Business Desk: Investor Manica Blain of Top Knot Ventures on Why Creator Brands Are The Buzziest Big Bet

Jessica Matlin (0:06)

Hey, everyone, welcome to Fat Mascara, it's Jess. All right, today we have a business desk. I'm doing another business desk pretty quickly on the heels of the Alison Hahn, former SVP of Sephora, because I got such feedback from the Alison episode. It seemed like a lot of you liked it. I hope you guys liked it. And it was very inside baseball, I tried to keep it lively, I tried to keep it fun. I personally, I mean, this is why I'm doing the podcast. I am fascinated by the beauty industry, every aspect of it, the people who work within the beauty industry, the products, the creatives behind the scenes. We don't need to go on and on. There's 700 plus episodes you can listen to if you'd like to learn more. And my background is an editorial for 20 years, and then I became a retail director. So I'm coming at it firm and then a beauty podcast or somewhere in between. So I'm coming from a very 360 lens when I look at the beauty industry. I'm really interested in getting into the guts of the business. So let me know how you're feeling about these episodes. I'm really enjoying talking to the people who are really kind of making the beauty world quietly turn whether or not we are aware. And one of those people is Manica Blain. We're going to talk about Manica in a second. But a little follow up about Alison, I had to cut that episode down to keep it tight and keep it right for the show. There was a piece of the episode that for some reason, I want to tell everyone, it really was kind of, it hit me like on a philosophical level. She talked about a brand. I'm not going to say the brand, but a brand that was like, hmm, should we take this or not? To Sephora. By the way, this brand is huge now, enormous.

The brand had stock packaging. Stock packaging is off the shelf, nothing fancy to have custom packaging. Think of custom packaging like Beautiful, think about the Pat McGrath lipstick with the lip. You're just absolutely hammering money to make custom packaging. The stock packaging did not bother Alison. I'm not saying that you're going to go and impress the director of retail at all of these places with some stock packaging. It was the combination of this woman, the creator's talent, her energy, her passion. The packaging was like, okay, we'll deal with this. Sometimes I think this is not perfect. This is not ready for prime time.

I love that Alison was taking a more holistic view of this talent, who is great and deserved a spot on the shelf.

I feel like I could have gotten in my own way being like, it's not ready. It's only stock packaging. It wasn't the perfect packaging, but I thought there was really something there. Unfortunately, we had to cut that.

That little thing just stuck with me. Back to Manica.

Manica is the founder of Top Knot Ventures. Now, what does that mean? It means that she is investing in different brands, early stage investment. She works totally on consumer brands, but she's very much investing in the beauty space. She also has a sub-stack called You Win Some, You Lose Some. She recently just wrote about the acquisition or rather the majority stake that the company TSG put in to Saltair. In this article, her sub-stack got picked up by Beauty Independent and it's kind of going wild on LinkedIn and a lot of people are talking about her perspective. She has a really interesting perspective on what TSG is doing, the future of creator brands and why Saltair was such a pick that they're betting big on this body care brand. So, really curious to hear her perspective, really enjoy chatting with her. Thank you so much, Manica.

Manica, I am talking to you in the virtual studio. I cannot ignore the fact that you are sitting in front of a bunk bed. Looks like it's from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And you've got a Top Knot Ventures.

Manica Blain (4:09)

I'm very on brand today. I'm actually, I'm recording live from Whistler, from a place that we have up here. And this is the room where my children sleep. I have two of them. As you may or may not know, Top Knot Ventures was born out of me being a mom to, at the time, two kids under two. So this is all very on brand for me. When you were like, can we shoot something? I'm like, well, I'm up in Whistler this week, but kids are in camp from nine to three.