From Elle Editor to Fragrance Founder: How Carol Han Pyle Built Nette, a Bootstrapped Sephora Favorite

0:00Natasha Jakubowski:Coming up in this episode of Professional Jealousy. Sephora DM'd us on Instagram. This was like six months into our brand launch. We had four candles. I had lived my entire adult life in New York City. It was very much non-stop. There wasn't a single moment where I was really in silence. And I think the pandemic really allowed that for me. And silence, that's when the light gets in and that's when the magic happens. No amount of expert social media marketing is going to help a confusing brand. I didn't know how to use Excel until a year ago.

0:43Natasha Jakubowski:Hi, I'm Natasha Jakubowski, Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly, a global marketing agency. and this is my podcast, Professional Jealousy, where I am lucky enough to talk to founders, CEOs and creatives that I'm impressed by and yes, a little jealous of. So today I'm talking to Carol Han Pyle, the founder of NET, a line of clean luxury candles and fragrances and we'll be chatting about her career path from fashion to founding a social media agency to fragrance brand founder, the moment that she decided to launch this luxurious brand and how she navigates the crazy world of beauty. So hi, Carol.

1:29Natasha Jakubowski:I should have checked that I was saying your name right. How are you doing? Right. I'm doing so well and I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. I am so happy to have you as a guest. I actually received some freebies, which I have to say my 13-year-old was over the moon. Because obviously, she loves anything to do with perfume, candles. She loves your brand. She loves Sephora. So thank you. For anyone that doesn't know the brand, can you give us the elevator pitch? Yeah. So NET is a brand that I founded in 2021. My background is primarily as an editor. So I was at Elle for four years in their fashion department.

2:18And then I left to start a social media agency called Community Atelier. It was, you know, back when 2010, that was when Instagram launched. So it was the very beginnings of this world of social media. And a lot of my designer friends had reached out to me wondering what they should do on Instagram. Or back then it was Twitter or Facebook in terms of content. And I was consulting a lot. So it was really easy actually to leave my job and start this agency. I had clients right out of the gate. I worked with amazing brands like Ralph Lauren and Club Monaco. And I did that for 10 years. And then the pandemic hit in 2020, and I ended up losing half of my clients overnight.

3:06And it was really such a huge reset for me. It was the first time in my entire adult life that I was not busy. And I had half the workload, and I wasn't going out to dinners, I wasn't going to workout classes every day. And so I had the space to really think about what I wanted to do next. And, you know, my mom had been a candle maker in San Francisco when I was little. She had a little candle shop on the water where she would hand dip and hand carve these beautiful, colorful pillars. I just I remember growing up in that shop surrounded by these candle creations of hers and, you know, the gorgeous smells that were in that shop.

3:44And I had always known that I wanted to do something in fragrance. So I spent that entire year incubating what net could be. And in 2021, we ended up launching. To me, net is fragrance through this lens of poetry. So the written word is also a huge passion of mine. I was an English major in college, and I think someday I will be a published writer. I think that's still in the future for me. But every fragrance begins as a poem that I write that is meant to convey a certain emotion. So, you know, joy, calm, nostalgia, desire. And that poem really becomes the emotional blueprint of the fragrance.

4:24I deliver that poem to our perfumer as part of the brief right in the beginning. And then we bring science in. So every fragrance is also scientifically proven to boost certain emotions and moods. And, you know, of course, we work with the world's leading top perfumers using only the very best ingredients available on the market today. So in that way, I really think of NET as both an art form and a tool for emotional well-being. You use it to smell beautiful, but also to make you feel something in a way that we actually can measure.

5:02Natasha Jakubowski:Sorry, that was the world's longest elevator. That was a very long, innovative pitch. But so much there. And I do, you know, I mean, there's so much, so many, so many questions, so many questions. Like, I feel like you're very creative and you've had this kind of what many would think is a dream job, like working for Elle as an editor, creating your own agency. like so it sounds like this was born of like time you know everyone else is like in chaos and and you're finding this creative like outlet um but what was the what was the trigger to actually do it i think it was silence being in silence for the first time you know i i had lived my entire adult life in new york city surround and working in magazines in the 2000s was every bit as brutal as people say.

