Briogeo: Nancy Twine

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid.

Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special. There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions, review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business?

Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing through Squarespace Capital. Go to squarespace.com slash built for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loan issued by Celtic Bank and service by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Airbnb.

This past summer, I took my family to Athens, and it was truly an incredible trip. We ate amazing food, we saw Parthenon and the Agora, and all the incredible things you can see in one of the most amazing cities in the world. And one of the things that made it special was the home we booked on Airbnb. We could see the Parthenon from our bedrooms.

It even had a small jacuzzi on the roof, and we were walking distance from everything you'd want to see. We had such an amazing time cooking and just spending time together as a family in that home on Airbnb. If you've ever had a chance to visit Athens, I cannot recommend it enough. That's the thing about Airbnb.

You're not just getting a place to sleep, you're getting a home base that fits your trip. And while you're away, your own home doesn't have to sit empty. Hosting on Airbnb can help you earn extra money on your schedule with full control. Your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. So I walk into this auditorium, and I look around, and I'm like, uh, here we go again. There were five of us who were going on stage to pitch our ideas, and the four other men who were presenting all had tech companies, and I just remember being like, oh my gosh, not again. It's like, what's your app?

Yeah, right. Like, this is what? Shampoo? No, no, no, where's your app?

Exactly. It was painful. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how old family skincare recipes and a personal tragedy inspired Nancy Twine to build a natural hair care line called Briogeo, one of the fastest growing hair brands sold at Sephora.

The easiest part about building a business is the day you imagine it in your head, because everything that happens after it is really hard. The research, the business plan, the pitch to investors, finding the factory, the distributor, the shops to sell your products, each one of these steps is an obstacle, and for the most part, each step creates a new problem. Too many problems can become overwhelming, and soon enough, it can also become tempting to just ditch the whole idea entirely. So to avoid that trap, Nancy Twine took each problem one at a time, which is good because her idea was pretty complicated.

To build a line of natural shampoos and conditioners without most of the synthetic ingredients you'd find in other hair care products. She also wanted to design a line of products for all hair types and textures, and she wanted those products on the shelves of Sephora, one of the premier beauty retailers in the world. All of these problems, Nancy would eventually solve. Her brand, Briogeo, is now carried by Sephora, and is expected to do almost $40 million in sales this year.

But to get there, especially with zero experience in the beauty industry, was going to pose a series of major challenges, starting with finding a chemist who actually believed you could make this stuff without parabens or sulfates or phthalates or any of the other common chemicals you need to make shelf-stable shampoo. Her biggest early challenge, though, was having the courage to start the business at all. It was 2010, and Nancy was in her 20s, on the fast track as a trader for Goldman Sachs in New York. And one day, without any warning, a tragedy completely upended her life, and prompted Nancy to re-evaluate the way she was living it, which we'll get to.

Nancy grew up on Long Island in New York. Her parents split up when she was a kid. Nancy's mother was a physician, and the Twines were one of the few black families in their neighborhood. My mom was a family doctor, and I don't even know if that term is quite used anymore.

And I do remember at a young age being at her doctor's office, and it was always full. You know, a lot of people ask me where I got this very confident entrepreneurial experience from, but I think that there was so much value and power of me seeing my mom running a successful practice, really running a business. My mom was an entrepreneur. And seeing that at a young age, seeing her confidence, seeing her joy, and the fact that being a female, being a black female, was not a hindrance to any of the dreams and goals that I would ultimately have in life.

And I read that, like, as a kid, you used to go to West Virginia a lot. But what's the connection to West Virginia? Yeah, so my mom is from West Virginia. She's one of eight children.

And my grandmother is from there, and that's where she raised her tribe, in a very small rural town called Rand, R-A-N-B. What did you know about her upbringing? I mean, it's like, I think to this day, it's one of the whitest states in the country, and obviously one of the poorest states in the country. Did she ever talk about what her childhood was like there?

Yeah, it was, you know, it was definitely a tough childhood. They didn't grow up with a lot. And the fact that my mom grew up in that type of environment, not only not having a lot, but not being able to see what success and beyond that lifestyle could look like, because so much of wanting to become better or becoming successful comes from seeing other people who look like you that have done it. And when you don't even see the possibility, but knowing within you that it exists and having that faith and belief in yourself, it's so, so powerful.

And that was very much my mom's story. So I guess as a kid, right, you used to go to West Virginia to visit your grandma, who was, from what I understand, like the local beauty guru. Like, what does she give people beauty tips? It was a little bit different than that.

I think, you know, my grandmother, again, was really kind of faced with the challenge of providing for eight children with very, very little. And she was very thrifty. I know one of the things that she used to do is she would stretch the little bits of product that she would get her hands on. So, you know, maybe she used some oils and extracts to stretch, you know, a quarter bottle of lotion to be able to fill it back up to a full bottle.

And she learned how to distill her own essential oils. And this kind of natural chemistry created this unique situation that I think ultimately too inspired my mom to later become a chemist and then a MD-PhD. So do you remember what your grandmother used to make? Yeah.

So one of the things that was kind of interesting, because it wasn't really a product that I used growing up, but these kind of thick kind of butters that you could use for all different sorts of things, really dry skin, feet, elbows, knees, and then, you know, other sort of medicinal needs like cuts or burns, different types of cells that would almost leave your skin glistening. But I just remember visiting that house and it was just like a lot of stuff, lots of jars, anything you needed, you could find in that house. And if you didn't find it precisely, it could be made or derived from something. And that was really kind of the attitude and spirit.

