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Purpose Haze, a new series featuring Scott Goodson, founder of StrawberryFrog together with New York festivals. It will defog purpose through in-depth interviews with those at the forefront of purpose driven companies. Watch what Happens when the smoke clears.

Scott: Hi, everyone. this is Scott Goodson, and, today we have a really great show. Welcome to Purpose Haze. Before we get to a very special guest, I want to just talk for a moment about something called the House of Beautiful Business, which is an organization based in Berlin that just had their annual retreat this year in Tangier.And basically, the House of Beautiful Business is an organization dedicated to making business more humane. And the reason I bring it up is because I think it's relevant. This marquee event that just happened to the conversation we're about to have. Please welcome Stacey Tank.

Stacey: Thank you so much, Scott. Great to be with you.

Scott: Stacey is the CEO of Bespoke Beauty Brands, one of the fastest growing, most dynamic beauty brands out there. You can find them across all the social media platforms. Stacey, not only is the CEO of Bespoke Beauty Brands, but she has an extraordinary career—having been at Heineken as Chief Transformation Officer based in Amsterdam, she's been at the Home Depot and also at GE.I've known Stacey for many years, and what I absolutely love about her is she's not only committed to purpose-driven companies, she's very purpose driven as an individual. So welcome to the show.

Stacey: Thank you so much.

Scott: Let's start. Maybe by just talking a little bit about, you know, your own journey and how you're a successful business leader. But how do you sort of think about purpose for yourself, your own purpose, and then maybe talk a little bit about how it relates to your company purpose?

Stacey: Sure. Yeah. I think we were all captivated by that famous Simon Sinek TED talk. Was it 12 years ago or something now? The why, the How and the What? Those circles that he drew so simply but so powerfully on that flip chart.

Scott: But if you don't know why you do what you do and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will anybody, how will you ever get people to vote for you or buy something from you? Or more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do.

Stacey: From that time I was working with Heineken in New York and the CEO Dolf van den Brink really embraced this idea of bringing individual and organizational purpose into a company. So we started to explore that work together. And that's when I started to ask myself some of those deeper questions about what is different when I'm part of a team, you know, what is that secret sauce that I can bring to serve my company, my community, my family, my friends, and the expression of that has actually evolved over time for me.

Stacey: It started as Ignite the Worthy Fight and Blow Your Hair back. And recently last year, as I had been going through it, you get a visual, right? Let's get some wind in there. But last year I started working with a coach. I think it's always really helpful to have someone holding the mirror for you, so you can be more self-reflective and honest to ask the hard questions.And she checked me a little bit on that expression and said, I think that you are evolving. Let's ask some of these questions again. And so the kind of next iteration, as I go through the Jedi trajectory of life, is to Ignite belief in a world where impossible dreams are possible. And the reason that I love that is one.It gives me a ton of energy when I say that I get myself right into that space of let's do big stuff, let's do hard stuff, let's do stuff that scares us a little bit because it will be possible. But also we live in a world with a lot of really gritty challenges, complex systemic challenges, whether it's climate change, whether it's misinformation, disinformation, polarization of society.And I think we do have to hold on to that hope and belief that impossible dreams really are possible, and we should chip away at them every day.

Scott: How does this personal purpose translate into your business, and what is the purpose of Bespoke Beauty Brands, and what is the connection between to think?

Stacey: Every organization has a different reason for being and a reason why they are fulfilling some purpose in society. For us we have two brands. One is Jason Wu beauty, one is Kimchi Chic.

Scott: They love the name kimchi kimchi chic. I love that I can just taste it.

Stacey: I think we have so much fun with these brands and they're very, very different. Kimchi is about colorful self-expression and every color of the rainbow. It's about joyful… irreverence. It's tongue-in-cheek and pushes the edge sometimes. And I just hope when people are experiencing our content, our products, that they have a smile, that we can bring just a moment of joy to people, to also be who they are and create a place where everyone feels like they can belong.

