adulthood. But somehow I ended up making myself be part of the beauty industry from a business perspective. So I worked at Estee Lauder where I did strategy. And then I moved to Ipsy, which is a beauty subscription service where I ran merchandising, which was playing with product and actually like testing product for what we wanted to put in our beauty bag. And so all of those experiences were in my adult life is when I had this aha moment of this is actually fun.

1:55Makeup is fun. It's expressive. Like it makes me feel a certain way when I put on a red lipstick or a gold highlighter. And that's where it clicked for me was that I see a space where this joyful relationship with beauty hasn't really been centered, especially for women who are South Asian. And that was something that I wanted to build for because I hadn't seen it before. So that's really how we I got started. Amazing. I want to talk about money because we're not following hobbies here. These are businesses. How did you get the money to start and what does it cost to start something like this?

2:29Full park-ish. Yeah. So I left my job in 2019 to start like working on this. I would probably recommend you keep your job if possible, as long as possible. But at that point, I had about$100 ,000 saved and I got like another$50 ,000 from family. And that was the$150 ,000 pool that I used to start the business. And I thought it would last me like two years. just got us through the launch day, which was September 2021. Wow. Okay. And then since then, how have you been funding things? So we did friends and family round. That's what got us to the Sephora launch. And then we did go out and raise funding.

3:10Okay. How did you learn how to do that? It's really trial and error. I think you just have to go and put yourself out there. In fact, the first time I was able to get money was when I posted on my LinkedIn. I had posted about our story. I'd made an application to one of those competitions for early stage startups. And I just posted my application on LinkedIn. And I said, this is my application, like just for everyone to read about what I'm building. And someone who I had gone to a school with 12 years ago reached out and was like, hey, what are you doing? Let's chat. And then we chatted and he was like, do you want money for this?

3:50And I was like, wow. That was easy. It sounds easy, but to get to that point, to get to the point where you have the confidence to be able to like totally have a conversation and have your business plan laid out took a lot of rejections. I think you just have to be very comfortable with putting yourself out there. And lots of people saw that post, but a lot of people, you would think that so many other people will come and support you and that doesn't always happen. but the people who will support you, whether that's your customers or whether that's like the people who want to fund you will find you eventually.

4:21You just need to be very comfortable with rejection and very comfortable with putting yourself out there. I want to like actually just talk about that a little bit more because people, again, it's one of those things that you hear a lot of people talking about. You need to get comfortable with rejection. You need to be comfortable putting yourself out there and confident asking people for money and you're like, yeah, sure, tick. It's actually a really hard thing. It's something that I think a lot of people are really wrestling with. And how did you get to that point? Was there anything that you were actively doing to feel comfortable?

4:53Were you just born with some innate confidence? I've only had one person answer that question with, yes, I was born with innate confidence. I think I just got rejected a bunch of times. It's really experience. I think you go in with you take every meeting as if it's going to be successful and then you hear a no and you're like okay now time for the next person on the list because ultimately like you just I have had the singular mission that I had to get to the finish line and we had to get to launch day and we had to I had to see this out in the world because I had at that point worked on it for a while and I just felt it was such a beautiful brand and I really wanted to see it come to life It was a sad attitude of I don't really, even if I get, even if someone says, no, it's not going to stop me from doing what I'm doing, at least I run out of money.

5:39And so I'll continue doing it anyway. So you try not to take it too personally. But I do think like more than confidence, I think it just takes persistence. I think if you have some level of innate persistence, I think that is probably going to take you a much longer way. Yeah, that's a really good way of phrasing it. How were you finding investors? You found that one on LinkedIn. the rest of them were you reaching out to your network for introductions someone doesn't have a network to get introductions how do you go about this yeah it's hard ultimately I would say the people who funded me in the friends and family round were people who had worked with me in the past like my ex-bosses some were my friends who were like okay I see you're doing this and I have some money to be able to give to you and this is despite having a pretty strong professional network I would say at that point I'd worked in the in corporate beauty for a while and I'd been to some good schools.

6:32I had a pretty good professional network, but even then convincing someone to invest in you is very hard. And so to the extent possible, I think the longer you can bootstrap, use your own savings, keep your job or like tap into people who know you, trust you, believe in you, whether it's like someone you've worked with in the past. I think that's probably the most time efficient thing to do because I I definitely reached out to a lot of seed funds, investment funds. Like I said, I got that first meeting because of my professional network. But all I heard was no. And it's honestly not easy. It felt like I was having hundreds of hours of conversations just to hear no.

