She Turned Food Waste Into A Skincare Brand That’s Helping Eczema Sufferers

0:00Alex Chisnall:What stops founders from building something meaningful isn't the lack of ideas, it's the fear of getting started. I'm Alex Chisnall and this is Screw It, Just Do It, a podcast for people who are ready to stop waiting, take action and make things happen. Turned down a really big investment very early on. I can't remember if it was 200 or 250 ,000. Right, no one's doing anything. This is great. I'm going to do it to prove it can be done. And I was just like, no, this is not, this does not. And my intuition was saying no. and everyone was like you're crazy take it this is huge and i was like i'm not doing it and actually turned out to be the best thing you're quite the investor story then because i i'm a psychic medium professional psychic medium which i know sounds absolutely mental but i was born with it it runs in my family it's like five generations of us and then even meeting my current investors they came to my work as a psychic medium i didn't actually hear back from anyone for like five weeks and in the five weeks of me not hearing back from anyone i had five angel investors step forward um so i then had to go back to the dragons and be like i kind of missed out Before we get into today's conversation, this is genuinely relevant for a lot of founders listening.

1:02Alex Chisnall:Are you running a business that pays supplies abroad, receives international payments, or operates across borders? World First helps founders manage global payments and FX more efficiently with access to competitive exchange rates and tools designed specifically for growing businesses. World First have given us an exclusive offer for podcast listeners to get 50 transactions completely fee-free for 60 days. Head to worldfirst.com forward slash screw it to create a free account and claim now. Now let's jump into the main conversation. Danielle, before my skin feels, who were you? It's a hard question because after my skin feels, there's been a lot of change.

1:43I would say before my skin feels I was I am still but I was very optimistic about the future of sustainability and a future of like we can change everything. And I like to think I'm still as optimistic. But I think when you're in the weeds, you get a bit. Oh, maybe it's not as easy as I thought it was going to be. So that light is dimmed a little bit, but I'm bringing it back. I think the reality of launching a startup sort of changes you a little bit. But I'm still the girl underneath.

2:10Alex Chisnall:and i can totally relate you know and i'm sure many people listening can like when you're in the weeds um it's really difficult to get perspective on on anything right and whether you end up in that stage of waking up or not actually looking forward to the day you have it's like obviously a really dangerous place to be because you're passionate about the business that you started and you want to grow it and scale it and see it succeed and help lots of people but when you're in that it's tough right yeah it is and you get really lost in the like small things and you're like no i need to think ab then you can't it's a real especially at the point we're at now we're in a transitional phase of going from like pure pure startup to like oh finally having some staff and like things and that transitional phase is really hard because you get really lost um and you kind of feel like you need to be doing what you were doing but you also need to do so much more but you also can't so it's a very confusing time to be but it's fine we're getting there good and what are you like with delegating uh so i'm an only child um and i have also worked for myself for like 12 years before this so not amazing but i'm learning it's really hard especially when you're like well i'll just do it myself but no you can't do that so i am really trying but i think it's probably not my strongest i think only children would say the same thing it's really hard as an only child because you're so used to doing everything on your and so having to relearn that now is quite hard and it's in in my experience that with a bunch of these it's it's it's trying to not become the bottleneck in your own business yeah it's really hard getting out your own way right all of those totally totally and like yeah and i've been i've seen myself get in the way and i have to just move out the way yeah um tell me what nearly stopped you from starting the business you know what I what I when I saw the question nothing I honestly nothing really nearly stopped me no I was really like I saw I was part of the family Charlotte Tilbury team so I saw from a very young age what like tenacity and drive looks like I mean Charlotte is like a force to be reckoned with and then from there only ever worked for like female entrepreneurs who are all like forces so it wasn't really a case of anything stopping it I think it's more a case of like not giving up that's actually been the thing now where like there are so many hurdles and so many things happen and it happens in every business right but I think it's important to recognize when you feel like giving up keep going but the actual stopping it didn't happen it was more of a timing thing and actually making sure I was ready from a personal perspective to go for it as well because you need to really from a personal perspective plan this as well and I don't think I knew that as much as I do now um and yeah after working with so many inspirational people I feel like I've always had the ambition of the drive just to go for it it was about making sure it was the right time so same for me and I've you know said this on the show loads of time like I'm working for Richard Branson for like 16 and a half years but the last I would say three or four years I was kind of done working in the company and I was doing it on autopilot I was definitely you know inspired but it was the timing and for me it happened to be voluntary redundancy being offered and offered again and again and again do you know what this is pretty good actually free travel for two years and a year's salary that gives me a bit of a safety net I'm gonna do it yeah take it yeah 100 % how about you how about you know the level of being ready versus there is no perfect time right so what kind of change for you I mean the thing that actually did it so I thought about launching my own business for ages so I was like I want to do it do we need another skincare brand in the world probably not but like can I do it with a reason to make it actually purposeful that that was the thing that was like a bit back and forth in my mind for a while and working out the timing and then I went to this big packaging show in Paris which is the biggest European packaging show for cosmetics in the world it's huge and I went on the sustainability tour of the show and the best thing they could show me in 2020 it's not that long ago was a mascara wand made with three percent less plastic or five percent less plastic it was ridiculous and I remember being like this sorry is everyone like listening to this and they were like wow and I was like no this is not wow it's just five percent less plastic you've just been bought a thousand million of them by big some big corporate company and so I left the show being like right no one's doing anything this is great I'm gonna do it to prove it can be done and that was really the like catalyst for actually going for it um otherwise I may have floated for a bit longer and maybe it would have been a bit different but it was really that point being like right nothing is happening I need to do something just to prove that if I can do it by myself everyone should do better and sort of hopefully start a conversation so it's more than just beauty it's actually like okay what's the future of this look like and how can we make sustainability actually work for us you know it's really interesting you said that that that's like crazy percentage right whereas you know conversations i've had with the likes of rowena bird from lush and telling me that you know importing all this like cork from portugal to like package their products in a sustainable way they're amazing but clearly no one else is and this is like big corporate i mean lush is corporate too like like two kind of but this is like big corporate beauty there's a real defining difference I think between like the L 'Oreal's of the world and then the Lush's of the world and they're they're like a benchmark completely um but yeah the actual other side of the industry is not doing anything and the consumers aren't asking for it but I don't think it's a consumer's problem I think it's the industry's problem I think it's government's problem so it has to start from the top and that was my like drive And talk to me about timings then for those who are kind of sat there, you know, thinking about an idea.

