How To Use Social Media To Create A Viral Brand

0:00Hey friends, it's Benjamin Gottlieb. Guess what? Shopify Masters is now on YouTube. That's right. You can watch episodes with myself and Schwang directly on YouTube or in the YouTube app. Just search for Shopify. masters. And as always, thanks for listening and watching, which you can now do on YouTube. Did I mention that? Hi, I'm Schweng Esther Shan, and you're tuning in to Shopify on location. Super excited about today's episode. We're chatting with Charlotte Parlomino. She's one of my favorite skincare experts on TikTok with close to 8 million likes and counting. Her really honest, well-informed videos are beloved by many.

0:39And she's also the co-founder and CEO of Do. They make science-backed products that are sold out by their fans. We're going to dig into her success on social media and business, what makes a great TikTok video, and how you can actually build trust for your brand and also cultivate a community. So thank you so much for being here, Charlotte. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to have you here in person and not just on my phone screen. So there's so much content out there, and I feel like skincare is also such a saturated market. So how were you able to create videos and content that really resonated with the community?

1:20Yeah. So I think when we were starting Do, it was myself and my co-founder, Joyce Vilemos, who's a cosmetic chemist with over a decade of experience, and another co-founder, Marta Friedman, who's really great at brand and community. What we wanted to do was create something that was clinically vetted and price transparent. And we didn't see many brands being, it's not that they weren't being honest, it's that they weren't leveling with people. And I think a lot of brands are afraid to say certain things because it opens up the door for more conversations. It's much easier to give a straightforward answer to something that's definitive versus saying, well, it depends.

1:53It takes a lot more work, a lot more education. But from my perspective, I'm 36. I'm looking for stuff that works and also things that make me feel good. I think that there's so much shame that's put into the beauty industry from so many different levels, right? You have shame that you aren't beautiful enough, you aren't young enough, you don't have perfect skin, but now we're also being shamed into, okay, well, this is toxic skincare and it's giving you and your family cancer. And you're like, okay, there's a lot going on here. What's actually happening? Can you level with me? And so we call ourselves a too much information brand.

2:24And in just sharing that story, I got my esthetician's license in 2020, sharing that journey, sharing what your skin needs, what it doesn't, how it's so varied. And that quite frankly, our products are not going to be for everybody really actually resonated with people because it's real. And I think that that's something that is very innate to myself and my co-founders. And so it was very easy to get that branding across for us. And then you have the perfect intersection of experience from media and tech. So what type of content that you think are working really well now on TikTok? It always changes.

2:59I think, so my background is I used to work at Hearst. I then worked at Snapchat. And when I was at Hearst, I did everything from advertising to editorial. I was a writer. And then I launched Snapchat Discover, which is actually how I learned how to video edit and cut videos on After Effects, was because we did not get a video team. It was me and a couple of editors and I was leading it. And I was like, I guess I have to learn After Effects overnight. And that's actually what led me to TikTok was because I was tired of editing my Instagram videos on After Effects. And so I was like, oh, TikTok has a better video editing suite.

3:33And so I just started cross-posting. And that's when things really started to blow up. And I just kind of leaned into it. It's always changing. I think algorithms are really fickle. So you have to really stay on point for your storytelling. And so for us, I like storytelling things that are topical. I like talking about cooking and food stuff. This is on my personal Instagrams. But for Dew, it's always about telling stories, being really clear on marketing, and also getting really geeked out on different parts of the story to where we got to where we are. I mean, one of our most viral videos right now on TikTok, for Dew's Instagram that has over 100 ,000 views, is just talking about packaging and talking about non-mined aluminum and what that means and what that carbon footprint means and why plastic isn't evil, but how we use plastic sometimes isn't necessarily the way it should be used now that we have more information on it.

4:27And it's just like a five-minute video about plastic and aluminum, and it's doing incredibly well. And it's because it's about storytelling. And I think what you and your team do so well is walking that thin line between educational content that's also entertaining. So how do you actually make sure that you're telling the story or getting the information across, but still staying entertaining? I mean, I think it's very inherent to who we are. At the end of the day, it's a skincare brand. We don't take ourselves super seriously. I think our products have real world impacts, right? I mean, I'm buying units in the tens of thousands.

