729 Lara Henderson: Founder & CEO of Pure Mama

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to The Cara Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:I'm so excited to have my next guest with us here today. Laura Henderson is the founder and CEO of Pure Mama, a beautiful, naturally luxurious skincare brand redefining body care for pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond. And the idea for Pure Mama was born during Laura's first pregnancy in 2018 when she discovered there was a serious lack of premium, safe, and effective skincare to support mothers through one of life's most transformative journeys and determined to change that. She spent more than two years developing the line before launching in 2021 from her home in New Zealand, where we get to speak with her today while she's raising her two young kids.

1:34Kara Goldin:And since then, Pure Mama has skyrocketed to become the number one premium pregnancy skincare brand across New Zealand and Australia, and the first of its kind to be stocked at prestige beauty retailers, Mecca, and huge fans like Kourtney Kardashian, Margot Robbie. I mean, you name it. These guys have really, really come up with some, an incredible, incredible company products. Pure Mama is killing it. So, so excited to have you here today. Laura is also the host of the incredible podcast show called The Pregnancy Paradox. So I'm so excited to have you here today. So welcome. Thank you so much, Cara.

2:20It's so nice to be here and to chat to you. That was quite the spiel, but you nailed it about the whole company. I love it. And our journey.

2:28Kara Goldin:I love it. So, okay. So let's start at the beginning. Tell us about Pure Mama and your words and how would you describe the brand, the products and what makes it unique? Yeah, absolutely. So it really came about from my own consumer problem, right? And I think a lot of people reach a friction point in products and services in their life. But I came from a corporate marketing background. So I'd worked in advertising and brand marketing and premium on premium brands for around 10 or 12 years and I fell pregnant in 2019 and I my belly was starting to get bigger I was I was probably around the 20 week mark and I was my skin was getting tight and itchy and I was like oh I'm really excited about this next new stage of body care like I'd never really been much of a all over body moisturizer kind of kind of girl but then I was like okay I really want to buy a beautiful belly oil because I'm it's kind of the celebration of your body and your journey but it also has a functional need, right?

3:33Like your skin is growing and stretching and so much during that time. And my sister had been pregnant before. She was probably about a year ahead of me. She had her daughter and I was like, okay, what do I use? You know, what's out there? And she was basically like, I'll just go to the pharmacy. There's brands like Walida or, you know, Bio Oil's okay. Or you can go more natural and go to this brand. But basically what I found is there was either this really kind of pharmaceutical clinical side to body care products, or there was a real natural, but almost polarizing mid-range, which is very heavily centered with essential oils.

4:22and they were almost too far down the herbal route or they had been part of other brands that just decided to do a body oil for pregnancy but hadn't really been through the checks and balances of going, well, what does that actually mean? And then there was this range of kind of cheap and cheerful. They might have balloons on them and babies and things like that. And I guess I can see how people got to that point, but I was like, where's this modern conscious skincare brand for women? And when you look at the entire beauty industry, you think of fragrance, makeup, like facial skincare, body care, and all of those things have been refined till the nth degree when it comes to ingredients, packaging, fragrancing, distributing, you know, retail partnerships, everything had been so well considered.

5:10but pregnancy was almost like you reach this point in your life and then you just kind of get going oh well here you go here's something for the next nine months and then you're going to go back to your normal body care anyway and that really just didn't sit right with me and I was also looking at the ingredients on a lot of these products they had really cheap carrier oils I couldn't remember the brand names the marketer in me was you know you you kind of say is there a light bulb moment There wasn't like this, well, a lot of people, you know, reference that, was there this moment that you realize?

5:42And it was more like this evolution of a journey for me over a month going, oh, well, what are these brands showing up? How do they show up on Google? Because the marketer in me goes, well, what are these people, how is their website optimized? What's the brand name? Can I remember it? What's their product set? What's their core USPs? What are their ingredients? How are they showing up on social? What are they doing and the events and the influencer space and all of these things. And I just found so many holes that I was like, okay, am I just missing something here or is this a huge opportunity?

6:14And I kind of mulled on it for a while, but then I found myself at a pregnancy massage in Noosa, which is in Queensland in Australia. And I was asking the massage therapist, I was like, what do I use on my body? And even she couldn't recommend any brand. she would basically say oh use this you know big big brand they do a body oil that might be a ride or if you don't like the smell go to this i was like why is there not this brand that people can confidently speak to when you're pregnant or during this journey that they really trust the ingredients they know that the fragrancing is all natural that the packaging sustainable but it makes it looks beautiful and it feels beautiful to use and it's not yelling stretch mark oil on your shelf kind of thing because I find that quite confrontational and not something you want to have sitting on your bathroom shelf or your bedside table all the time.