Yeah. So you went on to, when you went to college, you went to University of Virginia. Yes. First of all, what was your experience like at UVA?

I had a phenomenal experience at UVA, but I think one of the things that was so different starting out there was that a lot of the other black men and women didn't have the same type of diverse high school experience that I had. So I know that there were a lot of people where it was the first time really ever in their life they were around white people. So there were elements of self-segregation that I witnessed during my early times at UVA that I didn't quite understand in terms of, you know, black groups separating themselves in the libraries or in the dining halls. And it was so new to me because it just was so different than my experience in high school where everyone sat with each other.

But one of the things I focused on or made emphasis of was that I really wanted to continue my experience of having a diverse group of friends and I didn't want to self-segregate and I was able to really build a community of close friends that span all different sorts of ethnicities and backgrounds. And when you went to college, did you have any idea of what you wanted to eventually do for a career? So entering UVA, I would have never thought that I would become a finance person. What I did know is that I loved music.

I was in an acapella group in college. Oh, wow. Did you guys wear like a matching blazers? No, we were actually a really cool hip acapella group.

We were actually UVA's first hip hop acapella group. And so I had so much fun and that stemmed from me really finding music in high school. And it created kind of this fantasy for me of one day being a pop star like a Mariah Carey. But when I went to UVA and got exposed to hundreds of talented singers, both within my acapella group and outside of it, it was a awakening that I was just OK.

This is not going to be what was going to pay the bills. Right. Exactly. So no music career.

But instead, you decide to study finance. And what was the idea behind that? Just kind of like a good way to get a well-paying, stable job? So outside of wanting to be a musical pop star, I also had this hobby of creating and selling things.

I was very, very entrepreneurial as a child. In middle school, this is when the movie Clueless came out and those cool like feather pins were so popular, but no one knew where they could get them because Etsy wasn't around. And I went to Michael's, my local craft store, and got ribbon, pins, all sorts of stuff, feathers, and created replicas of those Clueless feather pins. And I would sell them at school.

Yeah, I have a lot of different stories of these like little mini entrepreneurial ventures. I loved creating and then the validation that came from people actually wanting to spend their money on my creations. And so ultimately, when I kind of gave up on the idea of becoming a famous pop star, I started to think more about how I could translate the passion for entrepreneurism into a career path and major. And so that was really kind of the first part of my journey of even contemplating a career in finance.

And you did a summer internship at Goldman Sachs, I read. And what did you do there? Yeah, so I actually interned for two summers. I spent my first summer in legal and compliance.

And I quickly realized that that part of the firm was just not something I was interested in. I was very, very bored. And while I was in legal and compliance, I was actually sitting on the sales and trading floor. And I was so intrigued by what was going on around me.

And I said, I don't know what that is, but I want to do that. That is where the action is at. I mean, people are standing up in their seats, they're shouting across the room, people were having fun, there was so much energy. And I thought to myself, I have another summer that I could spend at Goldman.

I want to spend it in sales and trading. And so voila, that next summer, I did a sales and trading internship. And you come in each morning, and you never know what you're going to get. Markets are constantly moving.

They're so dynamic. And not only that, there's just a lot of camaraderie on that sales and trading floor, which is so incredible. So to me, it was one of the most exciting things that I could be doing in the finance world. So right after that, you graduate, it's 2007.

And that internship lands you a job working for Goldman Sachs on the trading floor. And then a year later, 2008, the financial crisis, and obviously there must have been layoffs. You had managed to hang on to your job. But were you nervous, ever nervous about getting fired, about losing your job?

I was definitely nervous because so many of my friends in my internship class had gotten laid off in 2008. It was part of the reason why I knew I had to make myself invaluable. I knew that if I became invaluable, it would be very hard for my team to lay me off, which is why I invested the time and energy into being an incredible support, not only for my team, but teams around me that needed support. I mean, were you just working all the time?

Did you even have time for friends or to do anything outside of work? I was working a lot, and I think that my goal of making myself indispensable to protect my career during a tumultuous time probably put me in the position of being taken advantage of at times. There were, I'm sure, some of my classmates who would never come in on a Sunday night randomly because their boss texted them. However, everyone knew that I would be the first person to say yes and leave a dinner with my family to go into the office to work on a deck for my boss, even with 15 minutes notice.

Is that something that your mom would have expected you to do, like your dinner with your mom and you get a call and you're like, and she's like, oh, you gotta go. They need your help. Yeah, she was the type to say, you know, get there and get on it. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Yeah, I never was guilt-tripped. I was encouraged. And so from that standpoint, my family and my friends understood. All right, so you are clearly working crazy on Wall Street.

You're in your mid-20s. You've got a good salary. And your life takes a turn, a tragically unexpected turn. Your mom is killed.

She is a bike car. And that's it. I mean, what a just probably shocking thing to experience in your life. I mean, you were go, go, go.

And all of a sudden, your mom's gone. Yeah, it was a huge shock. I have friends who have lost their parents through battles of cancer, Alzheimer's, but it was a journey that they had mentally prepared themselves for. I didn't have that opportunity.

But not only that, it was the first time that I truly realized that this life is not promised to anyone. And we owe it to ourselves to find our happiness, to pursue our passions, and to make the most of this life because it's so, so fragile. And I feel like I had been so naive. I never even fathomed my mom not being around to see her grandchildren, any of that.

