How a Taylor Swift Moment Built a Global Beauty Brand

0:00On October 7th of 2024, Taylor Swift walked into a Chiefs American football game wearing my gold glitter freckles by FaZeit. and a content creator had reached out to us on our FaZeit Instagram account saying, I think Taylor is wearing your product. I go to my Instagram explore page and there's just zoomed in photos of Taylor wearing gold glitter freckles. Today's guest is Aliette Buttleman, the co-founder of FaZeit Beauty, viral freckle patch brand that turned a single product into a global pop culture phenomenon. As soon as I looked at the TV and saw her walking in, I started to cry like tears of joy.

0:36And my husband, I don't know why he did this, but he started recording me. Maybe it was just like he knew this was going to be a moment in our history. From that moment, you know, that was our catalyst. And really our lives dramatically changed in the last 12 months. Welcome to Screw It, Just Do It. The show for those who decided to screw it and just did it. This is the podcast that brings you face to face with the entrepreneurs and business rebels who threw caution to the wind and built something extraordinary. Elliot, take me back to the beginning. Origin story. what was your screw it just do it moment that got you to where you are today yeah I think my my life choices in my career have led up to a few screw it just do it moments I think the first one started when I was 15 and in performing arts college performing arts high school I was a little bored and decided to become a fashion model and did that for 10 years and lived across the world making money at a young age and learning a sense of independence from there I realized there wasn't much longevity in that career path.

1:36I went back to school. I attended Columbia University. I studied economics and art history. And my last year of uni, I was so scared that nobody was going to hire me. All of my friends were getting these amazing banking jobs and just having very serious career paths. And instead of putting myself out there in that way, I decided, you know, the only person who can't fire me is me. I'm going to start my own company. And at the time, I started a consulting company for different types of brands, fashion, beauty, and tech companies. Not that I had any experience in any of this. And I met my first client, Nina LaBruna, who is my now co-founder of Phase of Beauty.

2:15And we started working on her first skincare company together. And during COVID, she pitched to me, would you like to go 50-50 on a new company together, have our shared visions aligned with a fresh new start? And I said, Nina, absolutely not. I have zero interest in having skin in the game. I want to give you advice and walk away. And she's like, come on, you know, like lockdown uncertainty, like this could just be like a fun creative outlet. So I agreed to do that with her. And honestly, about three months in, I became so obsessive with our brand that I gave notice to all my other clients and I wanted to go full in and lived off, you know, my savings net at the that wasn't a ton of money but Nina and I collectively put$13 ,000 into starting phase at beauty and I've never backed since that moment.

3:03Great story um what do you think in your background prepared you for what you're doing now is there anything you can kind of pull out and go obviously the economics degree is gonna is gonna help but anything else like performing arts background the consultancy? The surprising answer is honestly being a fashion model for a decade which is confusing to most people, but, and it wasn't a career that I loved at all. But when I think about it, every single day I showed up on set to a new company selling something new and right. I was the mode of how they were going to sell it, but I was surrounded by so many different artists on set, makeup artists, hairstylists, art directors, you know, chief marketing officers, and together collectively, we were going to create something for them to sell to the world.

3:48And that's ultimately what I do today. I wear so many hats and I'm working with all different people to bring one singular vision alive. And I think really that's, it has a lot to do with our business today. And when you think back, was there like a specific moment where you took it, like you agreed with what your co-founder was proposing? Was it something that kind of ruminated in your head for quite a while? Or was there like a moment, you know, do you know what, I'm totally into this, let's do it, let's pull the trigger? Yeah, I mean, I'm, I think, quite a risk taker in life that I, you know, once I could hear her passion, it was contagious of, okay, this is interesting.

4:30She was really showing me this type of product that she had done so much research on that didn't exist at this point, which, which, you know, I was like, okay, like there, there, there is something here, but I think in terms of going all in, it was really seeing traction of like what we were putting out in the world, slowly starting to see our messaging resonate, our social media going viral having investors or retail buyers you know slide into our inboxes and I think each one of those points you know give you this like hopeful feeling of like oh okay like it's not just us other people think we're all into something as well.

5:04Let's talk about that kind of that virality then when Taylor Swift was first spotted wearing Fazit products what actually happened behind the scenes Alia and how fast did that like move for you guys? Yeah I mean we had been working on the company at that point for about a year and a half, right? So there was a lot of trial and error and we pivoted our company from skincare patches to makeup patches. And as soon as we launched this new category, we had virality across the whole summer. Um, just, you know, videos of random people really resonating on social. And we had the strategy of, we want to get our product in front of Taylor Swift.

