Please note, this transcript has been copy-pasted without the lovely touch of a human editor. Please expect some typos!

So I'm very excited to yeah old school fan. Uh I'm very excited to like hear your story and chat about where it all started, how you came up with this concept and like innovative marketing thing that we all love. Where do you like to start your story? My story starts before Frank Body with my other business. My very first baby called Willow and Blake. And I, I like to tell this story because I think it really sets the tone for how and why we were able to build Frank Body rather than people thinking, oh my God, they just built this thing out of nowhere.

Um So Frank came out of a couple of different moving parts myself and my co-founder, Bree and another ex co-founder, Erica had launched a branding agency called Willow and Blake back in 20 oh nine, um it started as an editorial piece. So we were just using that to write things that we loved because we're all copywriters by trade. And it grew into a freelance copy writing business, which then grew into a copy writing agency, which then over time grew into a full service branding agency. Willow and Blake still exists and we do, you know, brand identity for clients. We do full marketing campaigns, social media, all the rest of it. We were doing that for our clients at the time and people were coming to us because they felt that we had a fresh perspective on things. We were millennials creating four millennials. We were really engaging with new mediums and we were doing things that were our, our real focus. And I think what our specialty is and what we took over to Frank was that creation of new and fresh brand identities and in specifically voices that hadn't been there before.

And the brands are using social media. It's really easy to overlook the importance of voice and messaging. And we thought, well, if we can do this in a way that's actually really connecting with consumers and treating them as people, not just numbers and potential shoppers and utilize social media to do that, then we think there's a real recipe for success there it didn't seem very, you know, it wasn't rocket science to us. It just made sense to treat people like people and give them fresh content that they hadn't seen before. So we started doing that for a lot of our clients and people would come to us looking for risky and bold ideas. And then when we put it in front of them, there was a lot of risk. Adversity is probably the most polite way to put it and the ideas would get diluted down. And the phrase is, you know, oh, we've seen what this brand is doing. Can we do something like that? And that's where success goes to die when you try and emulate what another brand is already doing. It's just, it's never like it can work from time to time, but it's not a long-term brand building strategy. So we decided to put our money where our mouth was. And we thought, well, if we can create something and have complete end to end control over a brand, that would be the perfect case study for our clients who are feeling a little bit apprehensive about trying something very different.

At the same time, our now co-founders, Alex and Steve Alex was really interested in e-commerce and he was the one of us that really sort of led the charge there. It was the start of the e-commerce um and own like small brand direct to consumers starting to come to life and Steve, who was really the brains behind the first product. So he came up with the original copy scrub and all of these elements combined meant we knew we wanted to create a unique brand that was socially led. We knew we wanted to use ecommerce to sell it. And we knew that it was going to be this product based around the coffee scrub that would expand you into a bigger health and wellness brand. And they all came together to form Frank Body and there was no one sort of telling us no, you can't do that. Or that idea is we just went exactly where our gut and our strategy told us to go and we launched it, you know, with absolutely no money. Just a lot of grit and a lot of hard work back in 2013 and here we are, we'll turn 10 in six weeks. Oh my God. A decade. That is insane. 10 years to overnight success.

Although I feel like you had overnight success, like, really quickly. It was like everywhere and everywhere from the beginning, what I wanna understand is like the actual character of Frank. Like, how did you, what was the light bulb moment to that being the idea? Is it something that you'd already had in your background? Kind of like a little idea that you'd already been playing with for another client or something like that or, or was this like, hey, we're sitting in a room and boom. Like here's an idea, a little of a little of Columba. So we were looking at our first product, which was the coffee scrub. It looked like dirt and it was in a brown paper bag, as you mentioned before. It was so different to anything that was on the market. Body scrubs at the time were like gel and with microbeads and they smelled like a bowl of fruit exploded in your face. It was just so different to what we were putting out there. And the the language utilized by beauty brands was there was a lot of hyperbole either it went in one in two directions, very scientific. Um really clinical claims driven often claims that didn't then follow through and you didn't that, you know, that wasn't the experience that customers had or very flowery hyper feminine.

