Building OSEA, the Cult-Favorite Clean Beauty Brand with Co-Founder Melissa Palmer

On this week’s episode of Girl Gang the Podcast, we're in Los Angeles interviewing Melissa Palmer - Co-Founder & CEO of OSEA.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Girl Gang the Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 0:01

I'm your host, Amy Well, and the founder of Girl Gangthelabel.com. Hi, I'm Melissa Palmer, the co-founder and CEO of OSIA.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Thank you so much for coming in and telling us your story. Can you let our listeners know a little bit about your product line, where it started at, and how it's evolved?

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Everyone keeps describing us as a millennial brand, and my current joke is, yeah, because we are a millennial. Um, so we started officially in 1996, and much further back, my I was raised on a commune, and my it was a center for healing arts, and my mom at that time, both my parents were um massage therapists and did polarity therapy and acupressure and all sorts of different healing modalities. And my mom was tasked with starting a spa at the center, and she always loves to say she is the world's most least likely person to start a skincare company. So when she started the spa, every brand came to pitch her and show them the lines. It was a really incredible historical hot springs property. And she just read the back labels and was disgusted. It was filled with ingredients she couldn't pronounce, animal byproducts, and she she just didn't, she couldn't understand it. And she had always, and we were lucky enough to be raised, really conscious about everything we put in our body, and she saw on your body as the same thing. So the commune ended up breaking up, but that wasn't before the spa became a huge success, and as most communes do ultimately. And it got to the point we ended up moving to Malibu, where we still kept the commune vibe strong and slept outside and grew our food. Um, so we were definitely like the weirdo hippies, which wasn't cool at the time. And she just kept tinkering with these products and started getting a cult following of people buying it in jars and little homemade label containers, and always had a vision to launch it at Fred Siegel. And she walked in in 1996 and he brought the products on, and so that was really our moment. A long answer to the start. And I was in high school at the time and had always been super entrepreneurial, and just I joined her at that time.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

So it's been a long and fun road. If you could kind of touch on a few milestone moments, maybe on like that first decade of the brand and it becoming a cult success. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Well, I would say while we weren't built on social media, we were ignited by social media. So the first 10 years, it's so crazy to have been doing, and I I did have a couple years where I did something else we'll have to talk about, but to have essentially been doing the same thing for over two decades because the way that we operated was so different that we still got faxes and we we we'd sit and hover around the fax machine waiting for orders to come in. Um, so some of our biggest milestones in the first 10 years, I would say our biggest was in 1998. My mom was on an airplane and sat next to someone who mentioned they were starting this little brand in the US called Sephora. And they were gonna be opening the first Sephora in Soho. And well, she said, Well, I have a skincare brand. And so Sephora brought us in as the first indie brand to be in Sephora, and we had incredibly insane growth with Sephora for a couple of years. I mean, and we were really hovering around the fax machine because we were getting orders that, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, and it was like mind-blowing. Um, and ultimately Sephora ended up being what completely pivoted the brand because they in the early 2000s were going through like 2000, 2001, a lot of transitions in the business and were growing too fast. They had a huge leadership problem. They brought in the CEO of Home Depot to try and figure out their inventory issues. And it just wasn't set up for a small brand to succeed because we'd go to a store, they'd sell out, they wouldn't get products, we didn't have budget. And my mom and I were traveling to every Sephora around the country at that time. And our Sephora buyer said, Why don't you guys just start selling in spas by the beach? And so we did, and it completely pivoted our business. So that was one of the biggest kind of rides. And then in the also in the early 2000s, one of the crazy things that happened, this of like memorable moments, was Ozzie Osborne had been a fan of some of our products, and we had a piece of press right when the Osbornes was out, and we just stayed up all night for weeks shipping products because of Ozzy Osborne. Like our biggest press traction, one of the biggest to date.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

Oh my gosh, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

It was just a totally it was an entertainment weekly, which I sadly don't think exists anymore. And we were getting people, you know, the phones were ringing off the hook. There was no web orders at that time.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

