Mia Plecic Built 'Slick Hair' With $500

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World Podcast. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show and I'm the person behind all things Female Founder World. Today I'm in Sydney, Australia chatting with Mia Placid, the founder of Slick Hair. Welcome. Thank you. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host Jasmine Grinsworthy. For people that don't know your company, what are you building? So I'm the founder of Slick Hair. We are a hairstyling brand famous for the slick stick. It's an amazing brand. We're all about hairstyling for every hair type. and we really are trying to be that one-stop hair styling shop.

0:35Okay, and you started in 2019. Talk me through the experience of when you decided, okay, this is a cool idea, I want to turn this into a business. Yeah, I mean it's not as like sexy as, you know, you might expect with a brand like this because it's like I was literally the person who has the worst flyaway hairs in the world and I wanted to create a solution to that problem and I tried so many different products from waxes and hair sprays but I didn't like the residue that left in my hair. So I wanted to create a product that was a serum base that was easy to just apply, put in your handbag on the go and that's when Slick Stick was born.

1:11Amazing. So I just want to kind of like give people a little bit more context about what it is that you've built because you have incredible distribution. This company has grown so quickly. It's only been five and a bit years which is wild when I look at, you know, my notes here of all of the things that you've done. Can you just have a little brag, tell us some of the cool stuff that you've done? Yeah, of course. So COVID obviously hit. We were locked inside for a very long time down in Melbourne and I was quite bored. So the idea of growing this brand was the perfect distraction for me during that awful time.

1:46So I took to TikTok. I'd never really used the platform before apart from being a consumer of it. And I thought, why not share a little bit behind the scenes of, you know, starting this little hobby business. I, at the time, you know, started the business with about$500 to my name and I couldn't afford mass production. So I bought the product as a white label product. I got the local printing company to make me some labels and I was hand labeling every single bottle. And I actually hand labeled 40 ,000 units before I went to mass production. So I swear I have like permanent RSI in my knuckles.

2:20Did you rope in friends and family to do this video? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I've got friends who still say, don't ever forget me. I was like, you're sitting on your balcony during lockdown when I probably wasn't supposed to be there, helping you label these little slick sticks. So I was jumping on lives on TikTok every night, packing orders. I'd go to bed and I'd wake up and like one night I woke, one morning I woke up and had$40 ,000 in sales overnight. And that was pure organic through, you know, the video going viral on TikTok. and yeah, just getting all these orders from every corner of the globe.

2:54At the time, I was obviously very excited and I thought, wow, this is amazing, but I never saw the longevity in the brand. I thought that the business would, you know, fizzle out, TikTok might fizzle out or whatever, like, you know, it wasn't something I thought would turn into this big brand that it is today. But yeah, every day got up and it was more orders and then more excitement from, you consumers and we started working with a couple of influencers and the return on investment was insane we were like 10xing what I would pay that individual I'm gonna make you I'm everyone's listening thinking okay I need to know the details on all of these things that worked I'm gonna come back and ask you but I also like I'm gonna have a little brag for you you're in was it more than 5 ,000 doors yeah we've just hit about 5 ,000 doors so here in Australia we're in Coles Woolies and Priceline full distribution as well as some high street fashion brands like Style Runner Universal Russell, Hair House Warehouse, and I can't think of any more at the top of my head.

3:50Over in the UK, we launched about 12 months ago into Boots. There's about 680 doors in Boots as well as Urban Outfitters in the UK. A really exciting partnership that we got about two and a half years ago was Sephora Middle East. Launching your brand into Sephora is the goal for every beauty brand. And for us to have done it so soon and for them to have approached us was incredible. Like the most euphoric feeling getting that email. I thought it was a spam email start. And then over in the US we're in Urban Outfitters, Free People and Anthropology as well. Okay. So I'm going to get into the how you got into all of those stores in a minute.

