Lo Bosworth’s Recipe for a Successful Launch on Social Media

0:00Hey, welcome to Female Founder World. It's Jasmine. I'm the host of the show and I'm the creator of all things Female Founder World. Most of you guys will know my guest today, Lo Bosworth, as the girlie from the hills, Laguna Beach, but she's really spent the last seven years reinventing herself and building the most incredible supplement business called Love Wellness. I don't think you guys realize how big this is. I certainly didn't until I spoke to her, but she spent the first two years doing everything herself. So she put her savings in, she started this from home, she made the website herself like googled how to find manufacturers pretty much what all of us are doing that's how she got started and then by 2019 the business hit eight figures in revenue and they went on to become a bestseller at target they're stocked in altar and low since brought in investors so she's now got like 25 million dollars of investment in the company but she did start this herself and she has a lot of lessons around getting traction in the early days and how to scale.

1:07After we recorded this session, Lo was a guest speaker at our Female Founder World Network and Chill Morning in New York City at Chill House. Honestly, that was just the best morning. It was so nice to see our New York crew. I love seeing you guys IRL. And we have so many more events coming up across the US. We have London coming up and in one other country at the end of the year, which I'll share more about later. But the only way to find out about these are really to be on our email list. So you can sign up at femalefounderworld.com to make sure that you hear about registrations when they open.

1:42Okay, let's get into the show. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host, Jasmine Grinsworthy. Hello, welcome to the Female Founder World podcast. It's so good to have you on the show. Thank you. I'm so excited. And we're both in New York. I know. I love doing them in person. Now this is, you know, we were just talking to your team before and it's like definitely the future of podcasting and media is like being able to do this in person piece, having the video element and also just you get way better quality content if you can have that in-person connection as well. I don't even remember before COVID, were we doing podcasts in person?

2:14I mean, we were barely doing podcasts. Yeah. I had a podcast with a couple of my girlfriends in the early days of Love Wellness and it wasn't wellness related. It was called Lady Lovin' and it was with my two friends. One's a comedian, one's an entrepreneur. And I guess it was the three of us. So we always did it in person, but it was so long ago. Yeah, no, it definitely feels new. I feel like we've been seeing the clips going really well on TikTok. And so like that whole piece of it is like encouraging more people to do it in person. Anyway, I want to talk about you and your business and not me and mine.

2:45I feel like a lot of people are gonna know you from Laguna Beach and the Hills, but I am really interested in Lo the Entrepreneur and that's kind of what we're going to focus on. But I think it's super helpful for people to understand how you initially like made that transition from being the talent side in entertainment through to owning your own wellness company. Like how does that happen? I think it was always, it was an emotional decision to be totally honest with you. I was never that comfortable being on TV. I think certain people really thrive in entertainment and working as talent and I did not.

3:20It made me uncomfortable. And then sort of the blogging era began. And then it was just a full downward spiral for me. And I really started to feel like I don't believe that I can make a living in this industry. And I can't be working paycheck to paycheck based off of the way that other people feel about me. And I didn't want to be commoditized as a human being anymore based on like my performance or what I could deliver or a storyline. I just was like, I don't think that this is an authentic way for me to live. And so I decided I would like to have a much more normal life. I want to have a normal job.

4:00I want to go to work every day. And so I ended up moving to New York in 2012, the beginning of that year. I was still focused on content creation for a couple of years, but it was much more autonomous. I was creating my own food content and eventually into wellness content. But I was doing it myself, right? It was like the rise of the influencer. It was the early days of influencing. And it was really powerful for me. And it opened my eyes. And it allowed me to really reclaim, I think, myself and my confidence that I could sort of go forth and prosper, if that makes sense. And so it was really that experience of this discomfort.

4:43I think realizing that through the opening of Pandora's Box with the Hills and with Laguna Beach, I did have the opportunity to really make something of it, right? I was incredibly privileged to have that opportunity, even though it made me uncomfortable. It gave me an audience. It gave me, I think, an evolved perspective on the world. And so with Love Wellness, I decided to use those gifts that I had been given, whether they stung me or made me feel good at one point or another and take advantage of the opportunity. Yeah, I think also let's be really clear for everyone listening. This is not like some private equity firm came in and you became the face of this brand.