There was nothing just talking to you as a woman who was multifaceted and wanted honesty and embraced her sexuality. It was just, it was a bit naff bit nath. We really wanted to do something fresh. So thinking about those things and going well, we wanna cut through a lot of the BS that we see in the market. We want to be really upfront and honest with our customers about what this product is, the ingredients in it and what they can expect it to do for them. Uh So we thought we have to be very open and very frank about that. And that was where the whole idea of Frank came from. And we knew we were going to utilize social media. And we thought, well, if we're going to be using social, it probably makes sense to turn this concept of let's be Frank into the character that's called Frank. And that character can then have one on one first person conversations with people because we're using a platform that at the time wasn't really utilized by brands. It was a peer to peer communication channel. And we and a very, you know, other a small handful of other brands started to infiltrate it and go well, we're here, but we're gonna try and do it in a way that feels comfortable and suitable for this platform. And that was how the character of Frank was born and that characters sort of grown and shifted over time and you know, it has no gender, no real identity.

It's just a being that sort of encapsulates what's important to us and our customers at the time. Oh my gosh genius. I love it so much. Such a cool, cool concept to have come up with. I read that in the beginning and you mentioned just a moment earlier, you kind of had minimal capital to start. I think I read you invested $10,000 collectively, something like that, Australian. What did you allocate that towards in the beginning? And also because the world is so different now versus 2013, especially when we think about Instagram and ads and all that kind of stuff. So I'm curious to understand what that $10,000 went towards. You're so right, we launched in a very different time to now. So we were super scrappy. We were lucky that we could do a lot of it ourselves. So we did all of the branding, the copy, writing, the marketing, the social strategy because that's what we do. Um And I wouldn't recommend to founders that if you don't know how to do that. Well, I would say to try and find an expert, but at least like there's lots that you can learn online.

We googled everything. So if you look back at our search history, it's pretty hilarious to see what we were trying to figure out how to do at the time. But the capital allocation went to the raw materials for the product which we then made by hand ourselves. Um It went to setting up, you know, legal entities, bank accounts, um a web developer who just finished our website for us. It was really, really no frills if you look back and use time machine to see the very first version of frank body dot com. Oh my God, it's hilarious because it was really just proof of concept and getting it out there. Um And I think that there's something to be learned from doing that. It's a different time. I think launching a brand back then. You could be really scrappy launching a brand. Now, there's an expectation that even a homegrown founder led brand feels a little bit more finished and polished. So there are slightly more hurdles to get through if you're a founder now. But I don't think it's impossible to take a sort of proof of concept to market. How did you go to market?

Like, what was your strategy to getting eyeballs on this brand? What were you doing? It was a lot of blood sweat and tears, if I'm perfectly honest. So we, because we had no capital, all we could do was utilize free channels. So that meant using social media. So it was myself and er 24 hours a day um building up a social presence in the six months prior to launching. So the idea was don't launch a product into the ether and just hope that people find it, build a community online of people interested in the type of content that you are going to keep sharing with them once you watch the brand and then launch the product to them. So we did that. We spent about six months building up the Instagram and Facebook page at the time because Facebook pages were still a thing back then. Um The, the strategy still really works when you think about any channel, you can take that strategy and apply it to tiktok. Now, if you're a founder launching and you're like, I don't have any money, but I've got a phone, I've got my face and I've got ideas, you can put that together and do it yourself. Just dedication and a lot of hard work.

So we spent six months building that up and we big part of our brand is the belief in, you know, the beauty of a woman's body or a beauty of anyone's body and you have to be naked when you use our product. So there was that cheek and innuendo all way sort of peppered through the brand from the beginning. Um But apparently Instagram finds boobs and butts offensive and our first page got shut down about a week before we were launching. Oh, no. So whenever anyone asks, that's why we're Frank Bod and not Frank body because Frank body got shut down and we could never get it back. So we went, oh my God, what do we do? We, we just started again. We launched a new page Frank Bod and we did exactly the same thing. We, we've had about 10,000 followers on that first page, lost them all had to start from scratch. Um And you know, just worked over trying and trying to build that page up. Then once we got ready to launch, we emailed everyone we could possibly find and we were emailing bloggers and it was just the start of like the Instagram influencer and just gave everybody the product.