7:44Alex Chisnall:How long are you thinking about it? How long action and product? Let me tell you, COVID was interesting. So I had the idea, the brand name for years, years, years, years, ideas, sorts, but not like a solidified thing. 2020 happened, the show happened, and then it took three years to launch, but a year extra because the world ran out of aluminium. So I had to wait for aluminium for a year. It was either launching in plastic or wait. And I was like, well, obviously, I'm not going to do that. So I waited. So COVID was a weird time. I would say two years to launch a cosmetic brand really by the time we go through testing and all the stuff and so we launched in 2023 and we're just over three years old now which is mad because it seems like the longest three years of my life but also no time has passed you know it's mad but I think yeah cosmetics need a minimum two years but the idea had been brewing for a long time but it was really a case of like what's the purpose and what time is right to do it and then that all happened in COVID.

8:44Alex Chisnall:So many businesses were born out of COVID. Weird time, but I was also working full time. So I don't really know how I, well, I had a lot of time on my hands, you know, so I did a lot of things in COVID. Yeah. So were you, I've forgotten what the golden phrase was, furloughed. There you go. No, I wasn't furloughed. You were doing it full time. I was working full time and it was ridiculous. So my mates were often furloughing and I ended up paying for that. I was like, cool, you go and have a nice time. I'll work for three years by myself in my flat. Cool. And launchers couldn't go around. But you know what?

9:16It was good to actually just be doing something. But no, I worked the whole time.

9:20Alex Chisnall:Yeah, no, same. I ended up with one client. All my other clients literally disappeared in 30 days. You couldn't even speak to them because the marketing departments are all furloughed. So I was like, well, you're meant to be paying me every month to be a client, but you've just disappeared. and so one client just kept me going through that entire time like you say everybody else's or a vast majority of your friends are just sunning themselves in the local parks well I worked for lots of food brands at that time and obviously food was having a field day so it was like food drink and beauty were like on it so I was like it was very busy um but yeah it was annoying as well and if you hadn't taken the leap to start your brand what do you think life would look like now what would you be doing well I have another business and I would be doing the other business full-time so I I'm a psychic medium professional psychic medium which I know sounds absolutely mental but I was born with it it runs in my family it's like five generations of us in my family and I went to school for like seven years and studied and I I have a wait list that's until August 2027 so it's like mental um so I would be doing more of that and making that more of a career wow okay clearly we need to know more about yeah it's a bit weird yeah it goes back and you went to study 10 years yeah yeah so it goes back to my great great grandfather that i know of who was a scientist um and back in the victorian era a lot of scientists studied mediumship it was a big thing it was like the victorian thing and the school i studied at has been around since the 1800s and it's where they used to study on people like me it's in South Kent it's really big it's called the London College of Psychic Studies it's like an actual institution and so you can go and learn and actually train which is incredibly important because there's so many charlatans out there that are like crystal ball wielding card throwing people whereas how I have been taught to like manage my intuition is is very structured and now people come to me for readings once or twice a week I have two days one or two days a week um where people come and see me and give them some clarity and how for those who are an initiated like myself but have heard a number of people talking about that about this like friends and family how is that structured then from your point of view as you say there's you know any number of charlotte like there is in any industry right there's any number it's worse it's bad yeah well for me as a kid it was really quite a lot I'm hypersensitive and if you're a hypersensitive in my capacity being hypersensitive you feel see no things all the time and I knew from a young age I shouldn't have this information I don't know what it is what am I feeling I'm really confused so I actually took myself for a cat scam when I was a kid because I was like obviously crazy no I'm not and then when I went to work for Charlotte Tilbury she took me to a healer my first ever healer when I was 18 and it all came out I never told anyone and I was like I just know things I don't understand.

