The Glossy Beauty Podcast

Most businesses start with an idea before getting the right resources to make a product. With Beekman 1802, it was the other way around. Founders Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge had bought a farm together in upstate New York in 2006. Once they lost their New York City jobs in the recession that followed, they had their mortgage to pay and a bevy of goats (owned by a friendly neighbor of theirs, grazing on their land)."We Googled 'What can we make with goat milk?'" Ridge said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. The first thing that came up, unsurprisingly, was cheese. "But you have to become a Grade A certified dairy, and there's a lot of expenses with that. The next thing on the list was goat milk soap."Ten years later, their beauty business is a successful one -- it accounts for 90% of company sales. This is in no small part thanks to the couple's skill at marketing it on air at QVC and HSN (by way of Evine, now ShopHQ), Facebook Live and YouTube."I always say TV retail is like door-to-door sales except you are knocking on 120 million doors at once," Kilmer-Purcell said.Ridge added, "That's what unlocked the potential of the brand. Otherwise we'd have just kept growing very slowly, very organically."The two joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about starting the business with "less than zero" dollars, cold calling department stores and their interest in investment considering the very ripe beauty M&A scene.

8Greens founder Dawn Russell got the idea for her wellness business a painful way: by surviving a terrible diagnosis."I hate to start the conversation with cancer, but it really was what brought me into what I'm doing today," Russell said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast. "I got a bone infection and couldn't do chemo or radiation. I traveled the world for many years trying to find treatments to compensate for that, just to end up back in my little apartment in the West Village going back to the basics of food. That's when greens really started to come into my life."8Greens' first product, a round tablet of dehydrated greens is meant to be dissolved in a glass of water and debuted in 2016; the company recently rolled out its gummy format in October. Both products are not only meant for those facing health challenges, which is why 8Greens is available at retailers like Nordstrom, Anthropologie, Sephora and Amazon. However, its DTC subscription model brings in more than 60% of 8Greens' revenue, Russell said."I want it to be easy. Health should not be so difficult and intimidating and trendy," she said.Russell joined the Glossy Beauty Podcast to talk about the product's numerous prototypes, her company's surprisingly smooth relationship with Amazon and plans to enter the U.K. in 2020.

Vintner's Daughter founder April Gargiulo is the first person to tell you that her product doesn't come cheap. Consider the brand's hero Active Botanical Serum, which retails for $185.On the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Gargiulo insisted this price was despite leaner margins than what the beauty industry typically sticks to."They are criminal, as far as I'm concerned," she said. "If I priced the Active Botanical Serum based on traditional beauty margins, it would be well in the $400 range."Gargiulo joined the our show to talk about how she started a single-product brand before it was the norm, her Asian market distribution strategy and the pressure to make sure her brand's second product just as much of a hit as her first.

Beach House Group has launched four companies in the last 12 months, including Millie Bobby Brown's Florence by Mills and Tracee Ellis Ross' Pattern Beauty. While it may seem fast and furious, when founder Shaun Neff joined the company in 2016 he planned to shake up Beach House's model, from a private label partner for Target to full-fledged brands that responded to a white space."I wanted to build more brands," Neff said.Now Beach House Group's brands are on track to bring in $100 million by the end of the year, Neff said at a live podcast taping at the Glossy Beauty and Wellness Summit held in Palm Springs, California last week. With Glossy Beauty host Priya Rao, Neff discussed the importance of teaming up with (the right) celebrities, what's next for Beach House Group in 2020 and the simple way he comes up with new product ideas.

One nutritious meal doesn't mean a healthy diet, nor does going for something deep-fried once in a while mean you're will you be doomed. That's part of why Sakara Life, a meal and wellness delivery service founded by Whitney Tingle and Danielle DuBoise, doesn't tell you what you can and can't eat outside of its ready-to-consume products.They're instead focused on what they ship to customers, including four to six cups of greens every day.Tingle and DuBoise joined the Glossy Beauty podcast to talk about how they changed their stressful lifestyles by starting their company in 2012, how they grew it from a $700 investment into a team of 150 employees that brings in "many millions" in revenue, why Seamless isn't necessarily the cheaper choice and their recent launch with Sephora.