7:11But in the long run, it does help because now I feel like I know a lot of the funds in the beauty space because I had that first conversation with them. But I also that didn't mean that it converted in that first conversation. So then you ended up launching in 2021. What did you launch with? What product? We launched with our Kajal eyeliner, which is still one of our best-selling products, actually. We sell one every four minutes or something that my finance director came up with. And the Kajal is basically a traditional South Asian eyeliner. It's culturally, we used to make it at home. You burnt like almond and mix it with ghee or casserole oil and use it to line the eyes.

7:49culturally it's supposed to ward off evil eye or nuzzer. And so we had a campaign that played on that. It had that same like beautiful formulation that's very pigmented, but in a very modern formula. And we spoke to the idea of nuzzer no more. So we said like evil eye no more, but the evil eye is to the patriarchy and to the Eurocentric beauty standards that have kept us like held us behind and rejecting those ideas, embracing self-expression. So we launched it in black and also like a series of colors. And it was like a really fun, like focused launch, which again was very intentional because we had only so much money to be able to launch.

8:27We couldn't launch with a full collection. I want to talk about launch and launch marketing and what worked in that moment. And as you've since gone on to launch a lot more products, a lot more SKUs, what's working now? What did those launch campaigns look like? Can you walk through? I think one of the things that really worked for us was timing. And I think sometimes the fact that we were in this cultural moment in 2021, where nobody else had owned this messaging before of being loud and proud South Asian in beauty. And we were also there was a lot of conversations thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement that around inclusion.

9:06And so I think we were in a cultural moment where people were looking for those stories, looking for how do we uplift voices and I'm a beneficiary of that. I do think that timing helped in terms of being culturally in the moment. And then of course we had beautiful photography. We had a beautiful product. We had a Bollywood inspired photo shoot we did. We, the models we chose were from the community. We actually cast it from the community and found models who you typically wouldn't see in a beauty campaign and especially South Asian models. All three of our models were South Asian from different backgrounds and diverse stories.

9:42So it was such a fresh campaign in a moment where people were really looking for that. Not to say that they're not looking for it now. I'm just saying in that moment, it was so new that it just got attention. That's why we got the Vogue coverage on launch day and we were on the Allure homepage and all these things. And I think it's because we were able to capture that moment with a really beautiful and thoughtful brand and launch. How did that press come about? Were you working with an agency? Were you pitching? How did that happen? That was my only marketing spend, actually, mostly because I actually didn't know anything about marketing when I launched the brand.

10:14You've done so well. It was really, truly like our PR agency. And then we used to have a blog back in the day called Kofi Bites, where we worked with a lot of up and coming Gen Z writers who we were probably the first time they'd ever written for a publication, where we gave them a platform to talk about beauty and wellness. So there was this like very engaged writing community as well as a PR agency that was helping us also amplify those stories that kind of came together. Amazing. What agency did you work with? They're called 6-1. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Do you still work with an agency or do you do it yourself now?

10:46So we work with an agency. Actually, that is one of the people that we worked with at 6-1 who was loosely affiliated with that agency, went on to start her own agency and sort of like now work with her. They're called Good Apple PR. Okay. I love a good PR agency recommendation. They're great. They're great. Both of those are great. I think we were just like now we're in that phase where we want to be very like, there's a launch moment and there's the constant drumbeat. And so I think Good Apple has done a good job for us. Do you think that the press you're getting leads to sales or is it more about like brand building, getting Sephora?

11:20Like what does the press do for you? I would say if you go into it with a lens that will convert to sales, you're going to set yourself up for disappointment. Yeah, you think you can get this feature and then Shopify is going to be like... No, it very rarely happens. I think we've had a couple of press mentions that have led to sales. I think we were once in the Allure email, completely organic. And that led to a lot of traffic. The other one was that this year we were on the Today Show, She Made It segment. And like the day the segment aired, we saw like a huge jump in traffic. How do you get on the Today Show?

11:50That's so cool. You need to ask my PR agency. They did a great job. And of course, having a story. And just also, I think one of the things that was interesting was that they look for like other times you've shared the story before because they want to make sure that you have some experience sharing your story. So even doing things that are just putting your story out there on social media will make it more likely that they'll pick you up because they know you're good at expressing your story. In fact, the segment is going to re-air in December on December 27th. So I'm really excited. And this time I'm ready.

12:21So we have a we'll have a discount code ready. Last time around, I didn't think of that. But this time I want to convert all the traffic that comes in. So those have been segments that have actually converted to sales. But those, I would say, are few and far between. Overall, I would say it's more about establishing credibility. We this year won three Allure Best of Beauty awards, which I think is, again, unheard of for the brand that is our size and stage. It's like half of our product portfolio. But it just establishes that we're us in the eyes of the beauty consumer, that they're legit. And so that's someone Googles you.

