260 | Harnessing Experience for a Successful Business Comeback | with Emily DeLapp

Emily DeLapp

It's always worth it to listen to the feedback and have as much of a direct connection with your customers, with your fan base as possible because they won't lie to you. 

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. 

Today, I'm welcoming to the show a two-time founder, a freelance branding consultant, someone who specializes in developing unique and engaging brands in a typically oversaturated industry. 

Emily DeLapp, welcome to the show. 

Emily DeLapp

Thanks for having me.

Chase Clymer

Alrighty. So I've got a lot of things I just want to let the listeners know about. You've launched two brands. 

So you launched a clean beauty brand Concrete Minerals in 2009 with $100, and we're going to start there. We'll get into that in a second. 

But then you bootstrap that thing into a multi-million dollar business over a decade. You sold the business and then you wanted to do it again. 

You now are in your second brand, doing it with EXOH, this time in the health and personal care space.

I'm so excited to talk. But I guess, what did you spend $100 on with Concrete Minerals? Let's just start there. 

Emily DeLapp

That's a great question. I spent it on the bare essentials. 

So primarily, that was raw materials for creating the products since they were being produced in-house. So that was the bulk of it. 

That along with I think getting us registered on Etsy or whatever we had originally launched on back in 2009. 

Chase Clymer

Okay. Okay. 

So obviously, clean beauty brand - what were the products that Concrete Minerals was selling? What was your first assortment that you were selling? 

Emily DeLapp

The very first thing we ever launched was we produced a line of... I produced a line of colored cosmetics. 

We were doing eyeshadows. Eyeshadows were the big thing back then. These were loose mineral eyeshadows, hyper pigmented, excluded any sort of preservatives or any sort of filler ingredients, anything like that. 

So that was it. I think originally when we launched, it was 13 eyeshadows back in the day, which is pretty wild. 

Chase Clymer

Where did the idea to start your own business come from? 

Emily DeLapp

My entire family is pretty much made up of entrepreneurs at this point. My father's side, there's 9 siblings. And out of them, I think there's 6 entrepreneurs from that side of the family. 

So I think I grew up with this innate understanding that you could absolutely build a business. You just have to be willing to sweat and bleed and cry for it. 

But I think I always had a lot of really great context thanks to my dad, especially as I was growing up. I always saw that as a possibility. 

But seeing him and watching him build his own business, he's a general contractor based out in Southern California. And I saw his own struggles and saw that it was difficult to do it. But I think I always had it ingrained in me that it was something that you could do if you really wanted it. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Can I push you again though to get a little more tactical? 

Was there a problem in your life? Did you not like the makeup that was out there? What was the driving force between like, ‘I'm gonna figure out how to make makeup’? 

Emily DeLapp

I always joke that the reason I started my first company was just because I got pissed off enough to do it. 

I just got mad enough and tired of suffering for other people's businesses and pouring my entire heart and soul into something that they loved and either… Not even necessarily not being compensated properly, but just reaching this point where I realized I was maxed out on where I was growing with these other businesses. 

But really, what it was, I had worked with a mineral cosmetics brand briefly prior to this, and I'm sure we can get into this briefly as much as you want. 

But I came from the music industry, so I actually worked with heavy metal bands for years and years. But I ended up finding myself at another mineral cosmetics brand back before mineral cosmetics existed, really. Back before it was anything. 

We never talked about clean beauty. It was always branded as green beauty back then. And it was just like Birkenstocks and wheatgrass and really unapproachable for a lot of people. 

But I found myself at this little business and that was where I kind of learned that it was possible to create clean beauty products that were in more exciting, fun colors. And I think I really understood the formulas from working with them so directly. 

But after I ended up rebranding this company and helping them to get placed in Macy's and really expand into larger retail, I realized that they were kind of missing out on this massive market. 

There were younger people that really wanted an urban decay or like a Mac that was clean and didn't have these junk ingredients in it. 

