The Beauty Category Nobody Took Seriously Just Produced a Sellout Hit: Inside 4AM's Target Launch and $4M Fundraise With Jade Beguelin

0:00Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cut-offs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang-on-the-patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope? It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. Welcome back to Female Founder World. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show. And today I'm chatting with Jade Beglin.

0:35She's the co-founder of 4AM Skin. Jade, welcome to Female Founder World. Thank you for having me. The reason why we're having you on the show today, you've been building the business for a few years, but in the last year, I feel like things have kind of really taken off for you. You've just fundraised for a launch into Target. Your sales have increased four times year over year, and it does feel like a perfect time to have you on the show and kind of talk through what's working, what's not working. For people that don't know 4AM Skin, what is it that you're actually building? Yeah, so 4AM is a skincare brand, but we're really built to celebrate living your life outside of the bathroom.

1:12So we have a really minimalist approach to our products. And our hero SKU is Clean Sheets, which is a better for you makeup wipe. We really call them skincare wipes. It's your entire skincare routine in a wipe. It cleanses, it soothes, it hydrates all in one step. And yeah, that's 4AM. You started the skincare brand back in 2021 with your co-founder, Sabrina. You're working full time. What's your background? What were you doing? Yeah. So when we started the business, I was definitely working full time. Sabrina and I had met in college at Georgetown and she was in medical school. When we first thought of the idea of 4AM, I was actually working on Wall Street at JP Morgan as a trader.

1:52And then when we launched the business, I was working at a company called Ampush. That was a growth marketing ad tech startup, really where I had learned how to do paid ads for a bunch of direct-to-consumer brands. But I continued full-time until we launched in 2021. And then in 2020, the end of 2023, it was when I took the leap to be full-time on the business, which was very scary. What were some of the things that you were doing in the beginning to kind of get that early traction? because I've discovered 4am definitely through you. Like you're quite forward facing on TikTok. I think that that's been something that's worked really well for the brand.

2:30And when I think of brands that are building in public and doing it well, 4am is definitely one of the ones that the team at Female Founder World, like we referenced quite a bit. It was that the, that was like your launch strategy in the beginning. It was like, I'm just going to show up as a founder on TikTok and see how it goes. It was definitely not the plan at the beginning. Context was that Sabrina had built a platform on Instagram and I had always had private socials before that. And I remember our month one of sales, they were pretty good, but then by month two, they felt like they were dying down.

3:03And I think it was truly that all of our friends and family that we had forced to purchase were no longer purchasing. And so I knew that we had to figure out a way to reach more customers and TikTok was very new. and I knew that we had to just create a lot of content and I knew that the way to create a lot of content would like I still have to this day have a mental block towards Instagram but I felt like TikTok was a friendly platform not all my friends and family were there so then I just kind of challenged myself to post every single day and see what traction we would get and that was really the first time that we saw people who we really didn't know posting about the brand, as well as we had a couple viral TikToks on the 4AM account.

3:51The first one being for our first launch party, we had gotten Patron to gift us little Patron tequila bottles as part of a PR box. And we had 200 PR boxes. And I remember me and Sabrina thought we knew a decent number of influencers. And then when it came to like finding 200 addresses, we did not have that. So I remember posting the first TikTok we ever had that went viral was posting basically, if this is your vibe, we want to gift you 4am, like looking for influencers. And that was when we first saw the power of TikTok. Cause I remember for the first time our Instagram DMs, it said like 99 plus, which was crazy for us, especially having just started out.

4:34In 2022, you launched the under eye mask which I think is the thing that I know you guys for the most and then most recently you've launched clean sheets which I think is your is that your fourth skew yeah yeah I'm curious about how you think about okay what you're launching and when you're launching it and that progression from like the serum through to the under eye mask through the clean sheets what's the strategy there are you getting feedback from your community to decide what you're going to launch or do you just have this you know you've got it mapped out and you know what the next few is it going to look like in terms of product?

