The Beauty Brand Playbook Behind Lore's Successful Launch

0:00Melanie Bender:That was one of the most interesting challenges. My product is invisible.

0:05What happens when a former aerospace engineer turned brand builder behind beauty giants like Merit, Rode, and Versed decide to reinvent fragrance? Meet Melanie Bender, founder and CEO of Lore, a luxury scent brand built on the radical idea that how you feel matters more than how you look.

0:21Melanie Bender:That was what I wanted to spend my time on. Not beauty that you see, but beauty that you feel. After shaping some of beauty's most beloved names and teaming up with the founders of Youth of the People, Melanie brought together nature, art, and accessibility to launch lore. And in just a few months, the brand has landed in over 250 Sephora stores and in the hands of some top creators. It's not about getting the doors. It's not about getting the retailer. It's about being ready to perform in it. Melanie is here to share what it takes to build a luxury brand from scratch, break through crowded shelves, and trust your instincts, even when the path is anything but ordinary.

0:53I'm Adam Leventer, and this is Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and scaling a business. Melanie, welcome to the show.

1:00Melanie Bender:Hey, Adam. It's so great to be here. Great to be here with you. You are an aerospace engineer first, right before you jumped into entrepreneurship. How does one go from aerospace engineering into founderhood? Yeah, so aerospace engineering was the first of three majors that I went through in college. how someone goes from that to being a beauty founder is a lot of like hand wringing and hair pulling because I think it spoke to just my uncertainty about what I wanted to do in life and maybe to my just like joy and curiosity of so many things. And, you know, I think when you're when you're young and you're starting out and you're making your first decisions for yourself, like what you're going to major in, what your first job is going to be, where you're going to live.

1:45Melanie Bender:You kind of put a lot of pressure on yourself to have it all figured out. And it turns out that I didn't. Instead of having maybe all the answers, I just had a lot of questions. I was interested in what it took to build a rocket. I was interested in how all the systems of the earth work together to make rain and all these things. And I was interested in how brands connect with consumers and help shape identity and beliefs and values. And, you know, over the last, I guess, 20, 20-ish years, I kind of found my way through all of those and ultimately kind of found how they connect together and help me build brands that people love, that grow like rocket ships.

2:28Melanie Bender:Maybe that's how it all works. So you were very early on at Merit. You're very early on at Road. You're very early on at Versed. this chapter of entrepreneurship, does it feel different this time around, given your past experience building brands? You know, yes and no. I know this stage so well. It is my fourth early stage brand, my third that I've been with basically from inception, pre-product, pre-brand, pre-distribution. And I chose to do it four times because I love it so much. At this stage, you know, everything is possible. You're forming your worldview. You're forming your product ethos.

3:07Melanie Bender:You're forming your products themselves. You're choosing who the consumer is and the role that you want to play in their life. And that's something that I kept coming back to just again and again and again of loving that really formative stage, being able to touch every single part of the business and really see it take shape. You know, as founders, my first I'm doing it with a capital F and that does feel different. Different in amazing ways of having the the freedom and the call to make it what I think it should be, to make it the very best version of what I think it should be. But with that also comes the feeling of responsibility, that same responsibility to make it the very best version of what it can be.

3:47Melanie Bender:It's a little bit of both, which is, I guess, why we're here having this conversation. And you have two partners from You to the People. There's three of you on the cap table, is there? I have two co-founders, Joe and Greg, formerly founders of Views of the People. I'm founder. They're incredible in supporting me and my vision, but we do work together very closely on, you know, really all things of how that comes together and how that's executed. I've heard you say that you didn't want to do it alone. I wouldn't have done it alone, period. It's a long journey. It's a long journey, regardless of whether it's your first or fourth time doing it.

4:21Melanie Bender:Maybe because I knew how long it was, it felt clear to me that I wanted community building it. I wanted partnership. I wanted people who could challenge me to be the very best at what I can do and be, but also to help strengthen and fill in areas that I wanted that support. And because I knew that about myself, I honestly didn't necessarily see myself doing a brand. I couldn't really envision the situation in which I would find the right people to really make me feel comfortable and safe to put my own IP out there in that way. And it started with a conversation with the two of them when I let them know that I was leaving Road and very quickly became clear that that was the time and that these are the people.

5:10What was it about Joe and Greg as partners that made sense for you and for Laura?