Um So it was just emailing a kid, you not thousands of people, you don't email like six people and hope that you get a return because you've got to assume a like one in 100 strike rate when you're doing this. So it's a real volume game. But also looking at how you can build a story with that person that's actually going to connect with them. So it wasn't just about copy pasting the same email template out to 1000 people. It was about finding a unique angle for each and every one of them and asking them to try the product. And if they felt comfortable sharing it, the third prong was with, with our U G C strategy. So once we did launch to market, we had our social community that we'd already built, we had influencers and press going live and that was just us reaching out to all of them. And then we had our U G C strategy. So every time someone purchased a flyer came with the packaging, directing them to Instagram to take the frank effect selfie socials changed a lot over the time. But at that point in time, people were really interested in just sharing like the strangest most intimate taboo moments of their life.

Like we all just took photos of our coffee, we took photos of our feet everywhere we went. All of a sudden the weird filters like everything is very if I was doing it again now because we're still a brand operating now, that strategy doesn't work anymore. But at the time, that was a really relevant launch strategy for us. And so it was those three things, all of it was free, it was just woman power basically to get it out there in the world. Um And you can use that as the basis of a strategy now, but look at how you tweak it. So if I was looking at creating U G C now, I wouldn't be asking her to take a selfie on Instagram. I'd be looking at like what's a trending theme on tiktok and how could she organically integrate our brand into that? So be like the everything shower, for example and how does she potentially integrate Frank body into her routine that she's already gonna be creating and posting on there anyway. So there's things, yeah, like there's things to learn and that you can take, you know, learn from what's been, what's been done in the past, but tweak it for 2020 three. Yeah, for the modern day social media landscape. Absolutely not the vintage landscape that I did that we all grew up with.

I know when you think back to that time, you know, from the outside perspective, of course, it looks like overnight success, everything is just happening. But you know, there's some serious like grit and perseverance and hustle going in behind the scenes to get this brand out there. What are the moments or is there a specific moment that you're like, holy shit, we're on to something we've proven the concept now, we are gaining traction. Like it's kind of on the up. There was a whole bunch of small moments along the way. So like the very first night that we launched, we were naive. We put everything up for sale were, it's like it's there, go shop it. And we went to the pub and we were just looking at Shopify on our phone and then it said that we were out of inventory. I'm like, oh like it wasn't a huge amount. It was like a couple of 100 units. But that was still, we thought that would last like a month because we had no idea what was going to come in. Uh And so we hightailed it over to our warehouse and started making more product that very night that velocity only continued and we started to see orders come in from all these different parts of the world, which is the beauty of digital and social.

Uh And when we started to see people requesting it in certain areas of the world and we saw a really um quick following game in the US. We thought, oh, you know what, maybe there's actually something here. Press started picking it up the sharks as I call them, started circling from like private equity and BC going, hey, we want to chat and we were just young kids. We had no idea what we were doing. Um But you started to realize that oh OK. There, there's something in this idea that we've created. So let's take this a little bit more seriously. And when you have these kind of people coming to you, like you've got the press happening, you've got sales happening. Velocity is booming and then you start having people coming to you to raise and things like that. What was your mindset at that time around the capital piece? Were you thinking at the time bootstrapped always or were you thinking, oh, we're gonna entertain this idea or were you like, yeah, let's go and like get to the next level. I'd love to say that we were a group of founders that sat down and had a really elegant business plan from day one and knew when we wanted to take capital.

We didn't have any of that. We had a really good idea. We had a really good strategy about how to take that idea to market everything beyond that was learn as we go and make decisions as we go. And I'm really glad that we did because I don't think we could have ever anticipated what was going to happen with the company. But I also think that there's a time and place for planning and you can really only plan so far in the type of environment that we are living in. Now, things change just so frequently. But when it came to capital, the emails started coming to us and honestly, we weren't prepared for them. We just started having exploratory conversations with these people to sort of learn, we knew nothing about this space, but we thought it was really intriguing. So we had dozens and dozens of conversations and as we had those conversations that helped us firm up what we would want from a capital partner. And it became not about just taking money, it became about finding a strategic partner that was experienced within the space and could really guide us, help us identify mistakes before they happened and build knowledge and expertise into the director's team.

And that's exactly what we ended up doing. But it took us years and years to get there and to find that partner. So we, we continued to bootstrap for the first, oh my timelines wonky. But at least the first three or four years I read that you've done a raise a couple of years back, maybe a series b raise for 15 million along those lines. When you think about your experience now being, you know, multiple raises in, what are your kind of key learnings, key tips for a successful raise? Knowing that you've repeated the blueprint, you have to know why you're trying to raise capital. It might sound really silly, but I've met founders and they don't know why they're trying to raise money. They just think that they're supposed to, um don't give equity away if you don't need to. For us, we were chasing really aggressive global expansion into omni channel. So that meant there was a huge Capex capital expenditure behind the retail distribution in particular.

