Curious what learnings a beauty creator with 10M followers and her partner take into their roles as co-founders of a fragrance brand? Then this episode is for you!
In Ep. 158 of Earned, Conor sits down with Jackie Aina & Denis Asamoah, co-founders of fragrance brand FORVR Mood.
In Ep. 158 of Earned, Conor sits down with Jackie Aina and Denis Asamoah, co-founders of fragrance brand FORVR Mood. To start, we dive into how the global pandemic became a catalyst for Jackie, a beauty content creator, and Dennis, an investment banker, to combine their passions and areas of expertise, leading to the creation of a brand that sold out six months’ worth of inventory in just two hours. We learn about the journey the couple took from London to LA, balancing personal and professional lives, and thriving as a couple in business. We then discuss their ability to navigate the challenges of content creation and brand building, and they share invaluable lessons on community engagement, managing negativity, and being smart with investments. Switching gears, the couple reveals their goals of reshaping the beauty and fragrance industries and empowering consumers to feel confident and equipped. To close the show, we hear what’s next for the duo and what categories they’re expanding to next.
Check out highlights from the episode below, or or tune into the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen!
The following interview has been lightly edited for concision.
Denis Asamoah on Teaching Through Transparency: “It's important as brand founders that we share these stories because sometimes behind the scenes, everyone thinks everything's running smoothly, and everything's successful.”
Conor Begley: I'm curious for you what are your near-business-death experiences? Have you had any times when you’ve said, ‘I don't think we're going to make it,’ or ‘I don't know what to do, everything's burning down’?
Denis Asamoah: A hundred percent we have. It's important as brand founders that we share these stories because sometimes behind the scenes, everyone thinks everything's running smoothly, and everything's successful. One of the biggest myths I've learned in life is that your company can make millions of dollars, but is it making a profit? Are you keeping the lights on? It's something that I've learned very quickly. It doesn't mean anything, because you can do a press article and say this company is making X amount, and it sounds good.
But the most important question is, how much money do you have in your account? What is your actual net profit? That's the most important question. But in terms of our toughest time, it was around 2022 and 2023. We took a risk and made an investment on a 35,000 square foot warehouse so we could operate the business there, and that didn't really go smoothly.
To Jackie's point earlier, when we first started, the business took off really quickly. We ordered roughly 20,000 units. It sold in the space of a few hours. Our partner at the time told us oh yeah, you can sell 20,000 candles in a few hours in August. Well, November and December are the biggest moments for fine fragrance and home fragrance and brands, so you should do way more. So we ordered over over a hundred thousand units and at the time I didn't really understand the importance of cut stamping.
When you do that, you're now left with the product and if you don't sell it, you're done. And with candles it is very seasonal. And then, you've ordered so many fragrance oils. So we've ordered fragrance oils and I have expiry dates. See, this is the part of business. You don't ask the right questions and then you're now sitting there with inventory that you can't actually sell. Because it's seasonal, you can no longer sell it— because if it's a Christmas product and you are now in March, you don't want Christmas holiday themed products. So now you're stuck with it, and then, the fragrance expires, so you can't use it the following year.
There are all these little details and we didn't have data. We were going all in, but there was no real data to support how many to reorder. So our business got into a situation where we had lots of excess inventory and we had to dispose of a lot. We were able to come out of that storm and we've put things in place. We don't make all products straight away. We may get the key components. So, for example, if the component comes from China, like the glasses, we may just order the glasses, but we won't actually do the hot stamping for all products straight away. We'd only do like 20% of the units versus trying to do it all straight away.
Jackie Aina on Keeping Content Ready and Authentic: “Be very, very considerate and mindful of what you post, because it could come back to be your biggest break or it could be your worst nightmare.”
Conor Begley: Jackie, in your own content creation career, very few people get to the stage that you've gotten to in terms of the size of your audience, the engagement, and the community that you've built. For those that aspire to follow that path, what would be your advice to them? What have you learned? Were there any times when you said, ‘I'm done with it, I don't want to do this anymore, I'm over it’? Or have you remained passionate throughout the process?
Jackie Aina: I'm still very passionate about content creation overall, even though the space has changed a lot in both good ways and sometimes kind of crazy, strange, like ‘I don't know about this, girl’ ways. The overall community building aspect will always be the number one driving part of why I do this. If it's a world where you're just creating the content but not actively talking to people and not actively engaging with people, for me it wouldn't exist, it wouldn't be worthwhile. That's when I show up, that's what I'm here for, and as long as that [community] component is always there for me, I'm always, always going to have a job and I'm always going to enjoy this.
Even with the changes and the shifts in the community, or in the industry, do continue to change, I can change with it, but I can change in ways that continue to focus on what my why is. If someone were to ask me, what advice would I give? I know people are sick of hearing remain authentic, but I actually want to shift that response. It's not so much about being authentic. What I think people need to be more mindful of is that you may not be an overnight success. You may be a five-year success. You may be grinding for 10.
Personally, for me, my big break was my sixth year in. But what was so incredible is that when people did find out about me, when my videos did start blowing up at year six, they didn't have just like one viral video to consume. They were like ‘wait, she's amazing. But look at the background, look at the backlog of all this other content.’ So I like telling people to stay ready, so you don't have to get ready. Please believe, if and when you do get that big break, people are going to be like, ‘wow, she's been building.’ You can't erase that. You can't erase the history of the things that you upload. They live on forever. And be careful—even though you think no one's watching, one day everybody could be watching. So be very, very considerate and mindful of what you post, because it could come back to be your biggest break, or it could be your worst nightmare.
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