669: They Built a Luxury Beauty Brand in Year One — With a Team of Two | Brunel

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1:12They haven't raised a cent or paid a single influencer. Today's guests are Jasmine Tookes and Sabrina Carstenfeld, co-founders of Brunel, the bootstrap luxury body care brand that went viral purely on product and word of mouth and in this conversation you're going to learn why jasmine turned down years of celebrity brand deals to really build something real and how they launched self-funded and profitable while pushing chemists harder than any brand they'd ever worked with hear the stories learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

1:56Jasmine and Sabrina, you guys have both come from different worlds, Goldman Sachs, boardrooms to global runways, and you somehow ended up building this incredible beauty brand together. Take me back when Brunel was just an idea. What made you both believe this was worth building together? Yeah, well, I have been under the spotlight for over two decades. So I've been on runways and on photo shoots. And I've always known how important it is to really take care of your body. And I've always used body oils, which is the first product that we launched with. So I feel like it was a natural sort of occurrence for me.

2:38And then Sabrina and I met about two years ago and um as different as our backgrounds seem they're pretty similar yeah um yeah i think we both come from different different sides of a similar universe so obviously as part of being um a supermodel jasmine is around um the world's best makeup artist she's taking care of her body she's diving deep into all kinds of body care products um and then on my end um investing in consumer brands. So fashion, beauty, food and bev, and working very closely with teams. So when we started speaking, we were very much speaking the same language, just from different sides of it.

3:18And as Jasmine is saying, launching into body care and just seeing her passion within body care, but also seeing the consumer trends within body care, how that is a little bit of a you know, a growing market, a newer market, a market that's premiumizing. We sort of saw that as a good opportunity. Love it. And when it comes to bringing the brand to life, talk me through first steps. Like what did you guys do? What did MOQ look like? You know, talk me through that. First steps were very much, well, as a base, I think, on the brand visuals. Jasmine has been thinking about beauty and dreaming about a beauty world for well over a decade, which is definitely something you should.

4:05Yeah. Building a beauty brand and just the identity and visual of it all was very important to me. I feel like these days it's very rare you see a brand that has that more classic and elegant approach rather than a younger sort of bright colors and poppy, very in-your-face type of brand. So I wanted to create something that was timeless and something that felt like a brand that could have been around 20 years ago or 20 years into the future so that it has that sort of appeal. I thought of a lot of products that my mom used to use and that are still around today. And I'm like, wow, how do we build a sort of beautiful legacy brand like that?

4:46So brand identity was the first place that we started and making sure this is what it needs to look like and this is the message that it needs to get across as well. And then on the product side, we were looking at everything in the market. At this point, we're just chatting. There's no plan because there's no plan to make to make a brand. But a lot of people consume body care at the supermarket or at their local local market. They're buying it at the drugstore. And we're seeing all these amazing active ingredients in skincare. And it's so important to take care of your body. and within body care we're sort of seeing this space of just very derm-led brands very focused on the actives but then they ignore fragrance and they often do that because dermatologist-led brands tend to find it cleaner without fragrance fragrance is a sort of black box industry and yet when we speak to consumers they love fragrance fragrance is one of the biggest reasons why they buy body care and so we wanted to meet that in the middle and to to work with a fragrance house that would let us open that black box of fragrance to develop these fine fragrances and to enter a market that is not as penetrated on the premium side yet.

5:58Although in the past year, we've definitely were seeing that change and we're seeing all that transform. And a lot of what we're building is built around the health and wellness angle. To your question around what was our first step then, I guess we had the branding side. And one of the biggest first steps we did was go to Cosmoprof in Vegas, which is a big trade show. And we're able to meet in person a lot of the folks that we've been speaking to. So prior to kicking off anything, I spoke to everyone within my contact net of formulation chemists, packaging experts to find the right fit for us.

6:32Because we're self-funded, we're not coming in with massive MOQs. We wanted that very small minimum starting MOQ that you could get, but still being able to custom formulate with individual chemists and then own that IP and bring it to a command. So Cosmoproft was a great place to meet everyone and to help us really decide who our partners were going to be. I'm curious, from the self-funding, how did you guys, I guess, continue to grow the business? because you guys have had tremendous growth over the past couple of years since you've launched. How have you been able to allocate that capital while at the same time funding stock, purchase orders, et cetera?

