Anthony: Hello, I’m Anthony, founder at SeedLegals and every day I meet amazing founders. And today I’m talking to Elsie and Dominika from BYBI Beauty and more. They’re super successful founders. They’ve had an exit. They focus on female entrepreneurship. We’re going to talk about the journey. We’re going to talk about B Corps and more. So, Elsie, Dominika, tell us about yourselves.

Elsie: Hi. Well, great to be here. So we’re the founders of a skincare brand called BYBI. We actually started the brand in 2017, but prior to that, we were building a content platform that was centered around general wellness, and connecting that to beauty and skincare, which essentially means we were in our kitchens, like smothering avocado all over our faces and just seeing if we could get good results from that. And that was inspired by the wellness scene that was very big at that time. We’re thinking 2015, you know, all of the bloggers, as we used to call them, them, were kind of sharing their sweet potato brownies and we were enjoying being involved in that. So we yeah, we were making our own skincare. Building a bit of a community around that, sharing on Instagram, posting recipes.

We started to host workshops where we were teaching people how to make their own skincare. Had a book published by Penguin as well, which are just recipes for the skin. Basically, we were spending time proving out a concept which was there was a need for fresh, modern, interesting, natural beauty and that was underpinned by great ethics. And when we sort of proven that concept through community and content, we decided to take the plunge and launch, a product brand, which was BYBI. We launched in 2017, and it’s natural vegan, responsibly produced skincare that speaks to the modern millennial beauty consumer. 

Anthony: So you reminded me that we’ve known each other since 2017 SeedLegals is like six people or something at the time, I think I personally hopped on the term sheet and so on. It goes back and sounds absolutely delighted that you built a great company, hadn’t existed. And we now talking like six years or whatever it is later. So that is fantastic. So tell me a bit about the journey of BYBI, and then we’re going to get into the general. And what are you working on now?

Dominika: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been an absolute roller coaster, as you said. It’s been kind of six, seven years. You supported us on our pre-seed raise of 150 K in 2017, and from there we went on to raise over 10 million pounds in a combination of kind of venture equity and also a bit of venture debt, which is very fun. So the fundraising journey has been successful and exciting. And we brought on great investors like Unilever Ventures and some private equity. The journey of the brand, we’re now starting over 3000 doors globally. We have a range of about 20 products on skincare and kind of thinking about what’s next there. We’re stocked in the likes of boots, Holland, Barrett, target in the US. So we’ve got a global business. And we recently sold to the founding team of Revolution Beauty.

So we’ve joined a kind of group of brands, and now they own a majority stake of the business and kind of operationally run it. So it’s kind of been a full circle for us in that kind of we grew the brand, and now we’ve kind of stepped back into the original roles that we had very much as founders thinking about products, brand and strategy. And we freed up a bit of time to think about what’s next as well. Exactly. So now you go to tell me and everyone what’s what’s next? 

Elsie: Well, we throughout our journey, we’ve always, as I said, started with community. So we’ve often been in touch with, typically females. I guess the nature of what we’re doing in beauty and a lot of, our community was actually fellow skincare entrepreneurs or kind of general entrepreneurs who are thinking about starting their own thing, and they always found our journey and our story inspirational and kind of kind of came to us for advice. So we’ve always had this role of sort of mentorship for female founders, in a kind of informal capacity throughout the journey of BYBI. And now that we’ve got a little bit more time, we essentially are kind of forming, parameters around that being a formal offering. And actually we’ve started a startup advisory. It’s called DE London Consulting.

So DE London [laughs], and we just help female founders throughout the entire life cycle of those early days. We’re doing a lot in fundraising. And that is, you know, how do you attract investors? How do you pitch to investors? What are your pitch materials looking like? Are you using SeedLegals? All of that kind of thing? But we’re also doing a lot in sort of brand strategy, distribution and sales. We help a lot with, just how do you open doors? When’s the right time to open doors? And a bit of kind of logistics and sort of manufacturing, kind of thinking about the production of it. Basically, I’m explaining every single facet of a business because we support across most of it.

And you know, what we’re really enjoying doing is rolling up our sleeves and getting stuck in to a range of businesses and, and really being able to, you know, impart, knowledge of what we did right, but also what we did wrong and is thinking about putting ourselves back in our shoes, our 2017 shoes and saying, what would we really have needed? What advice would we really have needed? And how can we give that to entrepreneurs generally? But, you know, we feel specifically passionate about kind of helping females because I think that there’s well, I know that there’s a huge gap in funding, but also there’s a bit of a higher barrier for females to get into entrepreneurship. And we’re trying to kind of work on that and encourage and inspire.

Anthony: All right. So I mean, you know, in the same way I like to, apart from SeedLegals, help founders on legals and founded fallouts and all the other things that are founded to founder advice. I’m delighted to see what you doing. So who should approach you?

