How two women turned a $5000 coffee scrub start-up into a $20 million beauty brand
THESE Melbourne women started off with $5000 in the bank and an unusual, but awesome business idea. They turned that into a multi-million dollar brand.
IT MIGHT sound like an unusual recipe for entrepreneurial success, but the founders of Australian beauty brand Frank Body have made millions by convincing women to take photos of themselves while slathered in coffee body scrub.
Jess Hatzis, 30, and Bree Johnson, 29, from Melbourne, started the company with just $5000 and say they now make almost $20 million a year in revenue.
It all started when Johnson’s fiance and co-founder of Frank Body, Steve Rowley, who owns several cafes in Melbourne, found his female customers were asking for his leftover coffee grounds to use as a body exfoliator.
“He started chatting to these women and we were all really intrigued, and it was right at the time when there was a big move to natural health products,” Ms Johnson told news.com.au.
“So Steve and I concocted up the first formula, making all the scrubs by hand for the first few months. We each took home a little bag to try and while we felt ridiculous covering ourselves in coffee, when we washed it off, our skin felt amazing,” Ms Johnson said.
They are a self-funded start up and initially had no marketing budget, so they promoted their product exclusively on Instagram.
“We didn’t have any marketing budget, so it just made sense for us and our demographic, because [Instagram] is where they spend most of their time. There weren’t a lot of brands using social media in that way. We were very lucky getting in ahead of the pack,” Ms Hatzis said.
“When we first launched we sent product to a whole bunch of people we thought were influential – makeup artists, beauty bloggers – but our most important and valuable ambassadors are our customers. We love to hero them as much as we can,” she said.
The brand encouraged customers to share photos of themselves slathered in the signature brown scrub on social media. The unique photos are collated using branded hashtags - #frankeffect and #letsbefrank - and are now easily recognisable to young, digital-native women.
Famous faces such as Lara Bingle, A Bikini A Day’s Tash Oakely and Home and Away’s Tammin Sursok have all plugged the brand on their Instagram pages.
Now Frank Body has expanded into a full product range, which include a face cleanser and scrub, a lip balm and scrub and a face mask. All of the products cost less than $25.
Yesterday, Ms Hatzis and Ms Johnson were named the 2017 winners of the Veuve Clicquot New Generation Award, which is awarded to businesswomen under 40 who show “innovation, audacity and fearlessness”. They also want to acknowledge one of their other co-founders, Alex Boffa.
The award is named after Madame Clicquot, who was just 27 years old when she took over the reigns of the Clicquot house.
“It was really amazing being in the same room as the judges [which included the founders of sass&bide, Dinosaur Designs and T2 Tea], because we look up to a lot of those women. It was really humbling,” Ms Johnson said.
Their advice for young female entrepreneurs? Stop thinking, and just do it.
“There is never the right time to start. There’s always an excuse or a reason why you should wait and if you keep waiting you’ll never do it,” Ms Johnson said.
“But do it for the right reasons. We did it because we loved it and were passionate about creating brands. If you do something for the money instead of the love, that’s the wrong reason to do something.”
rebecca.sullivan@news.com.au
