In this talk, Michelle Phan shares her journey from a 19‑year‑old college student discovering YouTube to becoming a 7‑million‑subscriber creator and influential entrepreneur. She explains how she used YouTube as a free platform to teach beauty tutorials, positioning herself as a creator before the concept of online influencers existed. Phan emphasizes that influence is the new currency and describes how her channel evolved from pure beauty content to lifestyle, tech, and motivational videos. Leveraging her audience, she founded Ipsy, a subscription beauty service that delivers curated Glam Bags for $10 a month, built on a detailed customer profiling quiz, massive user‑generated reviews, and a community‑driven marketing model that requires no traditional ad spend. She details Ipsy’s rapid growth—from a $3 million seed round to $120 million in revenue, shipping one million bags monthly, and expanding beyond North America. Phan also discusses her partnership with L’Oréal to create EM Cosmetics, a digital‑only brand launched after three years of development, featuring 250 products and exemplifying how major beauty companies are embracing e‑commerce and influencer‑led brand creation. Throughout, she underscores the importance of spotting future platforms, nurturing small ideas, and using data‑rich community engagement to scale businesses.
Chapters
So I'm gonna move on to basically my introduction, which I personally don't like doing, but this will give you some better context on how I got started because oftentimes I feel like people only see me as a YouTuber, but I'm also like you guys. I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, a creator, and I love creating new things. So I will take you to the beginning and how it all started. Okay. So this is my YouTube channel. As you know, I have Over 7 million subscribers, over 1 billion views. And my channel has evolved over the course of 7 years. When I first started on YouTube, I was in college. I was 20 years old, actually 19 to be exact. No one really knew what I was doing. No one even knew what YouTube was. YouTube at its time was early on in its infancy. And it was really a place for people to just randomly find videos of cats, or funny karaoke songs. It was really— there wasn't really a place or a community where creators could come. And then when I saw that, I stumbled upon YouTube, I realized, wow, this is the future. This is where everyone's gonna be watching videos. The millennials, Generation Z, they're all gonna be here. And automatically right there, I saw the future. And this is important. When you guys are starting any new business, look forward. Don't look back. Be inspired by history, But because history inspires you, take that idea and create something for the future. And so when I saw YouTube, I didn't see it like a television set. I realized, wow, like, this is TV made for me. I can create my own TV shows. I can create my own channel, my own network. And I'm going to start my own channel here, and I'm going to start teaching and sharing what I love. So at first, I started sharing these beauty tips because 10 years ago, if a woman wanted to learn any beauty tutorials, she'd either have to go to a beauty counter where oftentimes she would feel pressured to buy products that she might not end up using. And she spends a lot of money and then she might not have a good experience with that. And there goes that opportunity for her to explore the love and art and creativity of beauty. Or you'd have to pay for a seminar. And so there was always something where you had to buy to learn. I never believed that you should buy to learn everything. I'm a huge believer in sharing. Knowledge is everywhere. And if you find the right place, you can learn things for free. So that place happened to be YouTube for me. So I started shooting these beauty tutorials not thinking anyone would watch them. And sure enough, I started getting thousands of views and hundreds and thousands of subscribers. And it was another creative outlet for me to look forward to because I was also a full-time student. I was an art college student. And it was really stressful, as you guys know, like finals and all these expectations. YouTube and my channel was a creative outlet for me to just express myself and vent. So by doing so, I started building my following because I realized there's one thing that matters most is influence. Influence is the new currency of the future. There's nothing more powerful than influence. And I understood that at a very early age. I knew that once I graduate from college, they're not just gonna be looking at my portfolio. They're probably gonna be looking at my Twitter, my other social media accounts and they're gonna see how many followers I have. And so if they're gonna hire someone, they're probably gonna hire someone that has more influence. Very early on I understood this because I knew the power of social media was going to evolve. And so here's my channel. My top videos, as you can see on the right, Barbie Transformation, Zombie Barbie, 'cause Barbie is very popular. And also I'll show you my current videos now. They've completely evolved. It's not just about beauty. I do a lot of lifestyle videos like how to destress, my favorite apps and technology, and also most importantly, I like to do motivational videos. Just getting my followers to be inspired. Not just for them to create outer beauty, but inner beauty too. So moving on to the goodies. The appetizer. Actually, no. Entrepreneurs, which is the businesses that I was able to create because of my platform. So Ipsy is a startup that I founded 3 years ago. We raised less than $3 million, and today we're making around $120 million, so 3 years later. This idea was inspired by a very simple trip in Thailand that I took in 2008. And I saw all these girls at a mall