Stacey: The Jason Wu Beauty brand is about fashion meets beauty. It's luxury, it's skin loving, and it feels like it's sort of aspirational, but it's affordable luxury. So everyone can participate in this brand and it's absolutely beautiful, multi-use products. And Jason Wu is a couture fashion designer. So the idea is Chanel Tom Ford, you know, they're aspirational. They have beautiful beauty brands.Jason…also, we have this luxury offering, but it's really affordable. So for $9 you can grab a lip gloss. And again, give yourself that moment of self-care, a little herbal oil and hyaluronic acid, you know, in your day. And I think for me, my individual purposes about impossible dreams becoming possible. So how does that intersect with these brands?I think, given the heaviness of society, given that the number one cause of death amongst children in the United States right now is suicide, given the epidemic around and social media and and depression and everything that's going on and polarization and misinformation, if we can help people feel good, just for a moment of every day and bring a smile and help them feel joy, I feel really good about that.And hopefully that allows us to then maybe connect better as human beings. It is just lipstick, but in a way I think it's more than lipstick.

Scott: So bringing the joy in the dark, in the difficult life, is not only beautiful, it seems very relevant to how we introduced the show. What do you think is the role of poetry in business versus prose?

Stacey: Being a part of an early stage, high growth company brings all kinds of interesting adventures that I didn't experience in the 150 billion, you know, annual sales companies. And one of them is that there's a really concrete democratization of the creation process, which means things are not getting overly edited. And there's not a lot of bureaucracy. And what that means is the poetry that our employees feel inside comes out all the time.And I hope it continues to always come out all the time. When they have ideas for products, we love to name products collectively and in social for example, we're always trying to tell stories and connect with folks and make them smile and bring them a little joy that is a poetic expression of one of our team members thought in the morning or a little collaboration, and it's coming out in the form of a TikTok reel or an Instagram slideshow or something.But that poetry is so alive and well, and I think too many cooks ruin a broth or whatever that expression is. It's hard in big business, because one of my biggest insights, going from giant companies to an early stage, high growth company, is in a big company. If I'm being honest, I think I was always playing not to lose.It's really hard to feel like you're playing to win because you have so much at stake. You have a big target on your back in an early stage company. You're playing to win every single day. Everything you do is about growth. It's about innovation. It's about the customer. And poetry can live in that world a lot more than in, in the big context.

Scott: Do you have examples of or could you talk to some examples and some creative work you've done, the social media work that are extraordinary or that we could show in this in the segment.

Stacey: One New York Fashion Week. So Jason Wu was a couture fashion designer and really grew up through that community and beauty and fashion adjacent to each other. A lot of the time. We were the TikTok, live shopping launch partner in the United States for beauty in 2023, and a huge thank you to TikTok for selecting us, because we are an early stage company and they've been amazing partners and in many ways have transformed the triple digit growth that we're seeing with these brands.One of the thoughts we had coming up to New York Fashion Week this February was, how do you take Fashion Week and express it and also make it accessible because it feels —including to me—like something that's amazing to watch as a kind of voyeur, like look under the circus tent. But these are amazing models and these designers and things that feel far away from me.And we said, let's take our TikTok live broadcast that we do. Let's bring them behind the runway, a place that most people, other than the models and the designers, the makeup artists they will never see back there. So and I had never seen back there what exactly happens with these models as you're getting ready to actually go on this runway?Maybe some press or some influencers had seen it, but we went live for two hours straight and we looked at Diane Kendall, who is our makeup artist that we collaborated with, and Jason dressing everyone. And we said, here's the look. We had this wonderful gold eye and we had this wonderful, kind of messy, moody, dark eye. And we said, this is what's going to go on the runway in an hour.Look here, you know, before anyone sees it, before Vogue publishes it. Now, if you wanted to take that look into the office, if you wanted to take that look into date night or night out with your friends, how would you do it? What are the products to do it? What questions do you have? And we had this wonderful host that we work with, Eden, and we were all there, and she was bringing in different experts and folks, and they were experimenting and trying it and bundling.And our consumer said, this is thank you for letting us see inside of there. Thank you for teaching us how to do that look. And it was the highest sales and engagement that we'd ever seen.

Scott: Wow.

