Building a Bootstrapped Skincare Brand

0:00I think a lot of brands forget to actually nurture their audience and they just say, well, we're having a sale. Let's just throw an email campaign out. I think email and SMS are mandatory and not just the typical come back and purchase. We do so much education. We do VIP. We really want to make people feel special. Welcome to the DTC Insider Podcast, where online business owners come to find actionable tips and tactics to grow their businesses. Now, here's your host, Brian Roizenthal.

0:43Hey, welcome to another episode. My name is Brian, I'm your host, and today I'm joined by Sarah Milansky. She's the founder of Blossom Essentials. Hey, Sarah, thanks for being here on the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. So why don't you start by telling the audience more about yourself and the company? Absolutely. So I'm the CEO and founder of Blossom Essentials. We make clean and natural hydration products for severely dry, reactive, and damaged skin. That can really mean anything from eczema, psoriasis, dermatitis, kind of the skin conditions realm, all the way to menopausal, hormonal changing skin, radiation therapy skin, which is really drying, you know, mosquito bites, you know, kind of the whole gamut within the dry skin space.

1:31Why did you decide to start a company? I have severely dry skin. I also have really sensitive skin. I can react to pretty much anything. I can go outside and have a reaction. I did one of those allergy tests and I was allergic to 49 out of the 60 things he tested me for. Yeah, it was brutal, very itchy. So yeah, ingredients really do matter. And I noticed that a lot of the products on the market were causing me to have reactions, especially ones that kind of boast being for sensitive skin. So I really took my own skin as the testing ground for making really non-reactive products. And your background is in marketing, right?

2:16Yes, digital marketing. Yeah. I've seen the whole world there. Right. So you've been in the trenches as well from the other side. Did you work with brands or did you do something else? Kind of all over the place. I started my digital marketing journey after college in the affiliate space. and I was working bringing on media buyers to run our offers that we would bring on, you know, kind of on the other side of the business. And then from there, I kind of moved up that ladder and realized, what else can I do? I got really bored and antsy and trying to find the next big thing, you know, as most entrepreneurs do until they finally start their own thing.

3:02But yeah, then I moved to media buying myself. So I do know how to navigate a business manager quite well. After that, I went into branding. Actually, no, before that, I went into business development for an actual media buying team where we developed or almost like incubated brands. And that was really, really cool. It kind of gave me the start into the world of manufacturing and how to navigate that, who to kind of speak to. A lot of, don't get me wrong, a lot of handholding for sure in the beginning and just kind of like what's going on. But ultimately, because of that, I was able to even have the, I don't want to say the guts, but like the beginning knowledge to launch Blossom.

3:42And it was really, really helpful. But after that, I worked in branding and a few other niches. And then I eventually just went off on my own. And what are the things, you know, because you've been at both sides, they value, you know, about, you know, marketers and agencies that probably those founders who have never worked at an agency or maybe as a freelancer don't know? Well, if you've been following me for a while, you might know that I don't love agencies. I've had a lot of bad experiences as a founder working with agencies, especially because I know or I knew what was going on. You know, I'm working at an affiliate agency for quite a while.

4:24And I did have that experience often where, you know, the CEO would sell me on it, build this pipe dream and then hand me off to a junior. And I was paying, you know, quite a lot of money. And it was, you know, terrible results. And it made me feel really questioning myself and my self-worth and the business and some gaslighting. Sorry, I know. I apologize if you're an agency. But yeah, I think that as, you know, even when I worked on the other side of things, I can only really experience it as the founder. And because of my poor experiences with those agencies, I now know exactly what to ask, exactly what to look out for as like red flags and then also green flags.

5:10Don't get me wrong. There are some, you know, quote unquote agencies that really are here working with the person that just needed some extra help. Right. And so they consider themselves an agency because they have employees. But at the end of the day, it's still really them and their mind behind the work. And I do that right now with our email and SMS team. And she's just such a go-getter and she works so hard. So yeah, I think, you know, asking the right questions and making sure that it's, I personally think unless you're spending, you know, high five figures on ads, do not go to an agency, find a person.

