341 | Building a Brand on Repeat Buying Power | with Lea Garcia

Leah Garcia is the Founder & CEO of NULASTIN®, the first beauty brand to commercialize elastin-based haircare. With a background as a professional athlete and award-winning media personality, Leah brings a performance mindset to DTC brand building, combining storytelling, product innovation, and operational grit.

Before launching NULASTIN, Leah built a successful career in broadcast journalism and sports media, covering professional bull riding for CBS and competing internationally in mountain biking. That same tenacity shows up in how she scaled NULASTIN to $17.5M in revenue before hiring her first employee, bootstrapping the brand through direct response marketing, Indiegogo campaigns, and scrappy user-generated content.

Leah shares why she shifted from a crowded skincare category to focus on brows and lashes, how “less polished” creative outperformed high-production assets, and why authenticity still drives her best-performing ads. She also breaks down her product development process, the metrics she tracks most closely, and how she’s approaching influencer and affiliate marketing now that the brand has scaled.

Whether she’s explaining why awkward websites sometimes convert better or why prestige branding can alienate loyal buyers, Leah offers a no-BS look at building a beauty brand that lasts without relying on glossy tactics or VC backing.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:43] Intro
• [01:20] Launching niche beauty products with clear focus
• [02:00] Identifying a personal need in the market
• [03:20] Investing early in a science-backed idea
• [04:30] Taking control after early business loss
• [05:36] Accepting risk when investing your own money
• [06:53] Bootstrapping with decks, debt, and side hustles
• [09:22] Trusting instinct over validation frameworks
• [10:38] Learning from regulatory arrogance
• [12:55] Leveraging infomercial skills for DTC
• [14:46] Episode Sponsors: Electric Eye, Heatmap & Zamp
• [18:43] Focusing early on user generated content
• [20:42] Understanding the tradeoffs of premium branding
• [22:30] Selling before customers hit the website
• [23:20] Learning from infomercial-driven growth
• [27:29] Blending legacy service with modern tech

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Pioneers elastin-based hair and skincare using ethically sourced, naturally derived ingredients nulastin.com/
• Follow Leah Garcia linkedin.com/in/leah-garcia-592988 
• Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connect
• Clear, real-time data built for ecommerce optimization heatmap.com/honest 
• Fully managed sales tax solution for Ecommerce brands zamp.com/honest 

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

 

Transcript

Leah Garcia

I wanted to bring the product to market because I needed it. And if I needed it, so did other women. And really, that was the whole crux of why I was so driven. 

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've got a great guest. She's an award-winning media personality and former professional athlete. A member of the EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women North American Class, a Titan 100 recipient, and the founder and CEO of NULASTIN. Welcome to the show, Leah Garcia.  

Leah Garcia

Wow. Sometimes when I hear that intro, I want to look around myself and be like, Who is that girl? That's fantastic. 

Chase Clymer

No, you've been doing some amazing stuff. 

Leah Garcia

Look at me go.

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Alright. So for the folks listening to this or watching on YouTube, hello, people. What types of products are you bringing to market over there at NULASTIN?

Leah Garcia

NULASTIN is an elastin replenishment company. And we're in the beauty space.  So our core products are hair care and skincare. We launched with Lash and Brow, a serum that enhances longer, thicker, fuller looking lashes and brows and then the scalp treatment came a little bit later. But we really focus on the skinification of the scalp at NULASTIN. That is our claim to fame. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now, between working in the media and being a pro athlete, where did you have the time to come up with this business?  What was going through. I guess, what was the inception where it went, maybe I need to do this? 

Leah Garcia

Yeah, the aha moment was pretty damn clear. I was an aging woman in a television business who had been a former professional athlete. So you start losing a little bit of your edge, be it from wrinkles and thinning hair or the writing on the wall where you see that things are changing and you want to stay relevant. You want to keep your job pretty much A, and I was introduced to this protein called elastin and immediately saw that no other brand was addressing this loss of elastin.

So we'd been talking about collagen. We'd been talking about other matrix proteins, but I just  serendipitously had met a microbiologist who had been working for bio companies and pharma and Amgen on tissue regeneration and wound healing. And the minute I realized that NULASTIN could A, help with my skin, but then B, once I realized that it was gonna be essential for hair,  I said, sign me up. Please let me take this to everybody else who I know needs it. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. And what year was that? 

