Ep 612: The Bootstrap Beauty Brand Going Up Against BlackRock in Target – Megababe

0:00It's so deeply ingrained in our society that we should be having a thigh gap or anything that you're experiencing around chafe is your fault. There's something wrong with you. I wanted to change that. One of the myths is that if you get into a large retailer, that means like the work is done and you kind of made it. Once we got into those large retailers, that is when the work started. It's like a David and Goliath every time we're in a retail shelf because all these brands are owned by the same three or four companies. They have so much more to spend with the retailer. They're more important to the retailer.

0:34Make sure you have a point of view. It is easier than ever to launch a product, but if you can't bring a point of view to the market, I don't know what your purpose is, and I don't think that customers will either.

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2:00Visit triplewhale.com, that's T-R-I-P-L-E-W-H-A-L-E dot com to learn more. I hosted a mastermind last year here, and we went out whale watching and saw like a whole pod, and they were spy hopping. And then they came back. Our place that we were having, our event was right on the water. And then the killer whales followed us into the inner harbor and were like hanging out while we were doing our event. So Canadian killer whales are not trying to like eat your boat. No. Well, in Spain, they were attacking yachts. Eat the rich. That's what they're trying to do. No, I was with them. I was like, that's right.

2:37Do it. Bizarre opening to a D2C podcast. But technically, we should just probably keep it because I'm here with mega babe herself, Katie Storino. Welcome to the D2C podcast. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm so jealous that you live near Wales. Yeah, we do live near Wales. It's not an everyday thing, although I live very close. I'm in a place called The Gorge, and so I see seals every day almost when I'm out on the water there. We like to rowboat and paddleboard and such. You'll have to come visit us. It's quite nice. I'm going to move in with you now. Nice. Okay, cool. I have an extra room.

3:08Okay. Um, well, take, take me back to the early, the pre-product mega babe days. Uh, talk to me about the message that you kind of brought out into the social sphere even before you launched your brand. So I started this work as just a curvy girl on the internet, trying to help women who didn't see themselves represented, get dressed. Um, basically it's a long winded way of being like, I was helping people find plus size clothing. And I realized through all these different seasons we were going through that there were no chafe solutions because every spring people were like, what are you using for thigh chafe?

3:48And I was like, I guess I'm using this stuff. I'm hoping that some big brand launches something cool soon. But they weren't. So that's where the seed of the idea came because I was like, I can't believe no one cares about chafe. And I found out no one even knew about chafe. Yeah. Though we've experienced it. Yes. I didn't know that other people knew that was going on, was that it was really common. It's so deeply ingrained in our society that we should be having a thigh gap or anything, anything like that you're experiencing around chafe is your fault. There's something wrong with you. And I wanted to change that.

4:25And so you built your audience. Did you know you always wanted, I guess you're just revealing, you didn't always know you wanted to launch the product. But talk about those initial days of just building that audience. How did that go? Building. So I had my own following. So I think when we launched Megababe, I had something like 60 ,000 followers. So not enough to make a viral brand at all. But at least I had a community behind me, which I still do, that was able to give me feedback, tell me what they loved, what they didn't love. And building that just came kind of organically. there weren't a lot of people talking about body diversity in the space that looked like me.

5:02And I was feeling a need in the market. And I realized that as soon as I started doing it, because I've, I worked in public relations in the past. And you can tell when you're hitting something, because there's a reaction. I mean, sometimes things can take longer, whatever. But I feel Like, you know, when you have something and I knew I had something because like press started coming to me. My followers were growing like pretty organically and I could tell that I was, I was stepping into the next phase of my life. You'd hit a nerve. Yes. So what were your first steps? I think based on your origin story, you were, you built this out of your parents' garage.

5:44Is that accurate? Yes. Like Jeff Bezos of ThyChief. I am, I know I'm still waiting for, I'm waiting for my yacht that the orcas can eat. Um, but I did, I, I, so I was like, you know what? I'm going to make a thigh chafe stick. And I grabbed my, my two best people, which are my sister, who's very good at finances and business decisions. And I grabbed my best friend from camp who just, we always kind of mind meld and speak the same creative language. And I was like, guys, we're going to make a chafe stick. And neither of them had experienced chafe up to that point. I talked to my family, my parents, extended relatives.

6:24They were like, I don't think that's a really big issue for people. It might just be for you. And I was like, I know you're wrong. I know that you're all wrong. And I found out as we were starting to Google manufacturers, because that is really what we did, really just finding the right place. And then someone would be like, we don't do that. But this person might, as I was starting to go down that hole, I realized people in that industry didn't even know what chafe was. So this was a total white space, which was exciting and scary because the education has been all up to us. It's a white space, but you're lucky that it's also a touchstone, that when people hear it, they may not know that they're looking for it.