5:08I think it's a mix of both. To be honest, the wipes was something we had always wanted to do from the beginning. It just was very difficult to do. There's not as many wipes manufacturers as there are serum manufacturers. So it was something that was always on the top of our mind because it just felt like a natural fit for our brand. We kind of celebrate being a little bit messier. There had never really been in our minds It's a skincare forward wipe. But what we started off with serums, I think, because serums felt like the most complicated skew. There's so many different serums. You never know what to use, et cetera.

5:47And I think each product we launched, I kind of learned something from. And it made me really think about what I wanted next for the next product to be. Serums retail for$69 each, which is actually the average price of a serum at Sephora. but I think it was really, it's super competitive, the serum market. We had really great retention on it, but it was really hard to get that first purchase in because of the higher price point. And because you have to compete and like really be able to kind of show and differentiate why we launched under eye masks next is we saw how much brand love we had. And especially people were fans of like our brand voice and our brand messaging.

6:30And I knew that I wanted a way to show skincare on your face. There's only so many times people can take a photo of like their vanity, et cetera. And so under eye masks felt like the next natural step just because I was like, people love being a part of the brand. Let's give them a way to be a part of it. And then a thing about the under eye mask though, is our under eye masks were reusable. So it was really actually like, we scaled them a decent amount, but it was really hard, especially to put paid spend behind them because since they're reusable for up to a year, there's not a ton of retention.

7:03You're not, the 60-day retention is not like very great because presumably they should be able to use them over and over again. And so I really thought when we thought about our next launch, I wanted to, one, make sure the price point was really somewhere where it could be an impulse purchase for a customer, especially since TikTok has been such a strong channel for us. That was a learning between the serums and the under eye mask. We went from$69 to$16 was the, obviously there's different price points for different items, but it made it, it was such an easy entryway point into the brand that I wanted to make sure that future products continue to be accessible.

7:42And so, yeah, so it's a combination of really wanting, like seeing a gap in the market and also learning from each product and like getting better at being able to listen to your customer. Isn't it interesting what you learn along the way? Like I'm listening to your story and it's kind of like, okay, what are the things that people can learn from this when they're launching their own products? And it's that, especially when like TikTok shop is your distribution or TikTok is going to be your distribution. It's like, okay, the entry, that entry price point needs to be something that feels accessible for people to try and trust the brand.

8:14And then maybe over time, as you build the relationship, then you're getting them onto the serum rather than launching with the serum and then trying to get them to, um, to commit to this like big ticket price right from the beginning. so I think that's really interesting and then also just like building a product for video I think is like something that people don't think about enough I've also had a skincare brand in a past life and we had face oils and it was the same thing I was like this is this was more like Instagram era than TikTok era and there's only so many times you can like show someone holding a bottle of oil exactly you know whereas if you have something that's like super visible then it just automatically seems to work for the way that like the distribution channels that exist right now exactly I even thought about it not even just on the exact product but when we were developing clean sheets so many learnings I had so for example the and I was specifically thinking about visual moments that I could think would do well for video for example one of the biggest issues with wipes on the market is when they're dry, they tug at your skin.

9:20So as a benefit, we wanted the wipes to be super soaked, but on top of the benefit, skin benefit, I could like, it hasn't happened yet, but I could imagine Micaela Negre like squeezing our wipes and showing how much liquid was in it. And I remember going back to our manufacturer so many times, she was like, this is too much liquid in there. And I was like, no, you don't understand. Like, I'm not trying to make anything else like that's on the market one and two it's like a true value prop and I could see how that could visually translate um to the brand and similarly to the price point it's not just about choosing like we're currently retailed at$29 for a 25 pack which is more expensive than wipes on the market but the reason why we started with the 25 pack rather than the 30 was just given our margins we especially when we were first starting out we could not get the 30 pack to be sub 30 dollars and I just I was like I don't care we need to make it under 30 dollars because I just feel like there's a that I think I think the average order value on TikTok is now 40 I think it's like but it is really that 20 to 40 range and 30 is really the sweet spot really smart when I first started out in digital media I was working as a fashion and beauty editor and it was like I don't know it was kind of early days of not early days of publishing in the internet but kind of when like all of the legacy media publishers were starting to move on to having like digital platforms and publishing on websites really and I remember moving from one kind of like startupy super viral website to another that was more legacy and my new employer saying like okay what do they do so well that makes the content so shareable and viral and like what are they doing right and I was just like oh they it's baked in from the beginning like the story like that is the first thing they think about is how will this be shared in group chats how will this be shared on Facebook and it was like built into the architecture of the content and I think when I look at what you're doing with clean sheets and what you just said it's like it's not this afterthought of how will this be shared and what's the video what's the video hook for this.

