Ep 019 – Building a Community-First Brand with Calling

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Sabah Yaqoob of Calling Beauty!

Sabah started her career journey in the fashion world, working at Alexander McQueen, Tom Ford Beauty and Harrods. She always knew that she wanted to start her own business one day, but never expected it to be in beauty. But as you’ll hear in this interview, life led her to launch Calling – a clean beauty brand that puts community first. They officially launched in 2023 with their hero product, Face Fog, and have already been featured in British Vogue and named Best New Beauty Brand by Pure Beauty Magazine.

Episode Highlights:

How she went from moving up in the fashion world to starting her own beauty brand:

“I used to describe in the early days my shift to wanting to create a beauty company to every rom com that we've all watched growing up. Where the main character is in love with some quarterback in her school, but there's a best friend that's always there for her, that never leaves her side, who is loyal, trustworthy, always makes her happy, and she never considers him as a love interest. But at the end of the movie, that's who she ends up with.

Beauty was kind of that for me. I was just obsessed with beauty from literally being 13 years old and my maternal grandmother showing me how to apply kajal to my eyes for the first time. To my mum, she's a Virgo and she just knows things because of that. Especially when it comes to beauty, fashion… she just sort of created this innate sense of selecting a product and the art around curating a routine and taking care of your skin and a love of beauty products.

But I never really saw it as a business opportunity that I would be good for until I realized that I'd been sort of curating this personal relationship with it all along. I had a unique perspective because of myself, my background, where I could see weaknesses in certain things in the beauty industry when it came to inclusivity and diversity. I was also really getting into looking at organic food, investing in my health and wellness, working with a functional doctor and realizing that discrepancy between the supplements, the vitamins, the food I'm eating versus these sort of heavily toxic products that we all just kind of conveniently turn an eye to. And it was at that intersection that I thought, no, there's something here. And that's when I started working on the brand.”

Some of the early challenges that Sabah faced to launch the business:

“Every week, every month, there were tasks that I just had no idea how to tackle until I had to tackle them. But specifically in those early years, beauty is a very technical industry. You are developing things that people will use on their skin. And because of that, it's very sensitive. So there is a lot of pressure to ensure that you're working with the right labs, that you are making sure that you’re compliance regulated, you're getting the product tested and all of your claims are backed up.

So for me, probably the most challenging part was having to find my manufacturers and suppliers without the benefit of attending what's called “Cosmoprof”. So it's basically like the premier vision of beauty. It's the largest beauty expo that happens every year in a few different cities, but the main one happens in Italy.

So because I didn't know that we were going to be hit by a global pandemic in 2020, I wasn't able to attend that expo. And even finding out that it existed took quite a lot of research because beauty is very exclusive, like the inner world of actually who's making these products, who are the key players, who are the best packaging designers. You can't just really go on Google and find out. I mean, you can, because that's how I initially found things, but through a lot of heavy research. And then when I was able to attend the expo for the first time, which I think was in 2022, FaceFog [our product] was already well into development. We launched that in 2023.

So it was nice to then attend and see that all of my research had proven to be correct. Like I'd done a good map of who the main players were and that I was in the right hands, but I had to pretty much go into that blind.

And the second biggest thing I would say is logistics. It was the most intimidating to me because I felt this big responsibility that I would have inventory I'd have stock and I have to get it from A to B, and how do you then get it to the customer?

But one piece of advice I would give to any founder that's doing direct to consumer or in consumer goods – it's not as intimidating as it seems. In the early years, I worked with a logistics consultant for a few months and she just sort of gave me a lowdown and helped me to understand what is my supply chain essentials. Because that's really the backbone. Your marketing can be fantastic. Your product can be excellent. But if you can't physically get it to people in the correct way, it's going to be a problem. And that is an ongoing challenge as a new brand.”

Why she chose to launch with just one product:

“I feel like I wanted to introduce one product for, number one, a practical reason. As a new brand, taking on inventory is a huge risk. And if nobody likes it and it doesn't sell, you are left with thousands of units. So I thought let's start with something small. And I think I have Patrick Chalhoub, one of the co-CEOs at Chalhoub, to thank for this because when I joined the company, we were invited in groups to sit with him for about 30 minutes and he always used to use the word ‘agility’. He would always talk about a company as this thing that has to be less like Superman and Batman and more like the Flash. Quick, able to get from here to there. Not so clunky, not so big and bulky. It has to be malleable.

And I thought, right, starting with one product makes a lot of sense because I can start small. I can really understand if the customer that I'm attracting is actually the customer that I want and may have made this product for. And put it into every single product that we will then launch afterwards.

So that was the practical decision. That was also, as you rightly said, beauty brands will have one product that then becomes the signature and they build out entire flagship lines around it. And I think when I started working on the formula for Face Fog, there were other formulas for other products going on at the same time, but I just thought, ‘No, this is too good.’

As for other brand founders, I think each business is very particular. But I do think that within fashion and beauty, you can have an incredibly successful company from one product. I think it allows you as a founder to test. It allows customers to get to know you. But I do also see from every pop up that we did last year, customers would ask, ‘Is this the only product that you have?’ Because they're interested. Once they've seen you, they've met you. They like the idea of the brand. If they're maybe not so certain about a face mist, it would be nice to have a couple other things to offer them. But we'll get to that. And a lot of that is coming this year, which I'm excited about.”

You can follow Calling on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠, ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠ or go shop their products on ⁠callingbeauty.com