Leah Garcia

Well, I met the microbiologist in about 2012 and I actually invested $50,000 in an earlier iteration of the business because I was so hook, line and sinker in with this. You spend your whole life as an entrepreneur, at least with that mentality where you're looking for something that's novel, something that has a consumable.

So there's gonna be replenishment and reorders. You didn't just want, I didn't want a snuggie blanket. I didn't want a one and done or a different colored iteration. So I had found something that just had Leah written all over it. That was 2012. And then by the time 2014 rolled along, that's when the Lash and Brow prototypes were introduced to me. And then by the time I got my shit together in 2016, I finally just said, Alright, I'm starting this business. And I went and filed for a business license. And the date that is listed on my record is January 13, 2016. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now was that $50,000 investment you made a few years before that? Was that just in the microbiologist and what he might be producing as an advisor and as a fan of the product and a potential customer?

Leah Garcia

That's probably the best question anyone's ever asked me because no one's ever said, where did that money go? 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I'm curious.  

Leah Garcia

Chase, it went bye bye. It escaped  everyone's wallet. It went into what was at the time, Skin by NULASTIN, and it was run by NotMe. And the business pretty much imploded in the course. They had over a million dollars in funding, and it imploded in about six months. And so was a cautionary tale for me. But I kept in touch with the microbiologist. And then when the opportunity  came about where I could take things into my own hands and  maintain control of my own destiny. That's what I did. But I definitely learned a lot of really great lessons from that failure, as everyone does.  

Chase Clymer

Oh yeah. I mean, you have to make choices. Some of them will be right. Some of them will be wrong. But boy, do you learn quickly when it's wrong. 

Leah Garcia

And they always say, right, if you're going to invest, don't invest unless you're willing and or able to lose the money. And it's funny because when I put the money in, I was like, well say goodbye, right? You never want to believe that your money is going to be there at the end and that the promise will come through.  

But actually, when I launched NULASTIN, I'm going to fast forward a second because I built the business up to 17 and a half million dollars before I hired my first employee by the time I launched. Then a group of Denver angels called me and said, we want to invest in your company. And I was like, I don't really need your money.

But when they finally did put their blood, sweat and tears in terms of cash, which is an angel investment into the business, I ended up getting a little over a half a million dollars from the angels. And then some friends and family wanted to jump in on that little round, which was a series A. And so they came on board and I am protecting their investment as if it is my lifeblood. So they are very lucky to have me at the helm because I am not going to let them down. I'm not gonna let them be in the situation that I was in prior. 

Chase Clymer

Alright. Let's walk it back to 2016. You have a prototype that you love. You file for the business, and you're going to go to the market. How do you do that? How do you find customers that aren't your friends and family? 

Leah Garcia

First of all, I didn't even have bottles to put the product in. So 2016 was really me learning how to put a pitch deck together and try to find money. So I was scurrying all over the country.

I was learning how to do pitch decks. I was trying to just find someone who'd be interested. And I don't know if you. Do you know the story of Airbnb? You and I were chatting about Airbnb. Have you ever seen their pitch deck? 

Chase Clymer

I don't know if I've ever seen the pitch deck. But the story itself is so funny from what it was to what it is now. The air part of it, they were just throwing air mattresses in people's houses in the Bay Area because rent was so wild. 

Leah Garcia

Right. But their first deck was just, I'm gonna call it ghetto. It was nothing fancy and the same with Uber. There was nothing fancy about the decks. And here I put all this fancy, you know, copy and beautiful aesthetics into the deck and  I still couldn't get any traction. And then I just said, F it, I'll do it myself and mortgaged my house and didn't take any money. And luckily I did have a side hustle. 

So my main job at the time was reporting for the professional bull rider store. I wasn't making great money. You think you would, but you don't. But it was enough to where I had time on my hands to really focus on what I needed to do. But I just said, you know, skin of the game, Garcia, just do it yourself. So I put my own self in the mix and then I put that pitch together. Then one colleague did give me $50,000 and then that gave me the confidence to move on. 