5:58You know, I was working 15-hour days. I had events to go to for work almost every night. It was very much nonstop. And then running your own social media agency starting when you're in your 20s is also no joke. And there wasn't a single moment where I was really in silence. And I think the pandemic really allowed that for me. And silence and being alone with your thoughts and that's when the light gets in and that's when the magic happens um so i i found that time to be deeply frightening and terrifying but also really clarifying and

6:38Natasha Jakubowski:illuminating at the same time yeah no amazing do you think um so the intentional move to create something new and you're already entrepreneurial you already had a company um but like literally I know this sounds silly but like what what were the first things that you did to make this real I did have my company and I and I loved the agency and I still love the agency I think that I was always executing on someone else's vision and I did that really well and I still do but I think that I've always I always really missed there was this hole where I felt that I could create something from the ground up of my own and that was really the motivation of trying to start net and the first thing I did was really find a branding agency I used this very young agency called regular practice out of London in.

7:40And they were able to help me develop the visual identity of the brand. And that was that was really important to me because once we had that down and once we had collaborated on what that looked like and felt like and sounded like, it allowed me to move forward and really fully developing the universe of the brand.

7:59Natasha Jakubowski:Yeah. What was your brief to them? Like what how did you describe the kind of brand that you wanted to bring to life? I came up with the name first and that was a really long process net is a french word that means clean impeccable and elegant and i told them that that was really what i wanted the brand to stand for how can you be as clean as possible and do things impeccably and do things with elegance and those are three values that we continue to come back to with every decision that we make around the brand with every product launch that we do. And that, you know, that was really the guiding light of how it how it moved forward.

8:41Natasha Jakubowski:Yeah. I love that, you know, part of your creative process is writing the poem, poem and that becoming the brief for the scent. It's such a romantic. It's such a romantic. You know, it's both creative. And I know you bring in some kind of neuroscience. You have these interesting kind of almost like two parts tensions you've got you know creative science and then you're clean as well as luxury um like how did you put this all together like how how do you think about the brand differently like there is obviously you're in a category that is like full and every day there's yet another fragrance or candle brand coming out.

9:33Natasha Jakubowski:Like, how do you think about that moat? Because there are lots of elements that feel so kind of, yeah, so differentiated. But how do you think about that? How do you stay apart from the kind of clutter? Well, my thinking was, why not? Why can't something be both clean and transparent and luxurious and covetable? And why can't something incorporate both art and science and feel very luxurious? So when I was developing our candles, candles is what we started with. I was trying to get pregnant and we were not having any success. You know, we ended up going through an IVF process that was quite brutal, four rounds.

10:17And throughout this entire period of my life, all of my practitioners from my acupuncturist to my GP to my OB were telling me to just watch what I ate, watch what products I used. And when I took a look at the candles that I was using, Chudon, Diptyque, Byredo, all of these amazing legacy brands that I loved, I couldn't find any information about what they used as their ingredients. It was all a very black box. And then on the other side of the token, there were these like$12 spa candles that only had eucalyptus oil in them and were very not well branded. I had no desire to buy them or put them in my home.

11:01And that's kind of, that was a little bit of a light bulb moment where I was like, why isn't there a clean candle that's also luxurious? It felt like there was this big white space. And so that's, you know, that's what I decided to base the candles around. Can we give them the best possible vessel? Our vessels are handmade, food safe, dishwasher safe, microwave safe. They're based on this$100 handmade ceramic mug I found in Sag Harbor. So they're like drinking mugs first. That's what they're initially designed to be. And my hope is that it's very obvious that you should clean out the candle vessel when you went once you're done and collect them as as cups to use for drinking um ultimately so that they're beautiful they're sustainable they're clean you don't feel reservations about

11:53Natasha Jakubowski:burning them yeah no it's such a such a nice idea building the you know i think people do tend to use the expensive vessels you know i hope so but actually making sure that it's something that can be used for that you know i've definitely got a few candles whether they're the dipseek or the byredo and it's like yeah it's not really a you know maybe i can put some pencils in there or something um so it's so nice building that in um so i didn't really yeah oh no i was just going to say i have a friend named dria who is another entrepreneur she has this community called by Tria and she actually Murphy and she actually uses our vessels as her matcha mugs and she posts an Instagram story almost every single day with a picture of her matcha because because it's such a huge part of her ritual and it's in one of our candle vessels and it just makes me very happy.

12:52Natasha Jakubowski:I know it makes you very happy as a as a founder of this brand being used in that way but presumably also that's perfect content as a social media mogul and a hat I'm sure that's uh it's like a classic a classic piece of influencer um yeah content that feels very right yes exactly it's perfect yeah um what do you think in your you mentioned uh the uh that your mother had this uh candle business what do you think in your upbringing made you entrepreneurial I have kids I'm always thinking about it like how do I make sure they're not you know spoiled and how do they still have drive and you know want to do stuff and make stuff and be ambitious what do you think in your because you again this wasn't your first business you've already got a social media agency?