So moving into retail channels, you're building all of your shelving and point of sale from scratch. It's really, really expensive. You're producing a lot of inventory 12 months before you're going to realize any sales, you need a huge amount of capital up front to be able to do that. If you're running a dot com business that you can self fund, I really wouldn't be looking at taking a lot of capital. Um and giving away equity, it might be more so looking for equity partners that bring skills to the table that you don't have. Um But it was that identifying why you need capital was the biggest problem. Uh and looking at whether there are other ways that you can do it. Um It might be a debt facility, it might be a friends and family round. Um So that's this, that's my biggest piece for the guys. Um Yeah, great advice. I think that we often see, you know, people jumping to raise capital also too early where it's like you need to get out there, prove what you're doing, get traction, so you have leverage to get more out of the deal versus being so, so early on in that ideas phase.

Yeah, try and raise from a position of strength as well. You know, it may sound silly, but we often also see founders go to market to raise capital at their worst points. Um So they're coming out of those deals very unfavorably. Um So having the foresight when you're in a good position to be looking forward over the next 3 to 5 years and identifying when you might not be and trying to raise capital at that good time. Absolutely not out of a place of desperation to keep going. I want to get your thoughts about, you know, the state of the landscape on funding before I circle back to marketing because I feel like that's really your like total zone of genius that I want to dig into. But when we read about the stats, you know, I think S B E Australia launched something last year, you know, 0.7% of funding went to sole female founders, female founded companies rather I think about this so much and I obviously don't know the answer. I, I I'm just like, why and like, what needs to change? How do you think things need to change and what do you see happening?

Oh God, we could have several podcasts like a mini series talking about this. We should, that is an institutional and systemic problem that is going to take a really long time to change. Um It's I sat in many of them with many, many men who are a couple of decades my senior and there's, it is so obvious how I am perceived in that room versus my very lovely, capable and intelligent male counterparts who are brilliant and that's why I'm in business with them. But I can see that I'm not treated with the same level of respect from everything that, you know, might be the eye contact and they'll be asking me a question but looking at my co-founder or they'll direct a question that should be clearly coming to me, to my co-founder or I'll be called hi girls. How are you going? I was 37. I've been a girl for about 25 years. So stop calling me that. Um you know, there's, there's just layers and layers of misogyny in this space that said I have met some really brilliant people and there's some amazing women doing great work in this space, very actively trying to level the playing field.

They've got their work cut out for them and we all have to sort of get involved. I think, I don't think it's on the women trying to raise capital to change that. It's not a US problem. It's a problem. Um All we can do is be as knowledgeable as possible going into these scenarios, which is what you would expect of anyone going in to try and raise capital. You have to know your numbers, you have to know your business inside out. You have to know why you need the money and how you can spend it. Um And maybe find partners, we will definitely find partners that are aligned with you value wise, find a broker or find a banker that is doesn't necessarily need to be a woman, but just a feminist who's actually going to really support you in your goals and stand up for yourself, negotiate, well, firm and friendly. Um I'm, you know, I'm really lucky. I've been surrounded by incredible co-founders and really great advisor and we have fantastic investors. Um You know, we obviously chose people that are value aligned with us. Um And if your gut is telling you that they're not like listen to your gut, your, your intuition is always right.

And so just use that tool to your advantage as well. So many great tips, I went on my little tangent there. But yeah, I'm very, very passionate about this point. I love a tangent. I think there's interesting things happening in this space as well, like at below and Blake, we have been really softly launching Willow and Blake Ventures, which is a, an arm of our business that isn't fundraising but is um basically like a sweat equity arrangement with clients who particularly a lot of women who are trying to grow their business, but don't necessarily have the capital to invest in brand marketing. And I think there's a lot of these interesting arrangements out there that might mean you do really get the opportunity to work with experts who are value aligned to you. Um, rather than just people who throw money in and then can't actually bring a lot to the table, which is what you see in a lot of, um, private equity in DC. So I think explore all of those different options as well. Oh, my gosh. I love that for anyone listening. Who's like, wow, I want to talk more about that. I wanna be considered, who are you looking for specifically?