Stacey: And I can tell you when we presented that idea, there were a lot of I don't think...I don't get it…No, no no no. What's nice in an early stage companies you say, well, let's just try it. Right. What's really trial and error. What's really the downside trial and error. And that redefined now how we're doing a lot of our lives in social content.Maybe on the other side with Kimchi Chic beauty. Kimchi is this really irreverent tongue-in-cheek brand. So our concealer for Under the Eyes is called Undercover Ho. Our best selling undercover Ho. Yeah, hopefully we don't award anyone with that, offend anyone with that. Our best selling product is called the Puff Puff Pass, and you can use it as a setting powder.But of course there's a double entendre there. We have our Best-Selling compact is called Almost Catfished because you look so good that you're tricking, you know, fooling people. For every April Fool's Day, we do something. This brand lends itself to humor. Last year we said, you love the Puff Puff Pass. That's our number one skew. So we made a giant Puff Puff Pass for you.You know, like this Godzilla puff puff pass. And actually consumers said that's funny. But also actually we want that. So our product development team made it. And then we debuted it a few months later this year. We did joke about doing the first-ever beauty festival, kind of like a Coachella type of festival, and we were going to bring that to the beauty space with Kimchi in the first festival ever.And consumers, even some of our partners said, how could you not have told me you're doing a festival? We want to rally around it. I want to be there. Well, it was just an April Fool's joke, but the consumer said they wanted it. We're actually going to do it in LA next month.

Scott: Oh, that's so cool.

Stacey: Yeah, well, lot of fun.

Scott: Do you feel like you're almost, like, at the vanguard of a whole new, not just movement in beauty, but in business, like, yes, I just the way you think and the way you act, the way you embrace the world. And I'm not just talking about early stage because I know where to stage. You can run fast and break things and all that stuff.But there's a certain humanness about you that is perhaps not so typical in corporate business, they say even in startups you have this, sensitivity, sensitivity, empathy and also a keen obviously business sense. Is, is business chasing? Are you the poster child of a new generation of business leaders?

Stacey: It's all changing. Yeah. I may be first with retail and how things come into the world and how we accumulate or purchase those things. When I joined Home Depot in 2015, Craig Menear was the new CEO and he is a lifelong merchant. He took me under his wing, and one of the first things we did was we did store walks in New York City together, and he taught me about vertical merchandising and price points and line structures and opening price point.It was amazing. And at that time we all had these cell phones, smartphones in our hand, and it was all about the physical brick and mortar meeting omnichannel or interconnected retail. You would have an app or mobile web and you would, you know, buy things between the two, buy online pickup and store, buy and line deliver from home.And this was groundbreaking for folks and people said retail is dead where you don't need all those stores. And over the last ten years we've seen how that's evolved. There is the third leg of this stool now, and it's social selling. Retailers are being disintermediated from their consumers. If I am watching the lipsticklesbians who I love, they're amazing.The product knowledge that they have in the beauty space is. But I watch them every single day. What are they doing? I learned from them and they're very joyful, which I love. The lipstick lesbians recommend a product. I'm clicking and buying directly from them. I'm not going to a retailer. I'm not going to Amazon. I'm not going to Target.You know, per se. Now, there are a lot of interesting collaborations happening as well. But this idea and TikTok shop has really mastered it. Now YouTube has a beta program and all the platforms are going there that in one click you can transact from a person, just you or me or anyone. This is something new. So these creators, you me are able to sell.

Scott: Anytime, anywhere.

Stacey: In one click. So the UX is getting so good one that exactly.

Scott: One day it'll be the metadata chip in our brain. We just kind of think it…that's it.

Stacey: Going to be dangerous because I think about buying things too often. I would get my.

Scott: Behavioral scientist and I travel easy and exactly. Economists. Well, making the impossible possible. This has been a fantastic conversation. I wanted to say this is like Part one because I want you to come back in a year because the wind in your hair, I think is only going to accelerate. And I think there's going to be some really interesting things that you've achieved over the next 12 months.

Scott: So thank you very much. And if you have any questions for the show or you would like to ask any questions of Stacey, please reach out to us.

Stacey: Thanks.

Scott: Thank you. So this.

Stacey: This is a lot of fun.

Scott: This is great. Bye bye.