Facebook ads for a clean beauty brand
A clean beauty hair care brand was selling to friends and family and nobody else. Paid advertising is how it found actual customers.
Gayle, Clean beauty. Recorded December 2020.
Gayle co-founded a consumer products business in clean beauty, specifically hair care. It is one of the most competitive categories in ecommerce — a large and fast-growing market, which means a large and fast-growing number of brands competing for the same customer.
They had the problem every new consumer brand has and few admit to. Sales were coming from friends and family. That is not a business yet, it is goodwill, and it tells you nothing about whether strangers will buy.
Paid advertising was how they found out. The point of it here was not volume but discovery: getting the product in front of people with no connection to the founders, and learning which of them responded.
They went from friends-and-family sales to acquiring genuinely new customers. In a category this crowded, proving that cold traffic converts is the milestone that everything else depends on.
Gayle is precise about who this works for, and it is worth taking seriously: someone data-driven, willing to test a variety of ads, and patient enough to treat it as both an art and a science. Testing costs money before it makes money, and a founder who expects the first ad to work will stop before finding out what does.
If your sales so far have come from people who know you, the next step is not more content. It is putting the product in front of strangers and paying attention to what happens.
In Gayle’s words
“The beauty industry is a huge business, clean beauty is growing like crazy, and it is very competitive. We are selling direct to consumers in a very competitive market, working to find our consumer.”
“He has helped us start our online advertising, which really means finding our customer. We went from only having friends and family sales to driving actual new people to our business.”
“I would recommend working with Kirat to anyone who is data-driven, who is willing to test a variety of ads, and who is patient enough to appreciate that this is both an art and a science.”
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