Dominika: I think you know anyone that’s, in the early stage of building their business that is really looking at scaling, I think, where our expertise in terms of getting really stuck in and, you know, execution, it’s that kind of you’ve you’re generating revenue. You’ve got, you know, that the business and there’s a customer there and you want to take it to the next level. And that next level can be supported through a fundraise or, or it cannot. So we can be quite flexible there. We also work with Virgin Startup and we got a Virgin Startup loan back in the. So I think this was prior to you in 2016. But they have a huge advocacy for supporting female founders as well when we do mentorship there. So I think it’s just, you know, we’re really on hand to be that council and that sounding board for, you know, the first few years of, of trying to scale your business because we really feel like now we have a lot of knowledge to impart.

Anthony: And it’s fantastic when you can do the brain dump and say, don’t do these things, do these things to get there faster. Of course, at some point it becomes a bit tricky because founders have to find their own way. You don’t know the answer. I don’t know the answer. Some you don’t want people to make mistakes, but some things have to be discovered. So one of the things I love, you know, I SeedLegals, is when I see, companies with food products or sometimes beauty products buying things in our slack channel, I see, I like to buy things from our customers, so it’s usually food. Sometimes it’s skin products and other things. And usually these companies are super early stage. So going right back to the beginning of BYBI, when you’re saying, you know, in your kitchen at home with avocado and whatever, I can see the first shipments that arrive when people are like studying. This is, you know, the funding round have clearly been packed by the founders themselves. The boxes, the ice is melted a bit. You know, it’s clearly like a homebrew stuff.

And then as the company progresses, you can see it becoming more professional. And it’s fantastic to see that journey. And you also get an inkling of which ones are on brand and really going to take off and which ones are still, I think, struggling. And I think one of the interesting things is for any founder doing a pitch deck, one of the questions is how much time and money should you spend on branding? Should it look awesome? Or is it all in the numbers? And if the the Tam Sam some five year projections maths. And I think they’re the advice and then I’ll turn to you is it’s going to depend on your industry area. If you’re doing quantum computing to get the graphics, you know, maybe a nice picture of something, but, it’s all going to be in the maths if it’s, the B2C products, if it’s a direct to consumer, if it’s a beauty product, if it’s a beer, it’s all in the branding because people are going to perceive from your pitch deck whether you’re going to have a breakthrough product or not. So what are your thoughts on that? How did you get that breakthrough products? Your website looks awesome. Are we going to talk about some of the B Corp and other things on it? What top tips would you have for founders for creating that standout brand?

Elsie: Yeah, I think as you say, for consumer and and especially beauty, which is an industry centered around aesthetics, that kind of look and feel of a pitch deck and, and how that bleeds out into your brand world as a whole is super important. And even if it’s scrappy from the beginning, I think the important thing is that the visuals and the way that you approach your branding really embody the mission of the brand, and that that’s really clear. And even if the logo is not quite right or the colors are a little bit off, and maybe you’ll work on that in a few years time, if you’re able to convey in your deck to an investor like what the brand actually stands for, I think that is the most important thing. And, you know, we especially these days, there’s actually quite a lot that you can do visually through Canva and AI that, you know, you can probably lean into digital tools to help bring to life. But you without the actual vision, which only you can, you can tell you can only tell that story. Without that, you know, it will be difficult for any kind of tool or any kind of designer to make the brand look amazing.

So you have to have a really authentic why, like really authentic problem solve. And those missions and values have to be like really clear. And I think that stands out to any investor that that opens your deck. To your point about a stand out product, we launched with a product called Bay Balm, which that in itself, it was our hero product at the time. You know, the name. It was like this peach, like really bright, fun balm that you could use. It was a really, like multi multipurpose, like do anything with that kind of balm. And that embodied our mission and our and our vision, which was make natural beauty fun and engaging. And that in itself you could see it straight away.

It was the first slide in our pitch deck. And and not just that was clear. You know, we were hand labeling the job. We were hand making the product, as you say. We were the founders packaging. It was scrappy, but you could see that mission. It really, really stood out. And I think if you’re if you’re going to lead with a hero product strategy, which is a very good strategy, and we see tons of brands, really nail it with that, then just think about does the product reflect what you’re trying to achieve as a brand? And what does it have that’s really memorable for us? It was the name and the branding. But, you know, the product itself was actually quite high tech in terms of the way that we formulated it. So you know what, what is stand out about it and then kind of really get behind that. So yeah. 

Anthony: All right. So looking at the Barbie site at the top, you’ve got a wonderful pictures product the benefits. And then underneath you’ve got, you know the boxes in a sense in the best way that need to be ticked. You’re vegan. You know no people were harmed in that and so on. But one of the things is B Corp so on SeedLegals, we’ve got data for everything and in funding rounds so you can select that. You’re a B Corp and it adds B Corp provisions. And my data suggests 3 or 4% of companies or B corporations. So for those who don’t know well let me ask you what is a B corporation? Sometimes I see founders, really thinking that being a B corporation is going to be very beneficial and a bit more not sure about is and since you’re a B corp, I’d love your feedback to help everyone pick wisely.