13:56Natasha Jakubowski:Like what do you think helped you become or be, feel entrepreneurial? Oh my gosh. Well, my mom is a huge inspiration. She was entrepreneurial, I think, because she didn't have a choice. She was an immigrant who moved here from South Korea, and she came here without speaking the language. And so it's really hard for immigrants to get normal jobs when, you know, their college educations that they received in their native countries don't really count here. And, you know, so I think that starting businesses was really just a necessity for her in order to help provide for the family. And then when my parents got divorced and, you know, and they separated and, you know, they were doing their own things, that was really all she knew.

14:42I've never known my mom my entire life to not have been running her own business. And sometimes it was harder than others, but there were definitely many years of my life and my childhood where I watched her work incredibly, incredibly hard. You know, she was really like that archetype of a single mother superwoman and so inspiring to me. She's my biggest inspiration. Yeah.

15:08Natasha Jakubowski:Amazing. Yeah. I have similar when my mother was definitely like her degree meant nothing when she moved in and it was it's so shocking and you know just thinking about how it must be so you know so difficult to start everything again and have to create value you know it's unimaginable yeah yeah um yeah how would you um how would you try and instill that sense of, you know, entrepreneurialism, knowing that, you know, you're not an immigrant coming in. Is there, do you have any tips? I'll take any tips for bringing up children with that drive. It's tough, right? Because, you know, I think I have a son, his name's Ozzy, he's three years old, and I work from home most of the time.

16:06And so he sees me working and he

16:12he understands like now, even at three years old, even at two and a half years old, he'll come up to my desk and he'll be like, I want to work. And I'm working and, you know, pounding out the keys on my laptop. And I think that he wants to, you know, I think children have this natural instinct to want to emulate their heroes, which are often their parents. So I think just by you being an entrepreneur and me being an entrepreneur and presumably working very hard and them not help, you know, they can't help but witness that. I would hope that that is instilling those values into them. And I don't think it's necessarily the worst thing in the world that Ozzy will actually not see me struggling the same way that I saw my mom struggling.

17:00I am very glad to you know kind of evolve from that for him yeah yeah no I agree I do I I actually

17:08Natasha Jakubowski:think that the the doing versus the saying is huge you know what being seeing how your parents behave seeing them work hard I think is is huge I mean that's what I'm hoping I think I've I think my parents my uh yeah I think my kids have seen that know that I work hard and there's an ethic that they definitely take away. Yes. Yeah. What has been the hardest thing about being a founder, about creating, you know, you're suddenly putting your own taste out there. You've gone from being an editor and helping, you know, publicize and communicate about other people's brands. What's been the hardest thing moving into that kind of product founder?

17:55My gosh, what hasn't been hard about it? I think that before I started this brand, I had run my agency for 10 years and I thought, this is going to be easy. I've already been doing this for 10 years. I've got this. I could not have imagined how much harder running a product-based business would be. One of my investor friends once said, software is easy and hardware is really hard. And that's why she only invests in software brands, because she understands how many things can go wrong in a product-based brand. But I really had to learn everything from the ground up. And everything from, I mean, I was just like in deep Google holes at 2 in the morning trying to figure out who manufactures candles in the U.S.

18:44And, you know, who I can go to to design my perfume bottle. Everything had to be learned. And so, and it had to be learned while I was building it. So lots of mistakes, you know, that kind of results in a lot of mistakes that you have to really bounce back from and get up really quickly from and recover from.

19:06Natasha Jakubowski:Any key mistakes that you think are worth mentioning in terms of absolutely terrible, but bounce back and everyone loves mistakes. Oh my gosh. Well, you know, I remember in 2023 or sorry, 2024, we launched our Pear Jam perfume and it was the first time that we had launched a single perfume at a time. And we had no idea really how it was going to go. The last time we had launched fragrance was when we had launched the category. That was very different because we launched five fragrances at once. And so we ordered our quantity and it sold out in two weeks. And it was a spring launch. It was called Pear Jam, a very springy fragrance.

19:54And we couldn't get back in stock for six months. So by the time we got back into stock, the buzz had sort of done its thing and died, as buzz tends to do. So I think that that was a really big missed opportunity. We learned from it, but it was six months of missed revenue. Yeah.

