How Barefaced Uses Educational Content To Build A Nine-Figure Beauty Brand - ft Jordan Harper

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0:30Jasmine:Hey everyone, welcome back to Female Founder World. Today I'm chatting with Jordan Harper. She's the founder of Barefaced Beauty and that is a nine-figure brand. They've done hundreds of millions in revenue. Jordan started off with 20 ,000 followers. Now she has hundreds of thousands of followers and it's one of those stories where you look at the brand and you think, oh easy for her. She started off as an influencer. No, she built her personal following as she built her brand and I wanted to get her in to talk about the strategy behind building her personal brand as she builds out a DDC business and some of the big risks that she took as she was building the company and how they've paid off.

1:04Jasmine:Jordan, welcome to Female Founder World. Thank you, happy to be here. You spent years kind of educating people on the topic of beauty before you really asked them to buy anything and education is still one of the core pillars that grows barefaced. I want to spend some time at the beginning of the show diving into the case study about what you're doing and why this is working because we hear a lot don't sell to people on social you should be educating and it's actually really hard to do that in reality but you're someone who seems to have nailed it while also building a brand that is bigger than just yourself let's start like overall what are some of the channels that you're using to do this and how are you using them to build out that education strategy so when I started the brand in 2020 I definitely think the social landscape has changed.

1:55So I think that when you're thinking about starting a brand today, you need to, I still believe truly that like social is the best place to start your brand because it's free. And when I think about starting my brand, like I didn't have any money, I didn't have any way to start it. So I think knowing that like we have a free platform, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, I started mine on YouTube, or excuse me, I started mine on Instagram trying to grow my YouTube right now. But when I think about these like social platforms and what you're doing, there's, there's so many ways that they're changing.

2:28And I think, yes, you want to educate, but you also want to entertain, right? Why aren't we fighting? We're fighting for attention. So I call it edutainment. Um, I don't think I've like trademarked that word. I heard it from someone, but a way of like bringing your, bringing people along for, I'm a nurse practitioner. So I feel like I'm not just like an influencer. I would say like, I think of myself as like an expert with influence. And so when I'm bringing people along for the content that I create, yes, I'm coming from like that more expert lens. I've tried to do it in a way that's very conversational.

3:00So it's not medical advice, but it's very conversational. And I feel like what's served the brand really well is bringing people alongside me. And when I think about even our customer base, so I'm 39. Our customer base is really like between 30s and 40s. And I think they really fit into like the growth that I've had as a person. I've had pregnancies and I've had like different milestone moments in my personal life that I've brought them along for. So I think a lot of our customers relate to that. So when I think about just like education and growing the brand, that has been a huge aspect of, we started with education.

3:35And when I started my account, I was like recommending products. And through that, this is actually really important. Through that, I created a lead generation, which I think this is like the best way to grow a community outside of your social platform that you do not own. And I started this even before I had a brand, I would drive to a skin quiz to help people. And this is before skin quizzes, like we're popular now. It's like way more of a thing, but I would do this lead gen and you can do this now with mini chat, driving people. And then you're, you know, getting their emails or getting their SMS.

4:09And then you have like a way to contact them. So before I even launched the business, we had tens of thousands of email addresses to send out communication to. So I wasn't just connecting with them on social media. So there's an education component, but I do think you should treat each platform for what it is. Social is attention. So, yeah, you want to educate. But then once you bring people in that are more interested, you can really sell to them and educate them further on platforms like your emails that go out. And what we did for the first couple of years is like a lot of our emails weren't even like actively selling.

4:42They were educating. And that's how we do our lead gen right now. Our lead generation drives to the skin quiz or drives to a template that I've created to guide them through whether they want to know about how to build a skincare plan or how to build and do treatments in office, which we don't sell office treatments, but I'm still offering like my POV to people, even though that's not something we can technically sell, but it's a value that we offer to people who are interested. because I share my point of view as a nurse practitioner. And so I kind of build out a treatment plan for someone in their thirties and forties.

5:13So that lead gen gets them there. Then it gets, we get their email, but then we, we kind of like have a separate email process that we guide them through. So it's like a nurture process. So we're not just like, Hey, here's, here's an email from us, buy from us right away. We're building that like experience, I guess, or that like rapport with that person. So they know, Oh, this is a trusted person in this space. if I have a question I can go here and then when they are ready to buy we're already like

5:40Jasmine:on the forefront of their mind I love this so much is the emails coming from the brand or do they come from you um now they come from the brand but some of those like within that they'll be from me but they're from the brand email okay when you're talking about the content that's like at the top of that funnel could you give us some examples of let's say like you know anyway you're a beauty brand as you are and you want to be thinking about your content strategy and you're launching a new product, how do you think about, okay, rather than just creating aesthetic content or salesy content, that education content pillar, what does that look like?