7:16Yeah, we had a budget that we created at the beginning that was built on what it would take to make the foundation. So the legal fees to create a business, to get the trademarks and then to make our product. We also wanted to keep momentum up. So we kept a good amount of capital aside to be formulating our next collection at the time before we even launched the first. So we had those buckets where we were not about to allocate all of our capital into launching our first collection. So that meant that when it came to the budget to say a big launch event, we just kept our numbers down in order to not give all that cash up.

7:56So we launched with cash in reserves and it meant that we were already paying for and working on our second collection. Then the funds that we were getting through selling is what we then used to sustain ourselves and grow and sort of increase the amount of new product that we were working on in parallel. I'd also say from the beginning, people really love the products so much and it sort of created this natural and organic traction for the brand. So we weren't, we've never paid an influencer or anyone to promote the brand. It was just our community that was constantly posting and sharing and loving and our products were going viral on TikTok.

8:39And that has also helped us to be able to keep fueling and paying for different parts of the company. And Jasmine, you had incubator deals on the table as well. So backing, you had infrastructure distribution, you guys walked away from all of it. What gave you guys that conviction to reject that support and maintain being bootstrapped and all of that good stuff? Yeah, I would say, I mean, all the way back to 15 years ago, people from so many different companies approached me, let's make a haircare brand, let's make a makeup brand, body care, jewelry, clothing, like, honestly any category I've been approached with before and while it might sound very very exciting and fun for a lot of people to just be able to and there's no nothing wrong with it but just be able to walk in a room and sort of make decisions yes no yes no and then walk away and not be involved in any of the emails or the phone calls or the zooms or anything that wasn't exciting to me and I feel like I've always had a very entrepreneurial spirit and I've always wanted to be very hands-on with whatever I've done.

9:43And I also feel like a lot of incubator brands, they just focus solely on the celebrity and they're like, okay, she has X amount of followers. We're going to use her to promote X, Y, and Z. And then the sales are going to be incredible and it's going to go great. Of course that can happen. But at the same time, I think that I'm so particular and the standards are so high at Brunel. So I think if I were to go down the route with an incubator brand, they would just release something that maybe wasn't perfect. And for me, that's just really not exciting. I think you really need to create something for the customer that is going to live beyond just me telling you to buy it.

10:22Like you have to love it and you have to hopefully discover it without me. So I wanted to build something like that on my own where I could definitely 100 % know we put everything into, you know, the highest standards of the ingredients going into the products. And we've just been very intentional about everything. And that's just way, way more, I think, rewarding to me. Also being self-funded, you know, it's your money and you want to see it succeed. And it takes a lot more, I think, hard work and dedication and grit and having to be willing to wear a lot of hats, which I enjoy. You raised something interesting.

11:02You said that, you know, you've had a lot of potential partners approach you over the years. And, you know, it's somewhat of a playbook, right? Like, you know, you find, you know, a creator or an influencer or a celebrity with a, you know, decent following. And then, you know, one person is focused on distribution and the other person is focused on the commercialization. And then that one person is focused on being that personal brand and the face of the brand. And that other person is focused on scale and product and all of that kind of stuff and operations. I'm curious, like it's somewhat of a playbook, doesn't always work.

11:43And I think people think it's much easier than it comes across. I'm curious from a business partner perspective and just for our community that would be looking to form a partnership with someone with a really strong following and audience and notoriety. I'm curious, Jasmine, what did you see in Sabrina and what made her a good potential partner and for this to look like a great partnership? Yeah, of course. Well, from the moment I met Sabrina, as she mentioned, it was never a let's meet each other and start a brand situation. It came very naturally and organically just as we got to know each other.

12:24And as we got to know each other, I think we both found in each other that we're incredibly hardworking and passionate. And she is a go-getter and badass woman. And I love, you know, I love working with hardworking women. And I mean, it's just so incredible. And it really inspired me to, you know, find someone like her and be introduced to her. And yeah, we both just shared this passion for wellness and beauty and bringing them both together. And, you know, I could have easily launched a product and been like, oh, this is, you know, a body oil that smells good. But I think what we found of merging those two was really unique.

13:04so I like that we were both able to sit down take a minute think about what product we wanted to introduce and why and I think we make a fantastic duo so I'm super happy to have met her and we learn so much from each other every single day so I think you know anyone out there who's looking for a partner I think it just needs to be an organic sort of synergy that you feel and not something that's really forced. Yeah. And I think also in partnerships, there's that really important element of trust, because if you can't communicate to one another, like just the ability to call up and just say, you know, I don't agree with this or we have a problem.

