How One TikTok Creator Built a Brand That Sells Out on Repeat

0:00The people that follow me are literally my exact customer. So I get to see exactly what my customer wants at any given time. Welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm your host, Serena Smith. From corporate consultant to influencer to beauty entrepreneur, our guest today knows how to take a leap of faith and build something from the ground up. Catherine Lockhart spent years sharing her passion for clean beauty online before deciding to create her own products, quite literally, by hand. We manufacture everything ourselves. So I own an extremely hilarious amount of manufacturing equipment.

0:35It is like half bakery in here, half brewery. What started as a DIY project in her kitchen has grown into Shelter Skin, a fast-growing beauty brand that hit$200 ,000 in sales in just the first three months. I get DMs of people being like, oh, I'm so sad. It's out of stock. I really want to try it. I heard great things. Here to share how she bootstrapped the entire business is Catherine Lockhart, founder of Shelter Skin. Thanks for being here, Catherine. Hi, that was so nice. I've never had someone introduce me like that. Oh, that's fun. Yeah, you were saying that you typically do podcasts that are more personally oriented, less on the business side of things, right?

1:13Yeah, certainly. Usually I'm on a podcast mostly for wellness or talking about non-toxic beauty. So being here from a business perspective is so fun for me, especially as a ex-management consultant. So we get to tap into the business the side today. Yes. And I want to talk about that because in some ways, the influencer to beauty entrepreneur pipeline is a well-trotted one. But what you hear less often is management consultant to influencer to beauty entrepreneur. Like how did that transition happen for you? Definitely. I mean, completely two different worlds, right? And it all happened, honestly, by accident.

1:56I didn't even have a TikTok. I was kind of anti-social media in every respect, honestly. But I had a friend that was staying with me in Austin for the weekend and he got really sick so he didn't want to do anything. And he was like, let's make TikToks. And I didn't know what he was talking about. I've never been on TikTok, hadn't edited a TikTok, nothing, whatever. He showed me how to do it. We did a silly little video. It was like the heyday of TikTok where it felt like everything was going viral. I think there was just genuinely less content on the app at the time. And I think the first video that I posted got, I don't know, maybe 20 ,000 views or something like that.

2:33And I was like, whoa, that's crazy. And so after he left, I was making more and I wasn't really making them about beauty at the time. I was just making them about whatever, Austin stuff, food recommendations. And I eventually just kind of ran out of stuff to talk about. And so I was thinking, okay, do I want to keep doing this? Is this really worth my time? I wasn't monetizing at all. It was just kind of a fun little hobby. And I was like, well, let's just double down on beauty. When I was in college, I was majoring in finance, but I was working at Sephora as a product consultant all through senior year of high school, all through college.

3:09And beauty was my favorite thing in the whole wide world. Whenever I was getting ready for high school, I was watching like the OG YouTube beauty influencers, you know, as I was getting ready. So it has always been a world that I've loved. My favorite thing about working there was the discount. I don't think I ever made an actual single dollar from Sephora because it all just went back to Sephora. And they're tricky that way. I know, right? I'm like, they know how to hire the right people. But yeah, so I just love beauty so much. So I was like, this is a great thing. I can keep talking about this.

3:41And so I really started doubling down on the beauty aspect. and I started a series, recommendations from an ex-Sephora employee. It was right around the Sephora sale. And that series really took off. That's when I got a manager. That's when I started monetizing. And pretty soon, I was kind of at a point where I knew that that year, my social media was going to outpace my income for my corporate job. But what really worked out well was I got laid off the exact week that I was planning on leaving. So it really was kismet. And I think I was probably the happiest person my manager has ever called to tell them that they were getting laid off.

4:26I was like, absolutely, no worries. Like, don't even stress. And yeah, you're like, give me give me that severance. Yeah, I was like, this could not have worked out better, honestly. And right when that happened, I was like, okay, this is it. This is my job. And I just really went all in, doubled down on Instagram too. That's been paying off really well. And yeah, I mean, that's like a hyper condensed version of all of the work. And when I look back now, I'm like, wow, how did I even get here? Like it was just so much work. And you know, there's always ups and downs, especially you're just a slave to the algorithm.