Yeah, none of us do. Yeah, I will say that my brother and I have always been close, but that experience, you know, brought us even closer. And I couldn't have imagined going through that experience on my own. And I did take some time off.

Yeah. How much time did you know how much time you took off? I took off about two months, which doesn't seem like a lot of time. And it probably wasn't.

But because I had been working so much, that two months felt like a year. Yeah. And during that time, did you start to kind of reevaluate your own, like, I don't know what your life was about and what you wanted to do with it? And did your mom's death kind of force you to think about, well, what is this all about?

What am I doing? It did. You know, another thing that was really sad for me is I remember, you know, the weeks and even months leading up to my mom's passing, so much of our conversations were just around the fact that I was working way too much and I was exhausted. And even some nights I would call her crying because I felt like I couldn't.

do it anymore and i wish that our conversations would have been more substantive and you know after the experience of losing my mom so suddenly and realizing that this life isn't necessarily promised to me either i knew that whatever i was going to do i wanted to wake up every day and be excited about going into the office at the time of your mother's death was she was she still working as a physician full-time no she was retired um she was retired so she was starting to enjoy retirement and i guess she was thinking about a business at that time right yeah um my mom was in the process of starting her own skincare line it was called something like skincare rx but it was all about kind of taking what she learned chemistry and even her medical career i mean she was talking about you know infusing plasma into facial creams like really cool advanced stuff and i remember she had like two or three formulas that were pretty developed and there was some packaging it was like these white jars with gold lettering and i was so kind of caught up in my finance life that i kind of forgot that my mom was working on this project in the background and it really wasn't only until you know i had to start going through her stuff after the passing that i found you know the photos and was reminded of this project she was working on and so i think um definitely created this light bulb moment and also brought me back to some of the childhood memories that i had with my mom um where we were making a lot of our own beauty products in the kitchen of our home fortunately we had access to a lot more than what my mom did growing up we had a local health food store where we could actually buy extracts and oils and butters and salts and sugars and uh we were making just custom beauty products for our needs the needs of friends like skin creams mainly um actually hair care products mainly and partly because um i have naturally very curly curly hair and the market for textured hair wasn't really established back then so i found myself struggling with the products that were available and either needing to um supplement them with other ingredients or just create my own products from scratch i read that there was a point where you thought all right i want to do my own thing and i probably need to leave finance and i guess your brother he's an entrepreneur too he started like a digital media company and i guess at a certain point you called him like hey can i come work with you did that happen yeah um it did happen and i'm just gonna be totally transparent with you i was um while i was at goldman i was seeing a therapist and prior to my mom's passing i was even thinking about you know what life beyond golden looked like and um she encouraged me to see if i could join my brother and his entrepreneurial ventures and he said you know this is my thing you should get your own thing i was so disappointed and kind of offended and i felt stuck because at the time my own thing like what was that what was that gonna be that was like this very nebulous weird space that i just couldn't possibly think of what would i do and it really wasn't until my soul-searching journey after my mom's passing between these childhood memories of making my own products where my mom had gotten to in the development of her brand and then thinking wow i could create my own beauty product line i guess at a certain point you were and this is something so cool about new york and like the cool thing about living in new york is there are all these resources i guess at a certain point you went to like a small business library like you actually really thought okay i better learn about what it means to start a small business i'm gonna do this is what happened there yeah and i know this sounds so nerdy but the new york small business library was game-changing for me because i got access to research databases and reports that i otherwise would have had to have spent thousands of dollars on and i was typing in different search terms like natural personal care market natural hair care clean hair care and one of the things i noticed in these reports was that there were pretty meaningful sections on natural personal care for body for skin care but there were really small kind of paragraphs dedicated to natural hair care and i thought that was really interesting and what it did tell me was that there were very few players in natural hair care at the time relative to the other categories but that it was also a budding space and that's really when the light bulb went off and i said this is a huge white space potential it makes sense because of my personal background focus here this has legs to run with i mean so you're looking through just like doing research right you know you want to do something in natural hair care products and by the way what does that mean like because you see a lot of hair products say natural on them or you know free of this or free of that but what this is 2010 what does that mean yeah it's a great question because the word natural is not um regulated the way that organic is so natural means different things to different people and for me it meant utilizing a high high percentage of naturally derived ingredients and so basically what i mean by that is instead of you know pumping our products with silicones which are synthetic polymers that give the illusion of shine on the hair we actually used real natural oils to do that because not only is it natural but the benefits the vitamins the nutrients uh the minerals within natural oils actually serve a purpose in enhancing the hair's health that silicones do not so that's really the foundational goal of why we do use natural clean ingredients in our products all right so you are thinking hey maybe i can do something here well what's the next step you take i mean you're a trader at goldman sachs and obviously you're super smart and talented but you're also pretty young and probably don't imagine you don't know a lot of people in the in the beauty industry so what like what's the next step who do you call where do you go yeah so you know after doing my research i realized one there's a void for clean natural hair care but there's also a void for effective clean natural hair care so i had a premise that was compelling because i wasn't just kind of hopping on something that already existed i was creating something that didn't exist and so i had never created a business plan before and i knew it was something that i wanted to be thoughtful about so i did what i always do which is i consulted my friend google and um i googled how to create a business plan and i