The clean beauty movement is on it’s way to becoming the fastest growing market in the industry with brands, retailers and influencer’s alike jumping on the bandwagon to see where it will take them. Elsie, along with Dominika Minrovic founded BYBI Beauty in 2017 with the hope that they can give consumers what they want – lean, affordable beauty. In this interview Elsie tells us more about their journey and where they want to go.
How did you get the idea to start Clean Beauty Co and BYBI Beauty?
Clean Beauty Co is a documentation of our journey into natural beauty and the idea came from a collision of our interest in wellness and beauty. We were taking the time to scrutinize the food we ate but had never stopped to understand our beauty labels. After a little research, we felt totally dissatisfied with what was currently on offer from the mainstream
beauty industry: blanket formulations across many brands, lots of water and synthetic fillers padding out our products, very little of the good stuff and a whole lot of marketing fluff. Our answer was to have a go at making beauty products ourselves and through sharing our DIY beauty experiments across our blog, Clean Beauty Co was born!
BYBI came around 18 months later after we’d had time to build up our understanding of the natural beauty industry and was our answer to what we truly believed it was missing: ethically effective skincare that spoke to us as hardcore beauty junkies.
How did you start to formulate the first of your products?
The BYBI product range is a actually a very developed version of some of our earliest CBCo recipes – so Babe Balm for example came from a recipe in our book called Fuss Free that was basically a very simple multipurpose balm. We loved the idea of it but wanted to make it a real standout product so worked with our chemist to develop the original formulation into an innovative, real high performance balm. Dominika and I are both trained skincare formulators so still do the base of all NPD, then work with our in-house chemist and the BYBI team to develop ideas. It’s a highly collaborative process and a real diverse range of people are involved which means our products end up answering the needs of many!
What were the most useful assets in building your company from having a
blog?
It’s great to have a community who have watched us and our journey, so really understand what we’re about and what we’re trying to achieve. This community has been hugely useful in shaping BYBI product development by giving us their thoughts on what they want from their beauty products, as well as providing us with support and encouragement. Running a blog also meant that we were able to get to know the industry really well before making the jump to starting a brand. It’s a good way to build things up without having to initially invest much financially and test the market to see if there is consumer appetite for your idea.
How did you pitch your business so that you were able to win Richard
Branson’s not-for-profit Virgin Start-up? And how did you invest the £50,000
winnings in the right way?
The Virgin Start-Up Loan is a loan awarded to small businesses that we applied for and were rewarded off the back of a detailed business plan. It was a great way for us to kick start the brand and we used the money to help launch BYBI – from our branding and design to formulating the range! It also meant we had the pleasure of meeting Sir Richard himself and interviewed him on stage!
What do you think the major appeal of Clean Beauty is?
I personally prefer clean beauty as I believe it’s superior terms of efficacy – formulations with generally less water and high quantities of actives lead to products that perform better. For me, clean also means better for the health of my skin and better for the environment.
One might think writing all your skincare recipes into a book for anyone and
everyone to access might be detrimental to your business? But it didn’t exactly turn
out that way – did you predict this and what made you want to be so transparent
with your customer?
The Clean Beauty Co blog and book is all about accessible DIY
beauty, using ingredients from your kitchen cupboards or fridge, so the offering is
actually quite different to the BYBI range. The idea with the book and our recipes is
that you might use up an avocado as a one time face mask or take a drop of apple
cider vinegar that you already have in your cupboard to make a hair rinse. Our
products on the other hand are innovative, high performance formulations made
with unique ingredients! So they don’t really compete in that sense, as they cater to
fairly different beauty needs. Plus not everyone can be bothered to make their own.
Having said that, we’re all about transparency at BYBI and are very open about the
ingredients we use and why, so if you really wanted to make one of our products you
could (you just might struggle to source some of the more obscure ingredients)!
What did you do before starting your own company?
Both Dominika and I are from marketing and advertising backgrounds and that’s actually how we met. I worked at Apple and Facebook before quitting to pursue Clean Beauty Co full time in Sept 2016.
When did you know it was the right time to invest everything into your own
business and how did you go about such a big change?
We spent about 18 months running both Clean Beauty Co (this was pre-BYBI) alongside working in full time roles. The tipping point was when CBCo was really starting to take off and we found we were cramming every minute of spare time into running workshops, hosting events, writing our book, sharing content etc and there weren’t enough hours in the day to do this effectively whilst also giving our day jobs 100%. We ended up doing a bad job of both! It was clear that CBCo was beginning to take off and we knew that if we didn’t both take the leap to pursue it full time, we might lose the momentum we’d gained. It was a tough decision but one that was well thought out and planned for; we saved enough financially to feel comfortable and were at a point in our careers where it was very ‘now or never’. Needless to say we’ve not once looked back since.
How do you think being female has helped you to develop better products for women?
It’s kind of odd when you look into who heads up some of the larger beauty brands and their target audiences. We met with an investor recently who said she only invests in brands run by founders who are target audience and that makes total sense. There’s no better way to know what your consumer wants than if you’re one of them! Dominika and I formulate products first and foremost for us – we know the type of product we want to fit into our lifestyle, the ingredients we like, the benefits we’re looking for, which means this is often the same for our consumer. It makes perfect sense but is surprisingly still quite uncommon in beauty.
Have you seen a lot of positive change for women in the beauty industry?
Absolutely! The industry has come a long way in the last couple of years, it’s a hugely
exciting time as we see disruptor brands challenge the way things have been done for
so long. For women as consumers this means brands are more relatable, more
trustworthy, more authentic. We’re seeing a wave of realistic images portrayed with
diversity at their core and I think this is hugely positive for women and their
relationship with beauty.
Where do you think your brand will be in 10 years?
We want to be the world’s biggest natural beauty brand, making effective and ethical beauty accessible to all.