And prior to working with this business and kind of understanding intimately what the formulas were really composed of, I was always very much under the impression that there was a reason that you couldn't produce something like a bright blue eyeshadow, or something really fun. I was like, there's got to be a reason it's all just beige and these really kind of old school colors. 

And so I had taken that with me and that was something that I kind of kept in the back of my mind. 

I worked in music for several years after that doing various things. I managed a kid's summer rock band camp in San Francisco. I did so many random things. 

But eventually I found myself out of a job  during the recession. I found myself out of a job, I had been laid off from another job and I was just exhausted. 

I thought I've got nothing left at this point. If I'm gonna try, I might as well try now. If I'm gonna suffer, I might as well suffer for myself, might as well see what I can make out of this.So that's where getting pissed off enough really became the inspiration of developing my first company.

Chase Clymer

 Awesome. 

So you had all of this experience working with a previous brand in the same industry, and you saw that... I can do this myself. Everyone in my family is doing it themselves in various different forms.

Maybe that's the music background in both of us. She's got to do it. That's how I ended up here. But you and I can talk more about that offline. 

Emily DeLapp

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

So you're getting launched. You're getting started. You're going into the clean beauty, mineral derived beauty products, right? You're launching this. 

You're starting... You started on Etsy? Is that what you said? 

Emily DeLapp

Yeah, we actually launched back on Etsy. Like I said, this was back in 2009.

D2C wasn't really a thing. I mean, it was really only available to some of the bigger brands primarily. There were no indie brands that were really kind of launching their own websites, because there was so much technicality behind it. 

I mean, it was still so difficult. We didn't have anywhere near the resources available that we do with things like Shopify and then all of the nearly unlimited apps that we can install and they're just so user-friendly and all of that. 

So back in the day, it was... We were kind of relegated to what Sophia was doing, Sophia Amoruso, when she was building Nasty Gal, I joke that our timelines are very, very parallel. 

It was right around the exact same time she was building Nasty Gal that was up in San Francisco and I was building this one down in Southern California. She launched on eBay and I had decided to launch concrete minerals on Etsy. 

There was a built-in… there was already a built-in group of people that were looking for mineral cosmetics - indie cosmetics on there.

And this was prior to the explosion of any cosmetics, which led to brands like Sugarpill and the infamous Lime Crime for anyone who remembers that whole situation. 

But prior to any of us having our own websites, we really all thrived on sales channels like Etsy. And Etsy was where we developed our first fan base. 

Chase Clymer

I mean, you answered my next question before I could even ask it. 

But I'll see if you have anything else to expound upon but basically, I know our listeners always want to know, what was your go-to-market strategy? How did you find your first customers? 

And obviously, releasing the product into a marketplace with established customers is a fantastic way to find out if people give a shit about what you're selling. 

Emily DeLapp

Absolutely. 

Chase Clymer

Was there anything else that you did? 

Emily DeLapp

I mean, the other big thing, we got very lucky. It was the Wild West of social media. It was the Wild West, man. 

I mean, everybody was on Facebook. Instagram was still in its infancy back in those days. And so we had so much direct access to people who were looking for the products. 

And that meant anytime we posted something to our 100, 200, 500 followers on Instagram, those were back in the days when every single follower of ours still saw every single thing that we posted. Nothing was limited at that point. 

And so we had so much outreach and direct connection with the small fan base that we had built. 

And this was also prior to anything really being monetized as far as influencers were concerned. People were really excited to have direct contact with brands as they were with celebrities and these other things that spawned out of influencers and social media. 

And because of that, we were able to really partner with a lot of brands in our infancy as we were developing things with concrete minerals. We were able to reach out to other brands and partner with them, or we were able to reach out to… 

And these are things that are obviously still available now. These things still exist. 

But for a very, very small brand that was being bootstrapped, we had a lot of direct access back then that has since then, obviously, it's been throttled in some ways. And social media has figured out how to kind of monetize some of those things in a way that's... 