7:01It's talking to an insecurity of yours, whereas it should be like a celebration of your journey. And yeah, that was where it all started really. And then I went through my pregnancy journey and there was other phases throughout that journey where I had a skincare need that I couldn't find a solution. And one of those was a lot of the time in your third trimester, you suffer from, you know, swollen ankles or hip pain or carpal tunnel or all those really glamorous things that you get when you're pregnant and I went to use massage rubs like deep heat anti-flam voltarin you know all of those kind of targeted massage rubs and all of them you can't use while pregnant so I was like okay that's an opportunity in itself I hadn't quite landed what that would be and then someone introduced me to the idea of a coffee scrub which I loved the idea of a scrub but the coffee smell was really polarizing during pregnancy but I was like I love this idea of a scrub to exfoliate before you use an oil and then I was breastfeeding and that was an absolute roller coaster to put it lightly and I was like my skin was cracked and raw and bleeding it was a lot and everyone just said use lanolin and I found it really sticky it didn't apply very well it's made from an animal byproduct and I just it didn't sit didn't sit well with me either so that was where I guess the ideation and the conception of these product SKUs came from which landed us on our belly and body oil our magnesium body rub so that's you know a targeted massage relief rub and then we've got our our bump scrub which we're which we're actually renaming to body scrub because so many people use it we just don't want to pigeonhole ourselves and then we've got our nipple butter as well so that was really where it all started was looking at what I needed and what I couldn't find and then looking at the opportunity and putting that lens over it well if you were going to bring a brand and a product to market how would you do it and how would you speak to this audience with such conviction that they know without a doubt that they're in the right place for the trusted beautiful skincare that they need and that was I guess the beginning of the journey but like we like you mentioned at the start you know it took two years to bring that to market product development takes a long time brand development and through that time I'd had a baby was working you know in the spare minutes that you can just sitting at a desk in a spare room going I really want to bring this to life I honestly had no idea how so it was a lot of questions a lot of research to build a product-based business from the ground up where you're formulating packaging learning how to distribute I'd never I'd never gone far that far across the business into operations or distribution I'd always worked in marketing which sits in its silo and and gave me so much insight into launching a brand and building building a product that people will want um but then actually taking that from ideation to a full-blown product brand range and managing that is on my own with little kids or a newborn, you know, is quite the adventure.

10:12Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. Well, you've done such a nice job. And when you first launched, did you just launch with one product or did you launch with how many SKUs did you actually launch with? No, we launched with three products. So we had our belly oil, our bump scrub and our nipple butter. And then the magnesium body rub was something that took the product development that took a little bit longer because we wanted to combine a natural anti-inflammatory in there called Suricam because the magnesium is really helping with that muscle tension and sleep. But we wanted to add another layer onto it because we know there's topical magnesium products for ours.

10:47We were really big on having a differentiating ingredient or a standout ingredient that sets us apart from kind of mainstream. And that one took a little bit longer to develop. So that wasn't launched, I can't really remember now, probably 18 months after. launch. And then we had a beautiful gift set as well. So it was really important to me that these products had a functional use, but that people actually went, oh, this is a beautiful gift for someone that's just announced they're pregnant or they're having a baby shower or something like that. So yeah, just three SKUs to start and a gift set.

11:19Kara Goldin:How did you get the word out about Pure Mama? And I mean, I have so many questions around that because you're not in the U.S., but you have captured the attention of many incredible U.S. celebrities, if they could be called that. But it's fascinating how you've been able to get this traction. What do you think is really the secret behind that? Well, in New Zealand, New Zealand's not that big. It's only 5 million people, give or take. So when you're working in this corporate environment and I was working for BMW as the brand manager at the time you work with a lot of people from press to agencies and you just when we launched here we had a couple of incredible influences I don't even want to call them that because they had their own respective rights one was a an incredible model and then there was a radio host and things like that so we we built it we started in New Zealand with well-known people and that was how we got a a big part of the word out, along with a really strong digital strategy and PR strategy as well.

12:26And so we started building on that. And then we went into Australia. Australia was obviously a lot bigger market. The population of Australia is around 30 million, I think. And we had no idea how to navigate the press market over there. But a big part of what we do is we've never outsourced like our seeding or influencer relations in New Zealand or Australia. Like we always are DMing that person. We're having a real conversation. If they have an agent, we still try and get them to have a conversation with us. So we're really big on building those relationships because there's a level of authenticity to that that money can't buy.