12:51There's five, 10 articles that are talking about you that helps because, again, they're not like, oh, this is something that's like a fly by night like operation. Something that you're doing so well is content, TikTok, community building. And I think it's one of those things where you discover a brand, you go to their account and you look what they're doing and you're like, yeah, they've absolutely nailed it. Like I can tell exactly what they're about immediately. Like it feels really relevant and really fresh, but like still is like selling me on the product. And that's a really hard thing to do.

13:23And it's also a hard thing to teach people how to do, but I would love to try and capture what it is that you're doing that's working. When you and your team are planning what you're going to post in your content, can you walk me through what that process looks like and some of the tools that you might use to do it and who's helping you do it? Yeah, I would say taking a step back even from the direction of our content, it really stems from this idea of I didn't feel seen in beauty content before. Our goal is to have people have a joyful relationship with beauty and see themselves in beauty. And that started with that blog I was talking about.

13:59The evolution of that is storytelling, but in video format or in social media friendly format. And so a lot of what we do is feature people who are using our products, their stories, showing those diverse faces in our content. So it stems from what is our brand mission and what should be the kind of stories that we should be telling. And as we think about content and doing a mix of, I would say, product content, but at the same time, talking about the brand personality, talking about behind the scenes. Now we have a theme that, you know, sometimes gets volunteered to do content with us. It's all about making sure we're still showcasing different faces, showcasing different stories, making it fun and approachable because that's the ethos of the brand.

14:43I think in terms of specific tools, now we have a team. I'm not super into the day-to-day. We use Planoly for still for Instagram planning. I think TikTok, we just use a Google sheet to plan and we'll typically put in like the concepts, put in some like reference links. And then we're probably shooting, filming, editing content every week, a couple of days of shooting content. And then my team is like editing content every week. Okay, business besties, let's switch gears for a second. Real quick, I want to talk to you about this season's presenting sponsor, Vistaprint. They are sponsoring this entire season of the Female Founder World podcast, and we love a supportive sponsor.

15:24So much so that we're actually working with Vistaprint ourselves to create the merch and all of those beautiful event perks that you know and love from our in real life Female Founder World events. If you haven't heard of Vistaprint, here's what you need to know. Vistaprint helps all kinds of business owners print all kinds of marketing products like super professional business cards, fun merch, eye-catching flyers and brochures, and a whole bunch more. And it's all completely custom. So you can do whatever you want. Whatever you're imagining right now, Vistaprint can print it. And if you're wondering if you're ready to be a designer girly, their easy to use website makes it super simple.

16:06Plus they have designers on hand to help you if you really need it. Right now, Vistaprint is giving all female Founderworld podcast listeners a little something, 25 % off your first order at vistaprint.com. Use the code FFW25 at checkout and step up your branding game. We put a link in the show notes if you want to learn more. do you work with any UGC creators we do but so we have our we launched our ambassador program called Kofi Besties earlier this year but that was a formal way of crystallizing the community we had already built micro creators a lot of the people in the Kofi Besties program are micro creators who do UGC so sometimes we'll ask them to be like hey for example in December we're doing a lot of emphasis on our sets our a set of like bundles of beauty products so we just recently worked with them to create content for the bundles.

17:00And so we reached out to some of them and it's a paid partnership, but it's like a way to have an already engaged community that loves your brand also creating content for you. Amazing. How do you, like in a really practical way, how do you start and then organize a community like that where they're dipping in and out with a paid arrangement, but you want to keep them engaged. You want to have the right people in there. Like Is there a dedicated person on your team that does that? We have someone who's helping freelance manage. So she probably does a few hours a day, I would say, manage the community.

17:34And we have a group chat as well in Geneva that she runs. And so it's really fun. I think it took us some time, right? We launched in 2021. We finally launched this program this year. So it took us three years to even get to a place where we had the resources to be able to do that. And initially, I would say how we started was just it started out by gifting products to influencers. And we did a pretty blanket approach, I would say. We were pretty generous with our gifting because it was still, all things considered, still one of the lowest cost marketing tools we had. And then we saw who genuinely engaged and we tried to keep like that relationship more informally.

18:13And then building that list for our new launches, continuing engaging them with new launches. Maybe sometimes we'll reach out to them and be like, do you need a restock of this product? Because we see them using it. We see that they love the brand. And then finally coming to a place where we were able to launch this community. But even then, I would say not everyone engages all the time. Everyone has a million things going on in their lives. And that's totally OK. It's just more about making sure that you're on occasion. We did a Zoom call where we did a holiday look together. And it was me, our team, and some of the people who were able to join in.

18:47So it's just like constantly providing some sort of programming to keep them engaged. it's okay for them to opt in or out of it depending on like their life because they have a lot going on too. I think the live programming is so key and it's one of those things where I think people get disheartened if they don't have a thousand people sign up to come to their whatever. Oh no we had 20 people come and that's amazing that 20 people took 45 minutes to join your thing is absolutely incredible. Yeah I agree I think it's like people need to reframe in their mind about what success looks like with that, because it is a form of influencer marketing.