And I ended up doing an Indiegogo campaign, ended up with 17,000 to really get my first packaging put together. And then it really was Chase, friends and family. And if you were somewhere around me, I would stick a camera in front of your face and I would take a before picture of your lashes and brows. And then I'd take an after picture when I saw you next. And then I would beg you to let me post those on my website, which I built on Wix. Hello. 

Then I moved upwards to a WordPress site. And then ultimately, when I finally got some help, I went over to Shopify and then Shopify Plus. But boy, there's a lot of blue ocean when you think about my business model.  

Chase Clymer

Well, first and foremost, if I was near you, you could use me as a dummy, put products on my face and take pictures. I don't care. My girlfriend does it all the time. But alright. So you do the Indiegogo campaign. What are your thoughts about that as testing the waters about product-market fit. I'm sure there's entrepreneurs out there that are like, should I do a Kickstarter crowdfunding thingy? 

Leah Garcia

I wasn't thinking like that. That part of it really. I wasn't getting that deep. I knew I wanted to bring the product to market because I needed it. And if I needed it, so did other women. And really, that was the whole crux of why I was so driven to bring this to market.

How do I find the customers and then develop something that's going to fit them? I was, no, I've got the holy grail. You're going to want to jump on this moving train when I come on the market. So I wasn't thinking the other direction. And I did it on Indiegogo because that's kind of what people said I should do if I didn't have funding. And because I didn't have funding and I certainly had run out of cold cash, something needed to give.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. No, that's a very honest answer. And that's the name of the podcast, Honest Ecommerce. 

Leah Garcia

Can I tell you how I really messed up on that Indiegogo campaign? 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, we want to hear that. 

Leah Garcia

Okay. So, cautionary tales, I learned about the investment part of it. But I really was a bit. Oh  my goodness. I was so arrogant, is really the best word for what I was. I wrote all the copy myself, never had anyone check it, didn't do any regulatory. AndI wrote it all down. And then when I started the Indiegogo campaign, they shut me down in three days. And I thought they shut me down because of that. I didn't know why they shut me down, but I then started bullying my way through LinkedIn and every other platform to try to find the owners of Indiegogo.

And somebody to talk to me about why they shut my campaign down. And I was frenetic. So I ended up driving to San Francisco from the central coast of California, parked outside their offices, walked into the basement, snuck by the security, went up the elevator, landed on their floor, walked in with their foosball table and all of the young people having a really good time.  And I looked like that movie Joy.

And I walked in and I was like, I want some answers.You all shut me down. And I was so  convinced that they had a glitch on their end. And this is that then they went back and they talked amongst themselves and they came back out. And this is my interpretation of what happened next. Hey, crazy lady, Stripe credit card shut you down. We did it. You use structure function claims, which means I was claiming to grow hair.  

I was not improving the look of my eyelashes. I was treating my copy as if I were a pharmaceutical drug. And there was no test anyway, I just basically had to tuck my tail between my legs, leave and laugh all the way back at what an idiot I was, how arrogant I was and another really great lesson that I learned. 

Chase Clymer

Thank you for sharing that. That's amazing. And I'm going to remember that. And I'm to tell that to people outside of this podcast. So thank you so much for that. Okay. So any Indiegogo campaign goes, you get your first round of product, and you're selling it to your friends and family. When does it go beyond? What started to happen? When did it start to click? 

Leah Garcia

I'll give a little shout out to a colleague of mine who really. He and I had worked together in the infomercial world. And he was a bit of a rainmaker. And so he kind of self-taught himself to work on Facebook ads at the time. And so we would get on the phone and craft the ad, but prior to that, I'd shot some video because I'd come from a television production background. So that was my forte: how to be in front of a camera, how to  fancy myself to be in marketing, because I'd been in infomercials prior.  

So I knew that dog and pony show. But he and I wrote the first ad for a Facebook campaign  and we put it out there for, I mean, I'm guessing that the first ad was a couple of hundred dollars spent, you know, and then we got the first order. There you go. And then it was just so amazing.  And then we would run. I mean, in one year, we probably only had three ads that we ran the whole year with our limited campaign.  

And that first year we made eleven thousand dollars. And that was the journey and how it started. And then the next year I moved on to getting help. Was that 2019, 2020? No, I was still doing it with him and I. Then we got close to $3 million. And then I brought in an agency and then we catapulted to seven and a half million and then up to the $17 million mark before iOS 14 changes.