5:30Like you put your own money in there and launched it and you built this thing yourself. we need to like really put that out up front because it's super impressive. Yeah. I think nowadays there's so many founder led brands that are created in exactly the way that you said, you know, private equity with, you know, like a boys club is like, okay, this is a hot category. Let's find a face. Let's put it in front of the company and let's run with that. And to a certain degree that is successful if that founder has an authentic, you know, connection to the product or whatever. But ultimately I think, and you see the brands that do fall flat, you know, that are quote unquote founder led, because it just, if it's not real, it's not real.

6:11But yeah, I mean, I was in 2014, 2015, really struggling with depression, anxiety. I kept getting like recurrent yeast infections and UTIs and I was in a bad place emotionally, but also physically. And I went through this very long journey to figure out what was wrong with me where I had to be my own health advocate and still women are having to advocate for their health left and right. It took me 18 months for a doctor to do a simple blood test and say, oh my God, you have severely deficient vitamin levels. And beyond that, these are being caused by gut health issues. These are being caused by the antibiotics that you've been taking your entire life and the antacids that you're taking.

6:55Doctors like that are so hard to find, by the way. They are not many. It's not even like that first doctor who gave me that blood test 18 months into this journey even suggested that. That was a learned experience over time that came from starting Love Wellness, talking to experts, understanding the downfalls of ingredients in the personal care category, which is not talked about at all. But when it comes to personal care, I just felt like these have to be common problems. Nobody is talking about this. But if I can use my platform to communicate my experience, it will help to desigmatize it. And if you can wrap education around something that's uncomfortable and package it in a beautiful way, typically you can move the needle.

7:50And that's what happened originally with Love Wellness, which, yes, I launched out of my living room with my own capital and just cold calling contract manufacturers and doctors be like, I have this idea. Can you help me? And, yeah, I did it alone for the first two years, everything from like answering the CX emails to, you know, trying to figure out Amazon, which didn't work well the first couple of years. But now it's a different story. I want to hear all about that scrappy beginning and how you got traction when it's just you and you're figuring everything out yourself. But first of all, I'm really curious.

8:23You're someone who's super visible and you are putting your own money into it. And so I feel like there's that extra layer of risk. If you fail, it's going to be a public failure. And I think that everyone who's building a business has this internal thing of like my friends and family will know. And that's mortifying in itself and stops people from putting themselves out there. but you've just like added this whole extra layer to it. What made you feel like, okay, this is the thing? Because I'm sure you could have started a lot of different businesses, but what gave you the confidence to kind of move forward with it?

8:54Did you do any kind of market research? Was it based on that like intuitive, your own experience? What made you think, no, I'm going to put myself out there. This is it. What I would say is that in my experience, when I have been responsible for myself or for a project, I very rarely fail. And so it was really intuitive from the beginning. And I knew that I would have to suck it up for the first couple of years. And my, I think my friends and family were kind of horrified that I was going into the vaginal care category and talking about this. And I know that there was a lot of like chatter and laughter behind my back.

9:32There was some snarky commentary around that. For sure, of course. And now eight years in, the story has changed completely. And, you know, people that made fun of me to my face now at parties are like, this is the most amazing founder who's like created this consumer category. I'm like, get away from me. No, we're not about that. Okay, so talk to me about how you actually got that traction in the beginning. You're figuring all of this out yourself. What were some of the places that you were going to learn to kind of like upskill as that really scrappy bootstrap founder? And what were some of the tools that kind of helped you get things off the ground?

10:09So thankfully, social media was exploding when I was first starting the business. And influencing on social media was also very novel at the time. And so it's a very different landscape now, right? Now it can cost so much money to acquire a customer through UGC. Even though UGC is some of the best performing content for customer acquisition, it's still really expensive. But in 2016, it was free and it worked incredibly well. So the first couple of years, I didn't have to spend any money to acquire my first, you know, tens of thousands of customers. and the thing about Love Wellness is that we make personal care in a way that is different from every other company.

10:55Our products are made with clean ingredients and body positive messaging and in the category you see brands that have body positive messaging now but their products are still toxic. Consumers don't know their products are toxic because they don't know enough about ingredients in the category or sort of like the clean wellness story and personal care But then the third category is negative messaging and bad ingredients. So we're really differentiated in that way. We, from day one, never made our products with problematic ingredients. And so they worked just way better out of the gate. And so immediately I was able to build community and do that through reviews and through our community platform called The Love Club, where women were like coming online and talking to each other about these things that they were dealing with.