11:31It's kind of like built into the product development. Exactly. I want to talk a little bit more about TikTok and TikTok shop and the strategy there, because you've had some pretty great wins that have come through TikTok shop in general. Can you talk me through the story about when they were doing that like crazy$1 offer? Yeah, I remember. So we hopped on to TikTok shop. I think it was still it was like the first within two months of TikTok shop launching like I got on it just because I think especially when you're in the startup the obviously the worst parts of a startup is having to be so scrappy but the best part of a startup is you don't have to cut through so much red tape to try new things and you should really be taking advantage of that like anytime time there's a new feature on TikTok, I at least, or any platform, I try to at least try it because we can just try things and if it doesn't work, move on.

12:28And that's so easy. And so we launched on TikTok like right when it started and TikTok was really pushing TikTok shop and TikTok was really pushing that platform a lot and trying to running these pretty crazy deals to try and incentivize customers to try purchasing on the platform. And so I remember when we first launched are under eye masks. They were doing crazy deals. And TikTok was funding it. That is not the case anymore. I wish I had taken... I mean, I think we took full advantage of it, but there were times where they were like, your first order on TikTok shop is only a dollar, but they weren't forcing the vendors to subsidize that.

13:05TikTok was actually subsidizing that. So we would be getting the full $16. And there's been so many weird, scrappy ways where we've done similar things of say, I remember there's also this app called Flip that has now gone under, but they were trying to get users onto the platform, doing really crazy deals subsidized by the platform. So we were on there, and I think if you were invited to Flip by someone, you got a certain number of credits. And I remember posting on TikTok being like, I will invite you to this app, and it will give you free credits by you being invited onto the app. you don't have to use it on 4am but 4am is available on there if you want to and it was funny because I had to add people's to add to like add someone I had to add someone as a contact on my phone first so I have like I think 50 or something maybe even 100 people on my phone where it's like Julia flip Connor flip of people who dm'd me on Instagram or TikTok being like send me an invite here's my phone number so like those weird things you have to kind of be down to do especially at the beginning.

14:11I think it's such a good lesson in also just using the tools that the platforms are trying to promote even if you're like okay this is not necessarily like what like TikTok live right now I think is something a lot of people are kind of leaning into I think it's working really well and TikTok is pushing it and when Instagram launched broadcast channels or launched threads you know it was just like just like why not just get on it because you know that these platforms who are our algorithmic overlords are pushing these things so you may as well make the most of like the benefit there are you are you using whatnot I'm not no I have heard of it I've I've actually bought something on it like once but yeah I wasn't super sticky on it but we've definitely tried TikTok live it's something I want to now that we have like a little bit more breathing room like go back into um just because I have seen a lot of uh friends brands do pretty well on live but it is a time time you have to put in some hours or hire someone to put in the hours yeah we just um we just had uh someone her name's max on the show last week and she's got a brand called untouched blooms and they do basically like phone you know those like um like pop socket type things anyway and she does tiktok like she goes live every single day and she's like it is it's actually having this really significant giving the business this really significant boost and she also does every saturday at the same time every saturday which i think is really interesting and then i also look at another case study when i think about live just programming and um in general is that did you see that tech business tv pm is it called openai has acquired them yeah wild so they're going live twice a day for three hours each and they kind of had this broadcast studio set up and they were like espn meets tech bro and but the thing that they got out of that live content was this just factory for like short form clips well yeah i think the clipping aspect is i really wanted to figure out a way like i was even because I think beauty has not like you've seen obviously like a lot of red pill media or like clavicular etc be boosted by live streaming and then having like armies of people clipping it and I and I think there's something there with beauty and I like I've actually tried to research it seeing if any beauty brands are like running clipping campaigns you have to have a ton of content to do so.