12:15And she went, oh, you're just psychic. And I was like, what does that mean? I don't know what it means. And then I spoke to my dad and he was like, oh, your grandma was like that. And I was like, what? And then I went back through the family history and basically found out all these things. And so for me, when I went to study, it was about learning to turn it off. So it's off all the time until I go into a reading. And then it's understanding the energy and the physics of it. It's basically working with space and time. Space and time isn't what we think it is. And I'm able to go into different space time frequencies and pick up messages and communicate with people who are no longer here and also all the future predicting stuff is based off me reading energy so whatever's going on in your energy um is what I'm able to pick up and that's how we predict the future but it's not some big gift it's just a skill that I have that I'm able to utilize and because I trained I'm able to do it properly I hate the whole kind of you've got a gift and it's like no actually for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years there was always one person in a village that could do this the medicine woman I'm just a medicine woman but we've just not got a tribe anymore so it's a real thing that's just been forgotten in our culture it's just that we have to fight unfortunately against witchcraft and like burning at the stake and all the stuff throughout history and I am trying to make it more normal because it's really helpful

13:24Alex Chisnall:in business and life interesting so yeah so tell me how you've utilized it in business then like for yourself I mean so many things I mean it's using your intuition right so talking to people talking to investors saying no to things where on paper it looks great uh one of the stories i talk about quite a lot as i turned down a really big investment very early on i can't remember it was 200 or 250 000 one of them but it was a big amount of money six months into the business and i was just like no this is not this does not my intuition was saying no and everyone was like you're crazy take it this is huge and i was like i'm not doing it and actually turned out to be the best thing and then even meeting my current investors they came to my work as a psychic medium so it wasn't the normal route to market yeah it was completely when people say how do you meet your like get your funding I'm like well my my other job actually um so they came through that route and they're really serious business people they just also are aligned with this kind of work as well and it all just happened fate wise if you believe in that um so it's about yeah using your intuition to trust your own decision and also using your intuition to know what's right for your business I think the thing that's so stressful as a startup and I'm sure others can relate is comparing yourself all the time every time I look on social media I freak out because I'm like oh my god so much is happening and I'm like you know what we're in our own lane doing our own thing and I know for my intuition that's the right thing to do but it's about getting yourself back on track and so for me that's personally and I see a lot of people that come a lot of people who are at work or career or in their own businesses and they need some guidance and we can help with that and you go you you go through a process and as you say you you may have yeah inherited this power but you've honed it and learned to kind of polish that rough diamond that's the main thing yeah because if you do not train this is like anyone that ever wants to do this please go to someone's been trained don't go to some like random person at the end of a pier the crystal ball like it's not it's not good because i could get a message and if i haven't been trained i might read it like this but actually the training means i can read it like this this and this and work out that actually means this so it's not always black and white so it's really important to know that because you feel I so I hear see and feel basically my main skills so when someone comes to a reading I tune into them by my body so whatever's going on in your body is happening in my body so I might get a feeling and if I haven't been trained on what that feeling is I might interpret it in the incorrect way so it's all these like senses that we have to learn how to interpret correctly and is that only done like accurately in person like you're in the same room over zoom as well yeah yeah we had to we had to switch in covid so like no medium was ever working over zoom ever it was not a thing and then in covid it was like oh shit what we're gonna do and then actually the because it's using frequency and energy there's no space and time between us anyway so it's me just tuning into you as i am here it works exactly the same yeah honestly you could do a whole podcast on that couldn't we sorry the whole other thing but But it's important.

16:23Alex Chisnall:It's great to know, you know, who you are ultimately as the as the owner of this business. Right. And your journey. And interesting, because we talked about it off air briefly. So that's when it comes to the investors, that's and that initial like 250 ,000. You got quite the investor story then, because that's not the Dragon's Den story, right? No, that's not that. That's the story. It's only just come out now because I was talking about it. the dragon's den story is i went on dragon's den i filmed it last year it came out this year um and it went well i think and we got basically three and a half offers although they didn't show the half offer which is really annoying because tuka half offered me but couldn't because he had a competitor brand but they didn't air it and i was like no he did actually offer um and then because it's a really stressful environment and you're in there for like an hour and 45 minutes talking under lights and pressure you kind of say yes and also you know you don't have to take it it's a TV show.