5:15Melanie Bender:Yeah, you know, I think with them, I just feel this complete creative trust. And it comes from us being very aligned in values. We've each done this for how long, over a dozen years. And I think through that time, we've been able to figure out who are we as brand builders and who are we as leaders. I'm fortunate to have known them for many, many years. We got to know each other when I was building Versed and they were building you to the people. And really just felt, I think, this kind of shared admiration and respect for how we made decisions and how we wanted our brands to show up and to function.

5:53Melanie Bender:And to me, that was kind of rare to people who really just like loved brand building as much as I did, loved the integrity and the creativity and felt that was as important as building a killer P &L. And to me, that was really the joy of finding people who were just as excited to be on this journey, who had incredible experience and knowledge and instincts, but most of all, just that joy of creating and beauty and of being able to do that together. Road was an incredible success story, right? This is a brand that was founded by Haley Bieber, scales, sells north of a billion dollars. Are there lessons from that particular experience that you find valuable today as you continue to build on Lore?

6:44Melanie Bender:Yeah, I mean, there's been incredible lessons from all the brands that I've done, which I feel so fortunate for. Very different lessons, you know, and each of the brands was very different in terms of not just identity, but strategy. And one of the things that I really took away from Rode is that Haley, she ran it like a fashion brand. To her, the only things that mattered were product and brand, creating things that she loved and was proud of that excited her and that she knew that the consumer would be excited and proud of. And that was it. She didn't stress about growth. She didn't stress about trying to, you know, kind of hit a certain ramp.

7:22Melanie Bender:In that way, it wasn't a P &L forward business in the way that ones I had done in the past. And to me, that really resonated, this hyper fixation on what are we actually making? What are we actually contributing? And that being the thing, that being enough. How much do you think about P &L versus the vision for the brand itself? and to your point, what you're actually building? Yeah, I mean, some days more than others. The P &L, it's the how, right? It can't be the why. But the P &L is really critical for you understanding the path to getting to do these amazing things that define the brand. But with Lore, it very much started by building something I love, building something that I thought should exist and doing it in a very open and undefined way.

8:11Melanie Bender:Very early on, I figured I wanted it to be fragrance. Frankly, I was tired of talking about how people look. After doing two skincare brands and one cosmetic brand, I knew that there was something deeper than that, something deeper that I wanted to spend my time thinking about and that I wanted to bring into the world. and that led me to fragrance so that I knew. But beyond that, I really let it be an open exploration. And it started with, you know, understanding first the science of fragrance, which was really fun, very aerospace engineering me. And then thinking about really what I wanted this world of the brand to be.

8:49Melanie Bender:It started kind of world first beliefs and codes. and from their product flowed in a very iterative way. Okay, let's double click on that. So world first, beliefs and codes. What does that mean in the context of, say, community building? It's interesting. They're kind of different ends of the continuity of a brand. All the brands I've done, you know, I've really believed in doing it world first. your world as a brand is, it's basically how you see, how you see reality. It's, it's what you hold to be true. I like starting there because I think that's what consumers are actually loving. That's what they actually buy.

9:30Melanie Bender:They, they buy into brands that have a different conception of reality that show them a different way of looking at the world, a different way of living within it. And to me, that's beautiful. That's compelling. That's cultural. Those are the brands that I like making. So I started first by really just kind of immersing myself, letting me imagine this world that I thought should exist, you know, kind of exploring what different ends of that could be. And then once I had that image, that idea, it was about articulating, kind of explaining, this is what it is, and this is why it is this way. Those were our beliefs and codes.

10:06Melanie Bender:And then everything really flowed from there. And community, I would also say that we're We're brand with community at our core, but I don't believe in being crowdsourced. So it wasn't about, you know, kind of going to a group of people and them telling us what it should be. I think it's more about really how you want to contribute to people's day-to-day lives, what role you want to play in it. And then making that a point of decision as you go through the brand, as you go through your packaging, the design of your fragrances, your price point. To me, that's where community comes to mind. So let's talk about storytelling.

10:41How do you actually create a story behind a brand? You've done such a good job with these fragrances and the brand itself. How do you think about storytelling?