What were you doing before you transitioned into this role and got involved? Can you kind of go through that process?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah. So I spent the first 10 plus years um really focused on OSEA. I went to college at the time and got a super um relevant degree in feminist studies, which but it really fueled my passion. And it's amazing how it actually did end up being slightly relevant, but an incredible education. Um and we just continued to grow really slowly with my mom and I operating the whole business out of her house and garage. And I like gosh, over 10 years ago now, developed a passion that became a rabid obsession of hula hooping. And yes, it's true. Um, and I just knew I had to start a hula hoop business, and so I ended up getting introduced with someone who just had, and we really activated it together and ended up growing a multimillion dollar hula hoop brand, which was I like to say going to business school because it was like every up and so many downs and so many ups. We sold, you know, nearly a million dollars of a handmade product in a Good Morning America episode, and then had to make it and had our website constantly crash. It was just every up and down, and ultimately, um I know that there's a lot of entrepreneurs listening, so ultimately I my business partner and I um ended up parting ways, and she was going through a divorce, which was very difficult for the business to operate. And I had not been as careful with my agreements as I should have been, and it's not something I love to talk about, and it's been like the greatest lesson, and something I love to encourage everyone to get super clear on agreements. And so I kind of like left that having, you know, just like my head down, what do I do next? And Osea was just still there cranking along. And um the great thing about the hula hooping business is I had learned about social media and uh e-com and like their welln-that brand was made for social media because it was just girls who wanted to show off hula hooping, myself largely included. Um, that's how I got hooked was making videos of myself hula hooping. Um so I just decided to tinker a little bit with OSEA and built a website and started doing Instagram, and that was five years ago, and we were still my mom and I and one employee at that time. We'd really grown. And now, fast forward five years, we have an office, we have a store, we have a team, and it's a whole new reality. So definitely fueled by social. And we really had the best of both worlds because we we'd have a tried and true product with a very small but loyal following that we knew worked, and to plug it into digital marketing and social was just has been explosive for us.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

And so cool that you got to take everything you learned from the hula hoop business and then be like, okay, we have this, just like you're saying, like the tried and trude products. Now, what's gonna happen if I take basically like this MBA that I got learning about the hula hoop business and then dabble it onto this, like what could happen?

SPEAKER_01 9:21

It was probably the most illuminating things in both when I was at the hula hooping company and when I came back to OCAs. I just kept getting so surprised at how similar the businesses really are. Both are in the consumer product space, so CPG is definitely more similar than going tech to CPG, but they just needed the same things and they had the same fundamental pieces to them. So I I also it was such an amazing education.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Can you talk a little bit about the growth of your social media in the beginning and the early days and um some things that maybe worked and didn't work when you were testing them out?

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Yeah. Well, I personally, my philosophy when people always say, like, oh, what changed things? And my answer is just everything. I try everything. Um so I think one of the first areas of success that we saw was through influencer marketing. And this was influencer marketing almost five years ago, so it wasn't really a thing. And we, you know, we're completely self-funded and have bootstrapped our growth through growth. And so we knew we would never be able to afford these expensive influencers, which five years ago would have been a deal by today's standards. So, and we knew we were always gonna be the small brand. So we went to really niche communities where we knew we would thrive. So one of those places was chefs and people who ate plant-based and vegan chefs. So we actually hadn't even highlighted the fact that we were plant-based, but we we found this community and we're like, oh, well, we're gonna start focusing on being a vegan brand. Um, even though it's always been part of our story, it that's a whole other strain of stories to talk about around the fact that everything we were doing 15 years ago was weird, and now just my mom is such a visionary. So we're very lucky in that sense. Um, so we really just went after communities where people could repetitively see us. I also got super deep into niche mom communities, um, homeschool moms. There was like different religious communities and just places where I knew we could connect with these pods of influencers, like where they were all friends, where someone would see us multiple times. So my sister, who still does all of our influencer marketing, um she's my little sister and has worked with me forever and is so patient and is the best. She also is a yoga teacher, so she got really into that community. And we just went after any community we could find.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

I think that's so important because a lot of I think like skincare and beauty when people are trying to get started. If everyone is doing the same thing and focusing on the same stuff, like the beauty bloggers, and I mean some of them are charging six figures now, and if you're self-funded, you can't do that, but just everyone has influence on some level. And I think that's like that's such a great strategy that still holds true to today. Like find someone that's influential within their group and you can expand from there. Like photographers, chefs, yoga teachers, like identify it, doesn't matter necessarily how many followers someone has. You can tell when people have an engaged community and a cult-like following where people trust what they want to do. And if you have a product with integrity, like searching out those people, I think is really important and still today.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