5:40Like the essence of our product of glitter freckles is just so Taylor and Ares tour coded. She needs to be wearing this product. And we had a whole 360 like flywheel strategy of getting getting the brand around her but on October 7th of 2024 Taylor Swift walked into a Chiefs American football game uh wearing my gold glitter freckles by phase it uh and a content creator had reached out to us on our phase it Instagram account saying I think Taylor is wearing your product and I I didn't believe I didn't register when I read the message and I go to my Instagram explore page and there's just zoomed in photos of Taylor wearing gold glitter freckles.

6:20No one in the world knew what brand this was. You know, she could have, you know, maybe drawn them on. No one, you know, really realized, you know, that there was some type of like patch adhesive to apply them. So I spent, you know, probably four hours that night contacting every single journalist already writing about, you know, Taylor's look and making sure they were crediting phase it but as soon as I looked at the tv and saw her walking in I started to cry like tears of joy and my husband I don't know why he did this but he started recording me maybe it was just like he knew this was going to be a moment in our history and I ended up without telling him posting me crying on tiktok with this text overlay of Taylor Swift just wore my you know my brand I've been a brand builder for a decade and the I think the video has like 10 million views now and that's how people started connecting the dots that okay this is this like small female owned brand and we had sales and website traffic skyrocket to about like 4800 percent um I had every news channel calling me the next morning to go to their studios or wanting to set up a set in our headquarters which was my apartment in New York um and from that moment you know that was our catalyst and really our lives dramatically changed in the last 12 months and so like looking Looking back at that, yes, there's always an element of luck and timing, of course, like I've done, you know, so many of these interviews and so many people said, you know, timing, luck all plays a part.

7:50But ultimately, as you've explained, there was a strategy and ultimately that that strategy paid off. Right. You engineered that strategy through to the pay dirt, basically. Right. Exactly. And there's so much like clickbait headlines of like overnight success phase it. And like you just said, obviously, you've talked to so many founders that it is timing and it is luck. And there is a ton of strategy that goes behind these moments. But then also, once they happen, there's also, did you as a company lay a foundation to support this moment? And we completely did. We had these months prior of having these viral moments and learning, OK, what happens in these moments?

8:30Can our supply chain sustain? Can our warehouse get out orders in time? time um also once you have a viral moment it's not just that moment you have to keep talking about that virality and you have to make it live longer so we had practiced this a bit and i guess all that practice led up to um you know the most viral moment of the last year and could i'm always interested like you know how you cope with the with the demand and always remember um a friend of mine who's also been on the show and he just had a you know relatively small bakery down in Brighton on the south coast of England and he pitched to Virgin Atlantic and they asked him for something ridiculous it was either four or five million cupcakes and he just went yeah we can do it we can do it yeah and then he's like shit what do we do now and I just thought with yourselves you know what happened and how did you deal with that did you like you said you'd spoken to the supply chain and you'd kind of maybe stress tested that to a certain degree but I'm sure nothing could expect you to be what was it I heard like sales 3 ,500 percent increase or something crazy yeah exactly something insane I mean they were doing hundreds of thousands of units of orders um no I so I handled the front end of the business so I was focused on the PR and the marketing and making sure everyone was getting this message out and that we were you know seizing every opportunity possible and my co-founder handles the back end of the business so she calls up both our manufacturer and our, you know, distribution warehouse saying you need to double team to like your team and your workforce tonight.

10:01This is what's going on. You're going to want to be a part of this. Um, and right. Like they do want to be like, they're both, you know, small business owners. Um, you know, that, you know, this, you know, we became both of their biggest clients ever. Um, so they really, you know, you know, got on the ship with us and, um, No, we never sold out of it. And again, back to the timing and luck is we had a massive order coming in two days before Taylor Swift wore the product. So we had prepared from these viral moments of like, okay, let's start increasing the inventory, the volume of the inventory we're ordering.

10:36And then once she wore it, we just hedged our bets of, okay, there's going to be an influx between her going on tour in North America and Halloween and the holidays. Let's order so much more product. And I think we had learned the lessons as entrepreneurs is that I've always believed in from the consulting side of like never over order inventory. You just don't want to be in that position as a small business. But I think at a certain point that you take a bet on yourself. I know I'm going to be able to sell through this, which we did. But yeah, I mean, the clickbait of people always saying in their marketing ads of like, you know, sold out, sold out, sold out.

11:11I was just like, I'm so sorry you sold out. It means you're not making any sales. We literally never sold out, not because there wasn't demand, but we just like kept pumping out supply. Did anything like internally break during that period? And if so, did you fix it or did everything kind of stand the stress test that everything was being put under? Other than maybe I don't know if you guys broke as well, but for sure. I mean, I definitely didn't sleep or talk to anyone for three weeks, but I broke. But no, I mean, I think anything that was in our control, we could handle. It was the third, you know, the external.