stumbled upon a website that offered a service where they would partner with you to understand your vision and then also give you some help on the financial side in terms of you know forecasting financial statements and that's how i went about creating my first business plan okay so you're working on a business plan but you don't actually have a product to sell yet so what what happens next yeah so after i had my business plan created i told myself that i was going to tell all of my friends about what it is i wanted to do because i knew if i went and told everyone that i wanted to start a clean natural hair care product line that they would ask me about it every time we went out and i didn't want to disappoint them so it was my way of holding myself accountable and so once i felt really good about the viability of this business plan i knew the next thing i needed to do was to start formulating and that's where i was a little bit stuck because without my mom and without advanced knowledge of chemistry i didn't feel comfortable formulating the products on my own in a way in which you know i could sell them to a sephora for example and at the time i had no idea that you could outsource r&d and manufacturing to an outside company and i only learned about that because i had told a friend about my idea and she said oh let me put you in touch with a friend who created a deodorant line and i said oh i would love that and i spoke to this friend and i go how are you making this deodorant at home he said i'm not i'm using a contract manufacturer so this was so fascinating for me i said this is cool i can actually utilize the team and resources of another company to bring my idea to life and so i was very very organized and i did a bunch of research on google i started attending some local trade shows and i figured out the who's who and hair care contract manufacturing but meantime you are still working at goldman's axe right i am and so that was really really tricky because this would have been 2011 2012 i had just become a vice president so i got promoted but i was also trying to allocate time to work on briogeo so and by the way did you already call it briogeo no it did not it did not have a name yeah basically the way that i worked it was that after work is when i did all of my email stuff so a lot of people were getting emails from me at like 9 10 p.m at night and my calls i would do those on my lunch break or some days i would take pto when i just knew that i was gonna have a really hectic day of calls and research because i had a ton of pto because i never took time off so um i never really took vacation um it was just more so days to work on my business plan so you would call up you connect with some of these potential factories and you would say hey i want to make hair care products like shampoos and conditioners and stuff but with no sulfates silicones parabens da dyes all the stuff that's in pretty much 99 percent of hair care products and i imagine most of the time they would be like uh can't be done that's not possible yeah you're absolutely right um it was very disappointing pretty much every conversation i had um made the idea seem very far-fetched and sometimes i would get close sometimes manufacturers would say oh we just started developing shampoos without sulfates but we need the silicone base in order for it to hydrate your hair if you don't have the silicones the clean surfactants are going to dry up the hair you can't have one or the other but you know there was one contract manufacturer that came back to me and said we've never done this before but i think we can do it especially if you're willing to dedicate the time to partner with our r&d team and to really work with us and give us some time and by the way i think just let's just be clear yeah we're not saying names or the name of this manufacturer because it's a trade secret right that's right okay so keep going yeah so there was a small contract manufacturer privately run and operated in the midwest i had opportunity to meet with the ceo of the contract manufacturer and i think he was uh kind of surprised that i was this finance girl who had this side project of you know starting a beauty product company and um i think he took note of my passion and i've been fortunate to work with people who have extended courtesies and opportunities to me because the passion became infectious so even though i wasn't coming in with a big check size or you know a big production run i do think there are a lot of people that just have that heart inside of them that want to see the underdog succeed and so luckily i was able to get the time and attention and the dedicated uh lab time with the chemist to help me really tackle this project yeah but you i mean you you did not have a background in chemistry um so how did you even know like the words to use when you're talking to lab chemists like even to tell them what you wanted them to make like like what would you say like i want this to be like what would you say yeah so it's a little hard sometimes to describe these things um so i had to kind of study up on hair care terminology specifically i was working on a treatment mask and i wanted it to have a very luxurious buttery rich texture so i needed to have a higher viscosity i also wanted the concentrations of uh what i called our nova complex and nova stands for natural oils vitamins and antioxidants i wanted the nova complex and this mask to be you know three times more concentrated than our other formulas this is a hair mask this is a hair mask what is a hair mask i just i don't want to use one so it is a concentrated conditioning treatment that helps to repair moisturize and enhance the vitality of the hair and all the while you're funding this i mean your costs are not high at this point just travel and stuff you're just funding it through your salary at goldman sachs right yes i was funding it through my salary but i was being really mindful of how much i was spending because things do really add up quickly and i didn't have products yet so i didn't want to get too far with spend before making sure that i could actually do this and what what were you looking to make shampoo conditioner like tell me the things that you wanted them to kind of like the protect you wanted to make for you yeah so originally i wanted to create a 15 skew uh product line 15 you wanted 15 okay 15 because i wanted to have something for every hair texture type and i didn't want to leave anyone out and i was speaking to a contact in the uh contract manufacturing space that really advised me against a 15 product skew line coming out the gate and he goes if you can do it with four products it's your best bet who was this person advising you just a friend or mentor so it was actually one of the contract manufacturers that i didn't end up going with but gave me some really great advice which is a good lesson and you know you might get rejected from somebody or you might reject them but you can really get some good advice from them yeah so you decide you're going to come up with four products and what were those products going to be what yeah so that was a big challenge for me you know how was i going to create a diverse assortment with only four skews so what i decided to do was to create one shampoo for all hair types okay and then i had three conditioners that were texture specific so with four products i was able to hit a pretty diverse client base all right so you are i think it took you about a year before you finally got this right and in that year were you telling your co-workers you're working on this no so no one in my immediate team knew that i