16:43We have not tried that yet, but I do think the most similar thing that we have right now is TikTok shops like affiliate model. So when we first started on TikTok, like most of the views and purchases were coming from the brand account. I think up until October, it was like 98 % of TikTok shop revenue was driven by my or a 4am account or Sabrina's account. But my goal throughout October to now and to continue was to bring that percentage down. Now we're at 57 % of revenue on TikTok is driven by affiliates. So it's actually only like it's a minority is coming from the 4am brand account. And that was like a specific focus of mine, because I mean, last month we had 1200 videos on TikTok with shop links with 4am tagged on that.

17:40And that's obviously as much as I tout like post every single day, et cetera. Like I can't compete with 12 or I could maybe get to 1200 probably, but like, I definitely like if we start surpassing that even more and I definitely, definitely have not posted 1200 videos last month of myself. So that's definitely a focus of ours because it just makes the platform a lot more scalable. Okay, let's talk about the affiliate strategy a little bit more. Tell me about someone who hasn't even, you know, this is an area they haven't like dive into yet. How do you get started? And then how did you scale that up to the point where you're getting 1200 videos a month?

18:18I like spoke to a lot of like, I'm a big Twitter person, actually, like I don't tweet on Twitter, but there's a lot of DTC growth hacking people on Twitter that I like just kind of peruse. And so a lot of people think that TikTok shop is a big seeding game. And it is. I think last month we seeded 800 units of clean sheets. So like we're still getting more than one video per gifting, but we are currently gifting a lot, but it did not start out that way. And that I don't think you should from day one be starting to gift to like 800 creators on the platform. What you have to start out is there's a cold start problem on TikTok shop in that you are extremely lucky if your product that has like zero sales on it, an affiliate makes a video and it like suddenly goes viral and you're off to the races.

19:16I think to get from zero to 200 sales, it has to come from your own content and you have to basically test lots of different hooks test lots of different angles test lots of different value props and affiliates it'll be too expensive to like send to affiliates who care enough to try all those different angles so what I did is I posted like multiple times a day with a TikTok link seeing what worked What worked really well for us, especially in the beginning, is actually storytelling. And it was me and my best friend started a skincare brand. Like I worked on Wall Street. She was a med student. We were both chronically tired.

20:03Basically really telling the brand story, which is actually great because I think a lot of people think TikTok is only like, oh, you have to show like be cheap and like show the product. like just show like oh my gosh all my pores disappeared in this one video um whereas what worked for us is actually it all started with like the founder story why we built the product and then going to what the product does um and then like here's buy now click the orange shopping cart and then we also saw the squeezing of the wipe as a hook of like showing showing how juicy it was so it was only after we started getting viral videos that we saw affiliates posting and that we saw affiliates posting um pretty regularly but not in like a major way and we weren't really the issue was from clean sheets launched in july from like september and october and november we sold out i think four times over that process so we were not doing any gifting at all it was only once we kind of got our inventory under control that we started gifting.

21:10And we had to have, I don't think the process is get a couple hundred sales on your own and then start gifting to creators. We always did have open commission though. So that means anyone who even buys the product can get, I think, 10 % commission on our store. And I think that's the beauty of TikTok. And I think it's how I'm hoping, I think I've heard mumblings that Meta will implement something similar to their affiliate model of like anyone being able to have these shareable links. Because it really is, I think, the time of like the micro creator as well of people who just really know how to talk to their audience, have a strong relationship with them or make really great content and are really great salespeople.

21:55That's so interesting because exactly what you said about the age of like the micro creator. I do think that especially on TikTok, like anyone can go viral with anything now and so it it really does make sense to have an incentive for them to be posting about your content even if they're not a like professional creator or you know I feel like that with the line is really blurred between content creator and just like human on the internet making a recommendation and you never know which is going to be the post that's going to go viral so I think that's really um really interesting I wanted to just like dig into something that you said that I'm curious about you said that uh you need to get your first couple hundred sales yourself on tiktok or tiktok shop and then kind of the affiliate piece comes next is that because affiliates you think are more likely to post once they've seen some proof once the brand has some like cool factor like is that is that why a hundred yes a hundred percent because on tiktok you can see the unit sold um and there's a lot of actually like it's this flywheel of now i think right now we're like the number four like they they have like rankings for the week in terms of different categories.