13:09And we're always making sure like people are enjoying the products. We don't ask for a lot up front. It's very much a, hey, if you love it, share it. If you don't, that's fine too. So we take off that pressure. And then when we launched into the US, we basically took all the learnings we had from that. We actually work with a team on the ground in LA that have some really great relationships among those celebrity or influencer crowds. And they often work with them on different photo shoots and different press activities. And they'll just be like, hey, you're pregnant. Biggest, congratulations.

13:42we'd love to send you, you know, a celebration box from one of our clients. And because they have relationships as well, genuinely personal, deep relationships with a lot of these people, the willingness to accept something like that when you're on an exciting new phase of your life is a little bit more open to just accepting another beauty PR box. Because you think of, you know, the Courtney's and the Margo's and the, you know, we've just done some stuff like with Elaine Welteroth or, you know, Amy Song and things used it. But they're excited about this new journey and they're in a new discovery phase for their skincare and they want what's best and safest for their baby as well.

14:22So when you have a brand that speaks to that inherently, they get excited about using it. And there's actually, it's a competitive market, but it's not as competitive as facial skincare or fragrance or makeup or anything like that. Those markets are so saturated that it's so hard to stand out that we have just been really considered in our approach and making sure again that we get the cut through and with someone like Courtney Kardashian we sent her like three boxes we sent some stuff to Chris's office Chris and Kylie's office then we sent another box to her house with like a bunch of flowers from her favorite florist um and then we went through one of her EAs I think that's how that all went about So we didn't actually know which one landed to her and how she ended up using it because we know that, you know, a lot of these bigger celebrities have literally a room in their house for like all the contra and gifting they get.

15:19So for them to actually take it out and use it and trust it and then recommend it is huge. so for someone of a bigger scale like that we definitely invest more in finding all the different avenues to make sure they see it they get it and we do what we can to make you know encourage them to try it we're just actually about to launch um some spa treatments across the u.s so those will be based in um we're partnering with you know leading spas and wellness destinations and they'll be offering a pure mama pregnancy or postnatal massage using our products. So for now, we actually are looking at going one step deeper and going for these more high profile people, they will get invited in to have the pure mama experience.

16:04And that is like a hands-on, tangible, you come in for a beautiful massage, spa treatment, you immerse yourselves in the products. and that's again one step beyond giving a box of product with a beautiful ribbon on it and then leaving it up to them to open it and try it and use it one thing we're incredibly big on is you know the way our products smell and feel so when you've got something when you've got something that's got a real textural sensory experience it's so important for people to actually get it out of the box and try it. And that's what our biggest piece of feedback on around our belly oil, which is definitely our signature product, is the fragrancing.

16:45We worked so hard to get that right. And so if we can encourage people to use it and try it and get really, I guess, excited about that special time in their day where they get to use that oil and it's a really powerful sensory experience, then that's a deeper level of emotional connection to a brand than just it's serving a functional purpose, you know?

17:09Kara Goldin:Definitely. Well, and how much of your own kind of brand story fits into this too? I mean, you shared with us all about the founding story and, you know, obviously you just had two kids and you had this own, your own kind of challenges during this time that I think are very relatable to so many people. But how much do you find that people are remembering that through your own story? I still manage all of our stories on social. So I am sharing a lot about my personal life and I intertwine that and I have since day dot into all of our communications. So I very much, I don't want to be the entire face of the brand.

17:59I don't want my name or my face to be completely synonymous with Pure Mama. I want it to stand on its own and build a heritage brand. But in terms of being relatable, like when I was in labor with my second child, I basically went you know quiet for 24 hours on social media because there's a lot going on and then we had a huge kind of birth complication and I kind of share those intimate parts of my life without overexposing myself in a way that I think is you know there's a vulnerability to it but I still maintain a sense of privacy but I do definitely share a lot of that journey and when you're going on this trajectory of growth around you know building retail partnerships and launching into the U.S.

18:50there's so many people in New Zealand and Australia now cheering us on because there's actually not that many New Zealand or Australian brands in this beauty and wellness space that have really gone into the American market because it is so big and there's so much opportunity in the over there but there's also you know a lot of risk that goes in so a lot of people are cheering us on what I'm now mindful of is when we when we're managing the story and my narrative across New Zealand Australia and the US is making sure that we're talking we're still doing community-based things in all of those countries so it's not like hey you've forgotten about New Zealand and Australia now now you've just been to the US because that's not what we want at all we don't want to forget about our base they are the lifeblood of the business and And whilst the U.S.

