Monday, March 12, 2018
Interview with Justine Lassoff and Katie Bogue Miller, Love Goodly
In recent years, Los Angeles has become the capital of subscription, consumer-focused "box" businesses, where consumers sign up for monthly deliveries based on a subscription. One of those companies is Los Angeles-based Love Goodly (www.lovegoodly.com) co-founders Justine Lassoff and Katie Bogue Miller, who sat down and told us about their company, focused on cruelty-free, non-toxic beauty and skincare products. Love Goodly recently launched its own crowd equity funding campaign. Photo: On left, Justine Lassoff, on right, Katie Bogue Miller.
What is Love Goodly?
Katie Bogue Miller: We started Love Goodly to help women make healthier choices. We wanted to make it easy to buy cruelty-free and nontoxic beauty and skincare products. What we are, is a subscription box that is sent every other month to your door, giving you the selection o the best brands and products out there.
Justine Lassoff: Every box has this great selection of products you can experience, and they're all full size. We're a little different from the sample size products out there. The value is always tremendous. The cost of a box is $29.95, but there's a value of over $80 in the box. The reason why, is we want to let you fall in love with those products, and continue to let you buy them on our e-commerce site as well, and also discover all of the product line for those brands.
What's your background?
Justine Lassoff: I have a background in e-commerce, and we're both experienced entrepreneurs. I was the co-founder and CEO of an e-commerce company in 2001, which did eco-friendly beauty and style and fashion products, although more in the flash sales model. Katie joined about a month after we started, as part of the founding team, as head of merchandising. That company was acquire a year afte rour launch, by a big company run by John Paul DeJoria, who started such companies like Paul Mitchell and Patron. We eneded up working together at the company that acquired us. We both wanted to continue helping women discover these conscious and amazing brands.
Katie Bogue Miller: We're both passionate about this lifestyle, because we're both moms. Iv'e been an animal advocate going on 25 years.
Justine Lassoff: On my side, I'm a breast cancer survivor. It's really important to know what ingrients are in the products you use. Your skin is your largest organ, and lots of women don't realize that in personal care and beauty, there can be 168 different chemicals in all these products, and some of them are linked to health problems. There are ingredients like parabens, aluminum, and mercury, and unfortunately, in the United States, there is not lot of restrictions like in Europe, where they ban many of these ingredients. Here, it's really up to the individual to check the products and labels for these brands, which can become overwhelming.
Where is the business today?
Justine Lassoff: We launched in 2015, and we have now been around for three years. We raised a seed round when we first started, from Alan DeBevoise, our angel investors, which allowed us to scale and grow through organic growth, and get the word out to build a local community. The funding we're going for now, is to continue scaling the business. We'll be spending it on building out our operations, also for customer acquisition, and focusing on a number of initiatives like our online shop, which is currently a smaller portion of our revenues. We've been really focused on our box business, but our shop will enable to get those products and brands out to a bigger audience. That's a really important initiative. We're also doing a private label line. We've been really privy to some amazing brands, and they are the ones we're going to partner with, and collaborate on skin care products. That's another initiative we're using this funding for.
There are a lot of subscription boxes out there, how do you get word out about your own?
Justine Lassoff: That's a great question. It's definitely important to get the word out and differentiate ourselves from other brands and other boxes. What we've spent a lot of time on, and what we've been able to do through our community, is make sure through unboxing, influencers, bloggers, and other brand partners, that we've been able to grow and scale our community. We've found that its the best way. It's all about connecting and sharing what we are doing wit influencers and other people who can share our story.
Katie Bogue Miller: It's about expert curation and having the right product mix, which helps us stand apart. We have a loyal community focused on cruelty-free and nontoxic and vegan products, and that really helps us stand out.
Justine Lassoff: The number one thing that a new customer looks for, is what is our value and mission, and how do we curate these boxes so that they are nontoxic, cruelty-free, with no animal products or byproducts. That's really the key to what we do, and I think our customers and audience sees that.
Katie Bogue Miller: We're also mission based, and we support cause partners for each box. It's a great way for us to stand out against our competitors. Not only are the products we provide better for you, but they're better for the environment, charities, and animals.
It sounds like there is a lot of logistics and packaging you have to deal with in this kind of business, how are you dealing with those challenges?
Katie Bogue Miller: It's a good challenge to have. As we're growing, we've been excited that we've been able to manage the inventory in-house at our downtown Los Angeles office. We're just now growing out of that and looking at fulfillment.
Justine Lassoff: We've learned a lot about how to be efficient in sending products in boxes. It's been a great way to learn, and it's enabled us to grow to more than 200 percent gross margin, as we've gained an understanding the intricacies of shipping, where the weight of the box, size of the box matters. There are many things like that we've learned over time.
Finally, what's next for you?
Justine Lassoff: We're very excited about a initiative we have, where we're working with a big guest celebrity curator, who is passionate about the charities we're supporting. We're excited that we'll be collaborating with PawWorks on this one, which again will help us reach a great community.
Katie Bogue Miller: It's all about getting the word out about our company to the mainstream, so that, even though we're selling vegan and nontoxic products, it's just as much about style, and it's just as effective, and it should be the place to go for every woman who wears beauty products.
Thanks!