17:18So like, so when they offered and I chose two people, I said yes, knowing that I could say though, if I wanted to later and they wanted a huge percentage, they upped it in the show, but it's very like, well, and then after the show, I didn't actually hear back from anyone for like five weeks. And in the five weeks of me not hearing back from anyone, I had five angel investors step forward. So I then had to go back to the dragons and be like, you kind of missed out. But also if you're really serious about it, you should come in on this because it's a real investment opportunity at a percentage that means that we can grow not at a percentage that bottlenecks the business and they said no and i was like well then you went that serious way

17:53Alex Chisnall:no contact is is a long time in business right yeah one of them one of them did call me but there was no paperwork the other one didn't i didn't hear anything from um and they were the one leading the paperwork and the due diligence and nothing and so i was like well if you really want the business you would have contacted me by now but they wanted 20 for 50 grand and in the beauty industry I mean it's a joke anyway but 50 grand would get you nothing yeah so I said no and zero regrets obviously zero I'm in zero like the investors now are amazing and they're actually really serious business people that have got background in beauty um so it just makes a lot of sense yeah and right for and I guess probably a good question to ask you would um if you had the opportunity to to do it again would you do it and would you recommend it for other people 100 % million percent it's the best thing you can do for your business just in terms of exposure to be honest with you the business has changed dramatically you obviously have to like I did a lot of prep you've got to prep and you've got to know what you're doing on the night like you may someone if you're not a marketing like I'm a marketing background luckily but if you're not you need to get someone in who understands that so they can utilize it to the best advantage but it's amazing yeah yeah now I've spoken to many people over the years who've been on it and some who've said they've had like fantastic contact from the dragons like here's my personal number phone me whenever and they've been felt scared to do that but then have done that and they've been there and then others who've obviously got the the other side of the coin and quite a few people to be honest who've had a similar experience to you but haven't talked about it and kept it quiet and just spoke to me off air about it right I was like I'm not lying you can check the text Like this is what happened.

19:36But also I think people forget it's a TV show. It is a TV show. And if you're running a serious business and you've got plans to seriously grow it in the way that you want to, I think you have to be very careful with taking that kind of money.

19:46Alex Chisnall:So I wanted to let you know about something that I see trip founders up all the time. If you're running a business with international payments, one of the biggest hidden costs is often foreign exchange. World First is built specifically for businesses operating across borders, helping you manage payments, hold multiple currencies, and reduce unnecessary FX costs. They're not a high street bank trying to do everything. They focus purely on international business payments and currency exchange. That's their thing. Switching providers is a commitment, which is why they're giving our listeners 50 fee-free business transactions to properly test their service.

20:22Alex Chisnall:Plus, signing up for an account is completely free, and there are no ongoing monthly fees. You've got 60 days from sign up to use them. Head to worldfirst.com forward slash screw it and get your 50 fee free business transactions. Now back to the podcast. Are you, when you started the business, thinking back to that time, so three years for you, are you, where you are now, is that where you kind of expected to be in the kind of life cycle of business? I think I launched a business with zero expectations, which I would say is not a great thing. When I launched a business, I kind of thought, I'm going to launch this, see what happens.

20:58like learn what like because I'm a creative so I love the creating of it and I was like yeah let's just do this and then it's kind of it has done more than I I have done things I really wanted to achieve I didn't think it would happen so quickly which is amazing um and like I said now in this transition period I now have to think really big and that's quite scary and so now I'm trying to work out what the next bit looks like and that's really scary um but we've done a lot in three years so I'm proud of what we've achieved we've actually built the business on the ground which is really interesting and the opposite to every other like new consumer goods brand so I spent the last three years every weekend at a market a farmer's market an event or a pop-up for like three years and I saw it was brutal but it's been the best thing we could done because it's free pretty much it's really cheap we've met every single one of our customers they then know who we are they get to try the products in real life and you can't do that in beauty very easily and we've been all over the UK and America doing it and it's really been a game changer so it's slightly different um some exhausted but it's done it's done good things so yeah and i guess

21:58Alex Chisnall:you you'd like to think that the chance of people referring that business are way way higher than yeah if you hadn't had that yeah or one-off like i'll buy it on a whim on an ad oh that looks expensive why is it like at least you can then engage and interact and we have so many people that message us and say well we met here or we met here and the weirdest thing is my final investor only came through me being in a sauna and this woman coming in and being like i see you everywhere and i was like what do you mean she was like i buy my products from you in london at all these markets and she was with her best friend who's a beauty journalist and then we got talking and the beauty journalist best friend is my final investor so like that that came through being at all those pockets so like there is a so i think right as well yeah physically physically so it's It's been an interesting route to market, you know.