And if I think if you can take a couple steps outside of what you think is your sphere of influence, we've had incredible success in communities, and I really credit my sister with this, that I never would have thought of, like nurses or flight attendants. Flight attendants all have dry skin and they all care about their and they're definitely influencers of the flight attendant community. So I think in health, wellness, beauty, any CPG, there's a huge crossover, and it just doesn't have to be as obvious because you know, we couldn't, we could still can't afford to work with any of the top skincare or makeup bloggers. And truthfully, they see so much product. It's kind of, I think, in many ways more impactful for someone who's not looking for skincare from who they're getting content from to get surprised to see it.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

And kind of like stops you in your tracks rather than like if you follow someone, maybe every once in a while you want to get some tips from them, but you're used to seeing those same types of products all the time. But yeah, I just I kind of like that stuff. Me as a consumer, not just as a business owner, where like something out of the blue kind of comes in, and I just think like, oh, that I really think that they're sharing this because they actually love it. Like, I kind of want to research the brand a little more and see if it's worth it to try it.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Well, and that is actually what above all else has fueled our business growth, our influencer relationships, everything is the product. We are definitely product first, and I think as we're just so saturated with so much content, so much information coming at us from every angle, that authenticity of whomever's talking about you, it comes through. And you can tell when someone actually likes something. So I'd say other tip is have a really good product.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yeah, and customers at the end of the day are the biggest influencers. Um number one. Yeah, they're spending their hard-earned money buying something, and so if it blows them away, they are gonna tell every single person they know. I'd love to dive into more. Your mom seriously, seriously is a vision visionary. Holy shit. Truly. Oh my god, did she so when she was doing this? I mean, it sounds like it was just a part of your family's like your values, um, your mission, starting the brand, trying to, you you know, you're creating something good for yourselves, good for other people. When you talked to her about this, did she have any idea what it would become?

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Well, actually, she always saw it becoming this big. Always. And she never knew how. So she likes to always say, like, have smart kids, it really does it. Um, but she oh she always saw, she always saw the vision. And I think it was if someone would have heard her, it just would be insane because we were so small. And she always has said, OSIA is just taking us on a journey. So it is true. I feel I'm just on that journey too.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

I mean, spoken again, just like a true visionary. I just feel like having that confidence and aligning with your purpose, and just you never know how it's gonna pan out. But fast forward, like everything you guys have stood for for so long is now like trending, just like you're saying, like the the millennial generation, and every like everyone is searching for what you've already created, tested, proven, and is there.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

And and in all true fairness, we uh have an amazing lineage of women. Um, my great-grandmother was the first woman to become a chiropractor in the 20s. She found chiropractic and convinced them to let her in, and she was like, Well, of course I'm gonna do this. And she became a chiropractor with a huge thriving practice. And the the reason our brand, which OSEA means ocean, sun, earth, and atmosphere, but the way that the seaweed portion came in is because of my grandmother or great grandmother. Um she had this thriving practice in Bayside, New York, and um in I think her 40s, she injured herself. She tore a ligament and her leg. She, I don't know the exact details of her injury, but she couldn't see her patients, and she was going crazy. And she had a dream that the ocean would cure her. So she yelled to my grandmother and said, Take me down to the water. And it was um the dead of winter on the Long Island Sound, and he took her down through the snow to the water, and she started swimming, and she was very quickly cured, and she ended up starting one of the first polar bear clubs, if not the first, in the country, and swam in the ocean like over 300 days a year. Her definition of a bad day is if the ice was too thick to cut into, she couldn't get in. Um, and so we have these incredible shots of them standing on the snow and their bathing gowns, and on they do their New Year's photo in the local paper every year, and she was so vital and so healthy, and such an incredibly fierce, independent woman. And so she really and she was so interested in natural holistic health and wellness, so it is something that has been part of our family lineage for so long. That is so badass. I just so I she lived to be quite old, so I also had the pleasure of knowing her, and she was pretty serious.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Oh my gosh. Okay, no wonder then. If you could share um some advice for people that are aspiring entrepreneurs and would like to start their own business.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