5:06So when I make a decision on packaging, it actually does have environmental impact. So I do take it seriously in that sense. I take it seriously in the sense that everything is clinically vetted. but skincare and beauty is meant to be fun. It's been used as a tool of oppression for a really long time. And so to use it in a way that's actually more fun, not taking it too seriously, using it as a way to really educate people. I mean, I actually am more interested in science when it's used in ways that are relevant to my everyday life. And so we found that this is a great way to get people in. But at the end of the day, like we are talking about science.

5:43We're talking about politics sometimes. And all of these things are just put in a more palatable way, because it's like an everyday item. Yeah. And I think the hard part is also you're talking about a very established industry and you're sometimes going against some industry norms and injecting that honesty. How can fellow founders kind of lean into that for their own industry and not be intimidated to go against norms and call out things that they want to change. Yeah. I mean, I think coming with receipts is really important. I don't say things in a vacuum, right? Like one of the things that really frustrates me in the skincare industry are the claims of coral reef safe sunscreen.

6:27Yeah, that might be true. You talk to marine biologists out of Australia and they're like, can you please stop saying this? It's a smokescreen. So I take that very seriously. I don't use that in my marketing. I see marketing as a tool for good, but it can also be used to distract. And so, you know, for us, this is very inherent to me. I've always been like this. I remember I met somebody that kind of like I was kind of friends with on the internet and they're like, oh, wow, you really are exactly like you are on social media. That's why it's easy for me to do. I would say do the thing that's easy for you to do and that's inherent to you because I think so often when we're in corporate environments, I worked in corporate for a long time, you are not allowed to bring your whole self to work.

7:07It's about a form of assimilation into the culture that you're being brought into. I'm allowed to bring myself to work now. I ask that the people that we hire bring themselves to work. And so this is who I am. I can't tell you to emulate me, but I can tell you to kind of strengthen who you are. Yeah. And another thing I really want to stress is a lot of people talk about you've got to sell on TikTok. But I feel like what you're doing is you barely do— Got to storytell on TikTok. Exactly. I mean, that's a great, great salespeople are storytellers. And I think that I actually got into a fight with my partner about this, about, I was like, I said to him, I was like, you're a great salesman and he's an art director.

7:47And he was so mad. And I was like, I'm telling you that you're good at telling stories because you get people's buy-in when you explain to them something. That's all that sales is. And I think if you approach things that buy my product, buy my product, I explain the product. I give you all the details, then you make the decision. That's what we do. And that's why it doesn't feel, I hope that we don't feel too salesy. I hope that we feel educational and then you are empowered to make a decision. Yeah. This is the exact words I have on my notes. I'm like, you are really not selling. You're actually providing education and helping people stay more informed.

8:24Well, I mean, the thing is, I don't want you to buy my products if they don't work for you. Everyone's skin is so different. So you live in Canada. Come wintertime, your skin is extremely dry. Instant Angel, one of our moisturizers, is a lipid-rich moisturizer. My co-founder Joyce did the patent for SkinCeuticals. So she really understands not only barrier repair, but the actual ingredients required for your skin to kind of replenish itself. I actually don't think Instant Angel on its own is enough for people who live in Toronto, where the humidity is in the floor and it's minus, you know, I mean, when we're getting into Celsius, like minus, like too much.

9:00And I lived in Canada. I lived in Montreal. I was putting on like Vaseline and Nivea on my face and it was not enough. And so I would not tell you that Instant Angel on its own is enough. I would tell you in a routine how to use it and how it may work for you. And I find that when you do it that way, you have a high loyalty rate. But also when something doesn't work out for somebody, we just refund you and there's no hard feelings. I find that when a customer feels duped into buying something or like you sold this to me in the wrong way, there's a lot of bad blood there. And I don't want that with consumers.