5:00So you never know if it's actually going to work out well. And from a business perspective, being an influencer is really scary to me, at least. I'm like, I don't know if there's longevity in this business. For me, I don't know if people are going to care about me in a few years. I don't know if there's going to be a new platform. And then all of a sudden, everything that I've built will be gone. It was a big, as you said, a leap of faith, I would say, for that. And then also now into shelter too. But yeah, that's how I got into influencing in the beginning. It was a total accident. But I'm really happy to be here now.

5:36Wow, that is really just like almost comically the dream story. I didn't even have TikTok. I didn't set out to be an influencer. It just happened. Yeah, I mean, it was a total whirlwind. I feel very lucky to be here and I feel like I started on both platforms at like the very end of like the good time to start. Yeah, you didn't even know it was the golden days at the time until it's over. I think there's something to be said for that like slower and more steady growth, both as an influencer, which like if you are an overnight success, it can just be like incredibly mystifying and frankly, like destabilizing.

6:15But also I think as an entrepreneur, right? Like the point of view from the outside is generally that if you have some kind of skyrocket in sales or something that you're an overnight success, right? But of course, behind the scenes that creates all kinds of attendant issues. Do you feel like your path as an influencer and growing your fan base kind of maps onto how Shelter has grown as well? Honestly, yes. That's a great parallel to draw. Whenever I think about Shelter and also my own personal brand, I kind of think like slow and steady wins the race. You hear of these brands that get on TikTok shop or something, and they're just selling millions orders in like one day, right?

6:59We couldn't handle that capacity. And so when we're doing launches too, we're extremely mindful of, okay, what can we actually produce and also ship? Because we don't have a 3PL. We ship everything ourselves. So like how many boxes can we even pack in a day? Until kind of recently, it was just myself and my fiance who was also a consultant and also left his job to help me start this, which was an extreme leap of faith for him. He was a little off-put by that in the beginning. No salary job in the relationship anymore. I know. And he has not taken a dollar from this business. Neither have I yet.

7:39So we started in April. So we've been putting essentially everything back into it. I think we're fortunate that it seems as though we're growing exactly at the pace at which we can handle. and we now have two more employees and a guy that kind of comes in when we have like overflow work or have like launches and need to get more products out because Brandon and Chance, our other employee, they don't love spending all their time making boxes. It's not like a great use of their time. But yeah, it's been very exciting and our biggest problem I think is always going to be scaling, especially when you're manufacturing yourself.

8:18But I mean, we're figuring it out along the way. I mean, from a practical perspective, though, it's beautiful that it's been happening aligned with the velocity at which you can handle it thus far. But from a practical perspective, how do you control for that, especially when you have a large fan base, right? And at any given point, a whole boatload of sales could come in. I guess the control is just going out of stock. We have been in and out of stock of products quite a bit since we first launched. We don't oversell what we have and everything is handmade and small batch. So we don't have a ton on hand at any given point.

8:59There was a point when it was just Brandon and it was practically made to order. We were so behind on orders and sales and shipping them out. And, you know, he could only make about like 50 body butters in a day. And that was his max capacity. He could only ship about 30 to 50 boxes in a day. But we never oversold. Like we never were putting more into our Shopify inventory than we had on hand. And it's super frustrating in the beginning as a customer, I imagine. It was super frustrating for me as a brand owner because obviously I want someone to be able to get something if they want it. And I get DMs of people being like, oh, I'm so sad.

9:41It's out of stock. I really wanted to try it. I heard great things, blah, blah, blah. And that to me is heart-wrenching because that's the whole point. I want people to be able to have access to a product that's better for them and also beautiful. And not being able to do that was really hard for me to grapple with in the beginning. But when we transitioned from our first office to this warehouse, that is when we really doubled down and focused on scaling. So now we're at a place where our capacity has increased like tenfold from what we were doing before, especially with the addition of another person in our manufacturing, but also just equipment in general.