20:13Natasha Jakubowski:And it was devastating. I think, you know, when people say, that's so cool that you sold out, it's not fun on the inside. Yeah. Yeah. Infuriating. I feel like you actually got into Sephora incredibly fast. Is that through your contacts or how did that happen? And how on earth did you, you know, manage to take such a new business into Sephora? Like, I know a lot of companies that that's basically broken them. Yeah. So Sephora DM'd us on Instagram. One of the merchants had ordered our candles and they sent us a DM. And they were like, we'd love to get on a call and talk. So this was like six months into our brand launch.

21:01It was, you know, when we had nothing but we had four candles. And so we got on the phone with the Sephora team. I was so new to the industry and I wasn't even in beauty. I was, I only had candles. I don't even think it registered to me what a big deal Sephora was at the time. I only knew Sephora as a consumer. And so I got on the call with them and I was like, oh, this team seems so sweet. They're so nice. And, you know, they were interested in bringing candles in. But in talking with them, I had let them know that I had plans to launch into Fine Fragrance. And they were like, let's wait for that.

21:38Will you launch Fine Fragrance exclusively with us for a little bit? So that's how that relationship started. And it's been really great. The Sephora team is truly best in class and so involved in our brand, really in everything from product development to the marketing rollouts. Extremely detail-oriented and very involved like no other retail team I've seen.

22:02Natasha Jakubowski:Amazing. so actually helped kind of with the brand launch and and not just how to do it in the store but something that was helpful generally that's very helpful they were like an extension of our very very very small team at that point um and i have to say we launched at sephora completely bootstrapped we're still completely bootstrapped we haven't raised any money and now that i would say never And that, I would say, is probably the hardest part about launching at a retailer like Sephora that I would caution against. If I had to do it again, I would probably have raised money before endeavoring to launch into a retailer like that.

22:46And, you know, we've made it work, but I think that the road could have been much smoother if we had some cash behind us.

22:56Natasha Jakubowski:yeah yeah that's amazing because what what sort of size was that first order like how many candles how many stores that seems like a hell of a lot to the front yourself opening orders for any retailer are large and you know you have to make sure that you have enough i mean inventory issues we still struggle with to this day yeah um it kind of seems like you know the brand has momentum we're growing by double digits year over year. And I always say to myself, you know, this is a year we're going to get our orders correct. And, you know, and we always under order, no matter like how much we increase year over year, our numbers, it always feels like there's a shortage at some point in the year of a very important skew.

23:45So that's something that we, you know, we are still working through.

23:50Natasha Jakubowski:Yeah. But so no investment. So would you have used, if you'd gone back and taken some money, would that have been for marketing or for what would you have used it for? Yeah, I think it would have been for marketing. I know that most Sephora brands dedicate an enormous part of, for example, their paid media budget to driving traffic to Sephora.com, you know, five, six-figure monthly budgets just to drive to Sephora. And as a bootstrap brand, you just don't have those resources. So you're really going up against competitors that are just not on the same playing field as you are. Yeah. How much has presumably one of the kind of, you know, secret advantages that you have is the fact that you've got this social media expertise, the agency.

24:45Natasha Jakubowski:How much has that been integrated into the kind of launch and scaling of NET? It's been incredibly helpful having done social media for fashion, beauty, hotel brands, lifestyle brands for 10 years. I can't imagine having launched a brand without that background and expertise. I have been trained for the first few years of my career to look at everything through an editorial lens and then through 10 years to look at everything through a marketing lens. So when it came to launch Net, a lot of those elements came very naturally to me. And Net is now a client of Community Ateliers, which is an advantage because I am the founder of Community Atelier.

25:33And I have team members on that team that have been with me for up to 13 years, who know me and the way I work, like the back of my hand, who are very, very loyal to me and to the vision of both Community Atelier and Sidnet. So having a built-in team like that, that you already have so much history with, is so crucial. I wouldn't say crucial.

25:57Natasha Jakubowski:It's very helpful. yeah it's a little bit like elon musk bringing their companies together being mutually helpful i'm joking but you know for uh for all those out there that you know i speak to lots of people who um haven't necessarily come from the kind of social media or marketing kind of discipline. What are your key tips and learnings and thoughts on using social media and marketing? Like how should a new brand go to market? What are some of the things that you've learned or understood from your experience? I think from a wider perspective, brand clarity is everything. And if you have brand clarity, everything else is easier.