23:05And so for like TikTok, on TikTok for cleansers, we've been hovering around like number four to number six of like units sold, top units sold for cleansers on TikTok. And so like anytime we're in those rankings, you see like a flood of new videos, people requesting samples, et cetera. But even if you're not even like in those top rankings, having some units sold is will um there's a ton of people on tiktok who like really focus on shop content and like they're just always looking for the next viral product so if you can show that there's any sort of momentum there you'll also get people requesting samples which is great on the platform because it's like that's someone who like wants to try your product and like wants to make a video on it um and that makes your job a lot easier just rather than doing like a ton of called outreach.

23:58We've all had that moment when you're sending out an email marketing campaign and you're stuck in some clunky platform drowning in features that you've never even touched, but you're definitely overpaying for. Then you go and ask customer support for help, please help. And you're hit with an AI chatbot. It's genuinely so frustrating.

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25:03Try OmniSend at omnisend.com forward slash female founder world, or by clicking the link in the show notes to get a 50 % discount for the first three months using OmniSend. Okay, so we understand that your TikTok and that distribution strategy through TikTok shop. Let's talk about retail now. You got into Sephora Accelerate last year. Now there are conversations happening with Target. Can you give us your retail story and I guess how you've been building the brand to like position yourself to be able to get into these bigger retail partners? Yeah. So we went through Sephora Accelerate last year.

25:40And actually it's funny because when we, and I think it's an incredible program because it teaches you so much about what is required for retail, gives you an experience with like what buyers are like, et cetera. And then we actually were reached out to by Target via TikTok DM. So, which like, I feel like I feel bad that this entire time I'm just only talking about TikTok. Funnily enough, TikTok is actually now the minority of our sales. Most people actually come through our D2C, through meta or through like repeat customers or subscriptions and stuff like that. But I do think it's obviously such a huge growth channel.

26:20So we were reached out to from Target in September. And that was basically two months after Clean Sheets had launched. And I sort of like knew Clean Sheets would be big, but I didn't think that it would like, As much as the brand grew 4X year over year from 2024 to 2025, Clean Sheets was like almost all of that growth. And Clean Sheets only launched in July. So like to give you context that it was a big difference in sales and we were constantly selling out. Basically now like 95 % of our sales is Clean Sheets. And so we've sort of gone through a pivot from being like a more holistic skincare brand to really realizing that there's a huge white space in wipes.

27:13Like there is no better for you wipe you like there's it's so hard to be differentiated in beauty. But when we launched wipes, we were like, I don't want to say their name, but like the blue packs. Yeah, they are number four on Amazon for all of beauty and personal care. yet like I don't can't think of any other competitor and so many there's not a ton of customer love for that skew and so I think the realization was that we had was like I think at the beginning we were trying to build something more similar to a road which is like you're building out to a gondola you're building a ton of different skews whereas now I think of ourselves more similar to say like touchland where they owned basically what Purell had been as this like drugstore commodity product had a better for you version that had a better user experience was cool and you could be proud to have it in your purse rather than like feel like oh this is like this thing that goes into hospitals um and that's how i feel like we're doing for the wipes and so we fundamentally the business changed and when target reached out was weird kind of like felt like the beginnings feelings of that and like but when they reached out i didn't really know what we were like I wasn't for sure that was going to be the plan but as we had discussions with them like they were so gung-ho on the brand they had basically I mean we're launching in almost 1750 doors which is almost basically nationwide and I had also had knew I would have to like fundraise for that so the question two became okay well if we want to do this like is the capital going to be there?

