What to Do When Your First Product Flops

0:00Hey, business besties. Welcome back to the Female Founder World Podcast.

0:30podcast app. Okay, let's get into the show. You are now entering Female Founder World with your host Jasmine Garnsworthy. Rushi, welcome to Female Founder World. Thank you for having me. I wanted to speak to you for a lot of reasons, but most recently because I went to your fashion week party and I walked in, your brand color is this like cobalt blue. Yeah. And I walked into this party and everyone was wearing blue and I'd forgotten that the invitation said that and I'd been at a different thing and I had like beige and some green and I felt like the biggest asshole because it was like I've intentionally worn green you know what I mean it's like such a like little tweak on it but I looked around the room and I was like whoa you have such a powerful community these are people who are obsessed with you that is amazing and what you felt.

1:17Thank you no I um I have really leaned into the blue color because it's it's my favorite color and it's the grounding color of the brand. And it is a nod to a sense of rebellion from the tradition and the rituals that are so core to the products. I wanted a little bit of that duality to put a little more of my personality into the brand. So it's been really cool to see people resonate with that. Yeah, I love that. I need to lean into it more and get like wear purple all the time or something because I feel like it, yeah, it makes the brand like really front of mind when people are talking to you.

1:54Exactly. You know, you're a founder and you are obviously like representing the brand out in public all the time. So I think it's really cool to be like representing the - Of course. I was actually inspired by Emily Weiss because I had seen, maybe it was a launch or something happened, some milestone with Glossier and she was wearing a full red suit with a pink blouse. And I was like, I want to be that proud of what I'm doing and own it everywhere. And so now whenever I'm shopping and I spot the blue. I'm always considering it. It's become a problem for my budget, but it's a part of my identity now.

2:31I love that. Okay, for people who don't know Avrani, what are you building? It's the Ayurvedic beauty brand that everyone can benefit from and enjoy. So right now we have skincare inspired by the recipes my grandmother taught me from growing up. In Indian culture, you often make your own beauty treatments at home using ingredients from the kitchen like turmeric and honey and neem. As an adult searching for a way to access those rituals and ingredients, I didn't have the bandwidth or capacity to make my own stuff every time. I'm an ambitious career-oriented woman. I wanted something that I could use more easily and it was more accessible.

3:15And so that's when the idea even sparked. and Ayurveda is so all-encompassing across body care, hair care, skin care. So the vision has always been to bring Ayurveda to life in a way that the whole world can enjoy. It's not so tied to just the Indian community. You've raised a lot of money for the brand, for a consumer brand. It's tough out there at the moment and I've seen some milestones that you've hit along the way. We're going to talk about that in a second. But when you got started, you were bootstrapping. You used your own money. You're in business school. I love this story. Can you tell it how you got started?

3:52Sure. So I went to business school, not really sure what I was going to do. Actually, I just knew I didn't want to be in finance anymore. 2017. This is summer 2017. And I'd been working in finance for six years at that point. So I had saved enough to afford going to school. And on the second day of school, I met my co-founder, Justin Silver. and I didn't know it at the time. We were just talking about what we had done in the past, what we wanted to do in the future and he also happened to work in banking and private equity like me but he had focused on consumer and specifically beauty and private equity and he was telling me about his most recent investment and it was in Tatcha, the Japanese inspired beauty brand and I had never heard of Tatcha so I was like, what is that?

4:36And he's telling me how this Asian founder brought these Japanese rituals like green tea, black charcoal, rice bran oil to the US in a luxury format. And all these sparks just started going off in my head. I'm like, Justin, there are so many Indian ingredients and rituals that are so sacred to our culture and in beauty that haven't been accessed whatsoever. So I'm telling him about growing up making my own turmeric mass, making my own coconut oil hair mass, all these things. And he's like, every time you have to make it yourself, why can't you buy it at the store? And within two weeks of that conversation, We transferred all of our savings that we were both going to spend on tuition into a joint business account, took out business school loans that were both still paying off.