5:47And then even then make sure that, you know, it's not too large of an agency where you really will just be another fish in the pond. And there's, I agree. And there's one more thing. And by the way, I own an agency and I'll tell you my thoughts on that. And I totally agree with some things you said because I come from the background of computer science. Back then, my first company in 28, I'm not that old. I'm 37, but I started early. I'm early, but yeah, I was pretty young. We opened the first office in 2010. and back then we used to deliver apps, you know, websites. It could be phone apps. Yes, a few, but not even.

6:33It was Facebook. There was a thing, you know, back then, a huge thing, you know, Facebook apps and, of course, web applications or for desktop. And the difference between marketing companies and those companies is that the deliverable, let's say it's clear, because in practice, it's not that clear. There's a deliverable. There's a website. There's a system. There's something. Then in 2013, I created the first version of the current agency I own. It's different because it's not, you don't work to deliver something. You work to achieve the brand's goals. And there's no deadline, like there are multiple small deadlines, but it's an ongoing thing you're chasing and there are ups and downs and the entry barrier.

7:23It's lower, right? So there were many agencies over the years. Everyone is doing meta ads, Google ads, all kinds of stuff. So it's kind of sad being an agency in the time in which agency is a bad word. And many agencies, agency owners try to say, well, I'm not an agency. I actually hate agencies, but well, you are. So it's tricky. It's tricky. Yeah, and I agree with you. And I think that the hardest part is that it's so much easier said than done to, say, vet them, right? Because if you don't know, like, I am grateful that I can go into a business manager and be like, this is good, this bad, this is good, this bad.

8:09You know, most founders, you know, especially when you're coming from, you know, founding the company for your own background, let's say for skincare specifically. let's say you made it in your kitchen or you started it because you have a chemistry degree and you wanted to create something and then the marketing comes after. And then you're like, oh, wait, I actually have to sell this. Let me go lean on my network or just start Googling who's an agency or who can help me with this. And then everybody under the sun promises the world and they have no idea how to choose and they can go through a referral.

8:45And when I first started, I have two distinct stories of my progression or journey for meta ads. So just to put it into perspective, the way it worked for us, I never really wanted to run the meta ads myself. I'm not, I'm not, I'm nowhere near good enough for that. I can look at it and I can evaluate, but I am not necessarily a super, you know, analytical person. And I'm not, I'm very much like, you know, I have emotions and I'm excited and that's not good for me. very much so. And I'm also, I hate like tedious work where you just have to like keep, you know, launching new ads, launching new ads.

9:21So I'm like the helper and I'll get whatever is needed to my media buyer to get it done. But at the end of the day, like I will never choose that role. But all of that being said, when I first launched five years ago, I partnered with my first partner back then and technically second, but that's a whole nother story. He was handling the media buying himself for his this other brand before he he came on on board with blossom and so he kind of like taught me a bunch and especially uh focused around creative and such but that's when ios 14 kind of happened and so he was struggling because he actually didn't know how to media buy that well either i guess uh and so we uh so he was referred an agency and it was pretty low cost back then but at the time, it was so much money for us because we weren't making anything.

10:12And it was referred by a friend of his who was using them for a supplement company. And so the supplement company was, you know, I guess taking off or they were seeing at least some success. And so we respected the agency and we believed in them. We're like, okay, let's give it a try. This is, you know, a large amount of money for us, but we're going to trust and believe that this is going to be the thing that gets us to the next goal. No, that did not happen. Even my ex-partner, after I think probably four months of running with them where it just went absolutely nowhere. And mind you, I don't give it like a month before I determine this is not working.

10:49I don't even give it three months, six months. I give it so much time because they keep coming back on these phone calls and giving me hope that this is going to be the next thing and then nothing happens. But I will say like that agency did better for me than the next story I'm about to tell you. But so we were using it, we were using them and finally we're like, we have to get out of here. I switched to this new agency or it was very much a young, it was a girl who was phenomenal at creatives. Actually, she pivoted to only being a creative agency now and kudos to her. I still have a lot of respect for her.

11:23I have nothing bad to say about this specific woman, but she had like a team behind her essentially. So kind of like what I was explaining earlier, find the person that's actually doing the work and then they have helpers. She was very much creative focused. So she pushed out a ton of new creatives with hooks and angles and such. And I loved it. I loved it. We did amazing. We did the best we've ever done to that point. And then, and I made a mistake. Like iOS 14 hadn't even happened yet with the first. Then it happened with this agency. And then her creatives weren't working because we weren't getting it to the right people.