was working on this project i had a couple of friends at goldman that i confided in but only a couple that i knew would not say anything because i was serious about my work and i didn't want to compromise that and sure i didn't want it to get out that i was doing both so how are you so you're like we're taking a day here and day there and flying to to this manufacturer and like come back to new york and is that what you were basically doing for a year yeah it was pretty crazy and um there were points in which i did start hitting a wall because i was getting very little sleep you know being on the trading floor i was also working with uh the london market so i needed to be at the desk by 7 a.m so i was getting to bed at like 1 2 a.m and then waking up at 5 30 a.m day over day over day and it started to become unsustainable yeah do you think i imagine one of the reasons why you were just grinding away was way to kind of cope with you with the loss of your mom yeah i mean the project and process of building griotio really became a therapy for me i needed to take that energy and pour it into something positive and there were a lot of people who were very quote-unquote proud of me that i didn't self-destruct or get into negative behavior like drinking or drugs and things like that and for me i really took the emotions of that experience and poured it into this project and i think that's why the hours that i was devoting the lack of sleep all of that stuff i just kept going because it was my therapy let me come back in just a moment how nancy managed to convince a man with very little hair to invest in her hair care product company stay with us i'm guy ross and you're listening to how i built this from npr hey welcome back to how i built this from npr i'm guy ross so by the end of 2012 nancy twine is about two years into launching her line of natural hair products and she's still got a few daunting problems to solve for instance she doesn't have a name for her company yet and she needs to figure out how to convince retailers to sell her product and at this point nancy starts to realize that she'll probably need some more money than what she has in her savings account so by that point the most money i spent was on the business plan which was about five thousand some of the initial concepts for the packaging which was you know north of 10k um and then you factor in everything else i was probably close to 25k but you're bootstrapping this business i mean are you i imagine you're thinking all right i gotta raise some money did you start to look around i did so i was self-funding a lot of it but i knew that if i was going to start to scale this at some point i didn't want to put myself in a position where i was completely maxed out because i also knew that it would be hard for me to focus on growing my business if i was thinking about you know how i was going to pay my rent so i did i started dabbling in um going to uh investor meetups and pitching sessions which was quite the experience and you would go to these things and they're like they're like speed dating or pitching business right it's so funny because i didn't even know what was the thing um and i got invited to one of these things and that's exactly what it was you know there was a line at each of these booths and you would do your one minute elevator pitch and it was nutso at this point you were going to these pitch meetings with investors angel investors with bottles of your product no not even you were just describing this concept yeah and i had some artwork on a piece of paper i would bring this thick piece of paper that had sketches of the packaging it was a really hard guy to sell a brand that existed i don't think so to tech investors i mean it was kind of crazy it's like what's your app yeah right exactly what this is a shampoo right no no which is why like going to these networking events was so discouraging because i was no one really cared about what i was doing and i even felt like the people in the room weren't consumers of what i was offering i mentioned these were predominantly men yes probably white men who don't use hair masks and many some of them probably don't have hair and also probably don't really understand your specific hair needs either that's right and by the way how did you eventually settle on the name uh briogeo i had so many like random names i can't even remember but i just remember i got to the point of frustration and knew that i needed help and a friend of mine ended up putting me in touch with a guy who was a consultant and for you know less than 500 bucks he picked my brain on what i wanted this brand to be and gave me a ton of options and briogeo stood out so the word brio is an italian word that means vibrant colorful full of life that's like our dna essence and the word geo is latin for of earth of nature and that speaks to our clean ingredient methodology all right so you are looking for money and you keep grinding away going to these things and at one of these things you do meet somebody who actually says yeah yeah i'll give me some money who was this person how did that happen yeah so um there was a investing network out in long island and i remember racing from work to try to make it there on time which i did and i was in 2013 this was in 2012 2012 yeah and so i walk into this auditorium and i look around and i'm like oh here we go again exactly as you described it was all white men older men too that you know filled this space and then there were five of us who were going on stage to pitch our ideas and um the four other men who were presenting all had tech companies and i just remember being like oh my gosh not again you know what's so hard about it guy too is that when you get onto a stage and you know that everyone there is probably not interested in what you have to offer and you kind of have to fake that sense of enthusiasm it was painful so here you are there four other guys packing up their software as a service product and then you present and what what happens so i presented with passion i had a great presentation and then after the stage pitches there was a breakout room in which the five of us each had a table where we could display our product concepts or technology um and so for me it was that you know poster board with the sketches of the product and no one came to my table it was so embarrassing i was so upset and at the very end as i was packing up my table a guy named phil came by and said you gave the best presentation and he said as you can tell i have very little hair i know a little about hair care but he goes i don't really invest in the products anyway i invest in the people and he goes you've got something and here's my number let's be in touch and his name is phil phil palmetto what a great guy yes so you feel like you card and then i'm assuming you call him the next day or so i didn't call him he called me wow i was on the trading desk and i got this missed call and i hopped off and it was phil phil had called because he wanted to follow up and he wanted to learn more and that's where the dialogue started and ultimately a year later after i had gotten my first retail commitment he made his first investment and briogeo how did you get a retail commitment um so after the lengthy process of formulating my first four products i had now had a name for the company i had the packaging design i had done my first run of you know 400 pieces or whatever the minimum was and i was tasked with figuring out how i was going to bring the products to market it's funny guy because i just focused on one thing at a time sure and so once the products were made i had to figure