5:19And we just never looked back. Like you think goosebumps. OK, so this is 2017. In 2020, you had a big rebrand. Yes. I read that that kind of led to your first million in sales. You grew by 400 percent in the year after that. What was the rebrand? And what did you learn from those early years? Because I do think a lot of people listening are kind of in that really beginning stage and you launch with something and maybe it's not hitting or it's not quite right, but it's so important to get that feedback and then iterate on it. So I want to know what you were seeing, how you were gathering that and how that then led to like really up leveling the brand to what it is now.

5:55Totally. So the first thing I will say when I started, I didn't have the customer in mind at all. It was all about how do I get the most excellent product in context of the actual formula? But who cares about the packaging or the messaging and what it comes in, in my mind? And that first couple of years was a brutal experience. You've come a long way as the woman who always wears blue. I have, I have. And so when it came to things like packaging, messaging, positioning, all of that, I just kind of put together what I thought people would expect out of an Indian beauty brand. So I used jewel tone, deep green packaging, gold, yellow gold accents.

6:42I put in a little millennial pink even because of Glossier. I'm like, oh, well, people like this. It was all based on what I thought people liked and it had nothing to do with what I liked. And as I had the experience that we launched the beta version of Avrani.com, the first version in 2018 in the summer between business school. Instead of doing an internship, we stayed in Philly and had our Shopify site go live and started the business. And that was when I first realized like, wow, the whole storytelling, the culture, the immersion of what I'm trying to create was completely lost because I didn't even put my heart into the actual packaging.

7:27I didn't resonate with it personally. And so as I found myself, you know, going to trade shows, going, having interviews, talking to people, trying to hire people, I myself felt very disconnected from what I was holding up and presenting as my brand. And once we graduated from school in 2019 and moved back to New York to build out the team and scale the business, I was like, I can't do this if it's this way. I need to take a step back and revisit the whole look, feel, aesthetic of the brand before I feel like I can put my whole self into it and be proud of what I'm creating. That's an expensive job and a big job.

8:08Yeah, and time. It took a year to do that. So 2019 to 2020 is when I worked on it, and we launched the brand as you see it today in 2020. Did you work with an agency to do the big free brands? No, because, and this is a blessing in disguise in retrospect, I couldn't afford it. I wanted to. I really wanted to. And all the advice I was getting from investors and my peers was just hire a branding agency. It's like a flat fee. They'll do everything for you. And I simply, I didn't have the money and we were running out of money because it was bootstrapped. And so in context of either getting the next production run to continue selling, continue getting that feedback or investing in the brand I just was like I have to do it myself wow yeah do you have graphic design experience I don't I don't and this is even canva like building I'm in canva I'm in powerpoint I'm like it was so janky in the beginning I would put stuff together in powerpoint and then just like screenshot it and then resize it it was like terrible but it was what I had to do to like get by and to keep keep it growing um none of none of what I did was like professional in the sense of I would like send the logo and people would be like this is like super pixelated like what are you you know like I had none of the resolution yeah what is any of that I had no idea I love this because it just shows you don't need to go into this space having all of the answers and having all of the resources you can really get yourself to a point where something can fly purely by just being willing to learn yes being scrappy and investing your time a hundred percent I mean even the website I watched YouTube tutorials to create it so I downloaded like a Shopify template and then I would watch I would have a computer with the tutorial running and then a computer where I was doing it and it was frustrating and arduous and And, you know, very time consuming, but I wanted it so bad that none of that got in my way where otherwise anything else that gave me that much of a headache I would have given up on.

10:16That really resonates with me. I feel like I've been through this exact same experience. OK, so then we're in 2020. You've got this beautiful new brand. This is where the Avrani Blue like really comes in and the business starts really growing. What were you doing to get that early traction once you had this brand and this product that you really believed in? Like what were those scrappy channels that were helping you get those first customers? So really it was social media that was the most cost effective way to get people into the brand. At the time, by the way, paid social media was a lot more lucrative.

10:54Now it's a way too expensive. customer acquisition is just almost impossible now online. But at the time, there was still something there. So on social media, specifically on Instagram, one of the things I did was walk the audience through the process of the rebrand, starting from how I updated the logo and why I changed it from lowercase to uppercase, why I chose this very specific shade of blue and what it means to me and the duality of that color of being loud but also calm and all of these feelings that I had that I truly never shared with anyone because I never thought that they would care was suddenly something that the audience was really resonating with because they could tell how much heart went into the brand and I just leaned into that completely like I was showing them dye lines of of the cartons I was showing them the progress of what each packaging looked like like the first round I got back it was the blue was off or it was too translucent and so I did like 20 % darker and I'm like this is what it looks like now and like just literally showing them exactly what I was going through as opposed to trying to choreograph the story, which is what I was doing before.