11:57After, I think I worked with her for probably like eight months or so. And she was, yeah, amazing. I really have a lot of respect for her. But, you know, ads weren't working. All of that that we were seeing success for prior was gone. And then I get to my nightmare agency that really scarred me. This is the company who made me second guess my product, my brand, and myself so much that I almost closed the business. That's how bad it was. I was spending$7 ,500 a month on this agency when we were making next to nothing. I was taking a huge leap of faith because they had become so highly regarded and referred by this mastermind I was in.

12:45Because I was like, I have to get in front of smart people. I have to figure out what the problem is. I've never had such a bad and demeaning and just awful experience that I had with that. What was the worst? What happened to them? So they led me on for six months. They said, your product is too expensive. It's not working. We were making prior with the creative agency like 50K a month, right? which at the time was monumental for us. And then with this one, we were spending 3x the cost and they were making us 10k a month in total. And it wasn't even through their ads. It was retention as well.

13:28So I was paying 3x, they were making us 10k and we were spending probably 10k. And then they just kept going excuse after excuse after excuse and never taking responsibility and never saying, hey, you know, maybe it's us. Maybe it's, you know, they obviously put me on a junior media buyer. That was very clear as day. Two of them, by the way. Like they switched to like even more junior, I think, once they realized it wasn't going to take off. But the worst part about it was like they kept giving me hope as if they're going to be the saving grace and not that we had a good brand. And then the moment I gave them six months, I swear to God, I'm not exaggerating.

14:10Six full months before I was like crying myself to sleep at night. Like, what am I doing? I'm in over my head. I made a mistake. I fired them. I partnered with my now partner who was just coming on as a media buyer at the time. And within quite literally two weeks, we had made$90 ,000 just by him just fixing the media buying. We didn't do anything different. We had the same creatives. We had the same offer. We had the same this, that, and the other. And all he did was go into the business manager, fix things, launch things appropriately. And then it turned around in the blink of an eye and we had our best year.

14:47That was, I remember, because it was an ultimatum. I had to go out and get more money from a family friend as a loan. And he was like, and this was, so this was December 27th, 2021, because we had 2022 as our biggest year. he said okay I'm going to give you this small amount of money you either take it and turn it into something so for 2022 or you if by the end of the year you run out of the money you're not getting another dime you have to close up shop and I was like okay so I found my then my now partner and then you know person and I took a huge risk because he was also very expensive but I knew him personally, like through my world.

15:30And I knew what he could do. And again, I'm not like two weeks and the whole, the whole business turned around. And that's when I knew it was the agency just like breaking me down and like trying to destroy my everything that I had and all of my belief in my company because we were fine. Like we, yeah. Anyway, so I'm very passionate about it. So yes, I am. Because I mean, in the audience, we have, you know, fellow founders had heard behind in your journey. And every piece of advice you give them, as little as it might seem, it's huge because they might be to, you know, about to hire the next agency.

16:13And probably they didn't bet it right. Probably it's because someone said you should work with them, but probably they didn't bet it. So it's always good. And besides that, you said that was, you know, 2021. Things have changed a lot in this, everywhere, but in this space, in the marketing space, in the DTC space, we're going to talk about the transition you made to retail as well. But things are, you know, when we started a company back then in 2013, meta ads was just the right, the right column ads. So there was not feed ads. No feed ads, right? That's a long time ago. Yeah, 2013. Then, well, of course, everything improved.

16:55You know, Facebook and with this, I don't know if you know Neil Goyal from LinkedIn, at least. Neil Goyal, he was formerly at TopCard and now he's at Disco. He's one of the top voices in the coverage in the U.S. mainly. And I had the pleasure of having him twice here and talk once in a while. Neil, if you're listening, he knows what he means to me because he's always, you know, trying to give you a lot of good advice, you know? And he did a breakdown on the evolution of e-commerce in the last few years. And basically in a nutshell, pre-2020, let's say pre-COVID, Meta was a money-making machine.