surrounding a kiosk. And they were going crazy. They were spending all this money and they were going crazy buying all these beauty products. And I was asking my friend, why are these girls buying beauty samples when you can just get them for free? And she said, well, here in Asia, if you buy a product, you have to return— and if you wanna return it, you can't return it. It's a final sale. And so a lot of these beauty products that they were buying samples were very expensive. La Mer, I don't know if you guys know this, but La Mer is like a $200 cream. They wanted to buy the sample because if you're gonna make a $200 investment and it's not gonna work for you, it's a waste of money. And so the shoppers in Asia are very savvy. They're all about sampling. And this idea really struck me because I realized, wow, sampling could be the new marketing for the future. And this— remember, this idea came in 2008. So I kind of tucked it away in the back of my head and I said, you know what? The time comes, I'll be able to make a business out of this. Fast forward 3 years later, 2011. Ipsy was born. And it was started here actually in San Mateo. So our office is literally 3 blocks away. We have over 100 people now. And a lot of them are beauty enthusiasts. They love waking up and they love coming to work because they don't feel like it's work anymore. So it's really cool to see how a simple idea that was inspired by me opening my eyes and asking questions created a new economy. So to talk more about what exactly Ipsy is, Ipsy is a beauty community. It's free to join, but if you pay $10 a month, you get these Glam Bags. And I'm holding one right there. Within these Glam Bags, we have around 4 to 5 full-size to deluxe-size beauty products. We don't believe in giving samples away because samples you can get for free. And I'm all about giving the best customer experience. And so We really believe in giving quality products. And so that's where all of our money went into. It went into customer experience, quality products. Marketing, $0. We didn't spend any money on marketing. Instead, we invested it in our customers so that they can create a community. Because once you have a strong community and influence, you don't really need a lot of marketing dollars to buy new customers. So this is the Glam Bag. You can see on the left. This is the metallic envelope that you get in the mail. So every month when our customers, they see this, we call them Ipsters. When they see this, they know that they're gonna get a Glam Bag. And on the right, you can see these are all the bags that we have to date. And on the bottom, every— most of our Ipsy customers, they love sharing what they get. They talk about it. They vlog about it. They'll do unbagging videos. Really, we don't really have to pay a lot of money to do any marketing because they do it for us, which is amazing because they love sharing. And so we empower them to share by giving them quality products. And not— they're not all gonna get the same products. Before they sign up for a Glam Bag, they have to take a very, very detailed profile quiz where we learn everything about them. Their eye color, hair color, skin type, what type of lipstick do they like, do they like red lipstick, nude lipstick. So we learn everything about them. And every month we encourage our Ipsters to give us beauty reviews so that we can also give this information to our brands and we can also learn more about them so that we can give them better products. So on average per month we get 700,000 beauty reviews, which is insane. I mean, that number is mind-boggling and it's growing still. It's growing. So we get a lot of data, which is really important for us because we get to learn more about our customers so that we can give them a better experience. And so this month we will be celebrating 1 million bags. We are shipping out 1 million bags every month. And this business is only in America and Canada. So I just came back from Japan learning all about the market. And we are looking to expand out there too in Asia. So remember, every big company, every big idea, they all come from small beginnings. So don't ever underestimate how small your beginnings are because you never know. If you nurture it the right way, it's like a plant. Just keep watering it, giving it the right sun and keep nurturing it and it's going to grow and it's going to be fruitful. So these are the different bags that we have and every month they are themed differently. That way we give our customers a little bit of newness and we curate different looks for them so that they don't have to go out and buy new products. They get products sent to them and they can discover new beauty brands without having to go to the stores. Because as you guys know, more and more people are shopping online and they wanna have a different experience when they're shopping online. So what we do is we give them a more in-depth experience as if a real beauty guru was giving them, or a real beauty guru was curating these products for them. So another business I launched was 2 years ago. I collaborated with, I partnered with L'Oréal. And we launched EM Cosmetics. This is the second brand L'Oréal has created. So L'Oréal, as you guys know, they acquire beauty brands, multimillion-dollar beauty brands, and they turn them into multibillion-dollar brands. They've never actually created a brand from the ground up besides L'Oréal. And so this was a very historic initiative. And it took me 3 years to build this brand. We launched around 250 different products, which is very massive. For a new brand. And it's e-commerce only. And this really happened because L'Oréal saw the value in digital marketing. They saw how digital marketing is really changing and this is where they need to be. This is the future, which is a really good investment.