And how can people kind of connect with you on, on the ventures front? Yeah, we are really looking at early stage consumer brands. We know consumer at the back of our hand, we've created and built over a billion dollars worth of household name brands. Um If you want to get in touch with us, email, willow at willow and blake dot com. Look at my plug in the middle of this, but I love it. I love it. I'm gonna tell everyone. Well, thanks. I mean, we want to work with people like your audience, you know, so the people listening, you're clearly driven because that's why you're here trying to absorb information, you know, and that that's the type of people that we love to work with people who are going to work really hard and who are passionate about what they're doing. So just go through the process with us. It's not something that we can do with every client. It's really, really selective because it has to work with for both parties. But where we can, we really love to do it, love it, love that, encouraging everyone to reach out and, and check in and go on your website and look at all the amazing work you've done my gosh and the brands that you work with. I wanna circle back just a little bit more into the marketing side of things because I, you know, I am just obsessed.

I wanna understand kind of the, the key pivotal moments over the last couple of years and how you've approached your innovative marketing campaigns and kind of kept it feeling fresh and exciting and kind of moving with the times. Well, that's a really good question. It's really easy over time to just sort of get set in your ways and rinse and repeat things. And one of the sayings that we have across both willow and Blake and Frank is that the only thing scarier than a new idea is an old one. It really guides a lot of our decision making. The absolute best campaigns we've come up with are the ones that have been done on a shoestring budget. Um I often think that a lot of money makes people lazy and it makes them stupid. Um There's a lot of creative solutions that come out of like being scrappy. Um like the, the Frank team last year for wanted to do with men are our target market. They haven't been, they love using the product, but they don't buy it. We wanted to do a cool little campaign for Father's Day. So we created this sort of spoof campaign that was like Dad Bod by Frank Bod and a couple of the guys in the office sort of stripped off down to their jocks and there was a um, a sheet thrown over a ladder.

They all posed in front of her and that, you know, it was basically shot in an iphone for a slab of beer for each of them. Um And it was one of the best campaigns that I've seen produced in a long time, got press picked up by all this press. And, you know, I think that went back to the root of who we are as a brand. We didn't launch with a lot of money and a lot of resources, but we launch with a lot of smarts and humor and sort of keeping that DNA of the brand no matter what your version of it is for your company, I think is the best way to evolve a marketing strategy. So change it for the time, change it for the platform, but don't change who you are at the core of the brand really long winded ad. So, like, do you want me to elaborate on anything? Oh my gosh, I love that. That is so fun. And I think that's, it's actually something I hear often is like when people are getting started, they're like, oh, well, I need to like, invest money over here and I need to pour money into an agency to do my ads and like, I need to do all this kind of stuff and I'm like, wait, wait, wait, do things that you can do on your phone. Like have fun with social media.

Like use social media to your advantage, tiktok especially is just like the absolute place to be and and enjoying the journey before you get into all that other stuff before you get into, you know, potentially wasting lots of money on ads. If you haven't got the right foundation set up 1000%. I am performance marketing has its place in the mix. It's really important but it shouldn't be your go to from the moment that you launch, I'm biased because I'm a brand specialist, but I believe so firmly in building a brand first. Um And you don't always need to pay a lot of money to do that. Like sometimes, yeah, you will need to work with experts like the blake and a million other great design and branding agencies that are out there. But there's so much that you can do yourself and you are the best person as the founder to really articulate what it is that the brand needs to stand for and then when you need to call in experts go for it. Um but you can throw a lot of money at performance marking and you don't build loyalty with that type of customer if that's your go to market approach, but you build loyal customers and you get really sticky customers if you take a brand first approach, and that's how you create a business with longevity rather than a flash in the pan product.

And you can that really informed our strategy over time because we knew if we didn't continue to invest in brand and when I say invest it was time, we would be this brand that we'd be having a conversation about going. Oh, do you remember when Frank bought that coffee scrub 10 years ago? Yeah, that was fun. What happened to that rather than, oh, this is one of the biggest body care brands in Australia now, like it's really strategic decisions that lead you to that point. Um So there's a lot of foresight required to, by founders to grow a brand successfully. What is your kind of key piece of advice that you like to give small business owners and founders who are in that early stage of building a business besides the shouting budget approach? Honestly, people are gonna hate this, but it's just like if you think you're working hard, you're gonna have to work harder. Um I meet a lot of founders and I talk to them about what they're doing and they're doing the absolute bare minimum and expecting the biggest results back because we don't always see under the wood of what is required to grow a brand.