10:24We manufacture everything ourselves. So I own an extremely hilarious amount of manufacturing equipment. It is like half bakery in here, half brewery pretty much. And what does that mean? We have like big bakery, like whipping machines. Essentially, we have a bunch of brewery machinery to do our oil infusions. And our whole like first line of our warehouse is just our production. There's just machine after machine after machine. And we're in the middle of getting a fully custom machine built for us right now as well. in Asia. So hopefully that will kind of increase our capacity way more. But I mean, that's like a $35 ,000 machine.

11:09And then I'm just going to own that. And I think that's so funny. Like I'm going to have to do this for the rest of my life or I'm going to be like liquidating all of this machinery. Like what do you even do with it? I don't know. My mom was in the CBD business for a while and she had like a$35 ,000 capsule making machine. And when she decided to get out, she was like, what do I do with this? There's always a buyer. There's always a buyer. Just throw it on Facebook Marketplace. It doesn't sound like you're going anywhere anytime soon. So that's the good news. And I can only imagine that when you got into this, you didn't think that one day you'd be like super stoked about the notion of a custom mixing machine being created for you.

11:58But here you are. When you said you were using the baking and the brewery machinery, is that typical in skincare or was that you MacGyvering things? And if so, how did you figure it out? Yeah, the latter for sure. There is no handbook on doing this. I completely understand why people do not manufacture things themselves. And I'll give you a little backstory about how we got here in the first place. When I was looking into starting Shelter Skin, I was reaching out to every possible lab I could find on Google. I feel as though the cosmetics industry and labs and sourcing good labs, it's kind of a hush-hush industry.

12:38It feels as though you have to know someone to know what to do. So I was just sending cold emails to all these labs explaining, here's what I want. Here's the formula. Can you do it? I got almost all no's. No one really wants to work with tallow. They especially don't want to work with natural ingredients. They're significantly more expensive. They're a lot more unstable, hard to control for. And even like tallow with us, it was a huge learning curve going from like making small batches to large batches because natural products just act so differently than synthetics do. So I got tons of no's from that.

13:18And then one person came back and they were like, yeah, we can, but you need to order 10 ,000 SKUs and it's going to cost$150 ,000. And I was like, okay, I don't think that's going to work for me, actually. That just seemed unfeasible for me in terms of sales. I was like, That's a lot of product and a lot of inventory to have on hand, not to mention an insane cash investment. And I've completely self-funded this business. We don't have any investors. And just thinking about that amount of money going out the door first thing, not even like packaging was not included. Branding was not included.

13:56They essentially were going to reformulate the formula I gave them and then fill it. And that just was not going to work. And I remember I was talking with my hairstylist at the time, actually, and I was lamenting about everything I was going through. And she said, well, you know, I know a girl that makes these natural face masks and she just does it out of her house. And I was like, okay, I don't know if I want to do that, especially not my house. I have two dogs. There'd be a lot of dog hair in the products. And that's just a horrible idea. But that did kind of get me going down the path of like, okay, what would this look like if I was going to try and manufacture this myself.

14:34And honestly, I had no idea what I was thinking. It is so hard to do this. In the beginning, I think I thought I was going to be the one doing it myself without the help of anyone. And I quickly realized that was not going to be possible. It is a full-time job and some. And so that is kind of how we started. And luckily, I entered into it with like just the right amount of delusion to think that that was possible and I could do it myself because the typical lab route was just absolutely not going to work for me. And I'm definitely one of those people where when I get into something, like I'm just going to figure it out.

15:16Like I'm just going to make it work. And that we still really are in early days. We started six months ago, but those were the early, early days of it. That was a lot of MacGyvering, as you said, a lot of kind of trying to figure out what works. So I mean, we've kind of upgraded our machinery as we were going back to the original question. So we started with machinery for the oil infusion that we do. We make all of our vanilla body oil in-house, but we do our vanilla body oil through a 28-day infusion process. So we take organic vanilla bean pods and infuse them in organic jojoba oil for 28 days.