22:46Alex Chisnall:And America, you say, as well? So this is the thing that we did that was unexpected in my dream retailer. So we launched into Credo in America about 18 months into the business launching, and they are an amazing retailer. If you don't know them, they, like, are the gold standard of clean, natural beauty products in the world. So to get in there, you have to be, like, amazing ingredient-wise, and it's very hard to get in there. So we launched into their last April, I think it was. probably something we've done too early because I don't have anything in America at all but it's a nice foot step in but it was amazing to go to America and travel and do all the sales stuff we do here over there it was amazing and it is a dream retailer which was a huge step personally.

23:28Alex Chisnall:You can't say no really Kenny if it's like dream retailer. No and it was actually when I launched. No exactly I was like I want to get into the shop yeah so that's cool so yeah at this point to kind of reflecting on on that journey as we kind of briefly done um for the last three years you know both your entrepreneurial and your life and the life journey that you've had so far um can you pick one song that would reflect that and what does that take you back to i was trying to think about it i have been driving around the uk a lot and i listen to country music a lot i don't know why i used to be a hip-hop kind of girl and now i've really gone into the country music so I would say one of the Casey Musgrave songs would be like what's been getting me through um but it's it's really like it is really hard work and so it's probably quite a sad song I would imagine versus like an uplifting one um but any country music for me is like that's what's got me on the road you know traveling around the UK yeah no so you you've you've done a Beyonce then have you gone from into country music yeah I have, I've done a Beyonce I love that, but if you don't know Casey Musgraves that album's great I know the name but I don't know the songs and it's only through probably watching everything to do with Yellowstone and all of the offshoots that I discovered last year that I've actually now got on my playlist some country songs from people who I have no idea who they are what their history is but they're probably big stars in that space she's great deeper well casey musgraves the album beyond okay we like that we'll put that good driving music yeah yeah love a bit of driving it well i'm i'm just about to go on a journey on next tuesday um a screw it just do it journey really and i'm going to be driving 17 hours to go to the sweden rock festival so i'll need a lot of music to listen okay get that get that on seven countries in uh 24 hours i think yeah oh my god i'm back again that'd be great it'll be great but that's a lot hope your car's got air con that's all i'm saying okay good well it doesn't look remotely as warm in sweden as it is in the uk no i'm sure yeah um so moving into kind of the the the nuts and bolts of the business danielle when did you realize that um this was a problem that affected so many people like was it something that you read was it a conversation you had kind of take this in terms of eczema yeah so yeah so just a backstory it so basically our products are made from food waste so this is a sustainability angle so they're made from the byproducts of tomato ketchup olive oil breakfast oats and orange juice so the bits that don't get used in manufacturing i rescue and ferment and when you ferment them you get all these amazing actives antioxidants vitamin c amazing stuff i had no idea that it was going to be good for eczema like zero no idea at all and about six months in all these markets where i had all these people messaging me these before and afters being like by the way the moisturizer i bought for my face i tried out my eczema do you know it's doing this and there's like hundreds of before and afters people using it on their kids people using it on like periole dermatitis rosacea every kind of skin condition so i then had to go back to my lab and be like what have i done and it turns out when you ferment the food it's mad when you ferment the food it's a bit like gut health you have a microbiome on your skin and the fermented postbiotics from the fermentation process balance a biome and a lot of skin imbalances are because of an imbalance in your microbiome which can be caused by using an excessive product so it can be something like an internal eczema something that's it's been in your life a long time there's many reasons for it and so our products have been really helpful and then we met this amazing customer called Dan who's like just an angel and he has suffered with eczema his whole life and he's gone through topical steroid withdrawal do you know what that is it's gnarly so basically if you've had eczema if you're a kid of the 90s and you've had eczema, the doctor would have put you on steroids your whole life.

27:25So a lot of people are walking around the UK being on steroids every single day. Steroids thin your skin. They damage like a lot of, they have caused a lot of problems over a long period of time. And when you wean off them, you actually go through a withdrawal, which is so bad that Dan had psychosis, but a lot of people have to stay inside for an entire year. Like your skin falls off. It's really, really bad. So basically we met him because he had topical steroid withdrawal. And I said, look, our moisturizer, it just happens to be working. Do you want to try it? Tried it and actually helped and I was like oh my god, what's happening?