19:38is a huge opportunity, I really make sure that I'm showing up in all three kind of core countries that we're represented in, which is a balance as an entrepreneur and a CEO and a mom, right, to make sure you're showing up in all of those places. But yeah, it's a fine balance between sharing what's going on in the business, making sure people are coming along for this journey with you and showing up in a very personal, family, relatable, you know, way. I shared a photo the other day. All day last Sunday, my kids had bags of lemons they were selling on the side of the road. And it was like a dollar a bag for six lemons.

20:19They were out there for three or four hours to sell them all. and that was probably my highest viewed story in the last month. So it really shows that people relate on that really grassroots level of like you're still a mum at the end of the day, balancing, you know, weekend activities and all of that kind of thing. So, yeah, it's definitely something I show up in but it's harder to manage the bigger we get to make it localised for community in every country basically. Yeah, definitely.

20:53Kara Goldin:But I think it also, putting a person to the brand, especially in the early days, I think is just is really critical and it's allowed you to be very relatable to so many of these brands as well. You know, when you share the product development or your pain points as a business owner and you build it to a standard that you would use and that you would let your family use is a really integral part about like our product development. So they know the standard is really high when it comes to our team formulating and what we put into ingredients and how we go about that journey. So sharing that layer of the business and making sure people are across the fact that we're doing clinical testing and all of that kind of thing is building that trust that me as a mother and me as a business owner and myself and our team as, you know, making sure you're in safe hands is really important.

21:48So we do share a lot of that journey as well.

21:53Kara Goldin:So expanding into Air One, Nordstrom, Revolve, Goop, massive. So, so huge. What are some of the biggest lessons that you've learned about breaking, I guess, into the U.S. market? So we've had a lot of people on this podcast who have shared that they haven't gone outside of whatever country they've started in because that's just unmanageable to them. They put up their own walls, but you've done that and you've done it successfully. So what are some of the biggest lessons in actually being able to, I guess, build your business across multiple countries? I think you have to have, and my sister actually co-owns the business with me.

22:43Her expertise is in finance and operations. So there is a huge amount of work that goes into setting up operationally in a country outside your own. and there's a layer of complexity to that that you have to be willing to take on and you have to have resource assigned to ensuring that you can get that up and running you know just reviewing 3pl distributors import requirements um dealing with distributors over in the u.s looking at pricing strategy margins all of that is really important to being able to make a viable business in a market and I can't emphasize enough how much work goes into that just to prepare to come into the US was at least 18 months and we even did some rough calculations the other day and it's probably close to half a million dollars by the time you're gearing up from a product development point of view and getting enough stock over there and you're working in adjacent to that with retailers in a D2C strategy.

23:50So it's not something to take lightly. It's not super easy to do, but it is possible to do if you believe that strongly that you've got a position in market and that you've done your research so you understand the lay of the land going in. And with that said, you can do all of that research, but until you launch, you actually don't know. One of the biggest learnings we had from a D2C point of view was we went in thinking, hey, we might go like a state-by-state approach because there's some bigger, more densely populated states. So let's focus on getting more share of voice with a smaller density area.

24:27Sorry, in terms of, you know, the actual place like Texas or New York or LA. So we're going, okay, we're going to focus on California and Texas and New York kind of thing. And what we actually found was that Meta and Google and TikTok don't favor a nationwide approach. So you actually get somewhat penalized from a DTC point of view if you're too narrow. They actually prefer you to go much broader, much wider. So their algorithms can actually work out where your customer is. So that was a huge learning when we came into market. There was about a two-month learning time there where we were like, the return on our ad spend isn't there.

25:09this is really hard our customer acquisition cost is is really expensive so we we pivoted a little bit there well quite a lot actually which which when you're spending so much every day to launch into market you have to move really fast because that money is just bleeding out um so you're very conscious of that and then when you're building your retail strategy we went on a huge journey with our retail strategy in the u.s because we're not from america and we have perceptions of how people shop but nothing even compared to coming into market and actually walking around and going how do people show up in these stores are people is your really conscious consumer shopping going to alter or are they going to these more beauty boutiques where are people going for pregnancy massage there's mum and baby stores as well which ones is there any major chains that we would fit with or are these all boutiques and so we so much research into how we show up and originally we had kind of a let's start showing up in ultrasound clinics and beautiful mum and baby stores and then beauty boutiques and we actually got we pitched to Erewhon not really understanding how big the Erewhon craze was and how powerful that is and then once they said yes and we sent samples we were like actually this is a huge brand play for us and setting the tone of voice for pure mama in the u.s market and once you land a retail partnership like that it really opens doors to pitching to the lights of goop and revolve hadn't done much in the category yet but we knew they had summer fridays and some other pregnancy related products on there So Revolve was more like an online version of something like Mecca here in New Zealand and Australia.