15:52And that is really unique because that's what our actual body oil product is. And it's incredibly scented. It's just smells like you're holding a bunch of vanilla bean pods in your hand. And we also use that vanilla oil in our tallow butter. And that's what scents our body butter as well. So we make a lot of vanilla oil and we first started with, it was essentially like a brewery equipment where it has like a heating panel on the bottom, stainless steel, really big and filled it all up. We had countless problems with that. One of them malfunctioned and boiled. And so we had like 300 degree oil that was like bubbling in our office.

16:35It was so scary because we had to go unplug. I was like, oh my God, it was the scariest thing. And we started with using like really small whipping machines. And as we've grown, we've found new machines. So actually now our infusion machinery is actually a milk pasteurizer, which is so random. How'd you figure that out? We spend a lot of time googling stuff around here. Like luckily Brandon is a mechanical engineer by education so that is extremely helpful in a job like this. Like I really don't think I would have been able to figure out any of this without him. I am so fortunate that he was willing to do it with me but we knew what kind of machine we needed.

17:17We needed like a really big volume with a water jacket on the outside. So it had even heating, whereas like the previous one we were using only heated from the bottom. So you didn't have that like chance of burning things. And then we wanted an internal agitator and we needed like a controlled temperature. And the milk pasteurizer was the thing that did all of that. It was, it is so random. And it's just so funny to me to think about like all these silly things that we're utilizing to make these products. But essentially, the next step in that is like lab equipment. So if you go into a lab that's doing like some sort of infusion, it's pretty much a milk pasteurizer, but massive.

18:02And it has literally steps up to it. Like it's that big. And that is kind of the next thing we'll need when we grow. But we're kind of taking like those interim baby steps. And I mean, we were talking about kind of how going too quickly can ruin businesses, honestly, because if you grow so much and then you buy so much product to scale, or you buy all these things to meet that initial demand, and then that demand isn't consistent, then it's so hard to keep a business like that. So we're kind of buying these interim machinery to get to what I know will eventually be like much larger machinery, but it's nice that we can kind of hedge on the way there and only have to buy what we need at the time.

18:45And it's a somewhat unconventional approach, right? When we're living in a society that is so built on immediate gratification and also when the world of entrepreneurism and founder-based companies, having historically been really focused on growth over everything and grow really fast, you know, as quickly as you can. Do you feel like there is more understanding, patience, maybe even forgiveness in the world of clean beauty because of the principles that it stands for? Certainly. I think there is a lot more patience when it comes to clean beauty. I think people also give me a lot more patience seeing how involved I am in the brand.

19:32And I think when people follow me, they give me a lot more grace. I'll tell you a story about our first launch, which was just horrible. The highest recommendation is don't ship with USPS if you're shipping a heat-sensitive product in the middle of summer because the first shipment that we sent out was 170 jars. We packaged all of them beautifully, shipped them out, took them to USPS, had a full conversation with people in the back, and then we're sitting at home looking at the tracking. We're like, wow, why have none of these been checked in? It's been all day. And it's like 85, 90 degrees or something like that.

20:10And they said that it was going to go on the first truck and they actually had left them outside all day long. So for over eight hours, they were just sitting in the heat and we were just like, oh my God, what do we do? Like, do we - like i literally i was like do we and it's an extremely heat sensitive product like it's all 100 natural there's no emulsifiers there's not stabilizers in it you know and we were like holy crap they're probably all going to be melted and it also taught us a lot about how we needed to change the seals that we were using so we were using plastic gaskets previously and it was leaking through the gasket if it got hot enough in austin it's 105 degrees in the summer.

20:55That'll melt anything. So we learned a lot from that experience. We never shipped with USPS again. We only ship with UPS, but people were so understanding about it when they received the product. I think one, because we had just launched, but I can say with a lot of confidence that the first group of people bought it because they followed me, which I was so grateful for. And they were so understanding. They were like, hey, just wanted to let you know, Like it came a little leaky, but no worries. Love it so much. And I was just like, oh my God, like, is this going to work? But the greatest part, and this is like why I think we're so fortunate that we're vertically integrated and doing everything ourselves is like we can pivot so quickly.