6:13Jasmine:What, what are some angles? What are some actual things that you're, how do you like reframe that in your mind from social or just across the board? I mean, across the board, we do several different types. So there's, I would say, you know, now it's kind of like more of a web than a funnel, right? Like you're touching people in so many different ways. And when you think about like running ads, which we didn't do this until year three of business. So if you were like at a place in your business where you're like, I can't afford to run ads. I think that's a very realistic place to be in. We were in that and I had no clue.

6:42One, I didn't even know how to run an ad. I think Facebook and meta is very confusing. And so I would say the first thing, and this is something I actually learned from the cakes founder and we still, um, we test this theory out. So, um, you probably heard of cakes, right? The nipple covers. Yeah. Okay. Um, okay. So anyways, So what she does is, and this is how they grow their account. And we, we trial all this on our Tik TOK. So we will have, and we have our, um, a brand manager do this, or we have content creators do this and we just have them crank out a ton of content. Like we try to do between two and three pieces of content a day on Tik TOK when we're testing out, um, what we want to push for an ad or what we want to push for a launch to see if like, what kind of tracks.

7:25And so we do that in a way that's like, okay, that's kind of our testing space. And so we're not just like running ads on something that we really have no concept of it's going to be successful or not. And so we can at least see like what's getting traction and yes, you're paying someone to do that. Or if you don't have employees, like you could easily do this. The cakes founder, when they were, when she was building the business, this was like all her, she would do a hundred pieces of content on her Tik TOK a month. And this is what I would essentially do too. When I, before I would hire or anyone.

7:55This is like, yes, your time is money. But like at the beginning, when you don't have the money potentially to like put into something, I didn't have investors in my company. So like this was me going all in. And so you have to use and get creative and resourceful for like what you have access to. So the way I would do it is I would test out different content strategies on TikTok and see kind of what tracks. I think a lot of what's working on TikTok, you can then bring over to on Instagram. So something about bare face now, but before we started, this is obviously not a thing. We have a really high returning customer rate.

8:26So our returning customer rate is about 90%. And the industry standard is around 30. However, you know, you always want new customer acquisition. So we have a different approach for new customer acquisition than we do for our existing customers. We like really nurture and value our existing customers more than anything because they're what continue to propel the business. So the way that we approach the web, I would say is like testing these theories on TikTok. Then if, you know, The ones that are successful typically are going to be successful on Instagram. I would even run those if I wasn't running and paying for ads, I would run those as trial reels.

8:58It's a great way to get in front of new eyes for$0. And then once we get people who are either, you know, what we're talking about on stories, those are typically followers who are watching. So maybe there's more calls to action. Like maybe there is a sales push. And what I like to do is a story framework where, um, and this has actually been really successful on my account. I've gotten the highest story views I've ever gotten using this framework. So I typically am getting around maybe like 30 to 40 ,000 views on stories. And that's when I'm kind of just like posting and not really being intentional about the story I'm telling.

9:37If I follow this framework, I will get a hundred to like 125 ,000 views per story, which is all that is, is more eyes looking towards what you're doing, what you're selling. So leveraging that and following a framework. And a lot of that is done. So, um, it ends up being anywhere between a four to six slide story framework. And this is something when you're, when you're posting on stories, you're posting to your followers. When you're posting to reels, you're posting to people who you want to see your business. So I think it's like a totally different type of communication. So I follow this and I started with an intro hook and it's not a video.

10:12It's something to get them engaged in something like, um, I was today years old when I found out that's kind of cheesy, but Like it's something that's like getting their attention in a way that's like relatable. So I'll do that. And it's like, oh my gosh, my kids aren't sleeping through the night. This is like something that's made such a difference in what I'm doing. Or I know a lot of my community is moms. And so I'll think of something that like is actually relatable to me and then have a conversation about it. So I introduced this like concept. I have done this with, what have I done? Oh, I did this with this campaign that we had.

10:43And this is the story view that I got like over 120 ,000 views. It was one of our most successful campaigns we ever did. And I truly believe it's because the story that I was, I told was like, it was introducing, so getting someone engaged, then introducing like a problem, kind of like building on that tension. And if you go to my Instagram page, you'll actually see, I'll do this sometimes in carousels as well. So it's a good way to like, you kind of introduce this like problem. I'm 40 years old. I have four kids. This is what I do to get my life together or whatever. And then I'm kind of introducing attention, introducing a solution, third-party verification, whether that's like a before and after for our product or reviews.

