The best advice we've received in three years of building

Being a category innovator is a tough enough job on its own. Hundreds of beauty brands launch every year with a clear or clearish vision. Some succeed and some don’t. It all depends upon whether the brand can connect to its intended customer and make them feel what they need to feel to make that buy decision. There’s a system in place for these brands to navigate. The most successful might find themselves in M&A talks a few years out. The least successful will fade away from the market as quietly as they emerged. There are incubators, accelerators, pitch competitions, and conferences dedicated to feeding the world of indie beauty startups into the Big Beauty Machine. Through this system, there’s access to funding, mentorship. It’s also a pathway to the wholesale relationships much of the beauty industry still insists are crucial to long-term success. 

When we started our journey with MILO, we had two things going for us that we thought would help more than they did. For starters, the MILO Trio is a genuine category innovation. There’s nothing on the market that meets our quality and efficacy standard while simultaneously replacing over 20 commonly used personal care items. That’s a claim so good, it sounds too good. We were able to manage that by persevering with sampling and building reputation in our immediate community.

The second thing we thought we had going for us was that one of our founders spent five years working in innovation consulting for some of the world’s largest personal care brands inside the top ten global CPG conglomerates. Insights from that experience have been invaluable in the sense that we have a roadmap of where and how to diverge. And the connections made in that world? Not as useful as we’d hoped. People were very generous with their time and mentorship. Yet each time, something felt off. While we were receiving objectively helpful advice, there was also a sense that they didn’t think it was going to work. There were too many things that were different. Too many things that kept The System from taking us seriously. Not only in terms of the product philosophy, but in terms of the things we chose to concern ourselves with in those early stages. We were very focused on philosophy and our structural differentiators. We’re both Systems Thinkers and didn’t feel able to move forward on a pre-determined path before we took the time to establish our own ethics and morals. I think many of the people we spoke to from VCs to industry execs offering mentorship thought we were distracted by things that didn’t matter. They advised us not to worry about our governance structure and to leave it open for discussion with potential investors. Similarly, they insinuated it was wildly premature to count a liquidity event out. Eventually, the dissonance between our mission and their advice became too great and we had to get specific about the guidance we sought. More importantly, it gave us the resolve we needed to honor our differences instead of continuing to apologize for them. 

Two of the best pieces of advice on our odyssey came from the same person. A longtime consumer packaged goods exec who left it all behind to successfully launch his own plant-based personal care brand. He was a breath of fresh air. Finally, we were speaking to someone who had been on both sides of the fence and could empathize. His validation of our experiences made the wisdom feel safer to trust:

1. Product-Market Fit above everything else. It sounds obvious but in our toughest moments of bootstrapping when most reasonable people would say to give up or at least sell out, we kept hearing one thing from our slowly expanding community: “The world needs MILO”. We’ve heard that over and over in response to both our products and our mission. We didn’t yet have the brand or the resources for a proper launch. Those early sampling events helped solidify what we felt intuitively—keep going. It was an exercise in surrender, patience, and self-trust, bolstered by the wisdom of someone who had been there. 

2. Big Business is Newtonian Physics and Startups are Quantum Physics. Put plainly, the former can be predicted and planned upon. You can easily guess what will succeed, and you can deterministically act towards that success based on immutable laws. The latter is entirely unpredictable. Things that should make sense don’t. Initiatives you expected to work might not and that thing you almost dismissed ended up being what took you to the next level. It allowed us to take ourselves more seriously. To recognize that we were our own center of gravity, surrendering to the idea that the things that missed us weren’t for us.

There have been plenty of instances in the two years since we received this advice and we can proudly say that even though it took longer and was way harder than it would have been if we made some of those concessions others suggested to us earlier on. Instead of forcing ourselves into a box so that we could feel progress, we took the time we needed to first develop the Human Care philosophy and a brand that could support it. And we’ve finally arrived. Thank you for being here with us. 

xx Katrina & Lisa