4:29But let's like back up and keep chatting about those early days because I want to know what that$500 went to right in the beginning. Yeah. So that just went to buying stock off Alibaba. We're talking like probably the lowest quality. Any cute packaging or are you just sending that out? It was just a black bottle that had an existing white label logo on it. I got a label printed, like I said, and wrapped over the top. And yeah, people were loving it and it was selling really well. Then we had a massive quality control issue whereby the wand in the slick stick was snapping on. We had about 20 ,000 units that broke.

5:04So that was a huge issue to navigate through. But we did. We figured it out. And then, yeah, I guess it just, I don't want to say it just kept on growing, but it kind of did. Don't get me wrong, so many hurdles along the way. But then Coles approached us in 2020, which was our first business retailer. Okay, I'm going to get to retailers in a second, but let's talk a little bit more about TikTok and content and the stuff that's working there. Because 2020 on TikTok is not 2025 on TikTok. Like we are in different times. Yeah. But I want to know, you know, I can imagine what was working for you then.

5:42Like a lot of content was going viral that found a first kind of story. You had this product that people hadn't seen before. I can totally see how that would have worked on a platform like TikTok. But now that we're in 2025, how are you thinking about content and these platforms? Because you are very much like an organic content-led brand. What's working now? Okay, business besties, let's switch gears for a second. And 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.

6:18So 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.

7:00Plus, they have designers on hand to help you if you really need it. Right now, Vistaprint is giving all female Founder World 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. Like you're very right. It's very different. Back then it was all about jumping on lives, you know, getting all of these people on your For You page coming onto your live video. it was very vloggy back then I think people really loved the long style content whereas now it's very short sharp people's attention spans are a lot shorter people want to see I guess the conclusion of a video within 20 seconds and I find that TikTok now is more about being funny and about comedy and behind the scenes of running the business and the stupid stuff as opposed to the more serious stuff.

7:59Very different to how it was. Yeah, that's really interesting. So how do you tap into that as a brand? So we have an in-house content and social team who pretty much jump on any new trend virality that's happening on TikTok. You know, it's really challenging for us because we are so busy and we're so lean as a team and we all work so hybrid in so many different roles that, you know, we don't always have the time to kind of jump on and, you know, do this new dance that's a trend. But it is a real focus of ours this year to really start putting that effort back into social media because I feel like, I wouldn't say we got arrogant, but we got to a point where we thought we were a bit too big for it or not necessarily too busy for it, but we just kind of, we were so guest consumed in what we had created as a brand that it wasn't a focus to necessarily take all that to social media at this point.

8:56Do you know what I mean? I used to be on it so much personally. I don't really use it as much anymore but I know how important it is for a brand. So, again, it's another big goal for this year. It's so interesting that you say that. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day around like as you're growing and building the business, like how your attention as a founder can get taken away from the thing that like made you work in the first place as you're like trying to build a team and manage your budgets and all of those kind of things and things feel really urgent and it's like the magic of what worked for the brand in the beginning was you with the camera on TikTok and so it makes so much sense for you to like return to that when you can.

9:35Absolutely and I think about that all the time it's like you're trying to reinvent the wheel every day trying to do new things but it's like I love that old saying keep it simple stupid and it's like you go back to what worked at the start which was just going live super organic no you know agenda just jumping on a live TikTok um so yeah it's it's very true do you still go live no I've done it a couple of times and I think the algorithm just doesn't like me anymore because I haven't been on for so long um I was getting like two three thousand people on a live at one point um but now I'd be lucky to get 10 and I guess that just comes down to my activity on the app yeah um we've obviously got the brand's TikTok account but then my personal one which was the one that went viral in early days.

10:20But then I wanted to transition not necessarily just be the face of the brand I wanted the brand to have its own platform. So then we transitioned into all our content going onto the Slick Hair TikTok account or we call it Slick Talk. So I kind of neglected my personal one. So yeah it's navigating I guess. So do you think now like a focus for 2025 is it's going back on that personal account and talking about the brand from there absolutely uh and I say it all the time and I know how it's just it's really tedious it's so it takes so much time it takes so much time and I have such great intentions like yesterday flying up to Sydney I had a really amazing event last night on the harbour and I'm like I'm gonna vlog this yeah and then I take a few videos and I'm like oh I just can't be bothered and the baby starts crying I'm like no this vlogging life is just not for me.