11:22And then at the end, you're like a call to action is the very last thing. So it's a very, very simple way. And there's a, um, there's a girl that I love that you guys, um, she's an, she's, she's an influencer, but obviously influencing is a job. she has a instagram account called the story tutorials she's a great follow and she kind of can walk you through that process i'm telling you to sell product it is very very effective

11:49Jasmine:i like i have my pen out i'm taking notes as if this is my own podcast okay we'll definitely be following her so i just want to recap you basically start with a um some kind of pain point that you know that your community will be feeling but that you can kind of be the proxy to like you're the one experiencing it so you can tell the story through your own you know experience and then you'll go into this is some kind of solution that you have and there might be a couple of slides about that and then there'll be a some kind of third party verification around and it's worth xyz and then it's the cta which might be like a mini chat prompt or something like that you know it's interesting so i use i've tested mini chat prompts in stories and i tested just links and stories.

12:33And I use mini chat a lot on my page for reels and carousels, but in stories, while I may get a lot of mini chat responses, I have found, and this is my own personal, like I'm sure mini chat, mini chat is very, um, legit. I'm sure they could like pull more information. This is my experience. When I've used mini chat as a prompt to a story, the actual link clicks from that. So like, obviously it goes to a DM, you can click on a link are so much lower than if I just linked directly. And we, what we do is we test the same link. So I'll use a custom UTM. So whether it's mini chat or, um, just a direct link, I'll use a custom UTM and the, the link in the actual story has been more successful for conversion.

13:23Jasmine:Interesting. Okay, great. And for people that don't know many chat, many chat is a great tool it's about 20 a month and it allows you to automate basically automate your dm so you can send links you can gather email addresses and it's kind of you see brands or um creators posting in captions like comment podcasts with the link to the show or something that is generally a many chat automation um for anyone who hasn't tried it it is amazing it is amazing i remember when they started i was i remember being very hesitant to use it because i thought surely this This isn't surely like Instagram's going to block this or have issues with this, but that they seem to be like fully on board and integrating it.

14:00Jasmine:So yeah, definitely get on board. I definitely thought it was like spammy at first and then they've definitely integrated it. It's definitely not spammy. It's, I don't think it's going anywhere and it's such a good way too. You can mini chat if you get a new follower, so you can have a mini chat set up. So an automated response. So if you get a new follower, you can kind of welcome them to your account. I think every single business owner should be doing that. I agree. Welcome them to your account. I agree. And then tell them what you do, ask them how you can help. And I think that's such a good way to like activate a new follower into your community and get them like instantly involved.

14:34Jasmine:Yeah. Especially when you think about how much of your content actually gets shown to your followers. Often it's not very much, but if you can begin that direct message relationship right away and start pointing them to things that are valuable, you can have that relationship immediately where you're not just forgotten about after that first follow. Definitely. I love this tutorial. Oh my gosh. I could talk about this all day. What does your content team, what does your marketing team look like? Like, are you, are you doing like a talking to camera for your stories? Is somebody in your team kind of taking photos from your photo reel and putting text overlay?

15:08Jasmine:Like what are the, what's the tactic? I actually love to, I could talk about this all day too, because I think this is like such an insider thing that you're, I have truly figured out along the way. And if I had someone kind of, and I definitely have no problem asking people. So if I feel like someone's doing content, well, I'll dig in, like, how are you doing this? What are you using? And so I think that's, you always want to be looking at people who are doing it. Well, I love following people who are giving social tips and video editing tips, but currently now I'm so thankful. So for the past year I've been doing, okay, first of all, I've been creating content since 2015 and it has taken me until probably the past year and a half.

15:47Now I have someone that edits basically all of my videos. I still am the creative, like I, um, vision, I would say for my Jordan Harper account now for our bare faced account, which also has, it's a large following too. That is completely owned by our brand team. And they run that completely. Whereas for a long time, I was approving every single post by chief brand officers here with me right now. And we would literally be in the weeds, like approving every single post. And we are, we have moved past that, but here's what I will say. I still think social is extremely important. And I think there's this concept of like, Oh, I'm going to get out of social.

16:22Like we're not getting out of social, like nobody's getting out. So you got to just like lean in and just figure out and adapt and figure out how to do it well, because that is where people's attention is. And so what I do for my account, we have a, so that bare face business account is totally separate. And we've recently now separated my account as well, just because the accounts have grown so significantly. It was too much for one team to manage. So we have a brand team and a marketing team. And I would say the brand team, 100 % owns the brand account and the brand messaging from that. We also now contract with an agency to help us get content every single month, whether that's UGC, it's really, it's all under our direction.

17:03They have UGC creators that they work with. They will do studio shoots for us. So that's something that we pay them like a rate every month. And then we get a certain amount of content. And so we kind of direct what those shoots look like. And that allows us to just get a lot more content before that we were doing it and we've done it in house and we've done it, but, and I don't know if like, there will be a season where we bring it back in house for the brand, um, as far as the content creation, but we're a fully remote team right now. So having those external, and I think this is such a hack too, for if you're starting a business, you don't have to bring everything in house.

