Hear how founder Anastasia Bezrukova has built a thriving clean makeup brand sold in 300+ stores

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Anastasia Bezrukova of Minori!

Minori is a San Francisco based clean makeup brand known as “makeup for people who don't wear makeup”. They launched 3 years ago and focus on creating the most essential, universally flattering products for a minimal, natural makeup look. Minori’s collection of lip glosses, cream blushes, highlighters, and newly launched sunscreen are sold in close to 350 stores in the United States and Canada.

Episode Highlights:

How Anastasia went from working at Ipsy to starting her own makeup brand:

“I think in my second year of working at Ipsy and. I was actually about to get married. Um, I had a wedding planned in New York city And um, I had a terrible makeup trial and then like wearing makeup Spent like so much makeup on me after me telling like, you know, I barely wear anything and uh, I decided the next day to go to sephora and to Attempt to purchase things for myself so I can perhaps do my own wedding makeup.

So it was really, I think, shocking to me in that moment when I was walking around Sephora, trying to spend my own money, because when you work in the beauty industry, you get so much free stuff. You don't really kind of even need to buy beauty products. That's definitely a perk of the job. But, um, when you, when you go in there as a real customer, you're I was just, I'm like, Oh my God, like I find this overwhelming. How is that possible? Because I've tried every single product sold here from a work perspective. I know what the good stuff is, but when you're there as a customer, it's so overwhelming. Women most of the time want very easy, simple things when they're getting ready in the morning. And I was wondering to myself, how is it that there isn't a single brand that only does the most essential products that kind of eliminates all of the unnecessary, all of the like really cool, trendy, but not something that you would put on at 8 in the morning type of colors. Instead of having this like giant assortment where lipstick comes in 16 different shades or in 12 shades, what would it look like if a company only made four shades, like the four best shades or the two best shades of blush. And that's really where that at home moment happened. Basically like a week after my wedding celebrations were over, I started working on a vision board. It was like, here, who is my customer? You know, who is she? What's her pain point? Um, what that whole kind of brand identity environment that I'm thinking of. And, and, but it really kind of started with the product. I was like, okay, we're going to make a lip product in four colors.

We're going to make a blush in two colors. I know exactly which two colors of blush look good on all skin tones because I had tried thousands of them for my work. And I wanted to put as much detail on paper because I knew that if I was going to go to a contract manufacturer packaging supplier, they were going to look at this 20 year old girl who has your experience in the industry, you know, aside from being a buyer and not take me seriously. So I wanted to kind of go in there armed with a very well thought out deck. And that was the first steps that I took. I went to Cosmoprof in Las Vegas, which is a really big beauty packaging, and supplier trade show. And I was walking around there kind of looking at all the vendors and getting business cards and trying to kind of get that process in the way. And within six months, I had a packaging supplier. I had hired a designer. I had tried to figure out my name. I was kind of really learning as I went along. I didn't know what that roadmap was going to be and I did a lot of things in the wrong order, but I got myself started to figure it out one step at a time.”

How long it takes to launch a beauty brand:

“Even if I was, let's say to start a new company today with the experience that I have with all of my supplier contacts, it would still take at least a year and a half because production timelines are long. Even when I placed a purchase order for a reorder of packaging or reorder formula, it takes us a good eight to nine months because of all of these pieces that were coming from all of these different countries. So if you add on to that just iterating, right, and working with a chemist and all the back and forth to get that formula right, it's not something that happens overnight. But it's such a beautiful process. And to me, those three years that it took to build the brand were some of the happiest times of my life because you're in this dream world that's actually a lot harder. Day one when you launch, you get pulled out of that and you're like, okay, now we need to make sales. I see it as a timeline before launch and after launch and all the different phases.”

Unique challenges Minori faced while trying to create their high quality packaging:

“I think that one of the biggest challenges was understanding the actual look and feel of packaging because when you're producing a component in your small brand factories don't necessarily want to give you a full pre -production sample. So your designer can mock something up and say, well, we think this tube, you know, that we're only seeing in this white sample. This is how it would look if we made it this color. And if we made the logo black, for example, but you don't really get to see it in its final form. I think now that we're a bigger company, factories will go and make samples for us, like no questions asked. But back in the day, my supplier wasn't offering to make me a sample. We kind of had to place our purchase order and then they made a sample. And then when we saw it, we're like, my God, this doesn't look great. This is not what we think is going to sell. And finally, there was a mistake that they made on their end, which forced them to pivot and pay for it. So it didn't cost us anything except time, but we changed to a really beautiful glass jar with soft touch packaging with our logo in white. All of these small details ended up making Minori the brand that it is today.

