00:00Hi, my name is Melissa Bradley and I am honored to be an advisor to the New Voices family.
00:24Today is a special day because we get a chance to highlight entrepreneurs who are doing amazing
00:29things.
00:30You're about to see right now Journey to Retail, which is going to profile two amazing New Voices
00:35entrepreneurs, Melissa from Lip Bar and Bea from Honey Pot.
00:39And the most exciting part is they're going to be in a conversation hosted by one of our
00:43own pitch competition winners, Jamika of Rosen Skin Care.
00:47So if you are interested in retail, in the beauty business, in CPG, anything like that,
00:54sit back, relax and get ready to hear from experts on the journey to retail.
00:58Hi, everyone.
00:59Welcome to Journey to Retail, a special segment for all of you checking out the New Voices and
01:06Target Accelerators pitch competition.
01:07I'm Jamika.
01:08I'm the founder of Rosen Skin Care and I'm super excited about today's topic, which is
01:13all about businesses led by women of color moving into the world of retail.
01:18I started Rosen in 2017 because I wanted to disrupt the skincare industry and offer clean
01:23ingredients for the millennial Gen Z community, specifically those dealing with breakouts.
01:28Once my company scaled into retail, I was able to expand my reach by so much and show
01:33other entrepreneurs that moving into retail on a major level is definitely possible.
01:38Today I'm joined by two incredible women who are trailblazing entrepreneurs taking the
01:42world by storm with their businesses.
01:44Both these ladies have lines that are available in major retail stores around the nation.
01:48I'm sure you've heard of them and I can't wait to dive into their journey into retail
01:52and their expansion in retail.
01:54I have with me the founder of The Honey Pot, a plant-based, black-owned, feminine care
01:59brand, B. Dixon, and the founder of, and the CEO of The Lip Bar, a vegan, cruelty-free
02:06beauty line, Melissa Butler.
02:08So I really wanted to start with just hearing a little bit about why you guys started your
02:13businesses, when you started, and when you knew you had the potential to go beyond this
02:17idea, small business stage into something that's totally scaled up to where you guys are at
02:23today.
02:24We can start with you, Bea.
02:26Hi, it's so nice to meet you in person, and I'm so grateful to be here with you, Melissa.
02:34How are you doing?
02:35I love you.
02:36I love you.
02:38I love you back.
02:39But no, I got started in the feminine hygiene space because I had my own problems with my
02:47own vagina.
02:49And basically, I had bacterial vaginosis for almost a year.
02:55Nothing that I did worked.
02:57One morning, my grandmother came to me in a dream and basically told me what to do to
03:02fix what I was dealing with.
03:04You know, she had been walking with me and watching me experience all these crazy things.
03:10And she handed me a piece of paper, and on the paper was a list of ingredients.
03:16And she kept telling me in the dream to remember, you know, just like, don't look at me, look
03:19at the paper so you can remember.
03:22And when I woke up, I wrote it down, I made it within a couple days, you know, four to
03:28five days after I was using it, I noticed that everything that I was dealing with had
03:33went away.
03:34And so that's really how, because immediately I was like, oh, I have to make this into a
03:38company, you know?
03:41And voila, here we are.
03:48I started the lip bar because I was frustrated with the beauty industry, its lack of diversity,
03:55its excessive amounts of chemicals.
03:58I'm not like a typical beauty founder where it's like, I love makeup, like I actually just
04:04learned how to do my own makeup a year ago.
04:07But I am a woman and a woman who's used to listening to society to tell us like, what
04:14is beautiful and looking at society's beauty norms.
04:18And I never, I just never felt like it was inclusive of, you know, most women, black women,
04:25you know, Indian women, Asian women.
04:27It's like, you never really saw those people in beauty campaigns, and they were never looked
04:31at as beautiful by society at large.
04:34And I was like, this is bullshit.
04:37I can do something to change it.
04:39And so I started the lip bar with the goal of challenging the beauty standard, because
04:44I felt like we just deserved it.
04:46We deserved more.
04:47We deserve to see ourselves and, and the rest is history.
04:51I love it.
04:52I'm part of your question.
04:54Oh, I, well, yeah, that's what I was going to follow up on is just like your story of
04:59getting started, but also when was that point for both of you guys where you felt like,
05:03okay, not only is like this a business idea past like something I'm going to make for myself,
05:07like, when did you go past like, oh, this is a scalable idea that like, I can take in
05:11the mass retailers, and I can really, you know, try to blow up.
05:16For me, it was immediate, you know, I mean, obviously, it didn't happen immediately.
05:22But I always knew that it could be every, it could be just as synonymous as Tampax and
05:31always and Summers Eve and Vagisil.
05:33It could be that household name.
05:36And so for me, it was like almost immediately, you know, and I've really had to like stick
05:43to those guns, because it's easy to drift away from that, you know, but for me, it's literally
05:51always been.
05:52Yeah, so first of all, that's amazing, B, because I feel like that is not the norm.
06:00Because when you're a founder, and you're a new founder, like you deal with so much imposter
06:05syndrome.
06:06So I was the person.
06:07So B was like, I got this.
06:08I know it works, came from, you know, from my ancestors, this came from my grandmother,
06:14whereas I was like, I know that the industry needs this, but can I be the person to deliver
06:21it?
06:22You know, will people understand it?
06:23So within beauty, like, I felt like I was tackling something that no one cared about.
06:29Right now, it's crazy, because diversity is so trendy.
06:33Within the beauty space, everyone has a million shades of foundation, everyone is catering to
06:38black and brown women.
06:40But in 2011, when I was working on this, no one cared about black beauty.
06:45And so I questioned it.
06:47And I questioned myself every step of the way, but I just kept going even throughout that
06:52fear.
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