Chase Clymer

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Electric Eye is a Shopify Plus partner that has helped over 100 brands migrate, redesign, and optimize their stores since 2016.

If you'd like to increase your conversion rate, average order value, and revenue per session, we are the true Shopify experts you've been looking for. 

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Chase Clymer

That's amazing growth. And so what were some of those big changes in marketing and sales that allowed you to go from. $10,000? Obviously, it was the people involved. You've already mentioned that. But from $10,000 in year one, to three, seven, 14, what were some of the things that people should expect if they want to see that kind of growth? 

Leah Garcia

The crowded marketplace is a real thing. And skincare, couldn't dig myself out of a hole with the skincare line because it's just how do you compete against the big brands? But the last in the brown market really was my entryway and that was not as crowded of a marketplace. It was easier to get traction. 

So I'd say my timing could not have been better with that particular product SKU and those two products were my heroes and they carried me through. So the marketing was more consistent  and it was less polished. So the less polished we were, the better we did. 

And then ultimately, we really started  focusing on the user generated content, which, you know, at the time you don't think you can afford UGC. Certainly, even to this day, I haven't really dove into affiliate marketing and or influencer marketing much. That's just getting going for my brand. 

But the things that really mattered were the consistency, the commonality of the message, but not being super slick, just making sure that we were the real people talking to the real customers and delivering without sounding conceited, the reality is I still perform quite well on ads because of my authenticity and just the fact that I truly believe in what I'm saying and doing. I've done the work. I am the customer. I over plucked my brows. I was aging. I'm 60 years old. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now Leah, you mentioned just now, you said that something you learned along the way with the marketing and then how you were presenting these ads is like they didn't have to be so polished. How did you come to terms with that with someone that came from a polished media world?  

Leah Garcia

Well, my first ad was so polished. It looked like it was just too pretty. Everything was the lighting and the sound quality and me standing on a section with the perfect dress on. Nobody wanted to see that. They just didn't want to see it. They would still stop and some of those ads did work. That's what I did for the Indiegogo campaign. But ultimately, it's just that I came from infomercials. It just didn't work. It just didn't work for Meta. But I didn't know it at the time until I did know it. Once you learn that, you don't unlearn it. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. 

Leah Garcia

But Chase, here's the other thing about that. I think the same can be said for the website. Now you want a website that converts. You want a website that looks good. Can I say that in my past, some of the awkwardest looking websites still perform equally as well as these beautiful manicured, perfect looking websites. There is something, it can't be too bad. There's a happy medium. There's a happy medium, but sometimes the polish will take you away from a particular customer base. 

It'll throw you into a new customer base. So you better be prepared to now nurture the new customer base that's really expecting that prestige look. Because when you walk away from the people who feel a little more comfortable in the analog world, or the more basic website look,  you are making a decision. 

Chase Clymer

Just talking about this right before this on an episode I recorded where sometimes when you're marketing and the product and the offer and how you present that to the correct segment of the market. If all that stuff is great, the experience doesn't matter. The people will buy it because you've already sold them before they got there. They clicked with the intent to buy. The website doesn't need to do any lifting. 

Leah Garcia

I agree. I agree. Bravo to whomever you were talking with about that. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. It was Aaron from Newton Baby, the world's largest direct-to-consumer baby goods company. 

Leah Garcia

Babies and puppies and animals, those are just fun businesses when you watch them. They can really scale fast. People spend more on their babies than they will on themselves. And they certainly spend more on their pets than they will on themselves. 

Chase Clymer

I do want to just circle back to something you said earlier, and I didn't give it the proper light shined on it. You mentioned that this scratched that entrepreneurial itch for you. This being new last in this business because of the fact that it was consumable and led to repeat purchases. That's all I'm looking forward to as an entrepreneur if I was going to invest in or build a new business. 

I think that for those folks listening out there, it's really easy to throw a logo on a t-shirt and say you have a clothing brand. But it's insanely difficult to differentiate yourself against the market unless you are a literal tastemaker with a billion followers. So what Leah's talking about here is just like there's these core fundamentals to starting, especially in Ecommerce, like a business that can sustain over time and last through some of the volatility in the market and the economy that we've experienced in the last decade. There's been multiple big, crazy things that have happened. But yeah, how did you know that?

