676: Alisha Spent 16 Years In Salons - and Distilled it all Into One $7K/Month Product

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
Hey Foundr fam, before we jump in, I want to 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 Foundr 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 Foundr community, you get 50% off your first three months with the code Foundr50. Just head to omnisend.com/foundr and that's Foundr without the E to get started. All right, now let's jump in the show.
Welcome to Little Empires, brought to you by the team at Foundr. At Foundr, our mission is to support the next generation of e-comm founders. So while you may know us for interviewing some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, this series is a little different. Little Empires shines a spotlight on the builders inside our own Foundr community. The entrepreneurs who are in the trenches, taking action, learning and building their businesses in real time. These aren't overnight success stories. These are real journeys, real lessons and real founders creating their own little empires one step at a time. This podcast is proudly produced by the Foundr team to give our students a platform to share their experiences, wins, challenges and honest realities of building a business from the ground up. Now, let's dive into today's episode.

**Leah Finch** (1:51)
Welcome to another episode of the Foundr Little Empires Podcast, where we feature founders from our founder community who are building and growing their incredible e-commerce brands. I'm your host, Leah Finch, community manager, founder. And today I'm joined by Alisha, the founder of James Jade Haircare. So if you are building a brand in beauty, wellness, hair care, or the personal care space, you're going to get a lot out of this conversation. And we are going to dive into Alisha's journey, how it all started, the lessons she learned, the challenges she overcame, and how she has grown her brand to this point today. So Alisha, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here. Very, very keen to have you on here. So what I would love to know, Alisha, to get us started, let's talk a bit about what your career was like before launching an e-commerce brand. So you've got a background in hairdressing. I am a hairdresser by trade. I started my apprenticeship at 15 years old. So I actually dropped out of year 10, went straight into doing hair. I did my apprenticeship and from there, I was a senior hairdresser and started my own salon at 20 years old. I had a salon for about eight to nine years working for myself and from there, I learned all things haircare, which I absolutely loved. So I had already such a big background in hair health and hair knowledge. Did you have any e-commerce, marketing, product development experience? None whatsoever. I wasn't even good on a laptop. So this was very, very new for me. I had to learn everything from scratch.
That is actually how I came across Foundr. I started the start and scale course. Okay, cool. I'm going to dig into that a bit further because I want to know what you got out of the course and how you leveraged it to start your brand. So you started out as a hairdresser when you were quite young, right? Yes. So you've been in the industry for some time. Did you mention about 15 years? Yes. I was a hairdresser from 15 years old, and I had a salon all through my 20s.
And it was about at 29, I decided that I just, it wasn't for me anymore. The stress, I was overworked, I was tired, I was thinking there's just must be something else out there for me, but hairdressing was all that I knew. I actually wanted to be a Redken rep in the haircare world. So I loved product, I loved selling you the right product. I loved when clients would have a result of finding the right product that helped them with their hair. So I thought that my journey was actually going to be becoming a rep. And that's when I thought maybe I could create my own haircare line, which I had no idea on where to even start with that. And so what gave you that feeling inside that you could actually start your own haircare brand? I think this is when Instagram was becoming quite... All right. And you knew that you wanted to stay in your space, right? You could see that bringing a haircare product and a haircare line to the world was the space that you had experience in, right? You came from a hairdressing background and it was time to launch your own. So, let's talk about the idea and the problem that your product solved. Let's talk about how that got started. So this actually started. So I knew that I wanted to create haircare, but at this point I didn't have the idea of what kind of haircare. So I actually sold my salon and I went traveling. And when I went traveling, I took away so many different products. And during that time, my hair actually got worse and I was overusing ingredients. And I just thought there must be an easier way. Like, why do we need all these different products? Why can't they be put into one bottle? And this is when I started to get the idea that we didn't need to have all these different products for different reasons that if we just took the right ingredients and put them into one bottle to simplify the haircare industry, that's when I started to become really passionate that this was what I was going to make. Okay, so it came out of your own experience, right? And when we're travelling overseas, we can oftentimes come across, the water is different, right? It can be harsher. It can be harsh on our hair and our hair can come out looking and feeling different and it can be damaging and a totally different experience whatsoever. So you noticed that you had maybe at the time, like what four or five products? I had my shampoo, my conditioner, my leave-in treatment, my serum, my heat protection.