12:15It made it first much more easier because I didn't have to do that added layer of like, what do I tell them? And two, it made it feel just so much more honest in terms of my connection with the brand. And I was pleasantly surprised to see how much that aspect of it alone resonated with people, regardless of like maybe they didn't like the shade of blue I chose but they appreciated why I chose it. There's something that I think has to happen internally to get to the point where you feel I don't know comfortable putting yourself out there in such a unfiltered raw kind of way. It's so much easier to have a easier in a personal sense to have a more professional video to maybe hire someone to create the content for you but people connect when you are being just that unfiltered version of yourself and people say it so much but I don't think I don't think it's really like hitting for a lot of people the way that you shop online like Instagram stories should also be what your like TikTok looks like like it is truly that like unfiltered approach yes but and we all want to consume that but very few of us and I'm still struggling with this in terms of having the courage to just fully put myself out there because I'll even find myself like, you know, there are days where like I haven't washed my hair in six days.

13:39I'm wearing just like a dirty old big t-shirt and I want to respond to people on stories, but I'm like, oh, I shouldn't put my face. I'm just going to put something else there. I still do that. Even though I know that they might appreciate it, I haven't gotten through that barrier of feeling totally comfortable in myself and it's something I'm still working on. Yeah I think that's going to resonate with a lot of people. Okay so I want to talk about raising your seed round now. What were some of the traction points that you were showing to get that money? What was that process like for you and what were you using the money for?

14:16Yeah so the seed round happened in 2021. And I launched the new brand in the summer of 2020. And that year of 2020 was when we crossed our first million of sales. So that's when suddenly conversations with investors got a lot easier than it was before. So it felt like that first million was certainly a benchmark in their eyes. Outside of that, they also saw the growth of engagement on social media. Like before I was just, you know, posting beautiful pictures of women looking perfect or ingredients looking perfect. And the way that the brand resonated, it actually resulted in increased followership and increased engagement.

15:01And investors saw that as well. And they also really loved the vision of it. A lot of other Indian beauty brands or Indian inspired beauty brands, while I mean, they're beautiful and I'm so glad that they exist. They validate what I'm doing as well. They're still embodying what people expect out of Indian culture in context of stereotypical Indian aesthetics, let's say, as an example of like intricate detail. like they think like Taj Mahal, Mahindi, piles of spices. And I am trying to expand people's imagination around what South Asian culture can be and what that can look like, because I myself did not see that growing up.

15:47So investors really resonated with that as well, particularly people who are also children of immigrants or have backgrounds where they felt a duality growing up. they really resonated with what I was doing. That's so interesting to me I remember having a conversation with a with an investor back in oh my gosh it must be like 2020 2021 and I was asking her you know like what are you investing in in the consumer space right now and where do you think beauty is going and I remember her saying there is some stuff that they're doing around like tech and new patented innovation in the space and then she said that the really the only other the thing that we're looking at and investing in, brands that are creating products for women that were previously like really underrepresented, which I think is amazing.

16:38But then you've also kind of taken to this next level where you're like, okay, but this isn't only for us. This is for everyone. Which I think is really powerful and really smart. Yes, I mean, the thing is we never really questioned, like growing up walking through Sephora, they're mostly French beauty brands. yes um english beauty brands and we never question is this for me like i never asked that for myself yet because of the lack of representation the flip side is constantly true where i'm constantly meeting women who are like but can i use this because that's what we're socialized to believe and what we're used to and so adjusting even that narrative around it has been a part of what drives me because I don't want people to think like, oh, there's one Indian beauty brand here.

17:30That's enough representation. It's like, no, we deserve choices too. And then on top of that, it's like, it's not just for us to benefit from just the way that all these other products and brands have transcended their own demographic. We have that capacity to do that too, in a really beautiful way. how do you take a brand from a seed round like what you did through to a couple of years later raising a seven million series a what are you showing like what do you have to do in that time because it just feels like such a short amount of time to add so much value to the business what are you doing what do other people need to be doing if they're in that in-between space I I mean the most obvious one is in sales showing a constant growth in sales which it can be challenging.