So I would my primary advice is just start somewhere. I really I'm just inherently a perfectionist, and I think that perfectionism held me back in so many ways. There are important parts of a business to be a perfectionist about. Our products are our number one obsession, and I had I just think when you start somewhere, you get to what's next. I the lesson was like best illuminated for me on an email marketing campaign. This is years ago, and I was I'd go through my typical rigmarole of like obsessing on the color and the font and the placement, and then I took the original that I had just that was good, and then I took my obsessive one and I A-B tested them, and there was literally no results different, but of course it has to be good, and so I think that something I've noticed in myself and so many entrepreneurs, and especially when starting, is that there's like something that holds people back from starting because it has to be perfect, and just starting is perfect, and that's what takes you to what's next. And the other piece of advice, which is what I'm the most passionate about, is get really comfortable talking about money, and this applies to anyone, this applies to anyone working or an entrepreneur or not an entrepreneur, get really comfortable being so clear on your own numbers, and even if you know you're in financial distress and in debt, like know how much debt you're in and have a plan and make a spreadsheet and just get super clear. And you have to talk about money so much. When I hire people, we have to negotiate a salary. And I find that sometimes people are like, Well, can we talk about the money conversation? And my answer is yes, please, let's do that right now first. Like that conversation makes me really comfortable, it's super clear. Um, and I have really noticed a difference in the way that women negotiate their salaries and the way that men negotiate. And I'm really passionate about women and getting really comfortable about asking for money. I this crazy lesson someone once told me that always sticks with me is like, you can't get more than you ask for. If you were to ask me to give you 20 bucks right now, I might give you 10, I might give you 20, I'm definitely not gonna give you 30. If you ask for five, you're not getting 20. So you just you can't get more than you ask for. So I think it's really important to get comfortable with asking.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

I am, and we were talking a little bit about this before recording, and you're and I love that that's one of your um passions is empowering people through education around finance. How we're gonna learn more about where we fall on the scale, how we can learn more about tools to get out of debt is if we can start with our immediate circles and feel comfortable telling people like, hey, I made$10,000 less than I should have this year. If anyone's been through that, can you let me know what tools I can use? Or can you guys share like where you're at? Am I is something off? Like, let's get through this together.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

It's I I think I learned this lesson originally from some of my guy friends who just started telling me how much they made as a way to inspire me. And I was. A blown away. And they still have a couple. I'm like, how's this year looking? And they're so happy to tell me. And I now have some girlfriends, and I like we talk about how much money you're making. And it, I think it's a really healthy conversation.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

It's nice to start to get comfortable and saying, like, hey, what did this month look like for you? And if they shared it was bad too, like, fuck, it was bad for me too. Like, what's going on? Let's solve this together. Oh, are these bloggers we were paying, their campaigns fell flat? We didn't make money off of it. Cool. Let's go to like a general assembly workshop together and find other verticals to make money. But if you don't talk about it, you're not gonna know where you fall. And if you just think everyone else is doing great or everyone else is doing bad, you're not really. I think it's nice to just tap into reality. What's actually going on? Who can you learn from? Who can you look to and say, I don't want to do that?

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Yeah, a friend of mine with a completely different kind of CPG company. Three years ago, we went to lunch and and I was like, Well, how much money are you selling a month in wholesale? And she told me, and I was shocked. And then I told her how much I was selling online, and we have just been each other's cheerleaders for wholesale and online. And both of them have gone up so much because she told me what was possible, and vice versa.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

I know you're so busy. I'm just so inspired right now. I think what I might want to do, um, maybe after the holidays when it's calmed down, maybe we can like collaborate together on just like a little one sheet where people can print it out for free and like set financial goals, like a little mind map or something together. I would be honored.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

There is nothing I would love to do more. I I just feel so inspired to share this information. Like, this isn't something I want to make money off of. I just want to share it. Yeah. Because that I I say a lot of times, but you know, it's not it, it's not a women's issue, and it is a women's issue. We haven't been dealing with money and in the workplace and having these conversations for multiple generations. We're learning what that all looks like, and so I think it's really important we support each other.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

All right, well, thank you so much for coming in today and chatting with us. If you can let our audience know where to find you and learn more.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

You can find us on Instagram at Osea Malibu, and that's O S E A, which stands for Ocean, Sun, Earth, and Atmosphere. You can find us online at OSEAMalibu.com. And for all the Girl Gang listeners, we are offering free shipping on your first purchase. So enter Girl Gang at checkout.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

Perfect. Thank you so much.