Hero Cosmetics

“You have to remember, I mean, we were profitable early on. The problem with the business was we're always chasing growth in terms of the, we were growing so rapidly and the POs were getting bigger and bigger that even though our top line was really high, I mea…”

“I think within 90 days we had run out of our initial inventory, so, and I remember before launch we were talking about, like, how long do you think it's going to take us to sell through 10,000 units? Would it take us a year? Is it going to take us six months? …”

“So I actually did not want it to be K-Beauty... Just because I thought it should be an American brand for this American audience. And that was actually part of the value prop, because sometimes when you buy, I mean, even today, it still happens, like, I think …”

“No, we didn't. I mean. Luckily, we were in the channels that were still deemed, like, essential retailers, so Amazon was still online, Target was deemed essential retailers, so so we really didn't see much impact.”

“I think it was a week or two weeks after the buyer called and said, we were selling so well that we're going to go full chain immediately.”

“And then I had a coffee chat with this investor in the space, showed her a mighty patch. I said, I want to do this new product. I think it's going to be a wash off face mask. She said, no, you should not do that. You should stick to patches. You should dominat…”

“Amazon for us was a very profitable channel, and the money we made from Amazon, we put towards launching our DTC site, launching slowly in retail, and I mean, we were, we bootstrapped for the first three years, and I think largely the economics of our product …”

“There were just a lot of little tricks, a lot of trap doors and, you know, onerous prep structures so that essentially we could sell the business later on and still walk away with barely anything. I mean, they were just very investor friendly, very founder unf…”

“We started with 50,000 dollars.”

“And I remember, you know, 20, 21, it was clear we were going to hit that hundred million dollar threshold. So there was a board meeting, and then it was a topic, and the question was, like, should we start a process? Should we think about this? And then everyo…”

“For us, the strategy was to just lean into the inventory, which is risky. So we went essentially from one month of inventory on hand with lots of orders to at one point, we're up to six months of inventory on hand.”