10:50Melanie Bender:I think about it very openly. And there's a deep story behind lore. There's a deep story behind each of our fragrances. And I think the key there was just letting the stories form whatever way was natural. Like I said, one of them subliminates the story of growing up in Hawaii. Lovely and a little twisted. It started really as a mood board. It's this world of Versailles, but Versailles stuck through the looking glass. And by first understanding that visually, I was able to understand more about kind of the story of the scent. So my process is really just exploring it through all different ways in.

11:23Melanie Bender:I love a Pinterest board. I love writing poetry and words. I love writing narratives and just kind of playing with it all, seeing what sticks. I'm big on bringing people into it to give feedback when ready. That's where my co-founders are tremendous. I kind of just love to throw things at them, which perks them up, which makes them excited. It's not always what I think it's going to be. And I think that's the beauty of story. It's not just what does it mean to you, but how does it connect with other people? And I think we all have the ability to be storytellers and just have to let it explore and flow naturally a little bit.

11:59Why fragrance? So it feels like you've got this background in skincare and makeup. You learn a lot there. You jump into this category that feels somewhat associated to that world, but isn't. It also seems to me that fragrance is hyper-competitive. Did you see it that way? Was there a part of the market that you thought was untapped?

12:19Melanie Bender:Adam, I was so tired of talking about moisturizer. The world does not need a concealer from me. It does not. And I think what drew me to fragrance was that it was new. It was definitely net new to me. and it's hyper competitive in the sense that it's growing really quickly. It's changing. And I've always been attracted to, you know, kind of categories of dynamism, areas that are changing, because I think anytime it's changing, that means that there's possibility here. There's things that are going to rise and things that are going to fall. To me, those are the most exciting categories to create.

12:52Melanie Bender:And that's what skincare was kind of 10 years ago. And it's what fragrance is today. So that was, you know, more of the, let's say, analytical reason for going into it, believing in the growth, believing in, you know, kind of a shortage of brands that had the playbook of best practices that I had from the brands that I had done. But as equally, if not more so important, was the emotional side. And I thought about my life and, you know, the eight plus hours a day that I spend on screens, that you probably spend on screens, that everyone listening probably spends on screens. And that's this like really weird alternate reality that's hyper visual.

13:26Melanie Bender:There's, you know, a lot of seeing to it. There's maybe a little bit of sound. There's no smell. There's no touch. And I think it contributes a lot to this feeling of detachment. We don't feel like we belong. We don't feel like we live full lives. And to me, as I thought about fragrance and understood the science of fragrance and how it fires in our brains and the strength of the emotional response that it brings, it all felt like this very beautiful potential to create products that bring back some of that feeling, that bring back some of the depth, that create beauty, not beauty that you see, but beauty that you feel.

14:01Melanie Bender:And that was what I wanted to spend my time on, products that you put on because of how they make you feel. Perfect segue. You brought some today, Melanie. Let's go through some of these. Let's take a look. Yeah. All right. First, we'll talk about Sublimity. This is our Sheer Solar Musk. It is the very first scent that I started working on. It's the scent of growing up in Hawaii, where I'm from. It was a feeling that I had always wanted to go back to that you never can. And I thought, okay, I'll share it with the world in fragrance form. Sublimity, it's the story of all piling into the back of a truck on the weekends because the best beaches in Hawaii, you need four-wheel drive to get to.

14:38Melanie Bender:Yeah, there are the beaches, your playground, and your palace. You know you're going to be there all day. Maybe you have like a cooler full of cold drinks in there with you. In Hawaii, the white florals, the pua kini kini, the ling ling, they go right up to the sand and they fragrance the air there with this like warmth, sweetness. And when you get to the beach, you know, maybe the sun is so hot on your skin that it starts to scream at you after a couple minutes. So you dive into the water and sublimity is that very first wave that you go under. And if you've ever been inside a wave, if you look out the back, maybe you'll see the sun, maybe you'll see the horizon.

15:14Melanie Bender:And there's this most incredible sensation that inside a wave time stands still that each little drop of water, It's just moving one at a time. And that's the moment of sublimity. That's what I wanted to capture with this fragrance, which is the solar fragrance. So there's warmth to it. There's coconut nectar. There's lang-lang blossom. There's a little bit of sandalwood. There's also a little bit of marine musk. But to me, most of all, it smells like full sun on warm skin on the beach in Hawaii. I got to get a smell. Yeah, please. You've sold me. You tell the story in such a compelling way. I mean, I'm sold on it.