11:48It was Amazon basically bases how much product you can send to their warehouse to sell based on like your sales history. So they had limited how much that we could send to them. We sold out of that immediately. And it takes them a second because, right, it's all like an algorithm. It's automated of how much more inventory we can send to them. So they were out of stock of us for a little bit. And for us, we're just trying to call every person we know up high, like high up at Amazon, cold emailing them, like, you need to give us more space, you're going to want to be a part of this. So that, you know, broke temporarily.

12:23Retail partners, you know, were selling out immediately having us overnight product. um there was a few hiccups but I mean I think we handled it quite well and you know we were a team of just Nina and I my co-founder and I we had one part-time like marketing person and then obviously like had our warehouse and manufacturing but it was a small team trying to make this come alive and we were calling all of our friends of like can we pay a little extra money on the side to like help us during this crazy period but now you've probably got Jeff Bezos on speed dial at Amazon, right? So it's... If only.

12:55You've grown, I think I read somewhere like 30x in a year, something like that. You know, that kind of level of growth sometimes absolutely crushes some founders, right? But how have you personally like handled the pressure that's come with such a fast growing business? Yeah, I remember like the day after everything happened, my husband's uncle is a successful CEO and I told him what was happening with the business. And I was so excited to tell him and he goes, well, what's next? Like he was like so unamused by our temporary success. He's like, well, what's next for the business? What are you working on?

13:32Like somebody is going to dupe you. Copycats are going to come in. You need to be planning your pipeline ahead of time. And that's what we've had been focused on day two of what is next for us. Obviously we want to squeeze all the juice out of this lemon, but really want to focus on the longevity of the brand. No, it was, I think we came into this issue of with hyper growth of every opportunity was thrown at us. I had retailers fighting over our distribution placement in the US. I then had international retailers reaching out to us, wanting us to launch. We're still a team of three at this point.

14:07I had every Fortune 500 brands reaching out to me saying, can we please do a collab? Do you want to be on the Superbowl commercial, which was all amazing. But then I, I think I was having a hard time gut checking. Am I just taking this opportunity because I'm in fear that's never going to happen again? Or does this, or does this actually feel aligned with our brand and our mission and where we want this company to go? So I think that put some stresses on us as, you know, first time growth leaders and founders, um, and then hiring and starting to like scale our team and learning how to become a manager and a leader for the first time, I think really puts stresses on you.

14:45For so long, it's been my co-founder and I making decisions nimbly together. And we're usually, you know, 99 % of the time, you know, always aligned. But now having to express this vision to more people and getting them on board and having, you know, workflow in the same way was definitely a stress for us. It's interesting. I would say without a shadow of a doubt after doing, you know, close on a thousand interviews for the for the podcast over the years that the number one challenge that most founders like 90, 90 percent of founders out there would say to me is is actually hiring the right people and then keeping those people within your business.

15:25And have you found that and taking on more of a leadership role when you are onboarding? Yeah, I mean, that's something I'm learning every day and a part of our hyper growth, because I don't think a lot of companies grow in the same way we have over the last year was I brought on an executive business coach of, okay, I just like need somebody else to gut check with, who has, you know, organizational psychology background. and, you know, just can, it can help with, you know, these different phases that we're entering quite abruptly. But yeah, I mean, I think like creating stickiness within company and learning, like, how do we create company culture that people want to be a part that we are the cool brand that they like, they feel passionate, and then they're adding value to something.

16:05I think it's really hard to like man make that atmosphere. I think luckily, like, there's naturally this cool factor with us already and being a startup and female owned, like people want to be a part of that. But I think it's once you find great talent, like how do you, you know, how do you create that stickiness, that relationship, them like feel like they're leveling up their skillset and consistently learning more. And I think that's what I found is the most important part of it is are, if you're, if your employees aren't bored, that is a fantastic thing. Like you want to keep pushing them for them to reach their own greatness.

16:37And for them, like, you know, it's like being a founder. It's, I didn't know how to do everything, but you know, every single day you're just learning a new skill set and you are fine tuning that over time and I think that's what keeps people really excited I always remember asking the founder of Lush Rowena Bird um that question she was like we just take everything everybody that nobody else wants that that's what we do I actually love that approach yeah I do it's kind of cool especially in this day day and age right you know CV CV and you're like no none of that um and also as a reference to Lush again you know So, you know, they're famous for the bath bombs, right?

