At a recent Future50 event hosted by BeautyMatter, Christine Chang, the co-CEO and co-founder of Glow Recipe, Andrea Lisbona, the founder and CEO of Touchland, and Beatrice Dixon, the co-founder, CEO, and chief innovation officer of The Honey Pot, spoke about the ups and downs of launching their businesses and their advice for maintaining consistent, sustainable growth.
Here is a look at some of the key themes from the panel discussion.
Despite the differences in Chang, Lisbona and Dixon’s backgrounds — and their paths to launching their brands — one element the three entrepreneurs have in common is their ability to fill a white space in a lifestyle and self-care market that is teeming with competition.
Glow Recipe is a fruit-forward skincare brand co-founded by Chang and Sarah Lee in 2014. At the time, the then-L’Oréal executives had noticed a rising interest in the American beauty market for Korean skincare products, so they decided to introduce Korean-inspired skincare with a unique aesthetic concept for an American audience.
Meanwhile, The Honey Pot was co-founded in 2012 by Dixon and Simon Gray, who saw a gap in the feminine care market for healthier, plant-based alternatives and decided to help be a part of the solution.
The youngest of the three brands, but by no means the smallest, Touchland launched in the US in 2018 after an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign, which reached 450 per cent of its initial fundraising goal.
The aesthetically designed hand sanitiser and lifestyle brand immediately took off with US customers and is currently distributed in over 4000 US retail doors including big-box chains; Sephora, Ulta and Target.
Where Touchland stands out in the market for creating a lifestyle around the brand and adding joy to a traditionally “boring” product, The Honey Pot’s success comes from an unmet need in the marketplace.
As Dixon recalled: “We had such real, raw customers…humans that just knew what our mission was and what we stood for, who stood behind us, with us and for us. It was at that moment [post the brand’s first viral moment] when we knew that we’re doing this right.”
Lisbona pointed out that while immediate growth can be a good problem for brand founders, it comes with certain challenges.
As Chang pointed out, it is an incredibly humbling experience for a brand founder to see their product take off or become viral, and then realise they don’t have the supply chain capabilities to fulfill operations as optimally as possible.
However, it is also through trial and error, Chang noted, that founders can learn the lessons necessary to drive sustainable growth.
She recalled how Glow Recipe started out as a curation site for Korean skincare products before it morphed into a consumer product goods brand.
“We always say that was the best education possible when it came to social media community building,” she said about the brand’s evolution from content hub to product. “We were able to really focus on education and connecting with our customers and then when we were good and ready we launched Glow Recipe [the skincare brand].”
Ten years post-launch, Glow Recipe has become a TikTok-viral brand, one of the top-rated skincare lines in Sephora, and earned an impressive US$300 million in revenue in 2023.
When it comes to staying relevant in an industry like feminine wellness, Dixon, The Honey Pot’s CEO, matter-of-factly stated, “You remain relevant by staying in your lane.”
“The Honey Pot really built the architecture for what vaginal wellness can look like. Nobody was doing it the way that we did it. But the beautiful thing is that we showed that it’s possible [to create a brand like this], so it’s inevitable that we will continue to have [similar] startups that come in [to the market],” she said.
“Having a state of mind that comes from abundance and making sure that that you’re not coming from a place of lack and having fear [is important] because you’re always going to have people competing with you, but I think it’s important for you to mind your business, know your data and to keep innovating so you can continue to keep ahead of the curve. Especially if you’re the one that helped to create a curve [in the first place],” she concluded.
Touchland’s Lisbona echoed Dixon’s key points.
“We’re kind of like the underdog in the beauty industry,” she mused. “So I feel like in terms of competitors, we don’t have many, but I think it’s about knowing truly who you are as a brand.
“I feel like when you’re growing very quickly, there’s a point where you start doing what others expect you to do instead of really knowing what you want to do… I want to make sure that once we launch a [new] product, it is the best out there. So [it’s important to] stay in your lane, know who you are, and be authentic because the moment you start looking at others, that’s when you start being like everyone else.”
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