21:37If we had bought all 10 ,000 of those units from a lab and they all were that exact same formula with that exact same ratio, because that's kind of like the levers that we can pull, like if we're going to use more tallow versus more oil, how to make it more heat stable versus not. We're just so fortunate that we could pivot so quickly. Like our gaskets didn't work. So we immediately got new like heat seals that are waterproof, you know? So we wouldn't have been able to do that if we had manufactured with a lab and we would just have lost, you know,$150 ,000 in 10 ,000 units. We wouldn't have been able to sell them.

22:11So in a way, we're super lucky that that's what happened and that we weren't able to do it like that in the beginning. And then I guess your note about sustainability and this kind of more like slow movement within the clean beauty space. I think it really depends on the brand. At this point, clean beauty is really marketing. It's kind of like dermatologist tested. There's absolutely no regulation, no standards, no validity behind it. You can put that on anything. No one's abide by. I think that there are some brands that are really careful and selective about their ingredients. And I do think that those brands do typically tend to use more sustainable packaging.

22:58Maybe they're growing a little bit slower. A lot of those brands you're probably not going to see like out of Sephora. A lot of them are mostly D2C like Shelter is. And they probably have a smaller following and they also probably have a much smaller marketing budget. And it's just like Those brands, I think, are really paving the path for what I hope will become more of a standard for beauty. And then there's also a lot of brands that kind of jump on the clean beauty bandwagon. And maybe that means they don't use some ingredients that aren't great, but maybe a lot more they're fine with. And that, I think, just comes down to being able to be an informed consumer and understanding how to read ingredients labels and utilizing resources to vet products yourself.

23:43because I think a lot of the brands that are out there that are using clean within their marketing aren't actually clean, especially by my standards. But I definitely think there's a lot of brands that are really dedicated to it and it's their mission and ethos and are doing really amazing things in the space. Yes, there is a ton of greenwashing in the industry, as we know. And the unfortunate part about it is it puts the onus on the consumer constantly to do their due diligence and to really engage in the extra levels of research to be able to figure out whether something truly is clean or not, or whatever it is that they're trying to solve for, right?

24:20It seems to me like your relationship with your fans is kind of the trust component, right? I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how you're engaging with and building community and how you feel like that has been able to help you parlay shelter into greater degrees of success. definitely I think that the trust that my community has in me is like the complete foundation of our relationship and why people follow me in in the first place and also why they are willing to purchase shelter as you said I spend an egregious amount of time reading and researching like I never thought I would be doing this in my adult life like reading research papers for fun but that is literally what I do now I think you're completely right A lot of brands can use this marketing whatever way they want.

25:12So it is on the consumer to be able to educate themselves and do that themselves. I don't think it's feasible or fair to expect people to have the time to do that or even know what they're supposed to be looking for. I think the beauty industry is very intentionally not transparent in a lot of ways. and that unfortunately negatively affects the consumer. And that is truly what I founded my brand on, not just Shelter, but also my personal brand. And I think my bio says, like, let's make clean beauty and low-tox living easy because that's the whole point is that like I'm sitting here doing the research for you and I love learning and it's cool that I still get to be able to learn in this way in the job that I'm doing.

26:02I think when I was doing influencing in the beginning and I wasn't really focused on the non-toxic health aspect, there were a lot of moments where I just felt like a cog in the marketing machine of the broader beauty industry. And I was like, wow, this feels very purposeless, honestly. Like I was doing great. I was making money. You know, engagement was there. But I was just like, oh, I don't know if this like really sits well with me from a purpose perspective. So the whole point of shelter is for people to know that whatever they're buying on the website, they don't even need to look at the ingredients.

26:39I spent way too much of my time reading ingredients labels. I don't want anyone to have to even think about that when they're shopping with shelter because everything is clean beyond compare. Like we go so far beyond the like need for transparency. If you watch our videos, you can practically learn how to make our exact product. We're not really hiding much. And then if you go onto our website, you know, I'm telling you the region our tallow is coming from, what grade our lanolin is, where we're getting it, like for all of our essential oils, what extraction method are we using? And most people, I would say, probably don't care.