669: They Built a Luxury Beauty Brand in Year One — With a Team of Two | Brunel

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
Hey Foundr fam, before we jump in, I wanna take a quick moment to talk about our sponsor Omnisend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders. We've been recommending Omnisend to founder students and members of our platform for a while now because it just works. So whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling it to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get results. And did you know, on average, Omnisend customers make $79 for every $1 they spend, which is an insanely good return on investment. And if you're already on another platform, here's the thing. In just five days, you could actually be paying 35% less without doing an absolute thing. Omnisend will move every flow across, list and template. You just show up when it's done. And finally, because you're part of the founder community, you get 50% off your first three months with the code FOUNDER50. Just head to omnisend.com/founder and that's Foundr without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump in the show.
A Victoria's Secret angel and a Goldman Sachs investor walk into a beauty brand and somehow build one of the most talked about luxury body care launches in recent memory. They haven't raised a cent or paid a single influencer. Today's guests are Jasmine Tookes and Sabrina Carstenfeldt, co-founders of Brunel. The bootstrap luxury body care brand that went viral purely on product and word of mouth. In this conversation, you're going to learn why Jasmine turned down years of celebrity brand deals to really build something real and how they launched self-funded and profitable while pushing chemists harder than any brand they'd ever worked with.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:42)
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

**Nathan Chan** (1:56)
Jasmin and Sabrina, you guys have both come from different worlds, Goldman Sachs boardrooms to global runways and you somehow ended up building this incredible beauty brand together. Take me back when Brunel was just an idea. What made you both believe this was worth building together?

**Jasmine Tookes** (2:17)
Well, I have been under the spotlight for over two decades. So I've been on runways and on photo shoots, and I've always known how important it is to really take care of your body, and I've always used body oils, which is the first product that we launched with. So I feel like it was a natural occurrence for me, and then Sabrina and I met about two years ago. And as different as our backgrounds seem, they're pretty similar.

**Sabrina Carstensen** (2:46)
Yeah. Yeah, I think we both come from different sides of a similar universe. So obviously, as part of being a supermodel, Jasmine is around the world's best makeup artist. She's taking care of her body. She's diving deep into all kinds of body care products. And then on my end, investing in consumer brands. So fashion, beauty, food and bev and working very closely with teams. So when we started speaking, we're very much speaking the same language just from different sides of it. And as Jasmine is saying, launching into body care and just seeing her passion within body care, but also seeing the consumer trends within body care, how that is a little bit of a growing market, a newer market, a market that's premiumizing.
We sort of saw that as a good opportunity.

**Nathan Chan** (3:40)
Love it. And when it comes to bringing the brand to life, talk me through first steps. Like what did you guys do? What did MOQ look like? Talk me through that.

**Sabrina Carstensen** (3:52)
First steps were very much, well, as a base, I think on the brand visuals. Jasmine has been thinking about beauty and dreaming about a beauty world for well over decades, which is definitely something you should, yeah.

**Jasmine Tookes** (4:06)
Yeah. Building a beauty brand and just the identity and visual of it all was very important to me. I feel like these days it's very rare you see a brand that has that more classic and elegant approach rather than a younger sort of right colors and poppy, very in-your-face type of brand. So I wanted to create something that was timeless and something that felt like a brand could have been around 20 years ago or 20 years into the future, so that it has that sort of appeal. I thought of a lot of products that my mom used to use and that are still around today. And I'm like, wow, how do we build a sort of beautiful legacy brand like that? So brand identity was the first place that we started. And making sure this is what it needs to look like and this is the message that it needs to get across as well.