Leah Garcia

I'm gonna give credit to the infomercial world. When I was midway through my television career,  I was traveling 200 days a year and I started a business called In-Room Fitness Programming. It was called Leah Garcia Fitness Programming. And my idea was that anybody in a hotel room could check in, turn on their TV, the on-demand and get a workout in. So I have this great concept.

That's another one where I mortgaged my house and invested a lot of money and it didn't work out. If I had the numbers on paper, it should have done really well. But the beauty of that is that I  also conceptualize product placement. Not that I invented it, but I'd seen it happening in movies where I thought, oh, what I can do is get a sponsor to help me fund this, to put a product behind me or wear Nike clothes or whatever it was I was going to do.

And while I was pitching some of that product placement at some expos that I went to, I met some individuals who saw me as a bit of a diamond in the rough. And then they hired me for  work with one of their infomercials. And the rest was really history because I started with Slendertone, which was an abdominal training device. And I went to Contour. And the Contour belt was one that I got to help with all of the ideation of what we wanted to do.

This was so much fun, but that company went from zero to $220 million in the course of about three years. But it wasn't just a one-time purchase, They had  gel pads that you needed to place on the back of the ad belt so that it would give you the EMS contraction so that it would flex the muscles. 

Without the gel pads that were going to run out about every four to six weeks, you couldn't keep using the belts. And no matter how many one-offs you would sell. I thought, well, isn't this a good business model? So I had a friend who used to tease me because he'd say, Leah, on your grave, it's going to be a long-term residual income. Because I used to just always talk about  what long-term residual income is going to look like for me. And that is just probably a survival thought because I grew up with a pretty limited means of family money. 

We grew up on a ranch and I think my mother and father in their best year probably only ever made $17,000 a year collectively between the two of them. And I don't think I ever wanted for anything. But I also believe that my mother could have lived a much better life had she had just a wee bit more money and something that wasn't going to run out, right? Because there was that scarcity that they had. So yeah, so I like to think I'm an observer. I'm always looking at what other people have done and what can I learn from that? And then how do I not repeat that but do this? that is my MO. That is who and what I am. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing, Leah. Now, is there anything I haven't asked you about today that you think might resonate with our audience? 

Leah Garcia

Yeah, we can go into all sorts of stuff now that that last comment came. It's really my whole, I'm the age demographic where I still love to pick up a phone. I still love human interaction. I still love that connection. And I'm also hip enough, I think, to be aware that I need the AI and I need all of the automation. So I think it's important for businesses when they're getting their groove to really make sure that you've got someone on their team with some heritage and some legacy experience.

Because a lot of the new  people launching a business, they think they've just invented the wheel. And we've already seen it, done it, thought it. But we're not caught up to where they are.  But we come with an awful lot of experience in terms of how to really take care of customers  based on some just good old Dale Carnegie information, how to win friends and influence people.

And we come from a world where we still love having a door open for us. And so I treat my customers with a lot of that old-fashioned politeness that I know that they're craving because that is the demographic that I'm dealing with. But then I'm sassy at times too. So don't push my buttons because I will bite like a little chihuahua. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing, Leah. You talked about how amazing this product is. You mortgaged your house, obviously, to get it to market. And it worked out well in the end. But if I'm listening to this, and I'm curious to learn more about the product, where should I go? What should I do? 

Leah Garcia

Oh, very much so. Very easy. You can go to NULASTIN.com. And we are also available on Amazon. And the Amazon storefront, we're about ready to move to a distribution model. Because Chase, I don't wake up every morning and dream about Amazon sales. It does not even enter my mind.

So I finally decided to hand that over to people who do. So we're about ready to move into a distribution model for that. And you know what makes me laugh? Is that the Amazon storefront right now is still set up on my Leah Garcia at. Well, it's not that one. But it's my AOL account.  so because that's how I launched the business back in the day with my AOL account. And so when they take it over, it's finally going to get sunsetted, which rest in peace, AOL account. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Leah, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all those amazing insights. 

Leah Garcia

Pleasure. Thanks, Chase.  

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 https://honestecommerce.com/ to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

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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!