008. Making It Up: $10M Beauty Agency, No Plan, No Degree

She talked her way into her first beauty counter job with zero experience, memorized a poem in Japanese, and built a $10 million agency without a business plan. In this episode, Susannah Dellinger shares her story — and what "making it up" really means.

In this episode:

• How a broke theater dropout talked her way into Nordstrom on Michigan Avenue with no beauty experience whatsoever
• The Shiseido poem that changed everything — and what it taught her about passion over credentials
• Rising through the ranks: from counter to national trainer, Dr. Brandt to Laura Mercier to Trish McAvoy
• The role that looked like a dream from the outside — and quietly broke her from the inside
• Why she walked away from it all on Valentine's Day 2018 with no backup plan
• How a pandemic, a Clubhouse app, and a toddler accidentally built Bright Beauty Connect
• What "making it up" actually means — and why it's the only career advice she trusts

01:17 What "Making It Up" Really Means

03:29 How a Theater Kid Fell Into Beauty

03:57 How She Faked Her Way Into Nordstrom

07:37 Rising Through the Ranks

08:40 Dr. Brandt, Laura Mercier & Trish McAvoy

11:49 The Dream Job That Broke Her

13:53 Walking Away With No Backup Plan

16:02 Consulting for Indie Beauty Brands

19:02 How a Pandemic Accidentally Built an Agency

21:12 Building Bright Beauty Connect: $10M in 48 Months

23:54 Why These Conversations Matter

Off the Shelf is a podcast about the people, brands, and behind-the-scenes forces shaping the beauty industry — money, relationships, risk, and what it really takes to scale.