28:55And it ended up being there. So, and we also looked at where wipes are bought and like, where it's like, I didn't want to go against like this, like they are a convenience skew and wanted to be as convenient and as accessible as possible. What I'm loving about this conversation is I'm, you started in 2021 is 2026. And I feel like things just click it's crazy yeah and I know what it's like yeah I know what it's like as well to be building for those like years where it's kind of like there's something here I don't know what it is I'm just going to follow but I'm going to keep following the momentum I'm going to keep listening to the customer I'm just going to keep going and then when you have that moment where it's like oh this is the like this is the thing I can feel the momentum I feel like we've got product market fit and often it comes with a product launch or a new product like I look at chill house with chill tips there were years in and yes and he was amazing she was actually one of the people I called when we were kind of making the target decision and she was like um yeah she was definitely convinced was one of the helping forces of convincing us that like target would probably the right be the right place for us when will you launch when's that happening so that's happening may 10th So today, yeah, when this episode goes live.

30:14Okay. So everyone gets a target and buy, buy, buy, buy 4am skin. Let's get you sold out. Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. Let's talk about funding a little bit. Cause in the beginning you were funding this yourself. You've just raised an institutional round. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's talk through the funding story and where that money went and how much it was because you've, again, you're someone who like really bootstrapped your way through to this real moment of proof of concept yeah so yeah so up until basically october of last year we had only ever taken five to fifteen thousand dollar checks up until then we had only outside capital had been eighty thousand dollars for like four years um And so then in October, we had actually, we had, we literally did not have money for our Black Friday orders.

31:08Like we were running, like we kept selling out and going out of stock and we had had, we actually, a family office came in and gave us our first six figure check. And then pretty quickly afterwards, we did a full fundraise and raised over 4 million. so it went from like$80 ,000 to and it's yeah I so yeah so it was pretty big difference um and how it sort of worked was actually it's so funny because I this is the advice that everyone gives and like I hate to give the same advice that everyone gives but it really was ask for advice and you'll get money and ask for money you'll get advice and basically as I mentioned the target conversation came up like late September, early October.

31:57And I loved the idea of doing nationwide at Target, but I knew there's no way I could sign on to something if we couldn't fundraise for it. So I went to, but this was October. It is not the best time to fundraise in November and December. So my initial plan was I will fundraise in January, but I need to make that I'll actually be able to fundraise in January. So I was talking to various investors for advice on one, did they think the target thing was a good idea? This was also at the same time, there was a lot of buzz around like Ami Kole and like their distribution strategy. And like everyone was like, you have to start small, like don't spread yourself too thin.

32:44And like, we'll see in three months whether like this was all, whether this was the right plan. I will say we are a single SKU business. We're only launching clean sheets in Target. So it makes things a lot simpler. It's not this like huge assortment. It's like versus I talked to someone at Verst and even at Verst, they launched with like 19 SKUs at Target. We're only launching with one. So it does make the operations portion a lot simpler. And the messaging, I think the marketing messaging around the launch as well about like what people are going in there to get. Yeah, exactly. We just have to tell you about this product and why you should buy it.

33:21But back to the fundraising thing. So I spoke to, basically started asking people, do you think we'll be able to raise in January? like blah blah blah blah and or in we start the question started of like do you think target's the right partner for us and then and then it also was like if they were the right partner do you think we'll be able to fundraise how much you think we'll need to raise and then through those asking questions we actually were preempted with a term sheet um before christmas so classic so it really was not like the full like i was kind of sad not sad that i'm not gonna say that but we didn't run a full fundraise process just because things got preempted.

34:02I could talk to you about this forever. I love, I love to hear, I don't know. I just love when I hear these like brands, bootstrap brands have these moments where they're winning and where it feels like all of the, all of the effort, all of the learnings is coming to this point of like this inflection point. And I think that you're at this inflection point now, which is such an exciting time to be able to talk to you do you feel that it's scary though yeah no you'll be amazing but yeah I totally feel it like I also think probably another thing that made the fundraiser a little easier was I was so confident with I was like you would be lucky to like get on this ship and I was very in another like if you wanted like specific tip I was really aggressive about our time this was actually um advice that we had gotten from another founder I don't know if she would say it publicly so I won't say her name but if investors wanted to meet with us one they weren't meeting with Sabrina and myself at the same time it was only one of us because we have to run a business at the same time right and we specifically said you have to meet us before 8.30, before breakfast or for breakfast or coffee, but like not 10 a.m., 8.30, 8 or 8.30, because I have to run a business or you can take me to dinner.