13:43Let's talk about this is so important. And to know that you have each other's backs because it's so time consuming and it's there's so many pressures that happen. And so that element of trust, like, do you really trust the person that you're going into partnership with. It matters so much. And we definitely felt like we had that. And then I think it's also about the skill sets that you need to bring a product to life and what you're looking for. And sometimes you find fantastic founding teams where the backgrounds are very similar. I think ours are different and we like to call it kind of complementary but contrasting skill sets.

14:15So we're in everything together and we're involved in all the decisions together and we have different brains, but they overlap. And so we felt like between the two worlds, we're able to bring to life this idea we had, which I think made the process really fun for us. Every day is a very fun endeavor. Yeah. And how long did it take to bring the brand to life? That's a great question because it was pressure. We were talking about it for so long and so long and having a good time about it. And then when we landed on our three products, one of them is a Golden Glow body oil. and if you look at the seasonality for Golden Glow body oils it's the summer and we realized that pretty much the summer beforehand and we said okay well we're either gonna make it this next summer or we have to wait a whole year and then that created this incredible pressure on making sure the logistics of everything came in place in order to launch in May and at the time everyone told us that wouldn't be possible all the timelines were not at all from for for may um and then they got to september and then we got it to august and then we got it to july and june and then we got it to may but so that tells you never tell two women that it's impossible it's possible but it was possible to get it so yeah that's a good question on timeline but um um yeah i guess much longer of like thinking and planning and preparing the products but then it It was, oh gosh, to bring it to life, everything else needs to happen now.

15:52So it took about six months once you actually kind of got going? Pedal to the metal. It was a year, but we already had started working on developing the formulas and the idea, but that was it beforehand. But there's just so much in a business on the rest of it to get it to work. So yeah, no, longer than six months. Okay. So when you guys launched, obviously product uptake was really solid. How fast did you guys sell out? And can you give us and our community a bit of context of the traction that you guys had, revenue, number of customers, anything there in the past year? Yeah, I mean, we launched.

16:34It was, I think, a very anticipated launch because people, we were hinting and teasing things here and there. And I think just also throughout my career, people are always asking of me, like, when are you going to do something? When are you going to do something? And it's back to the incubator conversation. I was just like, guys, I can't. This is just not going to work this way. So I think once the name Brunel started to sprinkle out, there was a lot of anticipation. We did like a two-week lead up, I think, to launch. and um on launch day i remember i was actually on set and we were we weren't even together that day everyone said we were on zoom and we logged on to shopify and we were watching everybody log on and the numbers kept rolling up and rolling up and we were both just so nervous but excited at the same time because we were like oh my gosh this is real because this over the last year we've been planning and planning and planning to so to see it actually start to come to life and be a physical product that people can hold and touch was just so surreal to me, to both of us.

17:40So we were sitting there, we were watching the numbers go up. And one thing that we were really pleasantly surprised about was, so we launched with three oils. We for sure thought and we made bets between ourselves and even our chemists, which one's going to sell the best or which one is going to sell the quickest. And our community completely surprised us. All three oils, like buying the bundle was our best seller. So that was the first one to just completely go, which still to this day is mind blowing because the way that we created the products is they each have a different use case. So one is for morning, one is for evening, and one is for that golden summer glow.

18:17But we're like, for sure, no one's going to do that. They're just definitely going to lean in on maybe a nighttime or a date or the golden glow. But they were going for all three. And it was like just the craziest thing to see those numbers go through. And I mean, all the way to people starting to receive the orders. It was shocking. I'm still shocked how well it went. How fast did you guys sell out? Was it in three days? Was it in seven days? Was it in two months? No, we didn't sell out in the first few days. That wasn't the launch strategy. We saw the numbers go down on our stock and then we placed a new order.

18:56Because we had already bought a lot of our glass were in our packaging. It was just a matter of refilling it. So as the numbers dwindled, the new stock came in and we wanted to just have an evergreen, just be a company that you can continue to buy from. So just inventory planning to try and avoid stockouts where possible. I think the only time we couldn't do that was holiday because we had a holiday gift set. And then when that sells out, that sells out. But otherwise we try and avoid stockouts. Yeah. Okay, great. So So when it comes to, I guess, the evergreen strategy and maintaining acquisition and growth, you guys are positioning Brunel as a luxury product.