7:07But when people hear it, like you say, there's a reaction. People know because it's such a painful thing when it happens. Yes. Well, even when you say the word chafe, we don't always get the reaction that you're hoping for. So I always say, you know, when you're rubbing and like your legs rub together, I try to show people because that word does not really resonate with people. Yeah. For me, it's just I just blow out the crotch of my jeans all the time within a couple of years. So like I think the jeans protect me from the chafe, but I just have to like patch up my jeans, right? Well, that is an indicator.

7:40I say, if your jeans have ever looked like this, then you need us. Yeah. Oh, that's good for the ads. Yeah. How much research went into knowing what even stops thigh chafe? Did you look at other products? How did you figure out the science of chafe suppression? I looked at what was on the market and how I wanted to improve upon it. And what worked for me, what didn't work for me, what I liked about other products and what I didn't. And we Frankenstein together like the ultimate chafe solution. We cleaned up the formulas that we saw on the market and made them made them more towards something we would want to buy and less like something that an old man might use.

8:19You're talking about me. I was just gonna say that the whole category really around chafe was so embarrassing. Also, I don't know if you've if you've ever done a deep dive in there, but it really is like, it's embarrassing things like Dee's Nuts for Her or Gooch Guard. These are real brands and I shouldn't be shouting them out, but they're real brands that are in business. And me as a girl who's just like trying to walk to work, I really wasn't, I didn't want to pull Gooch Guard out of my bag. No, I could see how that would be a problem. No, so we did. We launched with two SKUs. We launched with our Mega Babe Bust Dust, which I decided that, first of all, powder to stop boob sweat is something that people were not talking about or even identifying as an issue to talk about.

9:10Because I figured as long as we were talking about chafe, let's just open the conversation up and get into something else, boob sweat. I wanted to take a talc-free powder that was super fine and put it in a hands-free pump that you could just pump into your bra, down your back, in your underwear, that you didn't have to touch with your hands. I'm big on not touching things with my hands. And I found that people don't care about touching things with their hands. They are fine to touch things with their hands, actually, after all these years. So we kind of do both now. But yes, we launched with those two products in June of 2017.

9:46So the jobs to be done of Mega Babe is just to make people who have the scientifically average body feel more comfortable in life. It's not even about the body size or the average body or plus size or thin. It really is all these people in the world are dealing with really normal issues like the boob sweat, like a sweaty butt. But it really doesn't have to do with your body size. And we wanted to just normalize that conversation and especially empowering women to feel comfortable talking about it, not just with their friends, but even with themselves, feeling comfortable and confident to leave the house and not feel like they needed to feel ashamed or that they were using products that made them embarrassed.

10:37Yeah, exactly. Or that they just had to suffer, which I think a lot of people - Yes. Oh, we have decided that our biggest competitor is people just dealing. Yes. It's like women just being like, I guess I'll just tuck my dress between my legs. This is my cross to bear. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So you get these two products together. Talk to me about the go-to-market strategy. And you said you had 60 ,000 when you launched. So you had already started to build up the audience based on talking about these things. On my personal social. So we started a new channel for MegaBabe. Very cool. And then talk to me about the go-to-market.

11:14How did you launch it and how did it go? So my sister who lives near my parents, we figured out with the factories that we were working with that we had to meet these MOQs that were about 10 ,000 units per SKU, which if you're talking about the type of business we're talking about launching, is a lot. This is three people who have never been in beauty launching a product that everyone tells you isn't going to work and doesn't matter and people don't need it and it's embarrassing. So why are you doing it? So you got 20 ,000 units in my parents' garage and we pushed go like, I think it was like June 15th or something.

11:54And I was like, did we sell out yet? We'd sold like 10 sticks. And we just posted live. I posted on my stories. We had hired a PR firm. We got like a couple press mentions. But at that time, even talking to press, it was like, what's chafe? What is this for? This is for when you're sitting down and you feel like your legs are irritated? I mean it. People really don't – they didn't know what this was. So we were having to explain that over and over and over. But we did. We got a little bit of press. But the big thing that happened at the end of June, we were on the Today Show. And that is when I knew that we hit because we sold out of every unit that we made by July 1st.

12:42People say like those, you know, TV, no, people aren't saying TV's dead. No, they're saying TV's dead. Some people are saying TV's dead. And to think of the power of a Today Show experience having that much impact. And it doesn't, and you know what, it's never happened like that since. And And it was just in that moment on that day, the people watching hadn't seen that messaging before. And it hit a nerve. And then so what were the core things you did to build off that success to kind of keep the growth going? Obviously, getting more product by August was difficult. But I believe we were restocked by like mid-August or something.

13:23And then we started having – so we were just on it. We just had our own website. we were just D2C and then we were approached by both Target and Ulta to go into their stores like fairly quickly and that was a huge deal and we decided that I think Target had offered us like a smaller amount of doors and Ulta was ready to like get behind us full chain. So we launched exclusively in Ulta for I think the first year and then we launched in Target after that. Very cool. I remember one of my friends runs Bushbaum here in Canada. Oh, yes. And his strategy, I think, has been to go really, really deep with Ulta.