Dominika: I think that the best way to sum up B Corp is doing business better, and it kind of encompasses in your internal policies, but also, you know, your external policies. And for that, for us that very much applies to our supply chain. But it’s effectively ingraining policies within your business to make sure that you’re upholding the highest standards of trading. So it’s not only paying your supply chain workers especially, but in your internal workers, you know, at your HQ, how are you supporting them? How are you, you know, incentivizing them not just financially but in all the other ways that you can these days, which is is so important when you’re building a team. So that’s I would say, the best way to sum up.

And I think that B Corp, whether you are B Corp certified or not, should actually be ingrained in every business because this is the way that we need to run businesses these days. We need to be thinking about people and planet before profit, because without people and planet, there is no profit. So I would encourage all founders to look and familiarize themselves with B Corp, even if they don’t have the funding available or the emphasis to go through the actual certification process, which is very rigorous.

I would say from a consumer side, it’s probably not a purchasing driver. If you are stocks and have a strong mission around ethics, and construction places like Whole Foods, yes, potentially those customers are looking for that. But as we know that those channels are very small on a mass scale. You know, the awareness of B Corp is still in process and it’s unlikely to be a purchasing driver. I think it’s really important if you’re pushing yourself as a brand that behaves responsibly, that you do have certifications to back that up, because without those, it’s very hard to audit as a consumer and you want to have that, you know, legitimacy when you’re talking about these things. So as you’ve said, it’s not just B Corp for us.

We have natural certification. We have vegan certification like currency free as well. And that was very strong part of the brand to build an ethical value platform with which we then created products. So and I think outside of the UK, if you’re building a business outside of the UK, B Corp becomes almost less relevant because I think it’s highest brand awareness in the UK. But however it’s, it’s, you know, it’s an investment, an important investment as a business to make and also it’s future proofing. You know, regulation around running businesses is changing all the time. And by adhering to B Corp standards, you know that you’re not going to be hit with a change in legislation in your particular industry that they then may cost you and jeopardize either your distribution or your investment base as well. Because investors often look for compliance in areas under B Corp covers. So I think just as a base standard, it’s a really good thing to do even if you don’t go through the actual certification. 

Anthony: All right. Well thank you. That was brilliant. And I you know it matches I think what I think which is as a business you want the highest ethics. You want to do the right thing. And then the question is do do you need how useful is it to signal it publicly and internally? And can you just do it or do you need a certification. So let’s switch gears slightly to female entrepreneurship. And there’s a figure that’s bandied around a lot, which says only 2% of investment money goes to female founders, which is deeply despondent. On SeedLegals. We ran the numbers on funding rounds, closed and looked at, female only founders, mixed, male and female and male only. And we found 74% was male only founders, 16% was mixed male female and 14% was female only. So those are very different figures to the 2%, not 50/50 which it should be, or 30/30 depending on the number of founders on average and so on.

But so I think the reason for the discrepancy and then we’re going to dive into how we can help, is that that 2% number first, I don’t know where it comes from. It may be complete BS. Secondly, I think it includes those massive funding rounds that go to the likes of revolute and so on. And the reason I’m mentioning all of this is not to say things are peachy, but to say if you’re a female founder, if you believe that 2% figure you would never give up your day job. But that 2% number, I think just doesn’t apply. And if you’re looking at pre-seed and seed fundraising, yes, the odds are not as they should be, that they’re not that far off, that you should not be taking the plunge to be a founder yourself. So tell me now about the journey that you’re on to help female founders, what you found, biases are there yourself and what inspiration do you have for female founders?

Elsie: Yeah, I mean, we also feel like that figure is a little bit problematic in the it probably, as you have highlighted, doesn’t reflect the whole picture. I think it says it’s VC money. So possibly the difference that you’re seeing is that women feel more confident in earlier stage investment. Perhaps they don’t need to go on to raise any VC money. You know, they were it raises a lot of questions. But it also, as you touched on, can be discouraging if you’re a female starting a business and you’re told, hey, guess what, only 2% of you, going to go on to successfully raise at VC, you probably feel like, oh, God. Well, I don’t sound a very good chance. So it’s not it’s not the most empowering message. And it’s a stat that is probably the most frequently used stat that we see. 