19:40What's working right now in terms of getting customers into the door? Obviously, Jasmine, you have an incredible following, incredible brand. But yeah, what else is working for you guys right now? We are very focused on our community. So we host different community events. We pop up in different places. People really have learned to trust Brunel. I think obviously as a new brand and being that we're only D2C, I can find that pretty tricky because people can't just try us in a store. So we've built a great trust with our customers. If they've bought one product from us, some people are already on their eighth order of the same exact product.

20:19So that's been really incredible. and it's made our customers come back time and time again. And yeah, I would say like our products really speak for themselves. And I think any product we release down the line, it's just an instant sort of we trust them. It's going to keep us coming back. Yeah, I think on organic, we have obviously our weekly plan and all of that for socials. But every month we try and really focus around what's the new story or what's the new thing we're doing. and so um whether it's um whether it's centered around the Met Gala which is when we teased our brand last year and we had a bit of a moment this this year or next month we're launching a new product so that will clearly be um clearly be about that but in the month before that we had a documentary series that we launched and we were putting that on on on socials and so seeing how people react to that and the different um um story telling pieces the behind the scenes the the glam moments, the motherhood storytelling, all of those have been really important on Organic.

21:23And then we started doing paid as well. We started that about six months into the journey. And I think that's definitely a lever we can still pull at. So we have, you know, we have really, we see good ROAS there. We're just not spending a lot on that. But I think that's also been a good channel is the paid channel. And then we also, when we speak to customers, we ask them how you found out about us. Aside from word of mouth, as Jasmine was mentioning, another thing sometimes is really articles online. So press and awards that we've won, as well as just seeing us pop up on people's TikTok feeds.

21:57So it's been a bit of a breadth, but I think it's sort of an engine where there's a few parts that are kind of feeding each other than one strict one. Yeah. From speaking to many guests, it's somewhat of an ecosystem, right? And some people might follow Brunel for a little while and then they see a you know maybe a post from Jasmine and then they might see an ad a couple months later and then eventually but then how do you attribute the sale now all the platforms are going to want to claim the sale like from a paid aspect but yeah it's somewhat of an omni-channel process and presence since we're in year one and we're a lean team and we're also one channel d2c we try and attribute we have like sort of daily we kind of can see just kind of the daily the daily trends we don't know exactly where all of those daily moments are coming from but um when things spike we always try and look for like where the spike is coming from um and that'll be either because we've showed up an event somewhere or maybe someone has posted about us and that post has sort of gained a lot of traction or it's quite a few people for some reason have all posted on the same day or or something like that or because we want something or we run somewhere.

23:09So we definitely try and attribute or just find out what the cause is. And a lot of times we can kind of get there when there are those spikes, we can kind of look to see online. So I'm curious, you said something interesting, Sabrina. You said that you've tried paid ads and you're getting a good return on investment, but you're not spending that much. I literally just interviewed another founder before you guys, half an hour before you guys and they spend over a hundred million dollars a year now they're not just d2c they have a omni-channel focus they only got into retail though once they were spending at least 50 to 60 million dollars in annual spend so very different stage of the journey this brand has been around for you know close to 10 years super fast growth they went from zero to 300 million in 36 months, right?

24:07So crazy, crazy growth. However, you said something interesting. You said that you guys aren't spending more. And this is a common thing that we see amongst our members within one of our community's founder operators, where we help people scale their ads. So I'm curious, how come you're not spending more? Is that strategic? Is it because you'd rather maintain profitability or like yeah talk me through a certain margin or it's a great question of course like um yeah paid is such a special such a special engine for us and we do want to we do want to pull that lever a lot more so why we haven't so far i think the first six months we're actually organic fully organic and we wanted to make sure that organic engine is growing because we are self-funded and we want to use a lot of that capital into new development we have so many products that we work on we have to work two to three years in advance do all of that before we even see a dollar um back in terms of selling it then um we have to make sure the organic engine is working that we have that cash so to be to be profitable um then we turn on paid and and that's been going well to do paid really well and you spend a lot of time on it um a lot of time and as we are a small team we're growing our team to be able to then kind of dedicate the right time the resources.