19:23And it's a way of engaging those really influential and powerful people within your circle, even if they're not like huge influencers or press or whatever. These are the folks that you want to be out in the world as ambassadors for you. And it's like 20 people on a 45 minute call, huge win. Absolutely. And it shows up in little ways. Now when we post something, I see the people who comment on our posts. And there are people who we've touched in some way and left this impression, this joyful relationship manifested that in real life. And so I think that's really important. And I think coming back to that first question you had around, like, how do you make sure your content is successful?

20:02And you have to take some of those numbers out of it and really focus on, are you able to generate quality engagements? Because those people are going to be talking about your brand, even when you're not around. And I think that's what you have to reframe, because if you just think about numbers, yeah, we don't even have 100 ,000 Instagram followers, right? And a lot of brands do. And that doesn't mean that they're necessarily more engaged as an audience. And it doesn't mean they're selling more product. Yeah, exactly. And some of the comments people say, I love Kofi and I want to create a brand that someone loves.

20:35And that's just, that's the highest form of compliment you can have because you know how many there's so many brands it's so hard to fall in love these days I mean brands and people that's the that's what you want to try to accomplish through the content you're putting out through the interactions you're having and so you can't be too hung up on oh this only got like 500 views yeah I totally agree we're just coming off the back of Black Friday now like with the week after when we're recording this and this is going to publish a little bit later but we are in the thick of holiday as well what's working what's not working do you have a did you have a black friday offer what are your lessons from you've done this a couple of times now what's your lessons on what's cutting through for black friday i think people are go are looking for things that they have seen through the year so one of my biggest lessons this year was that you can't really create new excitement for a product like post-October.

21:32Like anything you're doing around like product awareness, brand awareness, you need to do between like January to September because after that, it's really about re-engaging the people that already have seen your brand before and then, or they've bought from you before, but maybe you're showing them a different product and just, or in our case, we focused, like I said, a lot on bundles because we finally have enough products for people to be able to do a full face of Kofi. So we're really focusing on telling people like we have, hey, you've tried our eyeliner, try our concealer or try our lip staining oil.

22:05And that's really what we're focusing on. It has worked really so far. We just did a test and it was really like pretty hacky, I would say, like our Shopify backend isn't fully working correctly. But we just were like, let's just test it out. And then if it works, if people are converting and they are buying like this, we created about six sets on our site. like everything from a five-minute face to a no makeup look to a full face of Kofi. And we were like, let's see if people are converting. And if they are, then next year we can like really invest in like good photography and all of that and like a proper back end on Shopify.

22:38So I would say just also just testing new things. But for us, what's working is really engaging people who've seen our brand before and then showing them that now they can do more with Kofi. Amazing. Got to talk about Sephora. How did Sephora happen? So Sephora happened because of Sephora Accelerate, which is their incubation program. Again, I talk about timing. That's the first time I heard about you guys was when you got on the, I think we reached out and did something about the Accelerator program. I think we did. We had a conversation. I think we had just launched back then. So we, I applied to Sephora Accelerate in September or October 2020.

23:17So this is before we had launched. We launched in February 2021. And again, I talk about timing because that was the year they decided to focus on founders of color and really catering the program to that because they took the 15 percent pledge, which was basically a pledge to have at least 15 percent of the shelf with founders who are founders of color or black founders. And again, I was a beneficiary of that. And we got into that program. We were selected even before we launched. And that was how the relationship started. But I would say from the time we got into Accelerate, which was end of 2020, early 2021, to the time we launched on.com, which was September 2022, that was still like 18 months.

23:59It took a while from the time we had that first conversation to actually being able to launch just on their website. And what were some of the things that you were doing during that time? Because my understanding of the founders that I've spoken to who launched in Sephora, it's like it's a one time offer. Like you don't want to mess that up. You need to make sure everything goes really perfectly because you don't get invited to like launch again into Sephora for a second time. What were some of the things that you were doing on the back end in the business to prepare yourself and make sure that A, you could fulfill that volume of product and B, that people were going to show up and buy it?

24:34Yeah, I think that's where just launching online was a very smart move. Honestly, I wouldn't even say I suggested it. Sephora told us you should just launch online first. And I was like, initially I was resistant to the idea because I was like, you know what? I want to launch across channels. What's the point of launching at Sephora if I'm not going to be in the store? But they really insisted. They were like, no, start online only. And actually, that thing, that step-by-step approach has really helped us because I agree, once you launch at Sephora, you want to be able to capture the momentum and grow.