THE HEART COMPANY self-care beauty brand: hair care products, premium hair accessories, vegan skin care and a feel good vegan perfume line
Please introduce yourself and the Startup THE HEART COMPANY to our readers!
First of all, thank you for your interest in our start-up and for giving us the opportunity to introduce our start-up to your audience.
THE HEART COMPANY is a female-founded self-care beauty brand. Our company’s beauty product portfolio includes hair care products, premium hair accessories, vegan skin care and a feel good vegan perfume line. Our brand´s mission is to spread love, positivity, kindness and good vibes around the beauty world. From the very beginning of our product development process we strongly believed that a key to success for our products should not just be a top quality. We also wanted to create a specific attitude toward life and hence decided our products needed to come to our customers in a way that would enforce the positive feelings our products are promising to support in our customers. So we utilize packaging and presentation of our products not only as a necessity – they are part of the overall orchestration of product, brand and emotional framework.
Why did you decide to start a business?
Our self-care beauty brand story began with a simple desire: We wanted to create a lovely online destination dedicated to offering self-care beauty products at an affordable price – all designed with LOVE. As best friends and DIY enthusiasts, we often shared our experiences about our daily beauty routines. We both love everything DIY beauty products and self-care. It all started with a heart…The heart emblem in our logo represents the femininity & emotionality of the brand. It also symbolizes our dedication to making each product with heart & passion. Seeing the happy smiles on pictures and videos that were sent to us by our customers from around the world, just makes us love what we do!
What is the vision behind THE HEART COMPANY?
Our vision for the future is to bring our beauty products to even more markets and to be present on additional Amazon market places as well as to continuously grow brand awareness and to find relevance in the global beauty market by sharing as much beauty & positivity with women around the world as we possibly can. We hope to be able to transport our brand values which are positive messaging, kindness and customer love to women around the world and to be able to surprise them with new beauty products that complement their THE HEART COMPANY beauty products in their bathrooms.
The beauty industry is moving fast and is as well growing at a high rate. To succeed you have to execute quickly. It is very important to be consistent with the messages that you spread on your social media channels, on your beauty product packaging as well as on your sales channels. THE HEART COMPANY customers will find our messages about beauty, positivity, love and kindness everywhere: on Social Media, on our Amazon brand stores, on our fragrance bottles, on our skin and hair care products as well as on shipping boxes.
From the idea to the start what have been the biggest challenges so far and how did you finance yourself?
The journey of founding your own business is a very tough process in which the right mindset, perseverance as well as resilience are important factors for success. One of the most challenging aspects as female founders and moms is finding balance between the job and the family. Having the right network and emotional support is one of the key factors to survive a start-up journey. We tried to compartmentalize our time so that we were as efficient as possible. THE HEART COMPANY brand was financed exclusively from our private funds so far – no investors or banks were involved so far. With constant growth this will, of course, probably change.
Who is the target group of THE HEART COMPANY?
Our main target audience is females between 18-38 years who are digitally savvy and care a lot about beauty combined with a positive, balanced, happy and healthy lifestyle. The purchase journey for millennial consumers is constantly changing. Millennials and Gen-Z will account for 45% of the luxury market by 2025 and will represent a 130% growth opportunity. Both young consumer groups seek an attitude of genuineness and approachability and, above all, the perception of individualization. They grew up with the internet and smartphones in a digital world.
A lot of them are always online or on their phones. They tend to research beauty products online by looking at reviews and ingredients, before actually buying them. With the integration of shoppable creatives and interactive ads we offer our millennial clients memorable advertising experiences. The elements that is factored into the purchase journey for our targeted consumer: Premium product quality, packaging and a strong product and brand message.
How do THE HEART COMPANY work? What are the advantages? What makes you different from other providers?
Our diverse mostly female team works remotely from various countries. Our company has a very lean structure with an amazing team of dedicated freelancers. This makes our decision processes very fast and efficient and our main focus is always the customer. We have both worked for large corporations for many years and love the organization and structure of big companies but as female founders of our own company we now love the freedom and the ability to act this way in our own start-up company. In big corporations each process takes so much longer. In our small and very international team we have the ability to conceptualize new product ideas and bring them to the market faster – which is amazing!
How has your company changed with Corona?
We already learned about the Covid situation in January 2020 due to our regular business communication with Asia. So we were already pretty aware of the possible upcoming pandemic situation and had decided at an early stage to be very budget savvy. On the other hand, we motivated ourselves to use the global challenging times to work on additional sales channels for our beauty. When you see it just from the business perspective the global lockdown situation even became a chance for our lean beauty start-up. We started to work on our Amazon brand stores for Germany as well as for the US and had the most amazing support from the Amazon global selling team.
The other outstanding thing that happened was our creative idea for our upcoming fragrance line. It was even inspired by the global times of uncertainty and by the deep desire for love, good vibes, kindness and positive inspiration around the world. We are beyond grateful about the fact that the leading fragrance house in the world supported our creative fragrance concept. Despite all the remote work for our modern, feel good perfume project it probably became one of the fastest fragrances launches ever. It was executed with so much dedication by the wonderful perfumers and the entire team that has worked on it. We can´t wait to launch the fragrances on Amazon in the US in the upcoming weeks.
How did you adjust to it and what changes have you made?
As shortly mentioned before we were of course very budget savvy when it came to advertising costs for social media ads and we tried to keep our product development costs as low as possible but without losing motivation and creativity.
Where do you see the opportunity in the crisis?
We both love the quote by the famous American life coach Tony Robbins: Life happens FOR you not TO you. During our start-up journey the internalization of this quote became very helpful whenever there was an obstacle to overcome. Covid was for sure a big obstacle for us as it was for everybody else. Tony´s wisdom always helps us to see things in a positive way, to stay consistent and to always believe in our vision and to love the daily process of building a company and brand.
THE HEART COMPANY, where does the road go? Where do you see yourself in five years?
THE HEART COMPANY will always be one brand, one point of view and all products will complement each other. We ́d love to connect our online business with offline emotional shopping experiences in the future. In addition to selected beauty online platforms, we are currently talking to experts in the travel retail sector, in particular for the Asian and Middle East markets. That is of course very exciting and confirms that an internationally oriented brand strategy simply brings a lot of potential with it.
We ideally want to reach women all over the world with our brand and the emotions that come with it. People are craving for authenticity and the sources of influence are shifting. People want to find ways to simplify the overwhelming complexity we all live in. For us as beauty brand founders these points are all great chances to build our brand and we will share as much beauty & positivity around the world as we possibly can.
At the end: Which 3 tips would you give to future founders?
You can´t teach resilience and a growth mindset but in our fast paced environments and in small start-ups the right mindset is critical to staying focused and to driving productivity. Always show passion in what you do and be transparent.
Build trustful and honest long-term business partnerships, work together as a team and always keep the fun part while working on a common business goal. Execution is key and continuous learning is also key. You don’t know everything in the beginning, the more you learn the better you are at what you do. The moment you stop learning is the moment you start failing. Building a sustainable brand and business is a journey and no short term goal. So you have to love the process to make it a success!
Thank you Or Bokobza and Chen Avni for the Interview
Statements of the author and the interviewee do not necessarily represent the editors and the publisher opinion again.