17:37There's so much you can do with agencies. And there's also like, I think, especially if you're bringing on like these big hires, it's so nice to test out and learn before you bring on people full-time because there's so much, so many mistakes, so many things we have learned along the way and having it be a contracted agency. There's just like, if you need to go in a different direction, it's just so much easier. and you can kind of pivot very quickly instead of being locked into these like, you know, a full-time employee, et cetera. But how I run Jordan Harper account is I have an editor and I pretty much film all of my content except for if we do campaigns or anything like that.

18:19But I just have me, one editor, and then we just use Asana for everything and she edits in Premiere Pro or CapCut. And we actually just brought in a second editor for YouTube and podcasts. So I have actually two editors on my account. So interesting.

18:34Jasmine:I feel like we spend a lot of time talking about content and marketing because it's something that you do so well. But I also want to talk about your funding story because I think the fact that you have managed to bootstrap the brand to this level is really impressive. And I think a lot of us are out here trying to bootstrap, whether it is by choice or by just necessity. And I want to understand how you've managed to do this. So you started the brand in 2020. you built it basically through credit and maxing out credit cards. I want to know what that conversation was like within your household, within your business and how you made that decision to take such a big leap.

19:12Jasmine:I think a lot of people, it's not the right decision for everyone, but clearly it's worked out for you. And I want to know what your thought process and what that conversation looks like. So before that was even a conversation, I think what my background as a nurse practitioner, I've treated thousands of patients over the past decade plus of being a nurse practitioner. So before I even thought about a business or before I even thought about maxing out credit cards, and we should also add that I was, my husband and I from our medical training and he was, had medical debt, like we were over$500 ,000 in debt, like literally had no business probably maxing out more, like maxing out credit cards.

19:47But before that was ever even a conversation, there was so much built on top of that. So like I had been listening to patients in office and I was posting skin tips and injection tips online. So I was listening to an online community and my patients in office for years. And I could see very clearly like where this gap was and patients were coming in. They were wanting to get these office treatments and wanting to get, you know, maybe like a laser treatment or a skin resurfacing treatment, but they didn't have set skincare routine. And I always use the analogy that would be like going to the dentist once or twice a year, but not brushing your teeth in between.

20:25So I started to see these gaps and people would just be using random skincare. So random skincare leads to random results. And so I just started to see these gaps and really understand that women are really overwhelmed by skincare. They don't know what to use. And so if I can create these like simplified processes for them, they can use skincare. Yes, but they can see results. And I think that's what we all want, right? Like we all want to feel confident in the skin that we're in. And so it doesn't really matter if you get an office treatment, like if you're not prepping your skin properly, and if you're not doing the post, if you're not treating it properly afterwards, like the investment that you're making is just like a waste.

20:59And I'm a person that I've struggled with my skin my whole life. So I'm very aware of like how you can feel when you don't feel good about your skin. And I'm aware that like, I don't even think about my skin. And that's also a great feeling. You don't think about it because you feel confident in it. So then you can just go out and live your life and feel fully alive, right? And pursue whatever you want to do without being held back by your skin. So for me, when I thought about this, it seems like a risk now. And I think that is so crazy, but it felt so clear. And it wasn't an idea that I just thought was good.

21:30It was an idea that patients had given me, the online community had given me. And so I was so clear with what I was doing. And I knew it was solving a problem that I just knew it was going to be successful. So yes, it was a risk, but it didn't like, it didn't feel like it at the time. And maybe that's being naive, but no, well, I mean, I think that everyone who starts a business

21:49Jasmine:has to have some naivety, you know, otherwise you wouldn't, you wouldn't do it because the chances, you know, the odds are stacked against you. That's just the fact. And you have to go into it thinking, you know, with that like conviction, like what, like what you said. So I can understand how it didn't feel like a huge risk, but I'm still really curious about the actual nuts and bolts of that, of how you actually bootstrap and fund a business that is so cash, like, you know, so expensive and so cashflow intensive. Um, do you take out loans? Do you hire a CFO? How do you, how do you do this? Okay.

22:22So I'll talk you through like the beginning and then like what we're doing now. So we are six years in. So at the beginning there, I should also say I've never taken a business class, a finance class. However, I do feel really grateful. Like I think my parents were always really vigilant about like, I remember like getting a checkbook and I would have to like fill in, you know, when I had money. So I was always, they were making sure I could like balance a checking account. And so anytime I had so many different jobs growing up. And so I was really good. I mean, that's super basic, but I do feel like they taught me to never overspend, never spend more than what I have.