27:54And so now we have these a group of amazing ambassadors and I would say a market 60 % of the people we talk to have a skin condition, maybe more maybe 70 like it's come so many people have skin conditions And so it's the lifestyle that we're living. It's the environment that we're in. It's the food. It's so many things And I think people are walking around suffering in silence or using a Steroid or using something just to like band-aid it versus fixing it and that's kind of what we're finding our products is doing is fixing it

28:20Alex Chisnall:which is mad is mad and yeah I when if somebody asked me like if I had a skin condition I would say no but then I reflect back and I remember when I was a teenager and my parents had like divorced father was coming back like once a year at Christmas we were going over there in the summer to Canada where he was lived and he and I could just remember this time in my life he would just sit in the kitchen and smoke like 60 fags a day and I just developed you know like hair and like forehead and other side of my nose and exactly what i was prescribed was you know steroid yeah yeah which is mad because it just banned it literally just band-aids obviously i'm not a gp and obviously i can't say fixing sorry i should have said like help soothe whatever medically i'm not a met this is not a medical product um but it's mad because the story does actually just it just band-aids and then you come off and it comes back and so many kids are being prescribed and there's a time and a place like there is a time and place for them but not for a small patch of eczema like there's other things i can remember and it was just yeah and and it did you know come back periodically i think in my 20s um yeah it's probably a stress that's what i thought yeah yeah and i just didn't want to go on stories but tried everything like researching the internet myself and trying you know some natural stuff that was coming up and i bet people listen to this like to say it's probably more than half the audience yeah i would say so the only thing that's different is that ours is fermented there's not that much fermented skincare out there and it was a complete accident mad and like the amount of people that are like living with a moisturizer and buying it in bulk now is quite mental um but it just proves the power of food waste yeah indeed and where do you where do you kind of stand with like ip and stuff like that for discovering something tricky so like it's out we have the IP of the formula so when you create a product you get the IP like it's my IP um there's nothing stopping anyone else in the world copying me as a small brand that could happen but our next products which are more designed for sensitive skin have got an exclusive food waste ingredient in it so that's kind of what we're doing now is we're finding and I wanted to anyway I wanted to use so we currently use Italian food waste because it wasn't available in the UK when I started and Italian food is the best food it's been in the sunshine it's got loads of antioxidants so if your skin it's better the next product is actually using British food waste which is really cool and we fermented that and it's got an even bigger effect on sensitive skin so we're now using our own sauces as a bit of a way to protect ourselves as well which is really cool and really fun I just think you're you're based in Brighton right you were saying yeah what's the name of the chef restaurant down there um silo yes but they're not here anymore and then they they were in london they're not in london anymore either yeah he is a really cool cat yeah he is but this is the thing i think like we all care about sustainability but the general probably doesn't actually care as long as the product works or it tastes good yeah so it's it's not really about being sustainably minded first it's about oh by the way do you know this is made from food waste and it's like what but it's actually doing xyz so that's kind of how we have to market it to get people actually on board and same with silo i feel like it was really good food but it was really made from like it was like recycle it was like zero waste was it it was that's right yeah yeah yeah um but yeah they closed unfortunately sad that is sad um but you know and i think you're right you you have to market it as this is fantastic at this meanwhile did you know there's an amazing backstory right and that's what gives us a unique selling point point of difference yeah exactly exactly it's a great product first plus it's made from ketchup what like that's yeah how we do it yeah and that that must have given you as you said you you must have any like a infinite number of testimonials and ambassadors who can spread the word just organically right and that seems to be happening like someone will use it on the x-ray and be like oh my god have you tried the screen and then we had a big piece in the sun that came out about and Dan and his topical steroid withdrawal and that did a whole thing and then obviously Dragon's Den I couldn't mention it because it's BBC and medical you have to be very careful but it has become a bit of a cult product I have to say yeah love that which is cool yeah but was was there at the time he launched it like any any resistance from the industry itself and it was very much like oh my god there's a brand making products from food waste that's crazy Plus she's ex Charlotte Tilbury.

32:50Okay, that's also kind of weird. So it gave it did give an angle to it It actually received really well with industry won loads of awards like first one two years and And because the products actually really good like that's the thing It's not like a fad product is actually really good people are like oh no This is actually like I said it's sustainable This really works you quite often get sustainable products that I handmade they're not very good Whereas as is like actually formulated with active and it's really amazing and so I think we had a lot of positive response as well but we did which is cool and then we launched into whole foods i think three or six months into the business so we're in whole foods as well which is cool