Serial entrepreneur Marcia Kilgore has no trouble calling out ineffective or unfair practices in beauty. "When you buy a $99 cream, you're probably getting something that's worth about $6," said the Bliss and Soap & Glory founder.Tired of the markup that working with a retailer requires, Kilgore launched her latest project, Beauty Pie, a direct-to-consumer membership service. Customers pay monthly fees that then go toward buying products at prices much closer to manufacturing costs. "We're charging one-tenth of what a normal beauty company would charge," she said.Kilgore joined the Glossy Beauty podcast to talk about her previous experience at Bliss and Soap & Glory, the typical Beauty Pie customer and the road to profitability.

Today, the Glossy Beauty Podcast turns 1. If you've been listening, you know that, every week, we speak with the people making change happen in the beauty and wellness industries.For this special anniversary episode, we’ve rounded up three clips from the most popular interviews of the last year.

When Virtue Labs founder and CEO Melisse Shaban was first introduced to a new technical process for extracting keratin, which promised to upend the world of hair care, she was skeptical. "These guys sold me hard that they had a very unique piece of technology that would revolutionize the skin- and hair-care businesses," she said on the latest episode of Glossy Beauty podcast. "And I was sort of like, 'Hmm, I've heard that before in my lifetime.'" (Shaban was previously the CEO of StriVectin and Frederic Fekkai, the latter before it was sold to Procter & Gamble.)But to her surprise, that technology lived up to the hype. Virtue Labs dedicates 15 employees to extracting keratin -- the protein integral to hair and nails -- from human hair before reintroducing it into shampoos, conditioners and hair masks. The result leaves customers' hair stronger, healthier and fuller -- all of which are adjectives being shouted by every beauty brand in Sephora, Ulta and CVS. "When you overdeliver on promises that people have heard for their entire lives, people are shocked. And they're thankful."Shaban joined the Glossy Beauty podcast to talk about keratin, old school marketing and the technology her brand relies on, which was first invented by an Iraq War veteran seeking to treat battle wounds.

Amanda Chantal Bacon is often ranked alongside Gwyneth Paltrow when it comes to seminal figures in wellness. But that's not to say she's fully comfortable with it. "I try to stay out of the fray of what the wellness world has become, which is odd, because I'm smack dab in the center of it, and have probably contributed to a lot of everything that I shy away from now," Chantal Bacon said on this week's episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast."And so what can I do -- I do feel like I was there and helped create a bit of this beast -- to really stay true to the mission and to spread that to my team?"Talking about it in earnest is one way to address the problem. Chantal Bacon also seeks to live out her values with Moon Juice, which opened its first shop in Venice, California in 2011 and carries products that offer more than what you'll find in just about any grocery store or gas station these days."What would be the difference between a Moon Juice with some type of pasteurization on it in a cute juice shop, and a juice for maybe $2.99 in a grocery store that's the same blend and organic?" she asked. "It would really be the difference of a label. So that didn't feel worthwhile. Herbs, though, that was something that when you scale it, it makes sense. Your costs go down. You're able to reach more people. Supplements are actually something that you need scale for safety reasons alone."In the latest Glossy Beauty podcast, Chantal Bacon discussed Moon Juice's focus on research over marketing ("people are always surprised to find out that we really don't spend any money on marketing"), the company's use of Instagram and its move into beauty and skincare products.

Zoë Foster Blake, the founder and chief creative office of DTC-first company Go-To Skin Care, has found many opposing marketing dynamics between her home country of Australia compared to the U.S."In Australia, I say that we're not really taking customers from other brands, but instead, we're creating new skin-care customers," said Foster Blake. "These are women who have never tried a sheet mask or a face oil, or worn SPF. And we're saying, 'Hey, it's really easy, and it can be fun.'" Though coming to the U.S. has been more challenging given the competitive landscape, via its sole partnership with Sephora, 80% of the brand's U.S. sales are now through retail versus online. In Australia, it is an even split.Foster Blake joined beauty editor Priya Rao to talk about the brand's potential for venture funding ("In Australia, it doesn't really happen," she said), the originality of the DTC model and the outsized importance of influencers in the U.S.