17:11Created a billion, billion pound business from it. That's still based in my town here where I live in Poole in Dorset. But how have you dealt with copycats? Because they've had, you know, everybody making a bath bomb. People like Primark are doing it for a pound, yet they're selling theirs for, I don't know, maybe five pounds, something like that, you know, 5x the price, et cetera. But how do you cope with that? I'm assuming it's happened, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it's the early days was quite emotional because we had created a category within beauty that had never existed before.

17:45This term makeup patch and then the subterm glitter freckle. And then the way we designed our packaging was incredibly unique. You don't often see models on the cover of packaging. And we were really referencing, you know, vintage magazine, a magazine stands back in the day. So to see copycats, like literally the whole thing, the terminology that, you know, our copyrighted packaging. um you know that stung in the early days but what we realized is like when you like legally can't fight china really um so all you can do is build brand and back to like what my uncle-in-law said of you no one can compete with innovation right you're if you're on to the next thing and the next design and the next category you know not that we are pushing ourselves to do that because of the copycats but you need to keep innovating as a brand and you need to you know create your brand vision and your voice and the feeling of it to your customers.

18:39And I think once you make that incredibly strong, no one can really break that, right? I have people, I have some people I see who is wearing, you know, a knockoff version of phase it and I can completely tell it's not phase it. They tag me and they tag phase it in social media, right? They, they want to be a part of our community, you know, but either like we're confused when they bought it or, you know, who knows? um and was there ever a point you you've thought about slowing down um I'm assuming not going on the conversation we've had so far no way are there so are you kidding me we just had the opportunity of a lifetime um no there's there's absolutely no slowing down I mean for most U.S.

19:19brands um within beauty you really crack the code to U.S. retail first and that can take you know like five to 10 years. We've been around for two and a half years and really like our, you know, viral moment was only a year ago. We just launched internationally at Sephora UK. And that is not a traditional route of beauty brands. And you just don't scale internationally this fast. So there's no slowing down. No. And what does that mean to you personally then launching into Sephora as well, especially coming from maybe the background that you had in modeling, et cetera, knowing the impact? Yeah.

19:52I mean, I put on my vision board two years ago of I wanted to create a brand that was going to be sold at Sephora one day. And for me, that was like, you know, the stamp of approval. So I told you I went to Cardiff a few weeks ago for our brand launch and for Cardiff's first Sephora opening ever in Wales, actually. There was a queue of 2000 people at this mall. There was confetti. There was local, you know, Cardiff and Welsh performers. I walked in and there's really only been a few pinch me moments for my career and over the last year because we've just been in fight or flight mode and we're just like really, you know, zoned in on what we want that we don't oftentimes take a step back to reflect how cool this is.

20:38but I mean someone I was singing Pink Pony Club by Chapel Rowan and I think I my eyes might have fogged up a little bit uh I it was really the coolest moment to see you know just how far we've come and to see like our brand you know next to all of these other brands um from founders I've looked up to for so long was pretty epic well um 2 ,000 people is like a lot that's like an arena like let's go and see a band like I just you know you know that's a lot of people that go down a high street especially if i can i know where the shopping mall is in cardiff where sephora is and i can kind of picture it and i was like wow that's a lot of people down there yeah but the cult following that that sephora has created of the fact that 2 000 people are waiting in line to experience their store and to shop um i mean they were waiting for four plus hours in line i mean right that's the type of brand that you know you would love to build 100 um whose decision was it talk me through that decision then of of deciding to go like international um like like two two and a half years into into the journey as well because like you say most people most beauty brands wouldn't choose that route you'd kind of focus on the the home market in the us etc but then you you get that moment of virality and and because of social media and the online world everybody knows who you are in 48 hours right yeah i mean with you know taylor being such a global presence I wasn't just on American news.

22:04I was, you know, on the BBC and, you know, all the UK outlets and people, friends in the Philippines and Australia were reaching out to me and saying, well, you're on our local news screen, that video crying. I was like, oh boy. But yeah, that kind of, you know, forced the brand into this global spotlight. And I think because our product doesn't exist other than phase it, that no one had anywhere to go internationally to experience the brand and our shipping costs were basically the same price of our products. So it really didn't make sense for most people to buy from us in the US. And we tried so hard to reduce those, those shipping costs, but you know, we just couldn't.

22:40Um, so, you know, it really made me think, okay, we need to, between that and, you know, really protecting the market and making sure copycats don't come in, we need to offer our products to our customers in these other markets. And Sephora actually came to me last November. And in my mind, I just, you know, we were thinking through larger retailers, but when the director of new beauty came to me and told me her strategy of launching Sephora is more in these like suburban markets that are, you know, don't have a beauty destination and the beauty consumer is underrepresented. That really struck a chord with us.