14:04I think, and even forego some other launches. How are you managing your multiple retail presences? Are you in more than those two now, or those are the main two? We are no longer in Ulta, actually. We are just in, we're not just in, we're in Target, we're in Walmart. We've just gotten into more products into CVS and more doors in CVS. And we're in some smaller retailers like Nordstrom and Anthropologie. But it's difficult. I think one of the myths about starting a brand is that if you get into a large retailer, then that means the work is done and you kind of made it and you did it. But what I found really interesting is that once we got into those large retailers, that is when the work started.

14:51And we had no idea. We had no idea. And we didn't hire anyone for years. So it was just us figuring it out by ourselves and, you know, like doing everything, doing customer service. We did shipping, like my parents and my brother-in-law, like literally wrapping pallets in my parents' garage for like the retail trucks to come pick up. So we were doing everything by ourselves and we bootstrapped it like that for many years. I imagine in retail, especially for like, it's a product that people understand, but they may not recognize it on the shelf. It may just look like deodorant or something that doesn't call out to them.

15:28So what did you have to do in these retail stores? I guess it's purchasing the promotional end caps and things like that. But talk to me a little bit about what you did to kind of break through. Those are a privilege. When we've had MCAPs, that's been amazing for us. but it's hard to get those. I'm just being really realistic for the people listening that it's hard to get those signs. It's hard to get those end caps. They don't just give them to everyone, especially we're a smaller brand. We're self-funded. We don't have the same budget as the people. We're in the deodorant aisle in Target. That is the most popular aisle in the store.

16:02We are competing against only giant brands. And I can't believe that we've lasted this long and done this well. What has worked for you in these places? Well, we've tried all the things. So you pay into the marketing that they offer you. You pay into the sampling opportunities. And you figure out what works for you. And I think sometimes it's interesting. You talk to other brands and they're like, this kills for us. We do so well with this and then we try it and it's not for us. Or we do really well with something that – so it's like you have to find your secret sauce for what's going to work to help drive the sales on the retail side.

16:38And you brought up a really good point about the people don't necessarily recognize the product for what it is, and especially because we're in the deodorant aisle. Our chafe stick, I think for many years, was getting confused for a deodorant. And my husband actually was like, you guys need to say it on the bottle. You need to say it on the cap. So we have a big stops chafe sticker now on our thigh rescue. Nice. That makes perfect sense. So I come from this world of performance marketing and e-commerce by a way of ads, essentially. That's really in my DNA. And I always love talking with people who've created audiences through their own audience, through their products audience, and really ads were more of an, it sounds like, especially in the early days, ads were more of an afterthought where you were really concerned with real product market fit, really building a community, leveraging organic social.

17:29Talk to me a little bit about that strategy and how it's evolved. Are you now running ads? Yes, but only recently in the past three years. So we will be eight in June. And I think for those first five years, we were not running ads. We were not doing the traditional marketing things. Like I had dreams of billboards. I had dreams of things like that. And we didn't spend money in that way. Again, because we're self-funded, we didn't take salaries for many years. We did all the jobs ourselves and we built our team really slowly. And we've basically grown with intention and grown sustainably so that we don't crash and burn.

18:11Yes, and profitably. Exactly. We've been profitable since the start, but that hasn't always been a cool thing. I feel like in those first five years, the trend for D2C brands was to spend so much on marketing without any guarantee and then go out of business. The founders had taken money from fundraising. They built this brand. It didn't work. They still had money in their pockets to walk away and start something else. So it's the opposite of what we've built, which is, again, it's profitable from the start. And we haven't grown less than 33 % year over year since we started it. One of my favorite creators is actually this guy that goes to grocery stores and he takes pictures of the shelves and he colors in all the brands that are owned by - I've seen him.

19:02The world's biggest - The world's biggest - Yes, yes. Cancel this clothing company is his name or his handle anyways. So I imagine in your aisle on the retail shelves, it's a similar thing where it's like a very few brands are actually owned by owner-operator, family-owned, and the rest of them are owned by BlackRock or something, right? Yes, yes, yes. That's exactly it. And I think people assume that we have funding in the way that other brands have funding. Most brands have funding because it's really hard to survive because you can't do that marketing and advertising without money. Again, I said, I mentioned in the beginning, my sister is very smart with money and she's the reason we're still in business.

19:40But I think that is one of the really hard things about going up against these so-called, it's like a David and Goliath thing every time we're in a retail shelf because I know that all these brands are owned by the same three or four companies and they have so much more to spend with the retailer. They're more important to the retailer. And I think supporting small woman-owned brands became less trendy or less important recently. That's what I've noticed. They used to really want to brag about that or put signage up or highlight you. And that has really gone away. Just in the cultural, political, economic climate that we're now in.