18:20I mean, it's such a, like you said, a short period of time and you can only make so many assumptions off of two months of sales growth. So it really is a holistic perspective on the whole brand and the industry. And I don't want to undermine the macro trends that take place and that also persuade people to want to invest in this kind of stuff. As you just mentioned, people have taken the bet on brands that are addressing women's needs who have not been represented before. People are taking the bet on cleaner, non-toxic formulas being something that everybody wants to gravitate towards. A bet on wellness in general as a deeper level of beauty.

19:06That the healthier you are, the more you take care of yourself, naturally the more beautiful you're going to be. and you don't have to solve for that surface level thing you can solve for the root problem and that these things are global trends and global uh global concepts that people are gravitating towards that are not specific to Indian culture but Ayurveda just so happens to be completely in line with all of these things and in fact it's you know it's a 5 ,000 year old wisdom in India and it's been so stuck in India, I think, in context of not being able to transcend that demographic. And what I'm trying to do is say, you know, all these things you're looking for, there's already a wisdom and knowledge around it if we can get past the fact that it comes from India.

19:58One of my favorite things to talk about is marketing. I love to know what's working, the scrappy stuff that's working or maybe a launch blueprint that you have around releasing a new product. What is your marketing engine? What does it look like? And you've been in the market for a few years now. What has shifted? So one of the biggest things that has shifted is that paid social is no longer a key driver. It's painful out there. It is. So while that was a majority of our marketing budget in the beginning, it is now not at all. It's like the fourth or fifth line in context of our marketing priorities.

20:38One of the things that I've leaned into more recently to address that or combat that is truly our community. So as an example, we recently did like a casting call for UGC content and it truly came out of a need where we were like we need more UGC content and while we had like people sending us photos and stuff it's not always like the great lighting or like the best angle that we need in order to show on our website and stuff so we're like what if we choreograph uh an event where we set up stations and and make it so that we can capture exactly the angle and the content and the lighting we want but then also allow our community our super fans to be a part of that and come help us with that uh we we send i i put it up on instagram we got over 7 000 applications oh for people who wanted to participate in it to physically come in to physically come in and do it it went it went around on tiktok it went it was just like they get free product they would get free product but that's it and like a fun day and a fun day and good content and good content and so they would also get access to the content we have the content as well um but i was shocked to see people's willingness to donate their time and energy and I was like I want to lean into this more because the community is they're the ones who are the loudest and proudest around what we're doing and beyond just like selling product if we can really help create that energy around it that's really what differentiates like a good from a great brand in my opinion.

22:26I look at what Ty Haney did at Outdoor Voices in the early days where they were, you know, very much community led. She was doing pickup basketball games in Soho with their community during their lunch break in the beginning and going for like dog walks with the community, really trying to activate around the mission of their brand, which is like doing things. What kind of other things are you doing? Are you thinking, okay, we're going to do more in-person events? Is it really just like a referral program online? Like tactically, what does it look like to activate your community? So both of those things.

22:57So more in-person events for sure. And the thing is, they don't always have to be super elaborate. So the one that you recently attended was certainly that was the biggest one we've ever done. That was amazing. But I have come to learn that even just giving your time and attention as a brand for people to like meet and greet or engage or even try the products. It's a huge way to get people excited. and also partnerships and collaborations with brands who have the same end consumer but aren't competitive with you so for example there are some like fashion brands that are inspired by South Asian culture so this is I'm talking even in 2021 we did this we did a partnership where we went to a studio, Anita Dongray actually, it's a high-end luxury like Indian bridal suite and we set up mini facial stations and so people could come in and see the clothes of course but then also engage with our products and try it out and it was very much an immersion into the culture in a way that someone who isn't Indian could experience and feel really connected to it.

