Katia Beauchamp: "This year was probably the most intense for Birchbox"

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us here at the NexWeb in New York. Absolutely. Could you just tell us a bit about your journey as an entrepreneur? Who you are. Sure. Quickly. Yeah, so that's basically what I just talked about up on stage, but Birchbox is about six years old and I co-founded it while I was in business school with my best friend there, Hailey. And when we came up with the idea for Birchbox honestly we weren't necessarily planning to launch a company. We were about seven months away from graduation. We decided that we wanted to write a business plan, that that was a great skill set. But when we came up with the idea for Birchbox we got so excited and we were so passionate that within 24 hours we turned an inkling of an idea into a business model and we started working on a beta test and emailing CEOs of massive brands and asking them for their advice and time. And then a few months later we launched a test, a beta test for 200 women. That got a lot of traction and answered some of the biggest questions, probably the biggest one being would anybody ever pay for samples because that was the big skepticism from investors, the industry, advisors, even some consumers. And would the samples lead to the full-size sale because our model is the subscription is an appetizer, but the entree, what we really want you to do is buy all of your beauty from Birchbox and when that happened. And then last with beauty brands want to continue working with us and the beta was so successful. We were so naive. We were like check, check, check. And we went on to write a business plan and launch in 2010. And once again we're kind of taken aback by the momentum of Birchbox. We hit our five-year number from that plan in about seven months and you know really we're just trying to keep our head above water for the first several years. That's great. So as we know the journey of an entrepreneur is not linear. Can you talk a bit about some of the challenges and the biases for entrepreneurs in this starting out facing those challenges? Yeah, I mean there always were so many challenges in starting a business, but I think the difference around the challenge itself was the amount of people it impacted. So in the early days like there probably were the very most challenges in the early days from getting fundraising to getting beauty brands to scale with us. I mean when we launched Birchbox they were like that is cool, but come back to us when you have 10,000 subscribers. A few months later we were like hi we have 10,000 subscribers and they were like we don't have 10,000 samples flying around. We have to plan and in two years you can have 10,000 and we were like in two years we're going to have millions from you. So that felt really hard at the time, but honestly like things small, having a small team, having fewer customers, maybe less pressure. And as things got bigger I remember just feeling like I'm a child who just got invited to like the adult table and nobody knows that I'm still a child and you're you've invited me to this massive industry. We've done so much to change it in six years and everything just got more intense. This year was probably the most intense for Birchbox and I'm not sure because it was the hardest but I do think because the most people could be impacted between having hundreds of employees, six offices, millions of customers and the stakes feeling so high. It was really intense when people stopped really loving retail in the public market and e-commerce and the private and there was less interest in being a market dominator, right? And all of a sudden people were afraid of Amazon, everybody. All of a sudden that was just a fear and people said well instead of like seizing the day and building it as big as you can like be profitable. And we had to change everything, we had to cut our team, we had to remove tens of millions of dollars of OpEx and it was really and it is really tough. But I also think that we went from being relatively just you know like smooth sailing in a lot of ways and finding product market so early to suddenly getting to see what we could actually do as operators and how skilled we were and I think in a way it gave us a different kind of confidence because the wind was always at our back and once there was something in front of us like could we you know push through it, build a door, open a window and we're a really talented group of people that absolutely did that. That's amazing. So let's talk a bit about how Birchbox is using visual media, video, words and scenes. Yeah. Communicating with your audiences and in your marketing. So I'm extremely lucky because my husband, the love of my life happens to have started a production company when I was starting Birchbox and it was 2009 and he insisted that we have video and no one had video at that point, right? It was so new and he was like you have to, we're going to make this happen. So it just became a core part of our strategy that every month we would do a series of things from showing you what's coming in the box to just getting to know our team to doing tutorials and it became like a core part of our DNA and the industry has changed so much since then. I mean obviously YouTube and the UGC was there. It was actually a really big part of our growth but creating content that was at the intersection of like useful and also enjoyable, still pretty new and I still think there's a lot of changes. So for us we've gone from different types of production value to now really enjoying this live interaction with our customers and we're pretty obsessed with being able to talk right to them and say is this what you want to see? We've done crazy things like we're going to be coloring people's hair live and listening to what people's questions are, how they should be talking to their stylist in their salon and also sometimes I'll just do chats about entrepreneurship or just like fun light hearted things about fun products for moms. I have two kids and just getting that direct interaction, it feels, I don't know, it warms my heart, it fills me up but it also feels very relevant because you're not just creating in the abstract. People are tailoring it while it's happening and I think that's going to be a really interesting part of the future. That's great. So as you're doing so many different things with video, what would be your free advice for a brand that's starting out to use video and get to that level? Yeah, I mean there's so many incredible ways to, so many new tools to use in video to create something that can appear really beautiful and stunning without it having to be as high cost. So I would do the research and figure out the scrappy ways if you need some of those things. I think for us, for Birchbox, it's really important as kind of a media company, an e-commerce company, but also a company that wants to be a part of this new era of relating to our customers as a human to be both aspirational and really relatable. And so we try to do both. We really try to have the beautiful things happen but also have the like, I had to get ready really fast this morning and it happened and that'd be perfectly okay. So I would say if that is what your brand needs, if you can't just do all like raw and you need some high production value, there's just incredible tools out there to make things look so much more beautiful from a software perspective, from the actual hardware perspective, the lights now, it used to cost so much to do this all and now a loomy can be like your best friend if you need to do something where you just need to look well lit. So I think that's my advice is to just do the research, try to stay scrappy, not overdo it. And I think that especially when you're just getting started and if people like your product, they kind of like seeing you grow up too. It's fun for them to kind of see you get in a studio someday or you know, it's a part of the experience of growing together. I think that's a beautiful way to end. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, thank you for having me. This was great.