11:48And if you read our customer reviews, that really is the foundation of this business and how we grew the business from the beginning. And now I think we have over 60 ,000 reviews on the website, which is insane. We've sold over a million bottles of Good Girl Probiotics, which is insane. And that probiotic was a groundbreaking innovation, first to market type of product. And if you develop something like that, and it really works, if you put the right team around it, you have a business. And so that was sort of the second part was realizing that I did have an opportunity on my hands and that I couldn't do it alone, right?

12:29This is the first time I have ever operated a business like this. I don't have the playbook. So a lot of it is just coming from gut intuition, what I think is the right decision. but also like being humble enough to realize that I don't know what I don't know so I better get somebody who's great at digital marketing on board I better get somebody who's great at customer service on board I better get somebody who's great like logistics and ops on board because it just it got too big for only me and now we're about 40 people and it's like still too big for us do you know what I mean we're still like oh my god we need more help I want to ask you about like team building and and how you went about that in a minute but I I want to keep talking about this like influencer piece because I think it's really interesting because like you said it's totally different like this whole landscape has shifted yes what worked when you launched like is not necessarily as easy to do now or not as like inexpensive to do now but it's still it's still kind of the playbook to like launch if you're bootstrapped to launch with content to do the influencer gifting thing to have a story.

13:37Yeah. If you were launching something now, like how would you be approaching that content and influence influencer piece? Would you be on TikTok? Like I know you were pretty not visible as a face of the brand in the early days. Would you switch that now? Do you think? Yeah. You know, that is a decision that we made about a year ago to actually start shifting that. And I think because of the way that you acquire customers now, it is so UGC focused that me telling my story is really successful and a big part of not only how we acquire new customers, but retain customers now, because I think our customers, they know me, you know, and eight years in, they know that the brand is trustworthy.

14:18They know that we make clean, safe products. And so being able to have that sort of constant feedback loop is really important. I would say that yes, social media is the best way to launch a brand these days, but there's such a specific like recipe that you have to go to market with. What is the recipe? Tell me the recipe. It's like the recipe is it can be both good and bad. It depends what you're selling. and I think the number one thing is, is there shock value in your content? Not necessarily in the product, but is there shock value in your content? Because we know that our attention spans are so short at this point.

15:05You know what you have to say and do in the first two to three seconds to hook somebody or what you have to show them to get them to even stay for an insignificant amount of time. Right. And so you have to have a product that is so differentiated or a story that is so wild and so out there or marketing comms that is so wildly inappropriate because I think we've gotten used to that, like in the political and media landscape. Yeah. That like marketing has to sort of match what you see and consume around you every single day. like beautiful lifestyle ads simply don't work anymore and I mean we see brands going so far as to almost like rely on sort of like fetish like type of what's what's the right word that I'm looking for like fetish categories to sell products like there's this one ad that I saw the other day that was like my boyfriend broke up with me for my stepmom because I didn't like because I needed to lose 10 pounds.

16:10It's like we're all a mini soap opera now. Exactly. It's like, what? Like things have gotten so far debt to like one side that like to be competitive, you have to be loud. You have to be willing to go there. And so, you know, as a brand that really focuses on brand positivity, I think we're sort of at a crossroads right now of like, what do we do? What do we do to continue to tell our story when there are a lot of brands out there that are sort of like the new, in my opinion, villains in personal care. Yeah. And they're doing it really, really well. And it's like very disappointing. Yeah. It's really interesting because it is, you know, it's like why Daily Mail blew up when digital content was taking off in terms of publishing.

16:53It's kind of like the snarky headline negativity, like actually does really well online. Yeah. Clickbaity, like all of that stuff performs really, really well. So how do you actually create a long-term brand in an environment like that is the challenge that I think so many people are facing right now? Yeah, definitely. I think it's a really tough time for digitally native brands, not only because of the advertising marketplace and how it has shifted and continues to shift and evolve like every three months, it's totally different. And you have to completely reinvent your strategy. But then you have Amazon and you also have retail.