24:19So I'm always trying to think about ways to connect with other founders and other brands as well to help each other out. Another thing that we have done in the past, and we should continue doing it, this bathing suit brand that we partnered with, I know the founder, Cam, really well. She started at the same time. we just did like an email swap where we sent emails to both of our list serves saying hey you can like if you enter your email you'll be added to the other list serve and you could win xyz and we created like 10 things that you could win 10 tiers of things and it was a combination of our stuff of skincare and bathing suits and accessories and stuff and it was like just right away tens of thousands of crossover emails that we got and so that is like more of a low lift low in-person energy engagement but super powerful and then the ones that are more in-person activations have more of that depth and more of that like emotion to it but affect far less people at a time so it's a combination of all of these things that together can build the momentum around the brand no one thing I would say has like made us pop off though I think it's really interesting what you're saying about the in real life piece you know I love an in-person event we host heaps of in-person events for female founder world but what I see is you have this like core group that comes in person and yes it's smaller maybe it's 50 people maybe it's 500 people but it's a small group but the way that they then impact and shape the culture of your brand online as being these people that have like physically and tangibly and really closely related with it is so powerful and I think don't just think that you're impacting those 50 people you're impacting their entire network as well yeah and then that network networks network and think about it as these like overlapping circles of like closeness to the brand exactly exactly it's powerful stuff so we've talked a lot about e-commerce, D2C, that side of the business, wholesale.

26:23This omni-channel strategy is something that so many consumer brands now are realizing, hey, we need to do this. We can't just acquire people through paid ads. What's your approach to retail? What's been going on? What's coming up? Talk me through it. Yeah. So I had that realization in early 2022. We have to do retail in order to scale this business any further. And the two major players are Ulta and Sephora in context of being like a true distribution partner. And Sephora has been the dream since the beginning of building the brand, seeing the brand at Sephora. So we will be launching our haircare line next spring through Sephora.

27:05Amazing, congratulations. Thank you. How does that come about? Yeah. Years and years of relationship building and then having the right time and place click. So for example, hair care is their fastest growing category right now. And they're seeing this increased focus on hair and scalp wellness specifically. And it just so happened I'd been doing R &D on hair care since 2020. So I was in a place to start pitching the framework for the products and what I was creating in 2021. And it took two years of talking to their teams, really thinking about the positioning in context of the rest of their offerings.

27:49And keep in mind, like skincare wouldn't have been able to enter in this vein. So it was just a series of serendipitous things falling into place and the persistence on my part, frankly, to want to get it there to get this deal lost. Did you work with a broker or were you managing this relationship? I did it myself. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So brokers I found and other founders and investors had advised exploring that. the challenge is because we are an Ayurvedic brand, the story gets lost when it's coming from a voice of someone who doesn't deeply understand it. And I've had this experience truly in PR as well, where every single major article and hit has been me reaching out to the writer so that I can fully capture what I'm trying to say.

28:46And I've worked with several, you know PR firms agencies freelancers and nothing nothing wrong with them specifically but I was noticing in context of me sharing a story and then writing let's say a press release of what I said and the magic of the brand being a bit lost and so the same goes for Sephora and so much of what we're building is the magic of the culture coming to life and being accessible across cultures and communities that when it's when it's synthesized into like a business context it just gets lost and so I've it just has to be me that makes sense so are you are you uh getting warm introductions to category managers and buyers are you like on LinkedIn oh my gosh and And that's how I fundraise too from the beginning.

29:41On LinkedIn, tell me anybody who works there, we have a three degree separation. Okay, I'm going to get coffee with this first person. Then I'm going to beg them for an intro to the second person. That is exactly how that worked. Wow. Yeah. And I have a whole Excel spreadsheet where I wrote every single buyer at Sephora. Wow. Where I'm like, how do I know them? What is the connection there? Where can I lean on? It was a process. Yeah. Yeah, for people who don't respect like networking or see the value in it, that approach. And look, you're going into Sephora now next year. Yeah, here we are. Okay.

30:16I want to talk about team. You are doing a lot of things. You just had this big event. You're talking about all of these marketing tactics. You've raised a significant amount of money. Who is doing this? Is it you and a bunch of people in Soho with you or in Fidey where you're based in New York? Are you guys remote? What does it look like? So there are eight of us full time, including myself and my co-founder and a couple of us part time working remote. In person work is really important. Yeah. And I know that maybe it's like everyone's not going to agree with me on this. But we at 2020 was a huge struggle when we were all forced to work remotely because that energy is lost.

