Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q I mean, it's so cool that your experiences led you to founding this company last year. How are you guys doing? I know you're still a small company. I think you've got about 10 or 15 employees. How are you, how are you doing right now?
A You know, at the moment, we're 12 people. You know, we were a much bigger team last year, and we shrunk it down strategically this year because last year, We were going way too quickly for my liking. Like it got frantic, you know, and I felt like we had to take a pause, slow down and build the foundation of the brand properly. Cause if you don't build a foundation, all the growth that you get, it's going to collapse at some point. So for me, it's always a marathon, not a sprint. So I deliberately shrunk the size of my team. Um, most of my business actually comes from retail. We launched in 203 auto stores, we in Selfridges, you know, in Oxford Street, which is a massive business for us. So most of our business actually came from retail. And one of the challenges we had was when we launched, The retailer's names almost overshadowed the branding. Everybody knew Alma Beauty, Ulta. That was sort of what they knew, right? So people were buying on Ulta.com, not our website. So that was an issue that we had coming into this year that in a way the pandemic has addressed for us, because all of a sudden people started seeing us as an entity outside Ulta or Selfridges or all our retail partners. And now we now have a business where right now my dot com is now over a 70%, almost 80% of our business. So what's happened to us in the end is it's allowed us to get more intimate with our custom…
AI assessment note: “You know, at the moment, we're 12 people.”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q I read, um, a really great article about you, and it talked about how, like, really early on, like, you know, just right out of college, you got into, um, into working with Revlon, and I guess it kind of stemmed from your childhood, where you were frustrated that you couldn't get Revlon products in Nigeria. Is that, is that right?
A Exactly. I think, you know, for me, one of the most common themes in my life is always standing up for, for what I believe is right and always fighting for a better world, you know, from being expelled when I was in high school for mobilizing everybody to go on strike because it was, the conditions weren't great and I had to, you know, mobilize them to go on strike. So they went on strike. What we wanted, they got it, but I was a scapegoat. So as I labeled the troublemaker, right? So, you know, leaving college and going, Hey, why don't we have good color cosmetics in Nigeria? And I reached out to all the brands and Revlon was the only one who responded positively. Um, and they'd been trying to come into the country for 15 years and they couldn't. And it took like the craziness of a teenager, not knowing how to take no for an answer. And that was how I got into the beauty space. Um, because you know, it, it really showed me that I had two sides to me in terms of, I'd always been, um, very academic. I finished high school at 15. So they were like, if you have a PhD at 19, you know, you were that clever. I was one of those gifted kids, but I'd also been very, very artistic. So beauty gave me a home to put those two things together in terms of the creativity and the academics of it all.
AI assessment note: “Exactly. I think, you know, for me... leaving college and going, Hey”
