672: From Broke College Student to $20M Brand in 10,000 Stores | ESW Beauty

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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While every brand was raising prices, she cut hers and nearly tripled revenue. Today's guest is Elina Wang, co-founder of ESW Beauty, the brand that turned a juice bar epiphany and a $25,000 loan into a $20 million business across 10,000 retail doors, fully bootstrapped and profitable from day one. In this conversation, you're going to learn why Elina made the contrarian bet on retail over DTC when every founder was going in the opposite direction, how she survived Covid wiping out every purchase order overnight while going through a co-founder breakup at the same time and what it actually costs to get your product into every major retailer and why most founders find this out too late.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:48)
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** (2:01)
Welcome to the show, Elina Wang. So you co-founded ESW Beauty almost seven years ago now.
Talk us through what was the AHA moment at the juice bar that led to launching this brand?

**Elina Wang** (2:20)
Yeah, it's a great question. For everyone that's know our brand is wellness-inspired skincare. So we take a lot of the tropes in healthy beverage and foods and combine it with skincare to create our brand. And actually this was at home. So I've always known I wanted to start my own skincare brand because of my background in K-Beauty, working for my family business from a young age.
And I needed to figure out what it was. So I ordered a shipment of pressed juicery or pressed juices. And I was drinking one of their kale, spinach, broccoli, apple juices. And then I was thinking, wait, this is healthy, made with nourishing ingredients, and skincare is largely made from water. It would be such a cool idea to make this into a face mask because I was using a face mask at the time while drinking the juice. And so that's how the idea happened.

**Nathan Chan** (3:16)
Okay. And how did you bring that product to life? So like you took a $25,000 loan from the bank. Did you have to put in any more of your own money? You started it with your partner at the time. Like how much did you guys put in, talk me through that manufacturing process of bringing it to life?

**Elina Wang** (3:37)
Yeah. I was a broke college student. So I not only had this, I was paying off student loans. I didn't have money to put in. And I think he was like, he just graduated and he has a whole story that we can also get into and why he became my co-founder. But maybe like $1,000 or $2,000. And we were like, well, we have this idea. What do we need capital? So we got a $25,000 SBA loan.
And then we made samples and we signed up for Cosmoprof, a trade show.
We made the booth, we bought flights and accommodation and we went. And then we were able to flip that into a couple of different POs and total was a sum of 250 grand over the span of the year.

**Nathan Chan** (4:23)
Yeah. And one of those POs was from Coles, right?

**Elina Wang** (4:26)
Yes, it was from Coles.

**Nathan Chan** (4:27)
And I want to unpack that. But before I do, talk me through how much it cost even from a sampling side? How did you find the manufacturer? How long did that take? All of that good stuff.

**Elina Wang** (4:45)
Yeah. So I have to thank my background because I was able to cut to the chase right away.