Paul Jauregui had a lot to have fun when he first appeared on this podcast in 2020. BK Magnificence, the cosmetics firm he co-founded together with his spouse, Lisa, had reached $1 million in gross sales in its first 12 months. He returned in early 2022 with extra excellent news: The corporate had launched a thriving affiliate marketing online program and bypassed the Fb advert meltdown from iOS 14.5.
He’s again, having surpassed a whopping $10 million in annual income, bolstered by early success on TikTok Store. On this our third interview, he shares BK Magnificence’s development challenges, optimistic TikTok vibes, and extra.
The whole audio of that dialog is embedded under. The transcript is edited for readability and size.
Eric Bandholz: You’ve reached $10 million in annual gross sales in simply 4 years.
Paul Jauregui: Sure. Three years in the past, we have been celebrating crossing the $1 million mark. Final week, we simply crossed into eight figures. Managing that comes with challenges. We’ve realized so much. Our enterprise has three elements at any given time — provide, demand, and supply. Alongside the way in which, we’ve had supply-related issues, forecasting glitches, and stock shortages.
On the demand aspect, paid buyer acquisition was an enormous a part of our latest development. Going from $5 to $10 million in annual gross sales throws the provision equation out of whack. We’re doing success in-house, so our capability to ship items and packages to our clients and get them out the door is reaching a degree I by no means anticipated. Final month, we shipped over 20,000 packages. We now have a each day baseline however nonetheless expertise enormous spikes with varied occasions and launches.
Bandholz: You’re now promoting on TikTok.
Jauregui: We’ve been on TikTok Store for a few month and a half. These are the pioneering instances. Once we joined, it was earlier than Shopify rolled out its native integration. We discovered some preliminary success. We have been additionally onboarding into Amazon. We have been halfway by way of the method and dealing with Amazon’s rising manufacturers workforce. Nonetheless, a couple of days in the past I emailed Amazon to push that launch into 2024.
As a substitute, I have to deal with an space of the enterprise that aligns extra with our DNA. We’ve all the time labored with content material creators on social platforms. TikTok Store aligns properly with that effort. We’re seeing a variety of success. It makes up about 15% of our whole income on any given day, and that’s rising.
Nonetheless, TikTok is spending some huge cash extending reductions to patrons on the platform — roughly 20-40%. We don’t pay for that. It drops on to the underside line. TikTok additionally presents free transport, which works into my pocket too. Each of these — reductions and free transport — are serving to with conversions.
There are a lot of advantages to getting in now with TikTok Store. We anticipate heavy promotions by TikTok throughout the vacation procuring interval in three key areas: retailers, customers, and content material creators.
We’ve been working an associates program through ShareASale. That’s how we’ve compensated people on platforms like YouTube. Nonetheless, it was not simple to have an affiliate hyperlink on TikTok. There’s no description field under the movies, and never everybody goes into the feedback. We’d see a video on TikTok about us, and our YouTube natural visitors would surge as a result of people needed to Google us to study extra and purchase our merchandise.
All of that now takes place on TikTok. People watching the movies can examine us out proper there. Earlier than TikTok Store, dozens of outstanding creators on that platform talked about our merchandise. However, once more, there was no type of clear path to purchase. I checked out it as top-of-the-funnel consciousness.
Now TikTok captures the precise transaction. The gross sales come from content material creators speaking about merchandise they love. TikTok has enabled them to monetize that extra successfully and share it with the customers with out leaving the platform.
One among our prime movies on TikTok has about 1.7 million views. A content material creator put it out a couple of weeks in the past. It’s generated low 5 figures in gross sales and a great deal of commissions for her.
Bandholz: Is that course of much like Meta’s outlets?
Jauregui: No. We’re on Fb and Instagram outlets. We now have advertisements working on these platforms. However it’s not getting a lot of my consideration. Ecommerce is a precedence for TikTok. They’ve their very own native associates program, checkout, and talent to create demand and consciousness. There’s even a TikTok success. It’s all self-contained.
TikTok’s ecosystem is exclusive. Meta’s promoting platform is the world’s most effective buyer acquisition resolution. TikTok has that, too, but it surely’s enabling creators to earn a fee, incentivizing them to supply extra content material. Meta creators don’t get commissions that I’m conscious of — a minimum of not in a simple means.
So our focus now could be educating creators on TikTok and getting them onto TikTok Store. Many creators haven’t tried it. To assist, our workforce created a information. We’re contacting creators already speaking about us on TikTok. That’s the place we see essentially the most success.
Bandholz: The place can people attain out to you?
Jauregui: Our web site is BKbeauty.com. I’m @pauljauregui on Twitter. I’m additionally on LinkedIn. Attain out, and I’ll ship you that information.