Anthony: And that’s why it’s important to, you know, put the right light on it. I think one of the issues is that later stage, the companies where most VC money goes are older, later stage companies that been around for 10 or 20 years raising their series F and they’re raising, you know, billion you only need three rounds of a few billions have distorted the entire, you know, a good 10,000 companies here and three companies here. And those companies of, you know, 20 years old reflect often at different period in history in found entrepreneurship. So some of that might just be the world was different 20 years ago. Yeah. And that’s what we’re seeing with that VC number. So the idea again is that to show as a female founder, you know what realistically at seed Pre-seed stage, how are you going to compete? How are you going to maximize your chance of fundraising? And also that you have a realistic chance of fundraising? 

Elsie: Yeah, absolutely. So and I think that we need to be responsible with the yeah, the way that we use that start. But I think by not highlighting it, we also run the risk of ignoring the problem. And we do have to address the fact that it’s not equal, you know, and that in itself is an issue. So personally, you know, I believe that the stat is possibly skewed all of the reasons that you said, as well as the fact that I think less women come to the table in the first place with their business idea, because I think that there is a lack of confidence. So what we’re thinking about is not so much about how do we get that VC money for women, but we rewind and we say, how do we empower that woman to actually take the plunge and start her business?

What’s holding her back? Why does she not have that confidence? Is it even a confidence? Is it actually that she’s also a mother and she’s finding the mental load too much? And to add a business on to that would be too taxing? Is it that she’s worried about things like maternity leave and going into the entrepreneurial world? You know, you get me, right. So we’ve been trying to do a bit of work at that beginning stage to, to, to help remove some of those barriers. And you know, the stats are right or wrong. You know, there is a discrepancy. And we do need to, you know, try and level things up between men and women. You know, I think there was a stat that we talk about quite a lot, which is there are only 50 women in the UK who were started or led, led, 50 million pound business ever. 50 women. How many men? All that. Right. Yeah. So there is an issue. So we do have to we’ve got to work on that. But you’re right. There’s 2% numbers. We’ve got to move on from that start. 

Anthony: So how do we help? And on my side you know with SeedLegals I’m trying to democratize it. You can raise more easily from angel investors. We’re a much more diverse pool. And the betting odds are much better. You know, if you’ve got a bigger brand, you’re going to reach out to your customers. You can raise smaller amounts from lots of people. The world is change, and you want to embrace the best way to find those investors. And on my part, the fact you can also do legals for a lot less money, opens it up to more. So what are the things, what messages do you have for people watching? 

Dominika: I think it’s two, but I think we need to educate our women and our children and our girls. We both got daughters on financial literacy. I think it goes as early stage as that. Because if you’re thinking about barriers to going out and raising money, if you don’t understand how the business world works and pure financial economics, that’s going to be quite challenging. So I think, you know, education around finance is something that girls typically just do not receive. My dad never spoke to me about money. He never educated me on anything to do with money. I guess he just assumes that I would get married and someone would take over from him. You know, that’s that mentality has to change. We’ve got to educate, you know, in schools and university.

Then women are equipped with the understanding and financial know how to then construct business plans that then weren’t, you know, to go out and fundraise. And as we know, you don’t necessarily need to go out and equity fundraise to launch and scale a business. So also getting out of the mindset of necessarily having to always fundraise and that being a marker of success because there’s plenty of businesses that have scaled without doing equity fundraising. And also, I think building support networks and communities, often led by our governments and initiatives where women have communities where they can feel supported when they’re starting the entrepreneurial journey. And that very much lacks in the UK, there’s not many hubs for women to feel that sense of community when they’re starting out an entrepreneurship journey. And whereas again, in that male space, there is quite a lot and they tend to be quite male dominated.

So I think that there’s quite a few different things, but addressing it right at the start, not once the business has been launched and that founder is going out to market to think, okay, I need to fundraise because as you’ve said, that has been quite democratized. Now, there’s a lot more angel and female angel investors, you know, that financial literacy can be gained, quite quickly these days. So it’s about inspiring and educating and giving confidence to that early stage, I think.

Anthony: And I have a feeling that the two of you and DE London are going to be very much at the heart of that. 

Dominika: See where we go. Yeah. 

Anthony: So everyone, you know who to talk to. 

Dominika: And then to answer back to you, DE London.com, but I would just interject to say the reason why is because we know women make great leaders and great entrepreneurs, so we’re not doing it just because, you know, we feel really passionately about women per se. It’s because we know the world will be a better and more successful place in entrepreneurship with more women, that because it brings diversity of thought. There’s, you know, there’s just I mean, so much we could go into about why women need to be in the workplace and what value they add. So again, it’s it’s for the greater good. And everyone will benefit from more women starting businesses, but also taking on leadership roles which are fairly similar, like spaces, if you think about it.

Anthony: All right. Well, this has been a fascinating and like, all encompassing inspirational discussion. So if everyone watching and I have a head over to de london.com, for inspiration, and if you’re building a B2C brand female founder in particular, you know where to head and you know who to talk to. So thank you. So much. 

Elsie and Dominika: Thank you, thank you.