11:06But at the end of the trip, I wish I, you know, I always wish I had, I do it. And I'm very grateful and lucky that I get to travel a lot with this business and go and do amazing things and meet amazing retailers. And I know that my audience would love to see the behind the scenes of that. So yeah, I am making a conscious effort to try and be a little bit more active on the socials. So you mentioned influencers before, when did you start kind of introducing influencers into your marketing strategy? And then how did you, how have you ramped that up over the last five years. I'm sure it looks different now than it did.

11:36It looks very different now. I mean, first influencer I ever worked with was Christina Sicarius. This was back in 2020. I think I reckon I paid around$800 and she gave us a massive return. And then I worked with Roxy Jacenko and she was a very big investment. But again, she returned for us. For people who are in the US, she is an entrepreneur, PR, reality, like everyone knows Roxy in Australia. in a certain demographic yeah so um working with her was great we got a huge investment and again I was fully bootstrapped so any cash in the bank to help grow the brand was very important we weren't at a point where we could you know spend 20 grand on an influencer and just have it as brand awareness and not make a return because that 20 grand would have put me out of business um so it's it influencer marketing has changed incredibly in the last five years it's not what it was back then.

12:33We do very much work with influencers on a brand awareness piece now, more so than a return on investment. And I think I've spoken to a lot of brand owners who say the same. It's a very saturated market now and consumers are becoming a lot more educated about what's being sold to them every day. And there's a lot of beauty brands out there. So yeah. Do you use any tools to manage influencer marketing now? We have been looking into a couple recently. One in particular is called Tribe. They're a US brand or sorry, software. Very expensive though. So I don't think we're quite at that point because we do have an in-house social team.

13:12So we still do it quite manually in the sense of, you know, reaching out and recording it all in an Excel document, just making sure that they're getting the product, posting about the product, etc. And that's also with UGC because we do have a KPI of sending about 50 parcels out a month. just in Australia alone. And that's like a gifting thing. That's a seeding thing. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we haven't got a tool integrated yet, but we do love collabs within Shopify. So we have Shopify Plus and there is a plug-in called Collabs whereby ambassadors can apply to be, I guess, a part of our Slick Sister community.

13:52We vet them, approve them. They get a credit to spend on our store. It may be, say,$50 and they go shopping. We get the product sent to them through our warehouse and then they create content in exchange for commission. So they have a unique code that Shopify all plugs in automatically. So that's a really great tool that we use as well. Amazing. Let's talk about retail partnerships now because you mentioned that Coles happened pretty quickly, 2021. And, again, most of our community are in the US. And if you're wondering what's Coles, this is the biggest supermarket in Australia. Or like, you know, there's two.

14:30There's two. Two majors. Two big ones. So it's a big deal. Really big deal. Massive. How did that happen? So I got a message from a lady on LinkedIn who said, I saw your product on TikTok. And I think that it would do really well in Coles. And she gave me her personal email address at the time, which I thought was very interesting and strange. and I thought this is for sure a scam and I didn't believe it and I didn't respond for a couple of days and then she sent me another follow-up and that time she'd actually put her Coles email address and I was like oh my goodness this is actually legit and yeah we it it's interesting because that whole range review process of getting into a retailer is very hectic and I was naive at the time because they approached me they were popping me on the shelf in between implementation and range reviews which is very very uncommon and I was like wow this is super easy like they've approached me I'm on the shelf within eight weeks of that conversation full distribution 640 doors very different now in the sense of if you want to launch into a retail you've got to go through that whole range view process but yeah that's kind of how the retail landscape started for us and for people that don't know you mentioned like implementation range review like what are those words and what are they referring to?