23:20That's exactly what we do as well. We sell products to, we think, communities that haven't been served, their desires haven't been served yet, if it's concert goers or female athletes and fans. And once I started thinking, okay, these suburban communities in the UK, a lot of those people are massive sports fans. And we know that is one of our core audiences. So even though Sephora only had about 11 stores this past year we just completely believed in them from the fact of like they are brand builders we know that they've just re-entered the market but we had confidence they were going to be scaling and people love Sephora and the way the merchandise and the brands they bring in and we're still a lean team um you know we can't you know go into thousands and thousands of stores quite yet internationally because we're trying to do that over here in the Yeah, exactly.

24:13And Elliot, what's your take on the Swift effect? You know, does celebrity virality make or break a brand long term? Yeah, I talk about this often. I call it a celebrity product fit. I don't believe that any celebrity that posts about your product, wears your product will have the Swift effect. And I know that she is a phenomenon and it's hard to equate her to, you know, anyone, any other celebrities pull. We've had tons of celebrities wear our product after Taylor Swift, including the Kardashians kids. And nobody other, it's been Taylor and then Lisa of Blackpink, who is in a K-pop girl band.

24:54She's probably been the next celebrity that has really moved the needle for the brand. And if you think about that, those are two artists with cult, you know, followings that are completely ingrained and engaged in what they're doing. Whereas I feel like a lot of other celebrities are oversaturated with the brands that they represent or work with and don't really, really like speak one-on-one to their audience and to their fan base. So, you know, I don't, I don't advise people to, you know, use celebrity marketing, you know, as a way to get to, you know, the next level of your business. But I think like if you are selling something that you know would resonate with a certain celebrity's lifestyle, then that's what I would go after.

25:36It's interesting. And I've interviewed her a couple of times over the years now, but a lady called Maria Hatsis Stephanis, who owns a hundred million dollar beauty brand called Rodial. And they do products like Dragon's Blood and Snake Venom. And, you know, it's very cool brand wise. But I always remember her telling me, and I can't remember which one now, but they paid, you know, one of the Kardashians a, you know, bootload of money to one of the campaigns. And she said, it did nothing. It didn't move our sales, you know, 0.1 % in one direction or the other. We just carried on like that. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting.

26:13You just wonder whether, as you've just said there, it's that oversaturation of that person. And you're probably going back to probably going back to something like 2021, 2022, something like that, you know, on, you know, when everybody was locked down and everybody was online anyway, you know. Right. But when you look at like, I think other A-list celebrities in the US like Hailey Bieber, I mean, she makes sense. She has such an engaged, you know, following that is really looking to see what she is doing with her makeup and her beauty and wellness. Again, that engaged following, I think, is key of whatever she wears.

26:47You know, everyone will buy. I always say that the same when people are always asking me, you know, how do you make a successful podcast? And I said, it's not necessarily getting the guests with the biggest audiences, it's getting the guests with the most engaged followings. That's like how we got the show to number one. The first time we got it to number one, like back in 2019, it was a brand called Huel, who are very, you know, big in the UK. Now, at the time, they're a 50 million pound brand. They're now like nearly a billion pound brand. But it was just the founder didn't put much content out.

27:17But when they did put content out, everybody wanted to learn about it. You know, what was he how was he building that brand? So I think 100 percent right when it comes to, you know, engaged followings. Another question I thought of was how do you keep things authentic when social media attention moves so quickly from from one trend to the other trend to the next trend to the next trend? We don't hop on trends. We create them. We are just focused on us. uh we don't look outwards uh anymore i think maybe that's something i did the early days as a founder as you just you know getting lacking that confidence a little bit so you're looking over your shoulder to see what is everyone else doing and you're assuming that's working um but now absolutely not like our packaging our voice the way our social media feeds our strategy with social media it's just so different than what everyone else is doing um the way we go into retail of, you know, I'm at Walmart and Sephora.

28:11That's not, no one's done that. That's like a big no-no in beauty. And really we break all of the rules and any advice industry experts give us, we do not take it. And I think that's, what's made us such a disruptive brand within beauty and just beyond beauty of where we've been breaking barriers. And back to what you were saying with community, I am not trying to push my brand to the beauty masses. I am trying to serve the underserved beauty you know customer the marathon runner a female fan you know the girl going to concerts and like a maximalist look of you're bringing my product to the different occasions and memories you're making at those occasions in your life and also you've got people chasing you now right it's not the other way around with you know what's happened to you guys over the last um year year and a half etc people are people are approaching you um and it's and it must I guess it must be difficult to come to a point like, you know, when when that moment happened for you, you said there'd been lots of other moments since.