25:27So we're seeing a good, yeah, we're seeing good, um, a good, a good ROAS in general, and we're seeing, and we want to push that lever even more. So, um, I don't know if that, if that's answering your question exactly, because we want to increase that basically. We see that as. Yep. No, um, it does answer my question. Uh, and I, I think I agree with you. Like when I started my brand Healthish at Time Marked Water Bottle, I don't own it anymore. I sold it. But, um, In the early days, we just focused on organic. Like we built a really strong organic engine till we were doing at least half a million dollars a year.

26:04And then we turned on ads, which was able to get us past, you know, the seven figure a year range. So I understand and I respect that. And you want to get your messaging dialed in, you know, the creative and working out what really lands and getting that product market fit or messaging market fit really right before you start playing around with ads. And of course, Jasmine has an incredible, incredible organic engine that you guys are producing content through her following as well. So that makes sense. But yeah, I had to ask that question because it's a common thing that we see with brands that we work with in our community founder operators where we help them scale.

26:45And one thing that we find is sometimes founders don't have the confidence in the numbers to actually scale. and it's around kind of like what's working, how much profit are they actually making, all these different things. So we've got some really cool software that helps you work that out and a tracker and all these different things. So I was just really curious there, but no, that answers the question. So thank you. No, I totally agree with you. And I think with paid, like you said, one of the, and I think you alluded to this in one of your earlier points was around the attribution of where the sales is coming from, because getting to know exactly what your costs are is such an important comfort level you need to scale paid at the level that you're talking about, where you're really pushing it all to really the marginal dollar is being spent on paid in order to see that marginal sale.

27:34So you need that total confidence in exactly what that dollar is. And as a new brand, you know, a lot of people can spend a lot more when you know the frequency in which people are repurchasing and what that retention rate looks like. Because obviously you can spend a lot more if you know, OK, I'm going to buy them for this amount, because I know they're going to buy from us four times again. And so all of those things help build that confidence to do paid. But then also having the right people who are obsessing over it every day and able to like add the creative and make that channel. And I think having a strong organic is so important or at least a strong content engine in some shape or form is so important to do paid well because you need that creative and you need to be testing the nine different hooks and the seconds and all the things and then refreshing all the time, which is a massive pain point for so many founders because that's an intense amount of time to be taking it to the numbers and the levels that you're talking about and then ultimately restricted by how profitable you want to be.

28:33And I think what stops us from being super, super, super aggressive on paid, we can definitely be a lot more, is just that we do want to be profitable. We're not going for the massive shoot to the moon in a couple of years and then see what happens and then it can tank. Anything can happen. We're trying not to make that happen. Yep, that makes sense. So you shared something else really interesting that you guys are a two-person team alongside, you know, chemists and fulfillment partners, which is amazing, right? Like the kind of members that we work with in our founder operators community that, you know, they're a small crew and small team, usually a solo founder or, you know, a duo like you guys.

29:13and they've unfortunately been burnt by marketing agencies and what we do is we have a community of DDC founders that are all growing their brands but we help them bring their marketing in-house. So most likely they've been burnt by one or more agencies, unfortunately. There are some great ones but it's hard to find good ones and so they bring it internal because we believe that building your marketing internally is a very strong core competency as a founder And if you have the knowledge and understanding on how to use ads to grow, it can be incredibly powerful. How to increase your conversion rate and optimize your funnel and your offers and just be better at marketing.

29:56It can be incredibly powerful and it's how you can grow your brand exceptionally fast. So you guys are a two-person team. At what point do you stop being lean? Because you talked about resourcing. At what point do you stop being lean? I, we prescribed to the philosophy that, um, you know, when it comes to running ads and doing a lot of your marketing in the early stages, you should want one, one or both of you guys should have that as a core competency and a strength and run, run out yourself. But I'm, I'm curious, like what's hiring looking like for you guys? Are you looking to hire right now?

30:29You like, talk me through that. No, we just hired our first employee. Congrats. Yeah. That's very exciting for us. Yeah. we have and i think um maybe calling ourselves a two-person team i think um also undersells the amazing people that we've had supporting us and yes it's been the chemists it's been our fulfillment partners we've also had wonderful support from contractors as well um and and and yeah amazing advisors and folks like that so on our day-to-day we're definitely speaking to more people than than just each other but full-time now three awesome and at what point do you stop being lean like how did you guys work out to make that first hire like and how did you know when to make that first time because that comes up a lot for our members as well it's it's a good point because we we did not hire when we were that like desperate or or over over capacity i think we we always sort of thought around that one year mark would be would be good because by that point we We've built the foundation.