I mean, I wouldn't absolutely argue as detrimental to smaller brands that may be bootstrapping but back then, man, it was the Wild West. 

Chase Clymer

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Chase Clymer

You launch on Etsy and walk me through the next year or two. 

How are things... How does the momentum start? How do things start to scale? When does building your own website become something that needs to be done?

Emily DeLapp

That's a great question. It's because we were absolutely reaching that point. 

Something that was very interesting about launching on a platform like Etsy–and I think that this rings true today–is there’s a lot of home crafters, which is absolutely what that platform specifically was designed for. 

However, I had always built this brand. I had always built Concrete Minerals to be a business and to be something that was going to scale at some point. 

Some of the interactions would be a little interesting and a little different. You'd get a lot of people trying to negotiate down prices and wild things like that. 

And so eventually we just reached this point where, and I think back then, I mean, we'd still have to repost listings and things like you would do on eBay. 

And so as far as the backend was concerned of really trying to run the day-to-day and processing orders and things like that, it just reached a point where it was completely untenable. 

There wasn't much we could do to keep scaling. It was just taking so long to do the day-to-day stuff. And so we had this, this was prior. 

Our first brand was, our first website was not launched on Shopify. I always forget that it was on some sort of an open source platform just prior to Shopify. And my brother, who's an incredible developer, he is amazing. 

And so I had worked with him. He helped us with a lot of the back end. But you know, we had a theme that we plugged in, very similar to Shopify, things like that. 

And we were able to launch there, but we had collected such an amazing list, a very, very solid list of emails back then. That was a big thing. 

And we just started pushing email marketing and marketing through Instagram, primarily Instagram and Facebook. And that was it. And overnight, I mean, overnight, it was, I remember our first Black Friday.

This was probably back in 2010, maybe 2011, when our first Black Friday was absolutely bonkers. I could have never expected anything like that. 

Chase Clymer

And obviously, it was off to the races. 

Now let's fast forward. I already told people what happened with that story. You took an exit in 2019 and now you're back. 

And we talked about starting concrete minerals in 2008 and 2009. Now in 2020, 2021, 22, 23… What is different? You're doing it again. 

How do you approach doing it as a founder a second time with how technology has changed, how the landscape has changed? 

Walk me through it. What's the first thing? 

Emily DeLapp

I love sharing this. I love sharing how I came to EXOH and how this whole thing happened. 

It was... We had developed concrete minerals and it's something that I was incredibly proud of, just to go back a little bit and just to touch on the end of that and how everything wrapped up.

We had scaled the brand as best as we could do. I had a small team, everything was going as well as it could. 

And then we brought on some business partners, a big digital marketing agency, and I fell in love with the guys. They were very much aligned with what we wanted to do. And so they decided to… we still didn't have many resources as far as fundraising or anything like that was concerned. 

Back then, especially, I mean, talking about back in 2016, investors were not looking at consumer products. It was still incredibly rare. They were almost completely relegated to the tech industry, and that was it. 

So we still didn't have a lot of capital to work with as far as scaling ads, as far as scaling digital marketing or anything like that. And so our resources were pretty limited. 

So we took on these partners, and they backed our ads then for 90 days. And that was it. We just flipped the switch. And overnight, I mean, we 10x'd our growth within two months. It was unreal.

And so as a result of that, there were so many things. There were so many things. 

From day one, we had produced our products in-house. We were not using a contract manufacturer, nothing like that. We produced it in-house. 

When we had moved into our office space, I built out a fantastic lab in there where we had developed the products and produced them.

And we did all of our order fulfillment in-house. And so we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in-house of shipping. And that was shipping internationally so we're still dealing with duties and customs and trying to develop all of these different resources. 

And so as we started to scale to these pretty significant milestones, at the same time I was trying to figure it out, I realized that we were reaching our max capacity. 