out how i was going to get them in front of retailers and i had a business plan so i knew who my target retailers were i was targeting the prestige retailers of the world like sephora nordstrom etc but they weren't giving the time of day because you were comparative nobody to other people in the industry right so i knew i couldn't just cold email them like that just wasn't gonna work so at the time i had started building up some uh mentors in the space that encouraged me to go to a trade show and to invest in getting a booth which is not cheap it's like two three thousand four thousand more it was more than that because i elected to be in this very special section of the cosmoprof beauty trade show where's that that's in las vegas and how much did your boot cost cost about ten thousand dollars for that weekend and then that was just for the space you had to like bring your stuff with you and like a signage and right yeah there was travel i had to design the space i needed staffing so i think when it was all said and done it was probably closer to 15 000 and meantime no one at goldman sachs knows it's like oh yeah great weekend you're flying in las vegas to go um have a booth at this at this trade show yeah it was a little weird and i did i started feeling guilty i'm like oh this isn't right like yeah i'm kind of living this double life but clearly by 2013 this is like this train is left the station now you got one foot really in this this side there and and you get to the show and you're standing there you've got your your bottles all lined up um and and people are passing by and people stop and start to talk to you yeah and it uh if you've never been to a trade show it is a very very overwhelming series of days because you were talking non-stop and you have to be on and you have to be at that booth because you never know who's gonna come by you can't even go to the bathroom yeah yeah it's very hard and i actually did step away to the bathroom and miss the buyer who i was there for but that's how it happened all right so you're there presumably hopefully to get some kind of deal somebody's purchase to make a purchase order and what who ends up ordering from you yeah so the first day i was handing out just lots of samples and buyers were very intrigued because they're always intrigued by newness and they had never seen a brand before but the buyers that i gave samples to most of them came back the next day and said i used the products last night or this morning like tell me more and so some of those buyers included you know urban outfitters nordstrom and then on the very last day the sephora team came by and that was what's really funny is that i didn't even know that they were the sephora team until they left because there was a group of four of them and their badges were turned the other way because they don't want to be kind of like smothered by everyone who's looking for the sephora team so when they came by i actually had no idea and when they walked off um another brand came up to my booth and said oh my gosh how did the conversation with sephora go and i was like what do you mean and she's like oh those four women were from sephora but they didn't make an order they didn't make an order i got no contacts i had no business cards and um i was actually very very disappointed because they were the people i came to see and i left without getting any information or an ability to even contact any of them did you leave with any orders i left with no orders but i did leave with interest from urban outfitters so urban outfitters stopped by and by the way were there people who assumed because you are an african-american woman that this you were making products for you know quote unquote ethnic aisle products you know you know i mean like that this was specifically for women of color i mean was there did people make that assumption initially you know i figured that people would which is why when i designed my booth i was very intentional about having hair model imagery at my booth that really displayed the diversity of our intended consumer so i think when people saw the breadth of ethnicities and skin tones and hair texture types i think it helped to offset maybe that stereotype yeah even when your website now we're jumping ahead but it's like you know there's just different skin tones and different hairstyles and it's like every single uh hair type and ethnicity is represented on your website yeah and that's um that's been a day one mission of the briogeo brand was to create you know problem solution formulas but that really speaks to a diverse spectrum of women and now men as well and it really just kind of reflects i think my experience of growing up and i've been so fortunate to have a diverse group of friends and i never wanted any of my friends to feel like they couldn't use briogeo too all right so you come back from that trade show and then i'm assuming you start to pick the phones on urban outfitters oh yeah so that that moved pretty quickly so they did eventually put an order in that fall and that was actually the milestone that philip who i spoke about a little earlier philip was then ready to commit some capital to the company because you needed cash to place that order i mean if and by the time how many do you remember how many bottles they bought her so they bought the stock they pretty much bought all the stock that i had so that those few hundred units right yeah so it was they were kind of dipping their toe into this and so you didn't have to make extra product but that was enough to get phil to say all right i mean i'll give you some money yes and then we'll give you so he gave me the first time about a hundred thousand dollars which and was that a game changer for you at this point oh yeah i mean that that was huge i mean i knew that i could you know scale the next production run it was still me at the time so i wasn't at a point where i needed to invest in staffing but it was really all about being able to scale the inventory all right so you get into urban outfitters but then the next challenge and i love that like methodical way you do this you're like you kind of break it up into bite-sized chunks like let me tackle this problem and then i'll tackle the next problem but the next problem was getting people to buy it better about outfitters like getting people to be aware of it right that's right so one of the other investments that i uh made early on was the pr agency and that was really important because i had to get the story out there one of the things that i did that was a little bit different is i made myself available to the editors and i told my pr agency that i didn't want to them to just pitch editors over email because i wouldn't be able to really tell the full story and because i was in new york i asked them if they could set me up with desk side appointments where i would actually meet the editor and be able to have a face-to-face connection and so i was able to create relationships with editors at a dozen publications and i started getting press out of the gate from even some of the bigger publications like you know allure and marie claire and refinery 29 now knowing what i know about the beauty industry from the interviews we've done on the show sephora is like valhalla like you gotta be in sephora that's right was sephora like front and center in your mind like what do you think i gotta get in there front and center i mean i needed to be in sephora i built this brand to be in sephora wow yeah so how did you like what do you how do you find out who contacted sephora is like info at sephora.com no it was definitely a bit of a puzzle and i remember