CONNECT WITH SUSANNAH

Instagram: @brightbeautyconnect

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/susannah-dellinger

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We are in a trust recession. We talk about it all the time, we see it on the news, we cannot get away from this word. A trust recession means, especially in beauty, people no longer believe what they see. People hardly believe what they hear, for sure. People believe what they feel in person. And when you can bring that together, when you can take your DTC, your direct-to-customer shopper, when you can take your Instagram shopper, your TikTok live shopper, and bring them all and have an experience, that is when you create an iconic brand. This is Off the Shelf, where we take the most iconic beauty brands, products, and people in the beauty industry off the shelf and examine the stories behind the story. It's where beauty is treated like the economic, cultural, and power-building force it really is. I'm Susanna Dillinger, and here we're going to talk about what really shapes the industry, who holds the power, how the decisions get made, and what it actually takes to build, scale, and quite frankly, survive in beauty. These are the conversations happening behind closed doors about money, relationships, risks, and cult moments. If you're building, breaking through, or trying to understand how beauty really works, or just love a really good story, you're in the right place. Welcome back to Off the Shelf. Today we're going to be talking about Alta Beauty, aka Fire Festival of the Beauty Industry. I'm kidding. Although, wouldn't that be hilarious if that's how Jaw Rule was announcing a skincare brand? Is three million people showing up to buy tickets that there was only 3,000 for? But today we are going to talk about how wonderful that actually is. We are going to talk about the demand for in-person community that we're seeing from the beauty industry. People more than ever want to be together. That's what's always made me love the beauty industry, that people want to shop together, explore together, that it's always been a communal, like let's go with your girlfriends, let's go explore different textures, different scents, and play. And we are now seeing almost the opposite result of people spending all the time on TikTok and Instagram and all the things where we're at home consuming in beauty and now want to be together in person. We started to see a little sliver of it about a year ago when Salish Matter, a YouTuber for tweens and teens, launched her own skincare brand called Sincerely Yours. Very, very smartly, they decided to do a launch with an in-store appearance in Boca. Not sure why we picked Boca. Love Boca, but we're in Boca. We're in a mall. And I want you to close your eyes and imagine a mall in Florida. It's not exactly a hop and spot like it was for those of us that grew up as 80s and 90s kids that got dropped off at the mall. There's not necessarily a bunch of 14, 16, 17-year-old girls or boys hanging out in a mall anymore. However, the day that Sincerely Yours launched, over 150,000 teenagers, tweens, and their parents stood in line for up to seven hours to get to meet or glimpse or take a picture of Salish in person. This was the first glimmer that we saw. Hang on. Is Jen Alpha going to single-handedly rescue malls? Are they going to show up for events and experiences? This is more people in one area than most concerts these days coming to experience something that they all love in person together, which is one of their favorite influencers with a skincare brand. Now, let's fast forward to Ulta Beauty World and talk about it. I'm not going to dissect whether or not it was a great marketing plan to heavily advertise something to your 7 million Instagram followers that you only had 3,000 tickets for. That part we're going to leave over here because we have about 2,999,000 people that were upset when they didn't get tickets. But what we do have is 3 million beauty lovers who all logged in at the exact same time to spend over $120 on a ticket to book a flight, to book a hotel room, and travel into the same place together for proximity to each other and the brands they love. And that's amazing. That's extraordinary. Anybody who's in the beauty industry, adjacent to the beauty industry, or just loves beauty, should feel so excited, encouraged, and just optimistic about what this means for beauty as we move forward. It means that people want to be together. It means that people want whatever the Coachella version is of the beauty industry to hang out. I personally think that there's a lot of brands and a lot of companies who could capitalize on this huge demand that are just kind of taking a back seat right now. So here we're gonna go through it. No charge to anybody who uses any of these great ideas, but I would definitely think about it. If you're a beauty brand and you're going to have a booth at Ulta Beauty World, if you're in Ulta, by the way, there is no reason not to participate in Ulta Beauty World, you could reach out to your most loyal DTC customers, look at who's repurchased the most amount of times in a 12-month period, pick six of them, contact them, and let them know they've been chosen to come fly into Orlando and work your booth with you. Who better to help bring your brand to life and excite other people walking around than your most ride or die loyal customers? And also, do you not think that they are going to be buying your products for the rest of their lives that you've given them basically our modern day version of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory golden ticket to come to Ulta Beauty World. And bonus, you don't have to pay for extra staffing support. I say this as somebody who owns agency and would love all of you to have to use staffing support, but use this as an opportunity to invite your community in or even just find out who lives in Orlando right there that's been shopping your products for over 12 months and have local Orlando people come. There's so many opportunities for brands that are exhibiting in Ulta to make this a true community-driven moment that I cannot wait to see who jumps on this. Additionally, Sephora. You have an opportunity to join the party. There's Sephora that happens. It's not quite on the level yet as Alta Beauty World. Whoever figures out how to actually take this on a tour, I'm not talking you don't have to be an heiress level tour, right? We don't have to go around for a year, but pick six of your key cities, whether it's Alta, Sephora, or somebody we don't even see coming. Imagine if TikTok shops decided to go to six key cities over the span of two months and show up with their top creators from TikTok shops and do live streaming and have in-person activations from all these brands that you can't typically walk in and touch and see and feel. TikTok shops is all about discovering things that aren't necessarily on the shelf of your favorite retailer. There are so many different companies that can figure out ways to engage their community, bring people together, and above all else, have a heck of a lot of fun. We are in a trust recession. We talk about it all the time, we see it on the