There's only so much we could produce in-house realistically before we hit this wall. So I'm going out there and researching and Googling and chatting with other friends and founders.

What lab should we work with? Where should we have our products produced? How do I make sure that they're getting produced in the same quality that we've always kind of prioritized? 

And we're working with a fantastic branding agency out in Brooklyn, and I'm flying back and forth from California trying to scale our packaging, trying to make sure that we're prepped for retail. 

Ulta's knocking down the door wanting to stock the products. Incredibly, I'm incredibly flattered, but also like, my god, how am I gonna do this?

And so ultimately, our business partners who, again, I loved, had wonderful intentions, but I think that our brand specifically, we took on a really unique partnership sharing equity. 

And it's not like we were paying them a retainer. This was a project that we decided to work on together. We decided to try to build things as quickly as possible, try to build them as securely as possible. 

And our goal was to take an exit. I had been running the business for seven, eight years at this point, and I was just maxed out. I was maxed out on my mental capacity for how much I could deal with. 

And we built it up and things went really great for a while. And then we had some issues with things that they were supposed to take over and things that I was supposed to be managing. And I felt like I had a lot of things that were still left on my plate at the end of the day. 

And it just all started to roll backwards. And I always say the company was never built on a solid foundation. It was almost built as a test. And I always joke that your first business isn't supposed to succeed. 

And I spent a year, I finally scaled back absolutely everything that we had. And I knew that it was time to walk away from the brand, and it was time to find some new owners and to just wrap it up and come to a close. 

All I wanted in my life was a break and some time and some peace. And so I worked really hard and I found some lovely people to take over the brand and they really cared about it. 

They really liked what we were doing. It was a group of women. It was crazy. 

And it took me a year. It took me a year to take an exit. And I walked away. And that was in November of 2019. 

And I joked after that, that I would never in a million years consider building another brand, that there was no way. 

And I said, god, it's such a shame. It's so awful. Knowing what I know, having the real world experience that I have, it feels like such a shame to not utilize any of that, but I couldn't fathom it. 

And then the pandemic happened and I was like retired for a year and I got to sleep and I got to do some real work on myself. I got to figure out who I was as an adult. 

I mean, I launched this company when I was 24 years old and I had no idea who I was without the title founder and CEO of Concrete Minerals. I didn't even know who I was. 

And then this crazy thing started to happen. 

And after about a year of soul searching and really feeling genuinely happy and just taking a real break, I started thinking about business ideas that I had always had in the back of my head. 

And I started to get kind of inspired by things again. And I started to think about this idea that we had kind of worked on here and there. 

We thought about expanding a different line with Concrete Minerals at one point that really more heavily focused on the idea of working in aromatherapy, but with personal care products, but in a really, really lighthearted, stupid, fun, satirical way that was really approachable. 

And I started revisiting that and I started falling in love with that idea. 

And next thing I knew, I was working on business plans. And I was working on all of the things, looking at these different resources that I now had available in front of me that I would have killed to have had when I built my first brand. 

And realizing, oh my god, there's so much more available. And I know how to utilize these tools. I know how to do this. And I just started getting really excited about it. 

And so as of August of 2021, I filed my paperwork. The business was created. And that was when EXOH finally first took root. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. 

Now, this time around, obviously, technology has evolved quite a bit. 

How did you approach A. launching the product as far as what its home would be? But B. what is that go-to-market strategy? 

Emily DeLapp

So that one again. That was really something I feel incredibly lucky about, just having the information that I have now. 

I have seen brands over the years backed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.I have seen tons of waste that has gone on. I have seen brands scale too quickly without building really solid fan bases and customer bases and really kind of understanding what's working and what's not. 

So something that was always a plan with EXOH from day one was to do production in-house, which sounds wild and sounds crazy, having been in the position that we were before. 