But there was so much uncertainty going into that. We really weren't sure like is making that extra investment of doing soft touch worth it, right? Should we go and make the glass frosted? Is that worth it? How is it going to look? It's all of these things that you kind of when you were looking at it on a deck, it doesn't translate to what it's going to be like in reality. And when you're ordering 10,000 units of a packaging component for the first time in your life and it's like all of your savings, you're literally unwell. Is this going to go the way that we want it or not? So I think getting the packaging right was extremely challenging in the early days.

Why Anastasia regrets investing in a fully custom website:

“ We also did the the You mistake of building a custom, fully custom website – the backend was Shopify, but the front end was React. I don't know if that tells you, but we spent something like $20, 000 building this custom website and it looked stunning. My designer had so much fun building, designing for her cause she had no limitations. But a year in we had to pull the plug and move everything over to Shopify 2. 0 and redo it. You know, it's small things like that. Now I would know exactly how to do right, but when you're doing it for the first time, you kind of get sucked into things that you think are going to be special or different and costly, costly decisions.”

How investing in better photography helped Minori land their first big retailer:

“One of the oddest things that I've done that I'm so happy I did is an expensive professional photo shoot so early on. That's normally a step that brands do like a month before, three months before launching. We had our lab samples with our formula with the shades finalized, but we didn't have our packaging like even close to being done. This was even pre -pandemic. So was like maybe a year into developing the brand, I hired a photographer and we did this stunning photo shoot on four models, four different skin tones. It was the kind of the photo shoot of my dreams. And we had these amazing images and I was able to take the brand that I was thinking in my head, in my deck and make it visually real.

So we had the brand identity built out. And then with the photography, that's when the brand came together and I was able to get retailer buyer meetings. And I got our first big retailer, the Detox Market, aligned a year and a half before we even launched. And it was such a long process because we were trying to become a clean beauty brand. We were getting all of our ingredients vetted by the routine. Like that took almost a year. So having done that work ahead of time allowed us to launch with the detox market. Had I not done that photo shoot really early on, it would have been hard to just present what that vision was going to be without that visual. But all these photos, the models are not holding the product. It's just like their skin and how beautiful they look wearing the makeup. And then we did a really big packaging photo shoot right before the launch when everything was actually ready. So that was something that I did completely in reverse order, but that did work out.

Tips for selling your products through wholesale:

“Well, you have to have your ducks in a row with the basics. You have to have your brand deck, your line sheets, having your email pitch crafted down to the fewest possible words that can tell your story as efficiently as possible and starting to build out those lists of like who would be your dream partners and maybe don't start with Sephora as being your dream partner unless you're like really building a brand that's that's going to be super well funded and getting in there. But if you take a look from like smaller, smaller stores as a start, starting to.maybe even have these conversations with them pre -launch, sharing your vision, sharing what you're building. Sometimes it's easier to kind of have a response from them before you're even launched because once you're launched, you really have to put yourself out there like pretty perfectly and they will be judging you and comparing you to all the other options that they can source out there.

It's an intense labor where you reach out through Instagram DMs or email and you send your lion sheet with your deck, you see who you are, you offer to send samples. And in the early days, it's like 99 % rejection because until you kind of have that proof of establishment, no one wants to be the first necessarily. It takes it takes a while. But I would really say you have to be resilient and keep going and keep trying to have these conversations going in person in stores and showing your product is definitely a way to start, especially kind of trying to build out a local distribution in your city. What really makes things a little bit more efficient is participating in wholesale trade shows. And that's been a huge needle mover for us.

A trade show booth is normally a couple thousand dollars, but there are shows that will have, like the Norrish section at Shop Object is great. It's like $1 and you get three shelves and there's all of these buyers from all over the US come and walk this show. the other amazing tool that's out there is FAIR, which is a wholesale marketplace. They've been around for several years, but I think in the last 12 months, they've gotten really big and they have a lot of people on both sides. They have all the small independent retailers in the country shopping on that platform and all of the brands are there too. So it doesn't look like Etsy on there anymore. Like you're seeing the bigger brands and those stores can place purchase orders directly through there and discover you. And it doesn't mean when you post your brand on fair that you're going to get orders overnight. It's still a long process. You have to have insanely good photography, really good product descriptions, thinking through like an SEO mindset about how you're setting things up and doing a lot of outreach to store yourself. And once kind of the ones that you've reached out to start placing orders through FAIR, the algorithm starts seeing that there's movement and starts pitching you to more and more retailers. But I would say for people who are looking to get into wholesale, fair should be your number one friend if independent distribution is what you're interested in and trying to figure out how to get it perfect because that will move the needle more than anything else if you get it right.”