And I talk to people, I like to be really honest about what it took to grow frank bodies to help manage their expectations of other founders out there when they're thinking about how they get their business off the ground. Um We had 9 to 5 at the time it was, you know, waking up first thing in the morning and working, it was working all night to get it done. It was working well into the early hours of the morning. It's not glamorous at all. It's a lot of hard work and I'm sure so many of the people listening are doing that right now. So that's my biggest piece of advice. It's gonna take a lot of work and that's how an overnight success happens because the person behind it has been hustling their arse off trying to get it out there in the world. And it's the 10 years of cumulative experience that they have that has led them to the point where they're able to create something that can grow. Um And I think you need to be doing things for the right reasons. I see a lot of people launch businesses because they're really in it to make a quick buck. Um I don't think you're ever going to build a brand that people can be passionate about if that's your reasoning to do it.

Money is fantastic. It's really nice to be rewarded for your hard work, but it can't be the reason that you're creating something and I think you ultimately see the businesses and the brands that are built from the heart go on to be the most successful ones. Mm. Oh, I love that. Couldn't agree more. What's going on in your world that you want to shout about what's happening over at Frank Bod. That is exciting or coming up or something, something new in the mix. Oh my God. There's so many things going on right now. We just launched a fantastic range called Everyday by Frank Bodie into Priceline stores nationally throughout Australia. Thank you. Um It was three, my co-founder baby. She came back from her real life baby and built this from scratch with our team. And it's a series. The whole idea behind it is about reimagining personal care. We do body care so well and we've taken what we know as body care into the personal care landscape and creating benefit driven skews that are either focusing on body acne or how pigmentation taking it into a channel in a format that customers haven't seen before.

Um It's really exciting. So that's available everywhere now. And we just launched a Walmart in the US, which is huge. So that's been several years in the making. Um And yeah, we're really, really excited about it and there's new products coming out soon and there's just so much going on. We turned 10. There's really exciting stuff for our 10th birthday. I could talk to you for hours about what's happening. But yeah, I'm really proud of our team. They've done such incredible work. That is so amazing. Congratulations. I'm excited to see how you celebrate 10 years. That sounds fun.


So question number one is, what's your, why? Why do you wake up every day and work on building Frank Bod? My, why has changed over the course of my life? My why now is creating flexibility and freedom, not just for myself, but for my family. Absolutely love that question. Number two is what's been your favorite marketing moment over the last almost decade? Uh There have been a lot I'd say to be honest, going right back to our roots and the, the social strategy that we've launched with and the consumer engagement we had around that, like tens of thousands of people taking the selfies that we asked them to take. That was momentous. Like that was just absolutely incredible. And I feel like because it's been 10 years, it is really easy to forget about it, but that gave me so much satisfaction to not only see that our strategy came to life but just see how much people loved the product and the brand.

Hm Yeah, for sure. Question number three is, what's your go to business resource if you have to think about a podcast or a book or a newsletter or something that you consume and find value in. Oh, uh I listen to so many and I go through phases. I am really enjoying a whole bunch of different podcasts at the moment. So I've been listening to, to be magnetic expanded. I'm really interested in the whole manifestation space. I really like practical things with outcomes. So I've been listening to things like my millennial investor and my millennial money and I think Victoria is doing an incredible job if she's on the money, I think, no matter how much, you know, even if it feels like you're going back to basics, there's still something to be learned there. So I try and listen to the full spectrum of things on topics that I'm particularly interested in at the time. I've been listening to some really interesting interviews on um the mentor by Mark Boris as well.

Um So yeah, there's, there's just so many amazing free resources out there right now. I think it's such an incredible time. Like we didn't really have this medium when I was launching. There was no stories from other female founders out there. It was just like, hello? Do you exist? Where are you? One 100%? I also think the School of youtube is just so powerful. Like if you want to be knowledgeable on something, set yourself a goal of 10 hours or 20 hours on that subject. Back to back on youtube, you are gonna learn so much. Could not agree more and you can Google and youtube your way to anything that you need to know and chat. GP. T it's like my best friend these days. 100%. Oh my gosh. Question number four is, how do you win the day? What are your AM and PM rituals and habits that keep you feeling happy and motivated? I want to keep it real. Um I have a two year old so there's no such thing as a beautiful morning routine in my house anymore. It just doesn't exist. Um I think that's really nice for other founders who either have kids or are thinking about having kids to hear because you hear a lot about this, like I wake up at five and I meditate and I drink my lemon water and I go to the yoga.