9:32I want people to understand what our products do and what they don't do. Set your expectations. And if it doesn't work out for you, we always refund you. But it creates like a different playing field and a different conversation where it's more open versus, again, those definitive lines where it's like, this is the product. It's going to work for everyone. It is a holy grail. I cringe when I hear holy grail. I'm like, holy grail for XYZ skin types. And then for your content, I think another aspect that I love so much is there are things that are trending on platform. There are things that are happening that's very current.

10:06When there was that crazy smog for wildfires, you made a great video about it. When everyone was trying that age filter, you also added your own spin and commentary. So how do other founders do the same thing where they are commenting on something that's trending right now, but that actually stays true to what they're talking about and true to what they're trying to build. Yeah, I think if you feel like you could just talk about something for 10 minutes, then make a video on it and try to cut it down to two. That's my advice. Like for me, like when I saw the wildfires, first off, I mean, the environment is something that, you know, as a brand that creates product and creates waste, it's something I think about a lot.

10:46And in that environment, so many people are like, what do I buy? And I'm like, I feel like these are starting because of climate change. Maybe you shouldn't buy anything and just rummage around what you currently have. And so that was kind of the premise for that video. And yeah, whenever there's something topical like with the beauty filter, I think that, you know, I'm 36 and I'm so young. Like I find it bizarre how media frames women approaching 40 as if like we're marching towards death and then it's like just disappear. I find it very strange. and I do think it has, you know, a lot to do with, like, how we listen to women, women's authority, and just generally what women are allowed to do within society.

11:28And so for that particular filter, the glam filter, the aging filter, all of these things, I like to just give people reminders and context because I hear from a lot of women in, like, their 50s and 60s, and they're like, we really appreciate this because, you know, we're just not seen and we're not listened to. And I don't want that. Like, I just find it so sad whenever I get a comment like, oh, like you're old. Like you don't know what you're talking about with skincare. And I'm like, I'm like, girl, you're going to be 40 one day. You're going to be 50. You're going to be 60. Like you're going to age up and there's no amount of skincare or cosmetic procedures or anything.

12:04Like we just need to allow people to age, particularly women. And we need to listen to people. And that's kind of where I come in with my opinions on that front. Because I'm like, this is a, you guys are self-defeating yourselves. And you're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where you're going to fail. And so we need to be more age positive generally with women versus, oh my God, she has a wrinkle. Like what a personal failing. And I'm like, this is not morality. But I could go into, I love like the US's origins and like Puritanism. It comes from that. And like the idea of like being beautiful linked to morality, which is not real.

12:43Sometimes we just got to like enjoy life and live and have these experiences. Yeah. And like talk about your personal experiences. Like I can't speak to every experience. I can speak to the ones that I'm familiar with. And then speaking to those experiences, we mentioned about you working at Hearst and Snapchat. I think a lot of our listeners are in similar shoes where they're in a great corporate job, but they have ideas running at the back of their mind. What's your advice for learning as much as possible from those corporate jobs and building up your skill set so that you are ready when you're launching a business?

13:17I mean, one piece of advice I got very early on in my career, because I can be quite combative, I'm not afraid of conflict, is that your career is long. And so I did remind myself of that throughout my entire career. And like, you know, when you are in these environments, contacts are really important. Keeping in touch with people is really important. Saving money is really important, which, you know, if I hadn't worked at Snapchat, I don't know if I would have had the basis to actually leave because I don't get help from my parents or from a trust fund or anything like that. I have a lot of privileges, but those are not part of them.

13:56And so I really did save up my money so that I would have, you know, a couple of months of runway where I didn't know what I was doing. And then, you know, 2020 hit. So that was really kind of scary and sobering. So I worked quite a few jobs. What I would say, though, is that just because you're working at a job doesn't mean that you can't start thinking about where things would go, taking coffees, taking people out for meetings, sliding into people's DMs. It's how I've actually made some of my best business connections is literally DMing somebody. And so I would say that all of those things you can start thinking of while you're at a job.

14:32And also looking at what the company is doing that you would not emulate and you would not replicate is also extremely important from a cultural perspective, but also from a business-making decision perspective. I think I've worked for a lot of companies where I'm like, okay, I could not be profitable for 10 years and keep raising money and, you know, pray I have an Uber exit one day or become Amazon. But realistically, for consumer packaged goods, let me look at the history of other companies that have run and the most successful exits or the most successful strategies, they usually started off a little bit more profitable, a little bit more lean.