17:33So you put$1, you got 10, and it was aggressive. And besides, we used to have all the funnel, landing page views, add to cart, initiated checkout and purchase, and we could see the whole thing there. Sure, you could use analytics, but you could see the truth, right? But then COVID hit, of course, massive demand. 2021 iOS 14 hit, as you said, generating the issues we keep till this day with tracking. 2022, there were a massive layoff. And in 2023, friends started to realize that they needed to be profitable. Because that's the thing. And we all say now, yeah, right, why not? But back then, you know, money was cheap and it wasn't a thing.

18:14And 2024, it was like the V line, you know, the inflection point in which everyone was like, oh, we need to go back to the basics. In 2025, I think that, of course, we are recording this in July. So we already have the first half. And probably, I don't know about you, but I don't think many people anticipated what happened so far with the tariffs and all this stuff. TikTok banned or not banned in the beginning of the year. So we thought it was going to be okay this year after the elections, which was, you know, a shaky year for many brands. Uncertainty. And I think the word uncertainty is still around.

18:54What do you think about that? I love that question. I was just talking to my retail consultant about this yesterday. It has never been more fickle. I swear, every year I go into it being like, this is going to be the year that it gets easier. And I think I'm just trying to trick myself into thinking that, guys, whoever's listening to this, it never gets easier, especially as you grow. It is so like there's there's so many uncertainties. You're absolutely correct. And I think that especially as a as a brand founder, I haven't necessarily had to navigate the tariffs as much as some others that were like in shipment.

19:33And also we produce in the United States, but I do get my components from from China. And it's not even a cost thing, although that definitely plays in. It's very much a capabilities thing. And the options are just so much more. What they consider stock is so much further along than what we have in the United States. And then the MOQs are significantly less. So I don't have to order 50 ,000 at a time constantly, especially if we're launching something new. So that didn't really seem like a feasible option to us. but uh all of the suppliers and especially the raw materials and ingredients suppliers they're just hiking up prices for no reason because they can right and it's and i was like well is it going to go down when tariffs are removed and they're like no once it goes up it doesn't come down they'll find another reason to charge you for it so um i'm now starting to navigate all of that so there's uncertainty on my level and then also uncertainty to the end customer.

20:29They don't want to spend as much money. The brands that are doing well right now are the cheaper brands, regardless of how their formulas are clean or natural or this, that, and the other, whatever's important to their values. And so it's just become, let's just see what happens, which is a really difficult thing to do when you're trying to grow because we had, And here's another example. Like the retailers are being very conservative and they're only taking bets on the brands that they don't have to take bets on. And what that means is they're bringing in brands that they know are going to sell, right?

21:07through virality or it's celebrity backed or something that's just engagement or brand awareness forward rather than the brands that are actually producing really great formulas and really great products. And so that shifted. That wasn't the case a year ago, even maybe less than a year ago. I think with the changes in the tariffs and with Trump changing his mind every two weeks, everybody's pulling back consumers retailers and it's more so important to be profitable now because it's a waiting game and a survival game versus okay how are we going to get to our next milestone and we had to pivot our mindset of late from this is going to be the year that we hit you know the next hockey stick to this is going to be the year that we're going to survive and have enough money in the bank so that by the time 2026 rolls around and maybe, you know, with the retailers we're actively pursuing and in conversations with are going to reopen those doors that they've now put internal, you know, pauses on.

22:16And that's, that's a thing. We were, we were talking to a huge retailer and we were pretty far along in the process. And then all of a sudden just quiet. And we're like, what's going on? Turns out from what we understand. They haven't really like, you know, come forward with this information, but based on what we're hearing from other brands that were pretty far along as well, and, you know, had actual conversations and were at the finish line, those were also paused. Like they hadn't heard anything either that a lot of these retailers have put a mandate in not to bring in new brands, not even like popular ones, like just nothing because we just don't know where the world is going to be in, you know, six to 12 months.

22:59And that's very difficult because we forecast as best we could, or at least we, you know, thankfully we're bootstrapped and that is a huge leg up for us because we don't have to report to an investor team that says, you know, we were supposed to go into so-and-so and we didn't because they put a mandate in and therefore you're not getting your, you know, 20X returns or whatever. We are in a very fortunate position where we can just wait it out. But on the other side of things, it's like my mental capacity to wrap my head around that is just not quite there. It's so hard, right? Because we're so on the brink of this like greatness that it's almost like every year, I feel like I'm like just grasping for it.