15:48Yeah, so once a year, these big retailers, all big retailers, they'll do this thing called a range review. So basically, if you're a brand wanting to get into their store, you've got to, I guess, apply to be a part of their range review. They'll accept you to come in for a meeting and you have 20 minutes to pitch your brand. It's like real life Shark Tank with the buyer. And buyers can be really lovely and really kind and really receptive to your brand some can be awful and very arrogant and it's much harder sell so you just never know who you're going to get um we've been very lucky with our buyers across the board they've been amazing but it is very intimidating and scary walking into those rooms and then implementation means there's like a two-week window where that product needs to be on all shelves where they implement it into their store so you have to have it's a very strict deadline you've got to have stock in their DC for it to then be sent into all their stores distributed around the nation and implemented onto the shelves.

16:49And then you pretty quickly rolled into, you know, we mentioned at the top of the show, all of those stores that you're stocked in now, which is amazing. Have you worked with any reps, agents, distributors, anyone to help you do that? So in Australia, no, we've done it all ourselves direct in-house, which makes the margins a lot more healthy. You need more resources internally though to manage those accounts. But we have recently started working with some distributors globally. We've just signed up with one in New Zealand, which has been amazing. They've pushed us into farmers and a couple of other retail doors over there, which is really exciting.

17:24And then over in Europe as well, we're working with a couple of really big distributors over there who are currently, as we speak, pitching to our big box European retailers like Sephora. Yes, thank you. DM, there's some big ones over there that we want to get into. Awesome. I'm going to ask you who the distributors are. You don't have to answer if it's not something you want to share. So New Zealand is Beauty Collective. They're great. We've only been working with them for about three months, but they've already had such success allocating the brand into some retailers. In the Middle East, Sephora are actually our distributor, so we're exclusive to Sephora over there.

18:02gosh, you've got me here. No, that's super helpful because it's one of those things that you can't Google. People mention distributors and it's kind of like. Well, and it's one of those things. You go to trade shows and there's thousands of them. Yeah. They come up to you. Hi, I'm a distributor from Switzerland. Hi, I'm a distributor from Germany. And you don't know if they're good. You don't know if they're going to do anything good for your brand. It's really like potluck unless you get that recommendation from somebody. Obviously looking at their portfolio helps and seeing what other brands they represent.

18:30but even then, you know, they could have represented them years ago for a short period of time, may not have worked out. It's all smoke and mirrors. So distribution took a few years for us to really, I guess, navigate and figure out whether that's something we wanted to pursue. But at the end of the day, I'm only one person. We're only a small team and the reality is I'm not going to have the bandwidth to be able to go and expand my brand in the Nordics. Yeah. So I may as well hand that over to somebody who knows, lives, breathes that market and can do that on my behalf. Yes, albeit I'd make a very small margin, but it's a smaller margin as opposed to no margin at all.

19:08Totally makes sense. Are you doing any paid ads? Yes. Okay, talk me through how you've... I have a very much a love-hate relationship with Meta. I mean, don't we all, even people that don't have a business, I feel. Yeah, it's very expensive. It's a very challenging one for us because, as I mentioned, we're in so many retail doors and the convenience of a consumer to be able to go down to Kohl's and buy our product, which is on sale a lot in that retailer, is a lot better than buying it on my website, waiting four days for it to arrive. You know what I mean? Paying for shipping. Paying for shipping and it's making it a lot more challenging for us to, I guess, acquire customers.

19:50Our acquisition costs are very high but what we find is that we are, again, using Meta as a market research, sorry, like a brand awareness piece where we buy can get the customer to know our brand so that when they go to Coles and Woolies and Priceline they'll see the brand. That makes sense. Yeah, they'll want to transact in store. Do you work with like any agencies or freelancers or anything like that on your paid strategy? We do currently have a contractor but we are hiring that person in-house but it is such a challenging role because if you're very good at paid ads, you're not working for somebody on 100K a year.