17:31And most digitally native brands at this point in time, I think like intend or would like to launch into retail, but don't necessarily understand how being in retail affects your digitally native business. And the reality is you have to get comfortable with losing your dot-com customers to your retail partners and to Amazon, which ultimately like it's all okay, right? Like your business grows, a sale is a sale. But I think five years ago, people were so focused on like, I have to own that e-commerce customer, but now it's so expensive to do that, that it's like, whatever, just buy it wherever you want.

18:14And so the future is, okay, how do we embrace this new world where, I mean, Amazon has been king for a while, but like where Amazon is king and you have to be comfortable with your dot-com business, maybe kind of just being a placeholder. That's really interesting. You said that when you first launched, Amazon didn't fly, didn't go super well. When did you relaunch and like, when did it start taking off? About two years ago, it started to perform really, really well. What changed? We brought on an agency. I wasn't doing it myself being like, hmm, I wonder what keyword I should buy against. It was just bringing in expertise, right?

18:54And like, that is what I always say. It's like you have to build the team around you. You have to invest in your team. You have to invest in people that know how to do it better than you, right? If you're trying to scale a business, there's only some things that you should learn firsthand. Otherwise, like you waste a lot of time and money by trying to figure things out yourself. This is something I think a lot of people struggle with. They kind of want to be, they want to understand everything within the business, but as a business is getting bigger, it's kind of like you are holding it back and slowing it down.

19:22If you're not bringing in those people who are better at it than you. Yes. Yeah, we had a new CEO come in six weeks ago. I've been the CEO, you know, since I found the brand. Wow, that's massive. And Maria is amazing. Maria Dempsey, she was previously the CEO of Nest Fragrances. And oh my God, what a force of nature she is. And for me, you know, in the CEO position for the past couple of years has been a challenge because I can't do product innovation and lead marketing and lead the team and manage the finances. and legal, the things that I'm not that good at, frankly, and continue to have the brand like feel innovative because that's really what I'm good at ultimately.

20:03And so having her come in has been such a blessing. And I think so many CEO founders need to learn when it's time to step aside because you do it for the good of your business, right? Like you have to understand that like you cannot do it all. And when you believe that you can, you're hurting your team, you're hurting your business, you're hurting your customer. There's this weird narrative around it. I remember when Emily from Glossier, they brought in a CEO and she like moved into a much different role within the business. And there were a lot of like really snarky commentary about it. And I was kind of like, this is a very appropriate thing for the business to be doing.

20:37This is what companies should be doing. It's such a weird mindset that the person who started the company is the one who should also be taking it to like figures in revenue or be expanding it globally. That's not necessarily the right thing. Yeah. I mean, I think that comes from like the tech bro unicorn type of story. You know what I mean? It's like all ego though, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that in those instances, those founders have raised so much money that they have budgets that allow them to fail and kind of like get started over and over again. But you know, if you are a company that is in series C or series D with really fabulous institutional investors, and it's your first time operating a business, you better bet that they're bringing in a very experienced C-suite team.

21:23So like, just prepare yourself for that. If you are like that unicorn that happens to start that business and be relieved when they do, right? Ultimately, like just, I think that like getting to the end of the race successfully is more important than being the person that gets you to the end of the race. So like a very like self-aware, you've obviously done a lot of like thinking and work around this? Because I don't think a lot of founders have that same perspective. Oh, I'm so relieved I brought in an amazing CEO. My life has gotten more challenging, but also so much easier. I have so much of my brain space back to think about innovation and comms and brand, which frankly, in my opinion, has suffered the past couple of years, because I've had to focus on truly operating at a much bigger scale than I was ever used to or comfortable with.

22:19So every other brand better watch out because I'm back in the driver's seat. Amazing. I can't wait to see what comes next. I want to know. Like the crazy person is back in charge of the creative. Let's see where it goes. Yeah. I want to, I'll be following. I want to understand like when you were first kind of getting started, you were bootstrapping, using your own money. Like what were some of the big things that you were spending on in the beginning? inventory yeah I know that's like sort of an obvious thing to say but truly inventory was some of the biggest spend out of the gate and then it was only matched by our digital spend we ran so lean for the first couple of years and we still run really lean we are private equity backed now I've raised 25 million dollars and so we we operate through the private equity lens right?