23:44You know, it's like I'm on a treadmill and it's like hanging from a string right in front of me. Exactly. I talk to many brands every single week and I can guarantee you're not the first one to say that, hey, you know, we had this goal, but now the goal is to survive. Literally, I think that Sean Frank at Rich, I think the other day he said something like that in their newsletter or on LinkedIn, and it's a pretty well-known brand.

24:14What we are living these days is not the norm, and brands need to adapt somehow. So probably the next question for you is, how are you adapting in 2025? Because you said you had some things planned for the year, but of course the year looks a lot different. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So don't be afraid to shake things up internally, even if that makes a few people mad. I think that when we move to a, and this is kind of a twofold answer, but when we move to a profit first or an EBITDA approach, and that was already in 2023 right so this was way before this but we scaled back meta dramatically because it was not you know at the end of the day it was very very expensive and now it's only more expensive by the way to to acquire customers on meta so we shifted and we decided as a company that's when we're going to pursue retail and in order to do that we had to go through a rebrand we had to change manufacturers it was like a complete overhaul so that's the first part of your answer because or part of your question because uh we were almost planning for this to happen years before unintentionally so i made new manufacturing relationships and i think that's a really really big part of why we're able to survive right now because they were understanding of like hey i put in these po's for massive or i put in these yeah purchase orders for massive of quantities, but in fact, the retailers ordered a lot less for our current ones and the other ones are taking a little bit longer.

25:47Can we prolong when you produce it into batches? And so having that relationship has allowed us to survive on that side of things. And then cutting back, I am very well known in my little world as very, I don't want to say scrappy. Scrappy is a good word. I don't want to say cheap but and i know every dollar coming in and every dollar going out and mind you we still spend a lot but keeping that opx as clean as humanly possible and just knowing your finances that has helped us a lot as well and that pushes me into my next point of like things have not been working for so long on like meta and other facets that i finally was like all right i I need to step on some toes.

26:35And it's not ideal. And I don't intentionally want to do that. But I have to make a change because something's not working and I have to fix it. Whether that's going to fix it or not, you have to understand that you're taking a risk if you're changing something. And that's not an easy thing to do. But I also understand it might fail. It might win. But if I don't try, we're just going to keep doing. We're going to be in the same cycle as we've always been for a while. And the world is changing. business is changing and we have to adapt so as of like two weeks three weeks ago maybe i overhauled a lot of internal digital focus stuff to number one cut some cut some costs number two to see if we just need a new set of eyes and number three to kind of have it all have a lot of like synergy between d2c and retail because i think for a very long time we did not really have that.

27:26And then we're trying new things. Sorry, Tukati. So what do you mean by synergy between retail and DDC? We want the customer to see us online and then go in and purchase or vice versa. It's more like, I don't want to say brand awareness because we're not driving brand awareness specifically like with med ads or something. We have our other ways of doing that through influencers. And we just recently started with a PR firm for the first time because we understand the importance of like, at the end of the day, nobody knows who we are and they're not gonna pick us up on shelf at Walmart unless they know who we are, right?

28:00So there's a lot of like mixing the ads around and the awareness around like, hey, this is what we're doing. This is why we're different. And then also trying to have us being in Walmart then get them to purchase online because of that authority. And like, you know, Walmart wants us, you want us to. So just a lot of synergy there. What was the big fear or the biggest misconception, fear, everything that you want to put into that bag that you had when you were going into retail for the first time coming from a DTC? It's terrifying. It still is terrifying. Like one misstep. And we're very fortunate that the partners that we have for retail are a lot more lenient.

28:44But if you go into a Target or a CVS or a Sephora or an Ulta, it is strict. And they'll, you know, catch you or ding you for anything. And so it's pretty terrifying. And you also need to prove yourself. I think the biggest misconception, or at least it was in the past, was like, okay, you get into the retailer and then you're done. You did all of the work to get into the retailer. You fought the fight. You went viral, blah, blah, blah. I mean, we've never gone viral. My point is the whole concept is like you got to that end, right? To the finish line. Except if you get to the finish line, you're only just getting to the starting line.