33:25Alex Chisnall:very cool um and kind of three years in for you what have been what's been like the hardest or some of the toughest moments that people can kind of maybe i would say from a professional level manufacturing is a nightmare literally ask anyone I just cannot cope with manufacturing I like and also because I'm an only child I am a bit of a control freak and I feel like I'll just like I'll do it myself you can't do manufacturing yourself that's a nightmare and it's also the like not not necessarily manufacturing as in making it it's also the ingredient sourcing there sometimes they don't make them anymore so you like build a whole product launch it and then one of the ingredients goes out of stock and so you're like well i have to reformulate put it back through testing like change all the boxes like this is the thing that happens in beauty it's really annoying so that has been quite frustrating um from a personal level and no one talks about it but i think it's interesting being a single person launching a startup is gnarly like it's one thing when you're with a family or if you have and like it's it's a different problem if you have children it's like two different it's every everyone is tough but i would say like doing it on my own living on my own and like literally doing what my own three is has been like a growth lesson in many ways but it has been really tough and it's silly things and i'm not saying it's to like oh boo you like poor me it's more just like you do a trade show for three days and then you come back and you get your flat and you've got it this is so much it's just not there's no one to help yeah and that has been like really testing i would say um yeah this is i think i'm on business number five now um um and it's the first time in when do i start 2009 first time that i've ever had co-founders and it just feels very different but i also struggle because i'm not the one making all the decisions anymore no i was i would struggle with that too i would really struggle with that can you do this and i'm like yeah no no i don't want to do that yeah i would struggle with that as well but it's more the personal side i think that is like tough when you're on your own yeah and have you forced just like are you um naturally very sociable and naturally more introverted uh social when i'm like have to be but introverted so i like being on my own um but i just think when you live on your own and you work in the business on your own and then like life it's just a lot on your own and because it was launching covid when i was on my own it's kind of just feels like an the center of that so it's just to want to watch if you are planning on launching a business and you're on your own maybe just get some things in steps so you do get some help early on or it's just from a mental health perspective I would say that has been the toughest thing um it's the toughest thing has actually been that versus the business you can solve business problems but managing your mental health throughout this is quite tough yeah yeah wow okay yeah and you don't think about it and I think people should think about it I was gonna say you wouldn't think of that or I don't think you would think of that before you start the business right mental health starting it on my own is that going to affect me because you're you're we just feel this energy don't you want to start this is this thing has been eating away at you and you want to do it sounds like we've had you know similar experience and then you realize that you're yeah you're on your own and if you look you're sitting on your floor staring at boxes crying into the abyss that's not what you want so you need to have like just a just support network I would say and how I know what you're going into and how have you gone about doing that have you almost like forced yourself to go out to stuff be that event be that online be that in person be that having a mentor it's only just starting now when I had the investment to get someone to help like it's only just so like it's not so I have an amazing operations person the marketing person and they've taken some of it off me so that I have more of a social life because I didn't have any social life because you can't obviously and that's fine you sign up for it and that's what it is but it's just being I think it's just being prepared for it and making sure that you're just aware of it and like looking after yourself and like you know you can't eat properly and you don't work out I saw this post the other day from this guy that was saying it was the founder of Perfect Head and he was saying all those things he was like when you sign up to launch a business it's not a pity party because you sign up for it but you have to be aware that you will not have like time to do xyz xyz and then I saw someone underneath comment being like well if you're doing that you're not running the business correct you're not doing something right and i was like no i disagree i think i don't know you're clearly you've got help at home then because if you are doing on your own and you are really going for you there is no time you will not have time to work out and eat properly and do all the things that make your life enjoyable it's startup for three years before it takes off that's my like theory um so just just make sure you know what you're going into and it's worth it but you just have to be prepared you do and it was a conversation I had recently with the founder on here as well.