But something that was really unique with this one was that while I was running Concrete Minerals, I had already sourced a contract manufacturer that I fell in love with, that I knew from day one of developing EXOH was going to be the manufacturer that we would scale our products into. 

But the reason I always wanted to launch and do production in-house for at least the first six months or the first year was because it was a really easy way for us to just really test and figure out what people wanted, what they didn't, what was working, what wasn't before I was stuck with some massive MOQs from these manufacturers and with a bunch of stock that wasn't going to move. 

That was definitely one of the big goals from day one, to build in that way. 

The other big one, we launched D2C in February of this year in 2023.

That meant we launched on Shopify, we launched our website. We've implemented all kinds of basic sales channels. 

We've got Instagram on there. We are finally onboarded with TikTok. Shout out TikTok for finally rolling out US Shop, man. That took forever. 

But we went ahead and launched there. We ran some TikTok ads. We've been kind of testing ads since then. And, really, just looking at some numbers and getting our analytics and just kind of sorting through what's working, what's not.

And then we launched on a fair to move into some indie retail and start moving into shops, boutiques, things like that with our products. 

I don't even think I've talked about what these products are. We launched with flavored lip balms. 

Chase Clymer

That sometimes helps. 

Emily DeLapp

Yeah. Maybe I shouldn't have talked about that. 

We decided to launch with a line of flavored lip balms and we did a lot of testing prior to that. 

We did a lot of surveys prior to that asking what flavors people would want to see. We wanted to come up with a lot of things that were really unique. Some unique flavors and things like that.

Every product. I mean, we launched with 14. We're getting ready to launch another eight. And we've gathered so much data, but it's been so much fun to hear the feedback and to be so involved with the small, growing fan base that we have right now. 

And I feel like that was the thing that I appreciated the most about Concrete Minerals. And I've been really grateful to feel like we've been able to kind of maintain that. I didn't want to scale something from zero to 60. 

I don't know. I've been in a position where I saw what prioritizing every single dollar really did and how it benefited us. I also saw the constraints that we had as a result. 

Especially at the beginning, when we're really establishing things and trying to learn, I feel like that direct connection with our audience and moving a bit more slowly and moving very intentionally–that's been very important with this brand. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely.

Now, is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our listeners? 

Emily DeLapp

We could really go into the rabbit hole about everything that's been going on and how DTC is shifting, how the economy is shifting so much. 

And that is... Talk about the Wild West. 

2020, 2021, 2022 even. The growth that we saw with DTC, the explosion in just the development of new projects and our products. 

And in addition to that, just seeing how wild it is to see these so many investors coming out of the woodwork. 

VC, I mean, VC just putting so much money into consumer products. It just, that in and of itself blew my mind when that really started taking hold. 

But I think ultimately, I think it's really worth it to put some real time into developing your brand. It's always worth it to listen to the feedback and have as much of a direct connection with your customers, with your fan base as possible because they won't lie to you. They're not going to lie to you.

And I think that there's no better way to do any of that than genuine authenticity. You can't fake authenticity. 

Right now our entire Black Friday strategy that we're developing for marketing is based on showing our customers hilarious examples of emails that AI tried to write for us for the holidays and things like that.

I'm really poking fun at the fact that, and I'm not saying that AI may not get there. I'm not wild about it, but I'm also not standing in the way of what's obviously going on. 

But right now, I think that there's still nothing better in the world than being able to have a direct, authentic connection with people, and especially the younger generations. There's nothing that they catch on to quicker than bullshit. There's nothing that they can sniff out faster. 

So I think it's really just worth it to, you know, just dig in a little bit and try to have some authentic connections and hear what's working and what's not, and develop with your customers, as opposed to for your customers. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely, Emily. 

Now, for those listening that want to check out the line that you have out and the new ones that you're going to release, where should they go? 

Emily DeLapp

Our main website is EXOH.co. And that is E-X-O-H.co. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Emily DeLapp

Cool. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.co to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes, that really helps us out. 

Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!