15:04Tech is different. Tech is a very, very different industry. So I think also know your industry and know that you're not going to copy and paste it. I think that with consumer packaged goods, right? So beauty, cosmetics, food, so many people are like, okay, I'm going to raise$100 million for a brand and then we're going to hit critical mass and that's when we're going to start to see money. We never operated that way. We always operated from, we have to be profitable from day one. Our EBITDA needs to be in this range and we need to be doing things in this way. And I'm lucky that my background is in business.

15:34That's actually what I studied in university was business and poli size. Like I understood a lot of these terms, but also I knew how to make a P &L. Yeah. And I'm so glad you raised that because especially in this economic environment, new founders are always stressed and they want to reach profitability. So what advice do you have for people who are starting out bootstrapping? How do they make their own runway last longer? Lean. Lean. You know, and I think that it's a blessing and a curse, the way that we've run our business, in the sense that I'm still doing social media. That is, we're hiring a social media manager.

16:09We're having interviews this week, right? To understand social media and to have that be almost like free marketing, where you have somebody that knows how to make a video go viral, incredibly valuable. My co-founder, Marta, knows a ton of influencers. She's incredible at branding. And so all of our photo shoots and things like that, we're able to do that kind of in-house. I think that there's a critical point where that needs to grow. Obviously, our Shopify has been extremely successful. But as we grow as a team, like we need to kind of branch out. But I think that when you're starting, and if you do not come from institutional money, if you don't have access to capital at a high level, because we did raise money at the beginning, but it all went into research and development.

16:59We actually didn't pay ourselves until 2021. We really didn't pay ourselves for a very long time because we started the company in 2018. I think what people don't realize is that you are going to have to be very lean. And so if you're used to a big corporate environment where you have a big staff that helps you out, I've never had that. I've always been kind of the scrappy person. Now it's on me to grow to delegation. So if you are starting a company and you don't come from money and you don't have that institutional money, get scrappy. It's incredible what you can do and build on your own, right?

17:34So TikTok, for example, it's like free marketing if you can figure it out. That's what I would say. Be scrappy or find a co-founder that's independently wealthy. Amazing. But thank you for being so candid and practical because I think that's very, very helpful for… None of my co-founders come from money, right? So it's like, and I don't think people talk about money very often. And I think that particularly women don't. And it's incredibly important to talk about. And also the privilege that we had in being able to raise money for that research and development for our first serum. It just took a lot of money to do the clinicals on that.

18:12So we did not pay ourselves, but we held down. I had like three jobs for the first couple of years. Yeah. No, it's practical advice. That's going to be super helpful. Bills are important. So Dia was born right here in New York City. It's also the place where you met Joyce and Marta. So talk to us about how the city has really influenced the brand. Yeah, I mean, New York is a place that will build you up and break you down. But in that breaking you down and you stay, you sometimes end up on the other end. I think that it was interesting. I was in LA last week and I was like, oh, I'm sleeping. That's so strange.

18:52I don't normally sleep. I have insomnia. And I think it's more that New York has this like palpable energy when you get here. and you know I think that that's very much so seen in do and how real we are and I think that that's kind of there's like a blunt honesty to do that's blended with this softness that softness comes from my co-founder Marta who's in LA and so it's critical that we always have her kind of you know keeping us kind of level and balanced but that blunt rawness and realness that we bring to things I think is very New York right if you're walking too slowly on the street someone's going to tell you, right?

19:29And it's just like, it's that simple. And it's not mean-spirited, right? It's just like, hey, you're in my way. No hard feelings. Kindly move. And so I think that that hustle really is brought into everything that we do. Because I always say this, I don't think we could have built this brand. I don't think I could have made the network that I've made. I don't think I would have been able to do what we've done if it wasn't in New York. And, you know, I've lived in Brooklyn for 12 years now. And so even just looking at my career trajectory, if I had stayed, you know, in Montreal, which I love Montreal, if there are any Montreal listeners, Queen them all, best croissant, I think, in North America.