23:03Profitability ultimately is our goal. It's not top level growth, like at any cost. That's a ridiculous way to run a business. And so many businesses that were hot three years ago were operating in that way. You know, the cash that we have on our balance sheet right now is significant because we have operated in a conservative way. So you don't really have to spend so much money to have a strong business. You have to be comfortable with growth over time that's, you know, 20 % growth, 30 % growth versus 150 % year over year growth. You know, ultimately who's better in the long, who's better off in the long run, right?

23:40At what point did you start bringing in investors and what made you think that it was time to get some external cash coming into the business? I think it was 2018, 2019 when I decided to launch a couple of additional SKUs outside of our vaginal health products into more of lifestyle. Like I launched Bye Bye Bloat then and Sparkle Fiber, which are gut health SKUs that really helped to take the business to the next level. And Bye Bye Bloat was the product that I think outside of our like really successful vaginal health SKUs put the brands on the map in a more mainstream way because Bye Bye Bloat is a great entry product for any person versus a vaginal health suppository, right?

24:23Like not everybody has a yeast infection. Not everybody needs this amazing product that we created, but Bye Bye Bloat, like, yeah, you have your period, you ate pizza, you want a deep loading product. Like Bye Bye Bloat literally has created an entirely new category within the supplement space. And so that product, I think, really was the game changer for us. And we saw that to scale, we just needed more money. We needed more inventory, a small business at that time. I mean, any small business, like before you hit a certain size, you cannot get a debt facility. Or if you do, it's incredibly expensive.

25:00That's why companies have to raise money because they can't get debt, right? Like you're not established enough for a bank to trust you to give you a$5 million loan. It takes so much success and so many years to get to a point where JP Morgan's like, here's$5 million. We trust you. You know what I mean? So that's why you see like the huge startup community of people raising money because you really can't get debt when you are a new business. And so when you have the opportunity to scale, when things are going right, that's why you raise. And it's to be able to get your business to the next level so that you can maybe raise again or maybe finally get that debt that you want so badly because you don't want to give away more of your company.

25:49But you face hard decisions at the beginning. I want to talk about retail a little bit and you are a bestseller at Target. How did that partnership come about? And then how do you go on to be a bestseller in that category as well? It's pretty wild. So we have, I think, upwards of like 20 facings at Target, which is a lot. Facings means like 20 spots on the shelf across different departments. Wow. I think it's about that. Plus or minus a couple. Target initially approached us and but we had been on their radar you know target is really good and i think their strategy right now is to bring in a lot of like founder-led brands we were one of the first founder-led brands that they brought in store and we launched in natural beauty like where the clean skincare is we're in the tampon aisle now but we launched where you can get clean skincare and we launched with a lot of our vaginal health skews and the idea was that we believed Women are more comfortable in the natural beauty aisle.

26:50So they're more willing to stick around for longer and to discover something new there. And our theory held water. It was absolutely true. And we have been, you know, like a top five to top 10 brand in that space ever since. Because it's a place that women want to shop. It was the same theory at Ulta. We launched at Ulta before Target and we were like, is our vaginal suppository gonna move here? And immediately it was a best-selling product because I think women want these products. They don't always know where to access them or how to access them. And when you put them in places that they are comfortable shopping, you get a really, really high conversion rate.

27:36Really smart. When did the Ulta launch come about and then when did the Target launch happen? So Ulta was July 2019. And then Target was, I would say like Jan 1, 2021. From the internet, man. They were like watching my Instagrams, just like everybody else, to be honest with you. I think we were just one of the first brands that was just doing something so unique and so different. And it's a responsibility of the buyer to keep their offering fresh and different. They took a bet on us and it was an experiment that paid off. For people who are now preparing to launch into their first kind of bigger retail partner, what advice do you have for them as they're preparing for that?

28:16Oh my gosh. Retail is very complicated and you need somebody on your team who has done retail before. There are so many opportunities, ways to work with your retail partners to support your business outside of just putting influencers in the store. And a lot of it has to do with paid spend, like within their own ecosystems, within their own search. This is so interesting. I don't think people know this. I mean, I learned all this stuff just since we launched into retailers. But, you know, there's a significant amount of spend that a retailer sort of expects you to put towards supporting your launch and supporting sell through.