Michelle Phan talks about starting from scratch, selling candy and building computers, then founding Ipsy with Marcelo Quimberos. They raised under $3M and stayed lean by networking for product samples and letting their content do the marketing.
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I'm gonna sit. Is that cool with you guys? Make it a little more casual. You first.
Hey, so I was just wondering, can you tell us more about your beginnings, like the very beginning, the state we're all in?
Sure.
Pre-funding, pre-whatever.
Which beginning? I mean, beginning where I was in high school selling candy to fund for my computer that I built, or— Beginning of college. Beginning of Ipsy, okay.
All my friends are subscribed.
Really?
No way.
Yeah, I love it. Oh, woo, girl, I love you. I love you. Thank you.
Yeah, and I have a lot of samples from it. And a lot of those bags I have because they cycle in our friend group.
Oh, you have one too? Nice. I love how a guy back there is like, I'm subscribed too. Sure. Well, I mean, it was a really simple idea. I met my business partner, Marcelo Quimberos. He was the one who built Funny or Die. So he's also an entrepreneur. He went to Stanford, got his business major. But what I really liked about him was that he wasn't just your average entrepreneur where it's all about money and he was just trying to make money. He was also a storyteller at heart. He saw the power of content. In storytelling. Because if you have content, content is really what drives people to your brand. People oftentimes, they tend to undervalue content, but it really is a form of communication and marketing. And if you have strong content, everything else is easier. And so when I met him and I saw that he built Funny or Die and he's a great numbers guy, this is something that I'm not good at, to be honest with you guys. I'm very creative. I'm very right-brained. So I needed someone to strengthen my left brain, the analytical side. I needed someone that understood numbers better than me. So when I met with him, we clicked right away. We shared the same vision. That's also very important when you guys are finding funding. It's— money is easy. You can find money anywhere. But you have to find someone that gives you that strategic foundation. That's the most important thing. That's something that money can't buy. And he had that strategy and he understood that strategy. And he also shared the same vision as me. That vision was we wanted to build a beauty community that's different than what is here today. Because I don't believe in the idea of a one-size-fits-all beauty look, which is right now in our current paradigm of mainstream media. There's this idea— ideal beauty that I feel is not relevant and it doesn't fit with everyone. You know, when you go online, especially Instagram, and you're looking at different girls, There's so many beautiful ethnicities that should be celebrated. There's so many different looks and we should celebrate that instead of boxing everyone into one look. And so this is why we wanted to create Ipsy. We wanted to give women and men all around the world a chance for them to try new beauty products, get excited about beauty, empowering them to be in control of their beauty, and most importantly, just giving them an outlet to express how they felt from the inside. And so he understood that vision and that's why we partnered. We raised less than $3 million and we were very lean. I mean, people wanted us to hire more people, but we realized, you know what, I'd rather keep my team small so that we're nimble and we can just move fast. Don't ever feel like you have to raise a lot of money to make something work.
How did you get the product done, the high quality? How did you start?
A lot of it is networking. I have a great network of beauty brands that I work closely with because they've worked with me before. But also we showed them the power of what we were able to bring. We told them, look, we're not your average beauty sampling program. We're more like a marketing machine. We can market your brand. We are giving your brand a new place for you to grow and to build your demographic because a lot of the mainstream outlet that's available today they're not as relevant to the young millennials and to Generation Z, which is the demographic they were trying to reach. And we had this demographic. And so this is why it was easier for us to partner with these beauty brands and for us to get these beauty samples and products. Yeah.
