Mm

... straightforward questions.

It wasn't, "How do I do a cut crease and how do I do an eyeshadow look with four different shades?" Like, that was never something anybody asked me.

So what I was very clear on is that the product market fit wasn't there in a lot of what was being done.

And as someone that had worked in makeup for 10 years, it was kind of crazy that I felt I didn't have the skill set when that was quite literally my job.

So I think we spent a lot of time developing the brand over that time period, working with our, our VP of creative, who I still work with, to create a new brand book and to figure out understanding this problem, right? This, this white space consumer, and the problem is that we're not actually creating products that she uses every day.

How do we sell for that and how do we build for that? And a lot of that became both a brand philosophy and a business philosophy because- As you watch the mistakes that people made during COVID, the primary one being at that time all beauty brands had a hero that was 60 to 80% of their business, and during COVID if people stopped wearing it, like a matte liquid lipstick or a foundation, your whole business was at risk.

So what other pillars did you prop up in those moments? Like, was it just the 10,000 and it was an, an organic launch, or was there a lot of paid spend? There was a whole lot of other gifting and seeding that went out.

... did you have that huge revenue bump? What worked?

It was more gradual, I would say.

So, uh, we launched in January of 2021 on direct-to-consumer.

We did $100,000 our first day.

The way that we did that is super unconventional.

So we, in October of 2020, we launched a mood board.

It was called At Mood, and we were not posting that it was gonna be a brand.

Mm-hmm.