613: Why Most Beauty Brands Fail - and How to Beat The Rest | DIBS Beauty Founder

Hey, founder fam. I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with Omnisend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for ecommerce founders. We've been recommending Omnisend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to 7 figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, Omnisend customers make $68 for every $1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment? And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50% off your first three months with the code founder 50. Just head to omnisend.com/ founder without the e to get started. Alright? Now let's jump back into the show. Welcome back to the Founder Podcast. What if building an eight figure beauty brand wasn't fancy marketing or a massive ad spend, but rather answering customer service calls on a personal cell phone and literally getting mistaken for a shoplifter while watching customers buy your products in Ulta? Well, today's guest, Jeff Lee, cofounder of Dibs Beauty, the color cosmetics brand that's rewriting the playbook on how to build in an impossibly saturated market. And in this conversation, you're going to discover how to achieve 60% repurchase rates in ninety days by obsessively focusing on the customer while entering retail earlier than you think is now essential for beauty brands, and how to pick the right retail partner for your customer and Jeff's exact prelaunch framework to build a 20,000 person wait list before launch. So guys, this is a master class in launching a premium beauty product brand in a crowded market through extreme customer proximity and disciplined community building. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the founder podcast with Nathan Chen. You co founded Dibs Beauty back in 2021. The company's growing super fast, but I read online that you've clocked in a 120 week sometimes. Is that what required to build, you know, an insanely fast growing direct to consumer company? It's not about working hard or the quantity of effort, but at the end of the day, there's simply no way of getting around it. And I like to say that I do work smart and I work hard and that's probably the superpower that's propelled me through. If you're founding a company, you have to do every single job to some degree or be able to do it if someone else can't. And that's what naturally leads to 120 a week, but there's also a piece of it, which is you're founding a culture and I'm pretty unapologetic about the culture that we have here, which is that we are absolute perfectionists when it comes to makeup. It might not be that serious of a product, but the fact is it's a crowded marketplace and I don't believe any brand out there, Whether it's CPG …