31:00And a lot of times with a company, like you have to feel that sense of motivation from seeing other people around you working towards the same goal. Because when you're isolated by yourself, it feels like you're the only one working on the thing. And it undermines the synergy that happens when a random idea sparks a conversation in person that can lead to a great strategy. So now we are a hybrid schedule. We're three days in office, two days remote. Tuesdays and Fridays are remote. And I have found that has made a big shift in the way that we engage with each other. On top of that, on a quarterly basis, I will do like a retreat type of thing.

31:49Sometimes it's elaborate. Like we went to the Catskills last year and did like a three night cabin thing. and then sometimes it's just in office we'll just like clear our schedule for the day and then just do activities for the day in person in in our office space and the key there I found and this is of course through doing this several times and learning from it is not really to focus on the business so much and the business strategy but more on our like personal self-esteem and our personal growth because when we elevate internally we bring such a better version of ourselves to our work that is so much more impactful than just trying to shove the mission down someone's throat from the from the perspective of the business so I have leaned a lot more into spirituality this the the practice of elevating our own self-esteem we do exercises around that as a team on a monthly basis so we'll write out affirmations we'll write out where do we want to be in a year like as an example on in the first week of january when we came back to the office this year i had everybody write a letter to themselves as though it was december 31st what are you so happy you accomplished as though it's already done as a practice of manifestation because it's something that has really helped me and these are the tools that I want my team to start embodying and when I see them do that the work just speaks for itself you're somebody I follow you on Instagram and I always see you on Instagram stories like highlighting these little pieces of wisdom from the books that you're reading you seem like somebody who's constantly learning and I find that very inspiring and I find it very inspiring watching how you've just become this incredible leader from maybe somebody who it's not like you've run a bunch of companies before like you've you've up leveled as the business has been growing and I want to know how you learned how to do that because that's something that I'm trying to do right now is we make you know I've got a couple of hires but really trying to grow in 2024 and I'm so conscious of the fact that the one thing that holds a business back truly is me and I need to figure out how to be the better version of myself so that I can lead this business?

34:14So the first step I would say is awareness of that. I think a lot of people are unaware of that. A lot of leaders. It is us that drive the business forward. No matter how great your talent is, if your direction and your vision and your focus on it isn't there, it's not going to grow. And in 2020, I had kind of that existential crisis of like, oh shit, it's got to be me that does this and I don't know what I'm doing. And at that point, it'd been a few years where I'm like, this is, I come to terms with the fact that this was incredibly lonely, that there are very few people that understand or resonate with what I'm dealing with.

34:53And for the people that are like, I don't have access to them easily. Right. So I turned to books. I was like, there has to be some wisdom here that I can integrate into my life. And so So books have become the way in which I grow myself before I can address my team. And I am constantly reading something. So I've stopped scrolling on my phone before bed. Oh my God, I'm just crying so hard. I said to my husband last night, like, my phones live in the kitchen and we go to bed without them. This is getting out of control. It is out of control. It really is. Literally like the one thing that is holding me back, I think, is my relationship with my phone.

35:34Anyway, onwards. So that's when I was like, OK, but I do need something to entertain myself of like and like slowly fall asleep. And so books have become my my escape in that regard. And I'm always reading something. And there's no limit to how much wisdom is out there. I really I didn't have a book list or anything. I just started with I like googled best business books and like the few that start are like a CEO only does three things the hard thing about hard things atomic habits like the classic ones and after I started getting into that I was like oh my gosh this is changing my life and so of course I'll come across a few that don't end up being so profound but ultimately they always help me and to be clear they're not always business books they're very creative and spiritual sometimes as well so uh one book i just absolutely love i had my whole team read it and we did a whole discussion was the four agreements and it's a more philosophical book around an approach to life and it really just like opened my mind for you by the way this sounds like the best work environment it's like come and become a better human yeah well thank you I appreciate that I mean we do work very hard I'm sure and there's a lot of the grind is still definitely there um but yeah I have that is my leadership style because I do find when I'm like oh change this small thing or do that small thing I'm like this is annoying this is like not the type of relationship I want to breed where I'm just like dictating what to do I want to inspire somebody to do to get to my end goal and I don't maybe know how to get there, but they'll figure it out.