I'm like, that sounds nice. Um That, that does not happen over here. It's just like pure chaos um in my morning, sort of my husband and I take it in turns, but I like to be able to spend the morning with my daughter before I then start my day at work. So I don't usually use it to do other things. So that's my morning routine. I, I soak her up sometimes I'll sit there reading a book, like I've got my book sitting on the couch right here now. So I'll read with her while she's eating her breakfast and I find that, that gives me some sort of personal satisfaction. Like I've accomplished something before the day has even really started. Even though I'm currently taking care of my child. I try to fit exercise to just wherever it can during the day. So it might be, sometimes I sit on the bike in the office while I'm on a call. Love that sometimes I squeeze in a 20 minute walk. Um, it, you know, I like to be really realistic about this. It's the juggle of motherhood and running two businesses. We don't have, looking at people think like she's got a cleaner and she's got money and all these bits and pieces.

We don't have any of that. We just have us. My parents work full time. So, you know, it's really, um, just the chaos of every other household. El El Burry in the evening I collapse and I watch TV. I'm not gonna go skin lies for you about this amazing wellness routine because it just doesn't exist right now. I love that. Keeping it real. I'm all for it. Question number five is what's been your worst money? Mistake? And how much did it cost you? Oh. Um, I was really young and dumb with credit cards, like, back in my late teens and early twenties. Um, I feel as though my formal education really set me up for failure there. That's why I talk a lot about financial literacy and the type of podcast that I mentioned before, especially for younger listeners because it's so easy to go. Oh my God, that's so boring. I don't want to do it. Oh, man, if you just learn the ABC S of that and do things properly from the very start, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of where I am now at 37 because I made so many dumb mistakes when I was young. Um So that's probably the biggest financial mistake I've made.

Uh And I wish I'd learned about investing for my future younger than what I did. Mm Absolutely. I really agree with that. Resonates with me. Question number six. Last question. What is just a crazy story good or bad that you can share from your journey in building Frank Bod? Oh um The one that's coming to mind is when all of a sudden Ariana Grande started telling everybody how much she loved Frank and we have no idea how she got her hands on it. Um It was pretty incredible like there it's still around um in like different beauty articles and some youtube clips with her on interviews and we thought my God, this is amazing. Like and then all of a sudden about two or three months later, she launched her own copycat like uh a coffee scrub by Ariana Grande and launched it into and I'm like, excuse me, it's not very supportive. It's not where I saw this going just like it's a, it's a moment that's coming to my head for um you know, I mean, good on her.

She saw an opportunity. But yeah, it, it really stood out to me as just a perfect example of how there could have been so much opportunity to collaborate and build something really beautiful and successful together. But not everyone sees things that way, I guess. Yeah, I feel like the copycat discussion is like again a whole other episode and I'm sure you have plenty of examples of seeing this happen either for your own brands or for the brands that you've worked on and, and been part of it's, I guess we were just having a chat about it actually inside Magic, which is our network for founders and we were talking about how it is inevitable, but it still sucks. Yeah, you have to, it's like water off a ducks back for me now. I just don't even think about it at the time when we were younger and watching it felt hyper personal. And I think that's probably why it comes to mind because it, it did trigger a different response in me at the time. Now. I just laugh about it. But, um, you know, it's hard at the time when you're building something and you're spending so much time and energy and probably money to have someone just come and rip off your idea that hurts.

But, um, if you're in that position as a founder see the flattering side and use it as your, what's the word I'm looking for? I guess a catalyst for looking at what's gonna be next for your brand doesn't mean changing your brand but always staying one step ahead and future proofing your own business. Mm Yes, I know the feeling. Thank you very much for saying that that's a great tip and a piece of advice to leave us with. This was so fun, Jess. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your journey with Frank Budd and all the cool stuff that you've been up to for the last decade. Loved it. Thank you so much for having me. It was really lovely to chat.