one of the women in that group it was kind of like the leader of the group she had a unique memorable name her name was margarita and that's all i remember so i did some google searching and i found out her full name and who she was and there was this website i can't remember the name of the website but it would help you to determine what the format of email addresses and i emailed her just sent a little follow-up email i attached our brand book and told her that i would love the opportunity to come to san francisco to meet with her in person to discuss the opportunity further and i never got a response so i waited a month and then i said all right i need something that's going to make it like a no-brainer to meet with me so i just decided to collect all of the press that i had gotten over the past couple of months and i put together this really beautiful press book and then i just decided to tell her that i was planning a trip to san francisco that i was going to actually be there and so um i finally got a response which was a forward to her junior buyer and she asked her junior buyer to take over the conversation she's like yeah let's meet up at peace coffee and uh let's let's chat so this buyer uh says yeah come meet me at peace so you literally get a plane and go to san francisco to have a coffee at peace i know it's insane it's so crazy thinking back at it but it was so well worth the investment of the time and money because um i really connected with that merchant and um she was also a person of color she really took a particular liking to the fact that briogeo really represented diversity but she was very honest with me and said you know nancy we just aren't focused on building out our hair care category um right now you know makeup is the thing and that's where we're focused but if things change you know we'd love to be in touch okay so it's a start but it's a little bit disappointing because you know by this point it's 2014 you're four years into this thing yeah and how you gonna change my mind it was definitely a disappointing moment and it was another moment which i second guessed you know whether or not i had picked the right category because wow already four years in yeah i did because you know it was similar feedback that i had gotten from some of the other buyers it was like why hair care like it's not the most interesting or like booming category within prestige beauty i guess i was ahead of my time from that standpoint but i also knew that like my time was running out in terms of putting the capital to work for my investors and also making that move to being a full-time entrepreneur so i continued to stay in touch with the buyer just so that she knew that briogeo was in demand and you know things were going well and then in february of 2014 i received an email that changed my life i had sent the merchant buyer january's press summary and a couple weeks later she responded and said nancy it's so great to hear from you the stars must have been aligned because we just got out of a town hall with our ceo and he wants to start building out our hair care category at sephora in a more meaningful way and we want to test briogeo wow i still have the email did you scream did you jump up and down oh my gosh i just it was the opportunity that i needed because i knew that i could do it i just needed the opportunity so they they agreed to sell briogeo in their stores or what so it was a test and the test was online only so if i hit my targets the next step would be to launch briogeo in 25 of the then 400 sephora stores by the way you're still at goldman sachs at this point in in early 2014 yes so i'm still at goldman and once i received that email from sephora i knew that it was the opportunity of a lifetime i knew that if i was going to do it right i could not continue working a full-time job and i owed it to myself to really give this opportunity a real chance you had to leave i had to leave but i was nervous i mean i was i was 28 years old i was a vice president at goldman i was making good money yeah but even though you were nervous you knew it was the right thing i knew it was the right thing and i really knew it was the right thing when i talked to my brother and a couple of other friends and family members and i was actually surprised by how supportive they were i thought there was at least one person that said are you sure this is the right thing do you really want to do this and not one person said that they said nancy we believe in you go for it that's awesome so you leave now you are there's no safety net under you this has got to work it's got to work i mean i put everything on the line i resigned i had no more income coming in i wasn't paying myself it was scary were you essentially funding the products by through the cash flow like sephora would do an order and then that's how you funded the business or were you already starting to seek out more outside investors well yeah i mean i was using the little bit of cash that i had because the thing about retail is that you don't get the money until you know several days after you ship the product and so i wasn't launching in sephora until august of that same year and they didn't place the order until july so i left goldman in april and i was living on no income from the business i mean i had some of the small orders from urban outfitters but that wasn't enough all right so you get this order from sephora i mean there's hundreds i mean thousands of products available on at sephora.com so how are you going to stand out what did you do so one of the most incredible investments i could have ever made at the time was partnering with a beauty sampling box called ipsy that curates uh different beauty samples for you know hundreds of thousands of subscribers like a birch box exactly and our most universal product is our deep conditioning mask and i thought it would be a good idea to sample that to a couple of hundred thousand people and so that was a very difficult decision because i had to fund all of that inventory for that sampling program up front but getting that product in the hands of about 200 000 people translated into incredible conversions at sephora so those sample boxes really kind of took off like people that that was all it took for people to start ordering it yep and then how long before they decide to put you in the stores yeah so sephora has a cadence of twice a year in which they roll out brands into stores in march and in september so we launched on.com in august and we weren't yet ready to go into store just a month later in september so once we hit march we were ready for it and uh it was such an incredible moment and the idea of having briogeo these four products i created sitting on a sephora shelf was just the experience of a lifetime how do you just out of curiosity is it harder to keep your product shelf stable because it's basically like things that degrade over time yeah absolutely that's a really good question um one of the things i'm very transparent about is that briogeo products are not 100% natural and where we cannot find a effective clean substitute we will opt with a synthetic version so long as we really do our diligence to make sure that it's a safe synthetic and uh there's an organization in europe called ego cert which declares what synthetic ingredients are safe for use in natural products and so we use a synthetic but eco cert preservative system that allows our products to have anywhere from a 24 to 30 month shelf life and at this point now that now that you're in sephora in the shops and they're making bigger and bigger orders presumably they're by far your biggest platform