20:26All of it. Yeah. Yep. It feels like that. I can understand that. In the ad realm, how has the growth through advertising done for you? I think it's been a learning curve. I think it's been hard for us to write those checks to spend that money. But we found, and we're on Amazon now too, we resisted Amazon for a really long time. Because we thought, I don't know, we thought it would upset retailers. We just didn't know. And now we crush on Amazon. So I feel like it's interesting because it's hard to tell what is successful because you don't always have the numbers behind what you can get how many impressions you're getting from a billboard.

21:07Let me back up. We did our first bus campaign last summer. And we had two buses, which brands that do bus campaigns, they get like 30, 40 buses. We had two buses. But people saw our bus. We had them in New York and Chicago and Boston, and it was really incredible. And then we did a deodorant campaign. That was for Chafe. And then we did a deodorant campaign. We also ran ads on basically regular TV, like not streaming. We started there. Classic, like call up the station. Yes. And that has been really interesting because everyone wants these new forms of advertising. and we have gotten so much traction from just this like old school out of home.

21:59We advertise in the taxis in New York and that is probably our most talked about ad campaign. Very cool. How do you quantify that? Either the taxi cab or the buses, are you looking for halo effects in your retail? How are you quantifying the success of out of home campaigns? Yes, we are. And so I would say last summer, if I'm being honest, we were probably disappointed with the results based on the money that we had spent because it was so hard spending money for the first time like that. But I think also it's like the public, the audience, they need to get used to you. They need to see it, what is it, seven times now in order to buy something.

22:42So it's like I feel like we got in front of people and now totally fluke by accident, had no idea. Amazon used our chafe stick in an ad that's running right now. It ran during the Super Bowl. It ran during the Oscars. The Olympics, I could not get better visibility. But I have no idea if that's really like – there's no like giant spike we're seeing. So I have to wait to see if that brand recognition is going to hit people once it starts to become warm out and they're like, oh my god, I need something for chafe for first wed or it's the season we're just getting into chafe season we're just getting into it it's not quite here any exciting activations you have planned for this summer yes we have a very we have our first non-product focused campaign it's called the i'm not fine index and we conducted uh we conducted a survey with women asking like different questions about like would you rather ask the driver to turn the air conditioning down or would you rather just sit there freezing.

23:50And the percentages of women who just would rather not be thought of as high maintenance or annoying or it's fine, I'll just deal with it. The amount of times we do that as women is sad. We've been conditioned to do that. We've been trained to do that. And so we're trying to highlight the fact that women every single day walk around saying that they're fine when they're not, that goes for your body comfort as well. So it's the same thing. It's like, I'll just deal with it. I'm fine. That's really smart brand messaging to get to that problem because it connects so well to your product and it connects to so many other things in life.

24:30Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And especially right now, it feels like you need something like that. Yeah. Cool. And then so how will that be rolled out? That's going to be mainly on the social channels? Really? No, it's really big for us. Are you ready? We're doing, we have billboards in New York, like big billboards. We have two. And then we have bus shelter advertisements and then on social. And then we're doing a bit of like sponsored content with like a select group of influencers. Super cool. Have you ever run person on the street style interviews as ad content? No, I could, I could see that working really well for you guys.

25:05We, I had, I had a guy who runs a street talk on a little while ago and it's just sort of like the ability to have, you know, because you're used to seeing person on the street style interviews as like comedy or political aggravation in some cases, but they're a really good way on with CPG products to overcome the awareness gap and sort of have like a full funnel all in one ad. And people will quite often watch it because it kind of feels a bit more organic. So I feel like for a category like yours, where it's like, even if you ask questions around things that you put up, what are you doing for Chase this summer?

25:37Yeah, exactly. Even just simple, just right on the nose. Like, what are you doing for Chase this summer? I think could be really effective for you. Yeah. I like your idea. I will take it. All right. Thinking about like, because it sounds like you have a lot of New York-centric activations. Does that impact sales nationally? I'm trying to think, or are you really focused on just, I guess the New York audience is so big that it just becomes worth it? Well, here's the thing. New York is a walking city. So you've got a lot of people. I'm walking here. That's what they say, right? Yeah, I'm walking here.

26:08Exactly. So I feel like that is one of the reasons I'm based here. That's another reason. But we really – we're trying to get to America. Like we're trying to get to the people. Yes. So we do – we obviously – we do digital advertisements and we do a lot of like social gifting. But it's hard. Like it's really hard. The density of the eyeballs in New York, right? Yeah. No, that is the reason to do a billboard here. Makes it make sense. But I also, we did billboards in Chicago. I would like to do billboards in smaller cities. But again, you've got to make choices. I'd like to do it all over Florida because it's hot all the time.