20:06But I just don't think I would have been able to have access to the people that I had access to here, which is really what helped catapult not only my career, but do. And, you know, even something as simple as like our logo and our branding. We met with somebody named Lee Schwartz from PSA Creative through a random connect from like the packaging space. And we pitched him an idea and he actually did our logo, our brand guidelines, like all these things. And, you know, I don't know how I would have met somebody like him, especially in the way that I'd met him, which literally this all unfolded within this plan of like three days.

20:46And so that really helped us kind of like get legitimacy. And I think, you know, it's so core to how our brand presents. But yeah, I think that New York is a place of like connection and opportunity and excitement. And so when you're down, it doesn't last too long because you're like, all right, like I need to keep going. Because so much of New York, I feel like is about setting trends, like whether it's food, fashion, skincare, it's always pushing the envelope forward. So yeah, talk to us about being in the beauty industry within New York and how, I guess, the hub of it all pushes the company forward.

21:21Yeah. I mean, I think there are a lot of amazing founders and amazing companies that are based out of New York. And I think it's, again, just by nature of like us all being in this pressure cooker and kind of on top of each other. But I would say that, you know, a lot of what we formulate and do. I'm very lucky to have a co-founder that is in STEM because it's very easy to be taken in by suppliers. So when you make a skincare product, you don't normally make the raw materials. The raw materials come from these large corporations, sometimes really cool upstarts, but Joyce reviews all the scientific literature, all their testing in vivo and in vitro, right?

21:57So in human and in test tubes. And we basically figure out what is the most promising to then make our formulas. And we really formulate based off of what skin needs and not necessarily trends. But I do think that's like a uniquely New York thing where you're like, I don't follow the trends. You're like, I'm making the trends. So I feel like that's also like very egotistical what I just said. But I also think it's like very, I think I can say that just based off of who my co-founder is. Because I, so many brands operate off of Mintel reports and marketing trends. And when people are Google searching, right?

22:30How many slugging brands have launched when I talked about slugging, you know, three, four years ago. And we are working on a barrier product, but we're going to launch it when we're ready and when the ingredients are truly unique and when there's something different that we can say in the market from a packaging perspective and a raw material perspective. And so maybe there'll be a whole other trend that comes up. The Forever Eye Mask, That was an idea that, you know, came up with, you know, just because I was so tired of throwing out eye masks and just throwing things out. I'm like, why am I throwing this out?

23:02It's just occlusion. Like, that's all this is. It's just to really trap products to hydrate it before you're on camera or an event. Why does this exist? And so we just kind of, like, redid the mold. But, again, like, I think that anybody who has a skincare brand probably thinks that they create trends. But I think I did there. You totally did. And it is a viral sold out product that is solving something that - With copycats now, lots of copycats. Exactly. It was the norm within beauty industry to always dispose our masks. So I think the question here is if I'm in any industry and I try to look for opportunities and I want to do something different, what's your advice for people who are trying to come up with new ideas and actually look out for those opportunities?

23:49I would say my first question would be, are you a category expert? I think that a lot of people are trying to solve for a marketing problem, but what's the design problem that you're solving for? And when I say design, I mean formula, packaging, mask, whatever it might be. So I was not a formulation expert. So I brought on a co-founder. I have two co-founders. We've split the company evenly three ways. And that's by design because we want checks and balances. We want everyone to be heard. And because we're all equally important to the company. But I'm not a chemist. And so for me to come on and say, okay, this is the formula, this is the thing, it's a little bit inauthentic.

24:27I needed somebody that really was a category expert, whereas I understand branding, storytelling, and now I got my esthetician's license. So I do understand a lot of what people are doing to their skin, what their skin needs, and just a lot of kind of like how that translates into use. Having that STEM counterpart is so important. So I think that's like one advice. Like we're so obsessed, especially in the United States, with like individual exceptionalism. And why? You know, you're not going to know it all, right? Even if you're the most brilliant engineer, are you the best storyteller? Are you the best person to do that?