20:21You've got your own agency making five times that amount. Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. I can imagine that. I want to talk really quickly about who you've hired and how you've hired. Who did you bring into the business first? So my first hire as a very naive founder was a marketing manager. And I don't think that was a bad hire, but I just thought that I needed support with marketing. I didn't quite understand at the time how big the brand would get and what we would need in terms of finance and operations supply chain. but currently we have I've got a COO who I hired when I fell pregnant in last year I had a baby last year so I keep forgetting it's 2025 so I've got an 11 month old so when I fell pregnant with him I thought okay I was again thinking of course I can work through and have a baby and do it all but that's not quite the reality so I think I was probably six seven months pregnant when I thought okay I think I need to hire someone to support me just through this next transition of my life and I was very lucky to land an incredible COO who has phenomenal experience in the FMCG space.

21:28So she has been an absolute powerhouse for our brand, really helping me elevate the brand in areas that I don't have experience in. I'm very much a creative, not a financier person, so she's helped a lot in that space. But in terms of the team, we've got the COO, we've got a finance manager, We've got a sales manager, supply chain manager, graphic designer, influencer marketing coordinator and social media content creator. I have to ask, as someone who has gone from, you know, starting this business really scrappily in 2019 to now you're leading a team, you have big responsibilities, you have, you know, huge like orders that you're fulfilling.

22:14How does your day-to-day life feel in this new era of entrepreneurship for you? That's a really good question. I was talking to someone last night at an event that I was at. I still don't really know what I'm doing. You do, though. From the outside, it sure looks like you do. I feel every day I go into the office and I'm like, what problem is going to be hit today? I'm very much, I call myself the firefighter. I put out a lot of problems. I obviously have a lot of big decisions that I need to make and a lot of them are very risk heavy. But I go through seasons with the brand in terms of what I do day to day.

22:48At the moment, I'm planning an eight-week trip to the US. So we have a very big goal this year to land a big box retailer in the States. and we have put in a lot of cash into the States at the moment just to try to get a bit of brand awareness over there. It's a very hard market to tap. As everyone knows, it's a beast and a lot of money doesn't go a long way. So we have deployed quite a lot of money into the States this year to try to grow the brand. We're working with a PR agency over there that's costing me an absolute fortune. Who are you working with? They're called ICA, Infinity Creative.

23:25Yep. So they represent some incredible brands. So many Aussies as well. You get what you pay for. Like they are very good. Yeah. But as a small business, it's a big investment, but one that we were prepared to do, I suppose, to help with the brand awareness over there. So, yeah, currently I'm planning a trip over to the States. We're sponsoring some really big Coachella parties. We're doing pop-ups, billboards, street posters, influencer activations. I think I've got about 15 events that I'm planning at the moment. Wow. A UCLA pop-up, sampling suite. So right now I'm an events planner. Yep. And in a couple of months I'll probably go back to, you know, I don't know, working at MPD.

24:09That's something I do a lot of. I'm in charge of all things new product. Every day is so different. It's really, I don't really have a title. I'm just a kind of a jack of all trades, master of none. Mia, the last thing I want to ask you is for a resource recommendation. yes so i personally i've got a couple i'd love to share um we recently started well not recently a couple years ago started using monday.com which is incredible platform for businesses to track what they're doing on a day-to-day basis i have a terrible i i reckon i'm undiagnosed adhd for sure i have the worst memory i'll do a task i'll forget that i do the task and then i'll go do the task again and then I'll be like hang on a minute there's that's or I've already done that spreadsheet and like you're just busy and overwhelmed I'm just busy and overwhelmed um but yes so I use Monday to track everything within myself and my schedule and what my team do um very very highly recommend that software um and my other favorite app is called I forgot I just went how to look at it it's a meditation app called insight okay we'll put a link in the show I'll chase you for it it's It's amazing.

25:18I often need a little bit of Zed music just to kind of get me through my day or a little five-minute meditation, someone telling me you're going to be okay. Yep, yep. So highly recommend that app as well. Amazing. Mia, thank you so much for coming on Female Founder World. Thanks for having me. And congratulations on everything you've built. Thank you. I just wanted to jump in and end the show with a quick thank you and shout out to all of our paid Business Besties subscribers. For$9 a month, Business Besties bypass literally years of networking by getting access to all of the people that you need to build your dream business.

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