now how were you able to fund making more product yeah so by that time i had started to exhaust most of the money that i got from phil but i knew that i was going to need more money so i reached out to phil put together a little deck of how i would use the funds to basically scale the growth of the business which she was incentivized to do given his equity position he felt like it was a good business case i had you know po's to point to um so he loaned me another 150k so last year you got uh you raised around from private equity firm that took an ownership stake in your business and i'm assuming they approached you at this point that's exactly what happened yeah it's such an incredible other story because before that you were going to these meetups and pitching your private investors and nobody was interested except phil and then you launch and then people see how successful it is and then all these private equity firms come knocking on your door yeah i mean it was really it was really funny to see i mean i get it i guess you know having sephora behind the brand and seeing that growth definitely creates a much more compelling story than having a sketch on a piece of paper but yeah it's really interesting because the dynamics had changed quite a bit so you are moving along watching your sort of your business grow and um which is amazing i think the last i saw i know your numbers are not public but what was reported was you were doing about 10 million in annual revenue and uh presumably at least that's not more now yeah so we will you know finish this year close to 40 million in gross sales which is pretty awesome yeah all right here we are 2020 and you know this because you've heard this on the show a lot of companies and businesses that have been on are in crisis um retail is is down um how is the business doing i mean i'm so fortunate guy in that um our business is doing phenomenally well we actually ended up revising up our pre-covid budget wow yeah and i think um you know the way that we think about care care is very much from a treatment perspective so it's less styling but it's more treatment focused and i think people have a bit more time to really spend on their self-care yeah yeah i mean i've heard that from other companies that focus on personal care products you know that self-care has become obviously really important as people shut in and then we have um because so many crises i don't even know where to begin then we have mass demonstrations social justice movements um people demonstrating against racial injustice all around the country you are a black entrepreneur and i know it's on instagram a while back um back in june um you wrote my bucket is nearing empty i'm exhausted and emotionally drained we all are um when you wrote my bucket is nearing empty i'm in new york city living in union square you're running a business what did you mean when you wrote my bucket is yeah i think it meant a lot of different things um it meant kind of this renewed fear for especially black men in my life my brother family members i mean i even recall telling my brother like you know be careful running in certain neighborhoods you know living in union square there were a lot of incredible peaceful protests many of which i actually participated in but from my window i mean i saw violence erupt in protests a lot of which were you know captured on social media but seeing it from your window is another thing and it's it's painful it's hurtful to see that yeah and then obviously you know i've experienced my own family tragedy and you know thinking about the families of those who were brutally killed and attacked and what they must be going through i mean it was just it was a lot and then on top of that you know there was a lot of outreach that i received and i know it was a good spirit you know people wanting me to do interviews or be on their panel or talk about this and that it was all happening at once and it was just i was i was really drained yeah i mean on the one hand obviously like what an incredible achievement as an entrepreneur this thing you built but on the other hand i guess you're expected to be kind of like an example of a successful black woman who started her own business and everybody wanted to hear from you and that's kind of exhausting yeah it was really exhausting and i kind of felt like you know there were so many people kind of coming out of the woodwork and like i get it but i don't believe that it is the responsibility of black people to fix the problem however i do feel that it's important that black people have a seat at the table when certain decisions are being made about progress because so oftentimes we're not so for me it was very much a fine balance of how do i allocate my time to the things that i think i can be most impactful knowing that i can't say yes to everything but i have to say yes to some things because i can't just sit back and say okay it's your problem go figure it out like i know i have to be a part of the conversation i really believe that when you think about your whole story just you know having that one random guy come up to you with a booth and say here's my card or someone giving you a piece of advice to start with four products and do you think that what happened to you and your story happened because you got lucky or because you are really smart and you work really hard and you have great skills um i think it's the latter plus something else you didn't mention i don't yeah luck sometimes happen but luck is not what this is about because that means i would struck luck over and over and over again and life is more of a random thing yeah i think this is all about the hard work and the time that i've put in as you mentioned but there's also a mindset of believing in myself that i've established that i think is probably the biggest attribute towards succeeding in anything that you put your mind to and i'm gonna ask you a difficult question um it seems to me that so much of your confidence and your what you have learned to be and to become comes from your mom from her the lessons that you kind of absorbed by watching her and listening to her and i wonder what you think she would have thought about this thing you're doing now i know that she would be so proud i mean she i don't even know if there's a word for it guy like i don't even know if proud really justifies the feeling but i have always felt like my mom has been a part of this journey there have been so many incredible things that have unfolded over the course of the past 10 years and i am a spiritual person and i do feel her spirit has really helped to guide me down this path and i just know that she is watching with eyes of joy and excitement and um i'm just so grateful to have had the opportunity as a young child again to see someone who looks like me defeat the odds and to overcome the challenges and to create success that's nancy twine founder and ceo of riozio by the way remember how nancy's brother who was also an entrepreneur once told her that she couldn't join his company that she had to start her own thing well today nancy's brother actually works for her he's in charge of riozio's direct to consumer business hey thanks so much for listening to the show this week you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts you can write to us at hibt at npr.org and if you want to follow us on twitter we're at how i built this or at guy ross this episode was produced by casey herman with music composed by ramtina arab louis thanks also to candace limb there at gales jacy howard julia carney nila grant and jeff rogers i'm guy ross and you've been listening to how i built this