27:08Obviously, Revolve does clothing and everything and beauty, but we were like, that's a great positioning play for us. And so we just looked at how we would build our brand from partnering with the right retailers without losing control. And also a big learning for us over the last year since being a market is there's a difference between a retail agreement and a retail partnership. So it's really interesting when you start becoming a really great seller for Erewhon or Revolve sees a really big opportunity. You know, their buyers and their team are really busy, but you start to get more time and you develop relationships and it's a really mutually beneficial relationship.

27:49And some of the retailers you develop that with over time and you can see where the real potential is and some just go, hey, you've listed online with us and we just, you're over here. and we don't put a lot of love or care into nurturing this category with you. So it's an interesting journey for us and we're still learning every day. But yeah, Nordstrom, we've quickly learned, has a really great reputation in America for this baby category and buying trusted baby gear and maternity gear and all of this kind of thing. So they've actually been quite a surprising one for us, but they have huge potential.

28:25And then Erewhon has quickly stepped outside of pregnancy to going, hey we were talking to some staff there the other week and they were like oh my gosh we love your belly oil I'm not pregnant but it's like our favorite oil in the whole range it's amazing and we were in there the other day and we were smelling all the oils and Maggie and I were like no this is still our favorite like within their whole set and so you start to build that credibility and it's it's at a really grassroots level like these these people are talking about it the shop assistants are talking about it people are starting to share where they bought it from And so you're slowly building that up.

29:01Goop was a huge win for us. And that was quite a lot of pitching. And, you know, we had an email address, we had an intro, but that doesn't guarantee you by any stretch of the imagination getting, you know, into Goop's world. And they actually took one of our skews, our magnesium body rub, and they, because maternity's not necessarily a category they really hone in on, they're more women's wellness in general from a retail point of view. we actually ended up having to change our packaging on our magnesium body rub to just talk more generally which was a huge strategic pivot yeah in our business because I I had always been from the get-go because of my consumer problem I'd always been so married and wedded to the like no this has to be pregnancy and postpartum but actually what we're finding is maybe that was a self-limiting belief that I had and I just didn't want the pregnant customer to feel like oh I don't know if I can use this or not but our brand actually the Pure Mama brand inherently does that so and our website talks to all of those and all of our awards talk to talk to that you know nurturing mum but actually our product packaging can be a lot more general So there's this huge shift in our business in the last six months going, well, our brand can do that and we can still, you know, sit on that from a direct, like a D2C model, you know, how we acquire our customers.

30:34But then from a retail perspective, we can really start to go into general body care, women's wellness, because our products really are just that good that anybody can use them. And we don't want people to go, oh, well, I picked up that, but it says it's for pregnancy and I'm not pregnant, so I'm not going to use it. you know that's the last thing we want so the retail pay partnerships are a huge part of that

30:56Kara Goldin:I'm so excited to hear all of that because I do I think there's a bigger opportunity for your brand beyond and it's not just for people who are pregnant so I had four four kids ages ago and I absolutely love your product so it's uh it's it's wonderful so last question what's one piece of advice you'd give to your younger self just starting out in this venture, you know, that would be helpful, would have been helpful to hear, I guess, early on? I guess going into it, you know it's going to be a juggle, but it's so fulfilling because I fill my cup from a parenting point of view every day, but I also love the business side of things.

31:54And whilst it's a juggle and it's relentless, I feel very accomplished at the end of every day, whether it's been in the parenting world or the business world. And I feel very grateful to be able to do that and have almost complete flexibility. so a lot of people say you know like you sacrifice everything and and being an entrepreneur is is you know relentless and it's it's all of those things but it's actually so fulfilling when you're doing things every day that you love and it's falling into both buckets so I would basically tell myself that you know that's that's an exciting journey to be on and it's it's such a for me it's actually just such a privilege to be able to be working in a growth business that our biggest challenge is how to scale and operational challenges and bringing out MPD and funding and things like that.