Tips For building a beauty brand with Essence Iman and The Established

It’s not easy making yourself stand out among the many beauty brands out there. The fight for space, time, money and attention is tough. That’s why we thought it would be a good idea to give you some tips that can help beauty brand creators.

For those of you who don’t know Essence Iman, she is the founder of the award-winning beauty brand, The Established. A popular brand used by celebrities like the Kardashians, she started her brand with just $200. She has an insane story that we won’t go into here but if you would like to hear just how The Establish became established take a listen to our interview with her here.

Through so many trials and errors, Essence figured out what worked best for her and her brand and now we got her to share some of her tips with you.

Before starting your brand what do you wish people would’ve told you?

You know, what is? It's so funny because I feel like the answer is probably like not what people would expect at least like early starting entrepreneurs and I feel like I was always kind of seeking like these sort of really tangible answers like, how exactly do I get from A to B to C? But in the position that I'm in now, I feel like a lot of it is around mindset. A lot of the things I would do differently would be around reshaping my train of thought and having the utmost clarity about what I'm building. I think clarity is probably one of the key things to have nailed before you go anywhere in your brand. In retrospect, when I started there were a lot of things that kind of came at me, which is fine and normal, I think to some degree in any business, and you learn and you adapt and you pivot or whatever. But I think starting out, have clarity, know what it is that you're building, and be rooted in it. Know your differentiating points for sure and don't overthink it. I feel like a lot of what I did, in the beginning, was overthinking, just waiting on perfection. When really I think the answer is just clarity and authenticity. That's beautiful.

Do you ever worry about the ways your brand will grow and maybe any rebranding that may have to happen?

I think it's so funny because I do kind of even now I get a little worried sometimes. I try not to get stuck there but I do have these natural feelings around like, I don't want to get copied or ripped off, I don't want to get to a point where like people are so desensitized to this minimalist look because everyone's doing it. Like I get copied a lot and so that's been something that's been really really tough for me to navigate on the one hand is sort of a compliment. It just is a testament to you know, the resonance of your brand and what you're building. But on the other hand, I think a lot of people don't understand the time, the years, and the experience that goes into getting your brands to that point. I didn’t have this all mapped out and The Established that you see today, we've been through so many different design iterations and packaging iterations and you know, product names, and there are some products that I had at one point that I don't even carry anymore and like that's like years of experience and trial and error in phases and evolution. So it can be really frustrating to see people kind of just come in and rip you off. I mean, same design, same product offerings with the design and you know, it's happened to me a number of times. It gets me down sometimes because it's super frustrating because I'm like, okay, these people might have more money than me like that is a reality, they might be able to come in and completely crush me, and nobody even knows where they originally came from. Like that's a reality for me sometimes.

That I think about, but I mean, I don't know, I just think the solution for me is like to be really confident in what I'm building, which I am. Our key differentiators are so strong and I think that our brand really resonates with people in a way that's unique and authentic and interesting. I think I just have to trust the universe and realize how far it's got me with the brand and how people relate to it. I don't know I just kind of sink into those feelings and it helps me not to worry so much about the noise and what the brand has to be and just be present because it's gonna evolve on its own.

How did you get brand exposure when you first started?

I knew I had to build community and I knew that I had to get the product in the hands of some key figures so on my lunch break, I would send these blind mailings. So I would Google the name of every media editor. I would look up the address of that magazine that they were affiliated with. I would address them a beautiful little package. I would send them a little note card with you know, this is The Established you know, introducing the brand saying who we are and that we’re based out of Philadelphia and that I was the founder. I was sending this package to any and everybody I could get my hands on. Anybody that had an address that worked in a magazine, some local, mostly national, I would just send them stuff. I had like really no excess inventory to be doing this, but I'm like whatever I took a chance. So I ended up sending a package to Julie Wilson, who at the time was the beauty director of Essence, ironically enough. And I honestly like I'd sent so many that I didn't really think much of it like no one ever got back to me no one ever like, you know, reached out and said thank you. So I just would send them and forget about it. Leave it up to the universe and I will never forget one day I was at work and Julie Wilson, DMs me on Instagram. She basically was like, “Hey I like your brand. I’ve been using this product every day. It's amazing. Keep it up.” It was just like a pat on the back was super sweet, super encouraging at that time. I mean this was like a verified blue check. I'm like I'm not seeing any kind of action in my DMs. I'm like, oh my god, like I was about to pass out. Like, wow, this is amazing. I felt great to have connected with her, but that was kind of it. And then she circles back like a couple of weeks later and she's like, Hey, just saying I'm including this in Essence magazine like 20th anniversary, 25th anniversary, or whatever.

Words of wisdom?

It's really important to like stay connected to folks because you just never really know. These editors bounce from magazine to magazine, and these buyers bounce from store to store so you know, even if something doesn't work out, you never know there might be an opportunity for you down the line with whatever job they're affiliated with next.

For example, Julie Wilson. Shout out to Julie Wilson she's amazing. Completely. She changed the trajectory of my career 100% I feel indebted to this woman. So she goes over to Cosmo magazine from Essence at the time I ended up quitting my job in June at the height of quarantine because I just hated working there and I just had this feeling that my business was gonna blow up. I just had like a really, really strong gut feeling. And the very next day I woke up and my phone is like going off. I’m like what is going on? And I'm like, I see like Cosmopolitan tagged you in a post and I was like, what?! We got all these followers so basically it was our very first viral moment but we have Julie Wilson to thank for that. She wrote this piece at the height of like BLM and George Floyd and all that, you know, she wrote this really big piece about like 125 Black Owned Brands to Shop, and she included The Established and we were tagged on Instagram and it just led to so much awareness. That was our breakthrough moment.

Essence talks more about The Establish and lessons learned in the full podcast episode below!