38:23Alex Chisnall:And it was, you know, I recognized a lot of those signs in myself that took me years to kind of recognize that again, I wasn't, I was working too many hours, I wasn't doing any exercise, eating all of the, you know, the wrong times and the wrong stuff. And anytime, like, yeah, caffeine, but you know, anytime you hit the road, anytime I'd literally just go to London and back all of my the routine goes out the window that I was trying to put in like let's just 20 minutes of exercise surely anyone could do 20 minutes of exercise no no and even that when you're high stress or like cortisol you shouldn't be doing 20 minutes of exercise so the other thing is if you're like verging on burnout which I have been if you've got really high cortisol you should like and so then you're confused like what do I so it's just like yeah you're right just having just being aware that this might happen yeah and you know making a plan also if you're doing this and doing psychic mediumship it's two very different worlds and so you're using all your heads and your body and it's like way too much so i wouldn't recommend that either um talk to me a little bit about um skin conditions affecting like confidence and identity as well um what kind of feedback have you had because clearly you're very different to most founders i speak to in that you have this interaction with your with your customers right so you're getting feedback in real time which yeah must be amazing and the kind of insights that you get around that talked a lot about confidence with with roxy nafusi recently and her book that she brought that out so yeah interested to know um yeah on that and the feedback you've had danielle well i think it's interesting in the beauty industry we're called my skin feels because it's all about how you feel versus like changing how you look so I how apart from Lush and maybe the body shop the old body shop every brand is out there to change how you look and we don't care about that we're all about changing how you feel so that's how we set out anyway and then the fact that it is actually changing people how they feel it's become amazing and I think the main thing we've seen is the stress of mums being taken away a bit like when your kid is uncomfortable or has eczema it's just like in pain and not happy you'll do anything to stop that and when you actually find something that helps we've had so many mums be like I can't believe it I've tried everything and then this happened and I don't want to say like this cream works for everyone because nothing works for everyone it's just the fact that we've had so much feedback that we're actually helping people and I remember the first email I got was a young girl who swam a lot and she had um like not like really irritated skin behind her ears I think it was a goggles and swimming hat and basically the plastic and the chlorine it's just a nightmare and she sent me the nicest email ever and saying that her daughter now calls this her magic cream and she was scared of all the creams that look like steroids for hours it's like fun and jazzy and different and so it's become her like swim bag cream and I was like well if we've done nothing else we've done that that's like a game changer so it really is about changing how you feel and for me when I'm in like a mental health mode or something happens the first thing I do is get in the bath because to me getting in the bath body scrub washing the day washing the day off is how I make myself feel better and so if we can give someone like five minutes to tune into how their skin feels by washing it off and starting again that's also like a really big part of what we're doing and we're seeing it and it's mad i love that it's cool yeah um coming to a close um question wise for someone listening who may feel trapped in their current situation um what advice would you would you give them i would say take a step back take a step back and zoom out this is exactly when you should come to a medium by the way just if you're feeling crossroads you know this is why we're here um but if you don't want to do that i would take a step back and every year I always do a mind map you know there's mind maps when you're a kid I do a mind map every year and I put my name in the middle and I write down everything I like doing it could be anything like I like going to pottery or like I used to love horses I want to get back into that whatever and I put it on a mind map and then I put it on my wall and it's a really good way of checking into the stuff that you really like in life because it's so easy like you said to get stuck in the humdrum boringness of like the nine to five and we don't have that long here and so for me you need to live your life and if that means you're going to make less money but you're going to live on an island or you're going to move to Bali or you're going to just like quit just quit the job like don't stay in it there's always another route money is always around if you look for it hard enough and you just need to work out what your soul wants to do and like why you're here and then you'll be on the right track you know that is fantastic advice um and I did that exercise last year literally you know good isn't it yeah and all of the things what was nuts I guess the realisation was that so many things that I put down I haven't done for years my favourite thing in the world was literally like snowboarding and I was like well I haven't snowboarded for five years but you're like that's number one if I could have that feeling of literally once a year it's enough and then I went three times this year I went three times this year but all of the other things music that I used to listen to bands, going to see live bands I went to see live bands for the first time in like years last year so great advice game changing the other thing just to say to that i always say to people more on a spiritual note but it's helpful sit in the silence like there is so much noise everywhere all the time everywhere and it's really hard to sit in the silence when you're here like with your phone or on your laptop or whatever if you can if you can afford to if you have capability to take stuff off for a week and turn everything off and sit in your silence everything you have all the answers you just you can't hear them so you need to be quiet to hear them no i think i think that's great advice as well i try and take um like a couple of days off every month um just to go away um like you say get rid of the phone and just take a pad and a pen um even that though don't do that just really sit yeah don't think about anything just sit do some yoga go outside go for a walk don't read it read a fun book nothing to do with work like read a fiction book you know and just to get you get you out there um quick fire round to finish off um a couple of questions for you danielle so for you uh what is an entrepreneur i don't like the word entrepreneur to be honest with you i feel like the label is really icky now so i feel like an entrepreneur is someone that just does what they want to do someone that just goes out and does what they want to do but i don't like the label i feel like it's just someone that's got balls who's gone out to do something that they want to do that's what i feel that's cool um and then a journey that you're you're going on what is a scale-up business to go from startup to scale up what does that stress um i would say as a creative it's really hard um i i would say stress honestly if i'm honestly it is stressful and i've got to fight i've got to bring the joy back into it that's my job this year is how to make that fun and not make that oh my god we've got to make money it's actually how are we building a brand for the future that's helping people that's and i have to get out the way on the scale up stress money thing and focus on the other way just remind yourself every day that that's what you're ultimately yeah to do right building a brand versus building cash i think there's two different things you know um remind me again of the song that you'd like or be your artist everyone listen to casey musgraves she's unbelievable Deeper Well is a good album but go back she's great, live put her on YouTube, her voice is mad Love it and having been on the show now showing your Screw It Just Do It journey is there anyone you would recommend that you think would also be a good guest?

46:02You should 100 % speak to Charlotte Tilbury if you can I don't think it's going to happen but she's amazing The other person, I've talked about her on another podcast she's going to think I'm a creep but Amelia from Bold Bean Company have you spoken to her yet no okay I think she's amazing so Bold Bean Company have basically changed the whole landscape of beans you know the beans in the jar the glass jar now yeah yeah they're like super expensive and once you eat them you can't eat anything else the founder of that she's amazing yeah big fan

46:35Alex Chisnall:okay amazing um well look thank you very much for being a guest really appreciate your time I really enjoyed hearing your journey. And yeah, let's keep in touch. Yeah, thank you.

46:50Alex Chisnall:If this conversation resonated with you, don't just sit there, act on it. Make sure you follow or subscribe for more game-changing conversations. And remember, the only thing standing between you and your business breakthrough is the decision to screw it and just do it.