EP#228 - Estella Benz: Bringing The Beauty Industry Up To Speed

Timestamps:

1:42 - Studying what you truly love

6:13 - From solo founder to co-founder

15:13 - Skin Match use cases

20:14 - The product database

25:54 - Business model sustainability

About Estella Benz:

Estella Benz is the co-founder and CEO at Skin Match, a retail technology which uses AI to take the beauty industry to the next level. In her university studies she combined marketing with the beauty industry, after failing to get into her desired fashion design school. Her interest in the beauty industry stems from the fact that it just takes a miniscule difference in a brand’s angle for this brand to find a completely new market, even if the industry as a whole seems saturated.

The predecessor to Skin Match was RUE CINQ, a luxury eCommerce store which targeted customers’ specific needs through its powerful algorithm. However, soon enough Estella started being asked by other brands for the use of this algorithm, and this was what in the end truly became a business, under the name Skin Match.

Skin Match offers beauty quizzes for brands’ websites, an “INCI-Explainer” for every single ingredient on the website (which is of course based on their growing product and ingredient database), and “beauty insight” — the google analytics of beauty products. Whatever new feature or tool they push out first gets tested by 100 customers with their likes. Estella recommends that you never assume you’ve reached product-market fit definitively, and that you be willing to ask the questions you don’t want the answers to. She says oftentimes founders know what’s wrong with their products, but aren’t willing to go through all the work required to fix them.

Memorable Quotes:

"We could earn a lot of money in corporate. But we still believe that entrepreneurship is the right path, and that keeps us going."

"Be open to ask the questions you don’t want the answers to."

Resources Mentioned:

The eMyth Enterprise, Michael E. Gerber 

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