Leigh Campbell, cofounder of Brillo Beauty, is on the Female Founder World podcast with Jasmine Garnsworthy!

Leigh is an OG beauty girlie. She hosts Australia’s largest beauty podcast called YouBeauty, which also has a Facebook group with more than 75,000 members, was Beauty Director at Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia, then Head of Lifestyle at Huffington Post in Australia, and is now at Mamamia—a huge women’s publishing and podcasting brand in Australia.

Recently she cofounded a beauty brand called Brillo Beauty just five months ago, and we spend a lot of time in this ep talking about how she spotted a gap in the market in a very crowded beauty industry, finding a cofounder, overcoming her fear to start her own business, and how Brillo got traction.

It’s not often we get to hear from someone really on the ground floor of something that I think is going to be huge, and I think it’s really helpful for anyone who is in the early days of their own founder story.

Leigh and her cofounder invested $260,000 of their own money to start Brillo, and made $180,000 back in the first three months of business just through sales on the website.

We have a full breakdown of how they spent that first investment too: the website cost $5k, formulation and all the testing you need to launch a beauty product was $30k, their first run of product including packaging was $150k, they spend another $50k on branding and content, $10k on legal and admin, and another $15k or so on other random startup costs.

Links

Episode 31: CES is in the Deep End