news, we cannot get away from this word. A trust recession means, especially in beauty, people no longer believe what they see. People hardly believe what they hear for sure. People believe what they feel in person. And when you can bring that together, when you can take your DTC, your direct-to-customer shopper, when you can take your Instagram shopper, your TikTok live shopper, and bring them all and have an experience, that is when you create an iconic brand. So close your eyes and imagine two months of your favorite beauty retailer showing you an absolute candy land of a beauty utopia. Every brand that you've ever thought of is there. They're wearing mascots. You've got a cocoa kind lip balm six-foot mascot. You've got mini Ferris wheels, you've got Beekman 1802 talking about the goats. You have every brand. You've got masterclasses this year at Alta Beauty World being taught by legendary JVN. You have Half Magic, the makeup artist behind Euphoria, the hit show. You have literally your dreams coming true in one place if you love the beauty industry. And you are being told for the low, low price of just over $100, you can participate in up to two days of beauty. You are told to log on on Wednesday morning at 9 a.m. Central, and that you will have a chance to queue in line to get the opportunity to buy a ticket. Now imagine there are only 3,000 tickets available, but they never told you that you just log on at immediately at 10:01 Eastern, 901 Central, you're told, congratulations, you're in the queue. And on the screen, there are seven to eight empty green dots that have white in the middle. And as your turn continues to go, they slowly painfully start to feel that you might be getting closer to the actual ability to buy a ticket. 45 minutes into it, you're on the screen. You did it, you made it. Just to go to checkout and say, sold out, not available. And then you find out that by 10:10 Eastern, 910 Central, the tickets had sold out. That is what happened to over 2,999,000 roughly people because there were only 3,000 tickets ever available. Now, do I think that Alta did anything wrong in this situation? Actually, I think they only did one thing wrong. I understand why only 3,000 tickets could be available. The goodie bags themselves were worth $2,000. That's a lot of product for brands to have to be able to put into these goodie bags. It's very expensive for brands to participate in events like this. It's costly to create these amazing animations and the booths themselves that can be up to $10,000, $15,000. And then on top of it, you're being asked to donate 3,000 full-size products. Plus, when people come to your booth, you're giving them more products, right? So it's definitely never been an ROI positive, meaning return on investment positive for these types of events. What Alta needed to do was to level set the expectation. We have 3,000 tickets available. Enter a raffle to win one of them. 3 million people would have entered the raffle happily, and then those selected would have been overjoyed versus the backlash of for up to two months, I was literally having some of these people are saying on TikTok and Instagram, they were having dreams about getting a ticket and planning birthday parties around it and trips with their girlfriends. They could taste it. They were so close because they did not have the level set expectation of what the actual chances and odds were. That's the only miss. Alta went and has created a beautiful in-person experience that brings their community together. They've always been about community. Their very essence is that you can belong with them, right? They have a loyalty program, one of the first in Beauty ever created that has 44 million users. 44 million people want to belong to Ulta. They have a sense of community. They're doing birthday parties. You can host a birthday party in Ulta. Your 10-year-old, your 12-year-old, your 16-year-old can go in there and Ulta will actually throw them a party and make an experience. They are actively working on creating a true third place for people to come together, be seen for their love of beauty, no judgment. You can show up how you are, whatever age you are, whatever ethnicity you are, however you want to be in the world and freely express that. And I think Ulta's done such a beautiful job of that. Next time, they just need to set the expectation. What's so interesting when we talk about community and how retailers like Sephora and Alta have created these moments for their customers, they're not the first to do it. In fact, the almost failed retailer of Neiman Sachs and Burgdorf Goodman really started this. They had legendary makeup artists like Trish McAvoy, Bobby Brown, Laura Mercier, makeup artists of their time come in and lead masterclasses. I remember when you could have 200 to 300 women come in for a masterclass to meet the legendary Trish McAvoy when I worked with her. These women would get so excited. They would buy pre-buy gift cards of up to $200 just to secure a seat, to be in the same room as Trish McAvoy, who would stand on a little stage that was built, you know, just for the day in front of pipe and drape, just white pipe and drape, that somebody moved a bunch of handbags out from the middle of Neiman Marcus for her to talk about her eight-step makeup technique. They were enthralled with it and they loved to come together. They would have a whole table, about four or five women, they're like, oh, we all come to this every year. It was their go-to thing to do together. Then they would go to lunch afterwards. This has always been community, showing up and being together in beauty for people that you resonate with, for brands that you feel like you belong to. This has always been a thing. And I don't know where Neiman's, where Saks, where Bergdorffs lost it. It used to be the go-to that when you wanted to have, even from a fashion perspective, they would do really cool trunk shows with designers that you could meet and greet that would give you personal tips on what would look great on you, makeup wise, skincare wise, hair care wise, the exact same thing. They used to be communal places. Something shifted after about 2011 into 2012, and Neiman's and Sachs moved away. And it opened up the gates for Alta, Sephora, and other retailers to create these memorable experiences. And now we have Gen Alpha who wouldn't ever equate Neiman Marcus or Saxeth Avenue as they go to place to meet their favorite brands. Because quite frankly, their favorite brands aren't even sold there anymore. Something got lost in the plot when it comes to community building. And I don't know how that happened when they did it so well. And it's fascinating to see this new age, this new guard come in and implement something that we know has always worked, creating moments for people to come together for their favorite brands and for their favorite products. I love to see it. These conversations matter because who gets to speak shapes who gets to win. If this episode challenged how you see beauty, business, or the power behind the industry, share it with someone who needs to hear it. To connect or explore more, check the show notes. I'm Susanna Dellinger, and this has been Off the Shelf.