However lighthearted the viral TikTok proverb “being delulu is the solulu” may have been intended, it articulates quite plainly a quietly understood requisite within the founder community.
“You have to be unrealistically optimistic,” said five-time founder Marcia Kilgore while moderating a panel with Tower 28’s Amy Liu; Brown Girl Jane’s Tai Beauchamp and U Beauty‘s Tina Chen Craig at the 2024 WWD Beauty CEO Summit.
“Just a little delulu,” laughed Liu, a beauty veteran whose brand was born out of her own lifelong struggle with eczema.
“I was looking for products that were not only clean, but also safe for sensitive skin, and that’s exactly what we are,” said Liu, whose brand is the only makeup line which is formulated 100 percent in compliance with the National Eczema Association’s ingredient guidelines.
After launching Bliss, Soap & Glory, FitFlop and Soaper Duper — in that order — Kilgore saw opportunity for Beauty Pie’s membership model which aims to offer high-value, lower-cost beauty products while attending a beauty exposition in Milan. “I was leaving the train station and walking into a Sephora with a bag of samples from Intercos thinking, ‘wow — I’ve got $5,000 of street value cosmetics over my shoulder here; wouldn’t it be fun if I could bring all of my friends to come to this Intercos beauty event and be able to get them that same kind of value?’
Marcia Kilgore
For Beauchamp, personal need was the genesis of Brown Girl Jane.
“We are a fine functional fragrance brand that is steeped in wellness and cultural storytelling,” said Beauchamp, who founded the brand alongside her Spelman sisters, Malaika and Nia Jones. The trio’s latest fragrance, Carnivale, $102, features notes of Caribbean mango, amber and whipped musk, aiming to evoke the empowering spirit of Trinidad Carnivale. “We wanted to tell stories that reflected our experiences as Black women and create fragrances that elevate your mood — that can take you to a place outside of yourself.”
Chen Craig, meanwhile, bills herself as “the world’s most reluctant beauty founder.”
“I thought to myself, ‘Listen — they put a man on the moon in 1969, why can’t they put retinol on my face where I don’t get rosacea?,’” said Chen Craig, whose hallmark is U Beauty’s siren capsule technology, which aims to allow users to combine several actives without fear of irritation or loss of efficacy.
On Scaling and Capital
“Bootstrapping has become so romanticized,” said Chen Craig, who gained U Beauty’s first minority investment in 2022 from Sandbridge Capital. “There shouldn’t be a stigma to taking [private equity]; when you don’t take capital, you’re leaving opportunity on the table.”
Beauty Pie marks the first time Kilgore has taken external investment for any of her brands, and there has “definitely been a learning curve,” she said. While it’s not uncommon for founders to feel a tension between growth and brand vision, she and Liu have found weighing investment through the lens of compatibility as a key to protecting both.
“It’s similar to a marriage — whether you’re talking about your retailer or your investors, you have to want to live the same life,” said Liu, who raised a $28 million series A funding round last December led by Prelude Growth Partners. “If you want to get there fast, you might take more money in the beginning; I wanted more control and so I did not take a lot of money in the beginning — it just depends.”
“Your first customer is yourself,” said Chen Craig. “Be obsessed with it — if you aren’t obsessed with your own product like a teenager in love, then you probably should not do it.”
Knowing when to say “no” is just as important as being OK with saying “yes,” noted Beauchamp.
“We said ‘no’ to some investment very early on, knowing that the marriage would not have worked out they way we wanted it to,” said Beauchamp, who has since gained investment from venture capital firm Fearless Fund. “We bootstrapped for three years — it really is about value alignment and being in it for the right reasons.”
On Founder Lessons They Wish They’d Known Earlier
“I wish I had known when I started my first company [Bag Snob] when I was 23 years old, not to waste so much time and energy on writing the perfect business plan,” said Chen Craig, who has since learned — at least sometimes — to “throw away the playbook; it can be such a waste of time trying to chase a competitor or [replicate] something just because it worked for another brand a year ago, or two years ago.”
Relinquishing fear-based control has also been part of Liu’s journey.
“If I could do it differently, I would try to have less fear involved and not be so motivated by fear,” she said. “I was afraid of spending money in the beginning and losing it all — even now sometimes, when things have gone well, I worry about it all going away. You have to try to get to a place where you’re like, ‘OK — I know what I know, I don’t know what I don’t know.”
On Staying Curious and Being a Forever Learner
For Liu, the founder journey has been a humbling one in the best way.
“Having been in this industry for 21 years, I think I thought I knew a lot more than I actually did — becoming a founder was very humbling for me,” she said, adding that “curiosity and perseverance [are key].”
Today’s “founder economy” has proven a door to opportunity and community for Beauchamp. “Founders are sharing information and it’s great because the [founder] journey can be very isolating, so knowing that others are dealing with the same thing has been helpful,” she said.