15:48But how do you do this digitally? Like this is such a tactical experience. We're smelling something here. We're together in person. Yeah. You're building this brand online. Yes, you're in retail. You're in 250 Sephora doors, which we'll get to in a moment. But when you're building a fragrance brand, how do you tell that story digitally?

16:10Melanie Bender:Totally. I mean, that was one of the most interesting challenges. My product is invisible. I'm choosing to sell them visual product through largely, you know, kind of visual mediums. And that's to me where the focus on feeling comes through that we choose scents because how they make us feel. We choose most things in our life because of how they make us feel. And there are certainly, you know, kind of literal ways to speak to scent, descriptive ways. But to me, it was more about kind of inviting different ways to tell the story. And to me, sublimity is the scent of growing up in Hawaii. But to someone else, I have people who say, okay, this reminds me of this one vacation that I took, the last vacation that I took with my parents.

16:51Melanie Bender:Or, you know, to me, it's this place in Mexico that we'd go every year. What was exciting about fragrance was not just telling my stories through it, but really using it as this kind of open call for sharing stories in general. and that's to me also part of the strategy because fragrance is so kind of person to person it is very personal it's interpreted differently it means something differently and I was really interested in not just being kind of descriptive and literal but also letting people discover scents and fragrances by stories that they share so how does Sephora come across lore yeah I mean we were very, very fortunate to have existing relationships with Sephora from my co-founders, whose first brands used to be people.

17:37Melanie Bender:It's still exclusive to Sephora. You know, I think we all knew early on that we wanted to build this brand, not just with a retailer, but with that retailer, with Sephora. Truly the best brand builders in beauty. They understand what it takes to build something from scratch to shift categories. And they have an incredible vision and fragrance and a lot of, you know, potential to continue growing that. So it made us all very excited to bring it to them. As soon as we got in the room, I think within 10 minutes in, it was very clear that this was something very special to do together. And the decision was easy.

18:17How does it scale so fast across the Sephora retail network? I mean, it's a relatively young business. All of a sudden, you're in 250 locations. How does that happen from a CapEx perspective, let's say?

18:34Melanie Bender:I think the decision to go into retail period, but also what's the right footprint to start with is a big one. Sephora has over 600 standalone doors in the US. So So while 250 doors is a lot of them, it's, it's for them, it would be partial chain. We had a lot of conversation together with them as to what was the right number to start with. We started in 150. That's one of the, the real lessons that, um, that I had from being in beauty and just consumer goods as long as I have, that it's not about getting the doors. It's not about getting the retailer. It's about being ready to perform in it. And it's very easy to push to be full chain.

19:09Melanie Bender:It's very easy to push for, you know, the most doors that you can get. Um, but what's more important is that you're in the right doors for where you're at right now. I am not a celebrity. I did not launch with a big audience. So I knew that it was very much building the brand through the brand. And for that reason, it was right to start what would be smaller in terms of door count, starting in 150 doors to build and grow from there. Very fortunate to be expanding now into 250, but it's all very based on kind of what feels like the right pace to go at for how I want to build the brand. With everything lore, it's about what feels right.

19:46Melanie Bender:It's about what's the, you know, kind of what supports the vision in the long term. You know, kind of CapEx-wise, it's different in every retailer, in every category. As a new brand of fragrance, we're fortunate that there's not the big kind of gondola build-outs that you would have in makeup, but there's certainly investments that go into it. And that's also a reason to think about starting small, you know, and really understanding what does it take to work in these doors so that as you're going from, if it's$150 to$250, or, you know, I've had past brands that are in$7 ,000. It's all about really being ready to make those doors successful for you and your partners.

20:25Do they ask for exclusivity off the bat in a partnership like this?

20:29Melanie Bender:It's very common for any new brand launching in a retailer for exclusivity to be part of the discussion. It's something that I was very comfortable and even excited to bring to Sephora. I'm a big believer in do one thing exceptionally and only expand from there. So I am not at all thinking about other places to go. I'm only thinking about, you know, really making Laura at Sephora the best possible partnership it can be. So Imaginary Ventures gets involved in the business at some point. They do a seed round with you guys. What has that experience been like with them? And do you find that they're the perfect partner?

21:09for Lore.