[Editor’s Note: Founder Forum, a series of conversations with local entrepreneurs, is sponsored by the Maine Technology Institute. Read more about MSI’s sponsored-content strategy here.]

Nisha Dearborn never thought of herself as an entrepreneur. Now, she says she can’t imagine ever going back to her corporate ladder-climbing days.

All it took to set her on the path to entrepreneurship was a move to Maine and the spark of an idea, coupled with her specific professional experience.

In October 2019, Dearborn founded her own skincare-product company, Fresh Chemistry, based on the idea that skincare products, like food, is best when fresh. Having worked in the skincare and beauty industry for nearly a decade at Johnson & Johnson, Dearborn knew for a fact that most skincare products are at least six months old before they’re used in a consumer’s home. Why, in these heady days of direct-to-consumer brands, did it have to be this way? Turns out it doesn’t and Fresh Chemistry is leading the way in a new category of skincare products that require a bit of assemble. Fresh Chemistry sends customers a small bottle containing the base and up to three vials containing the active ingredients such as Vitamin C or Alpha Hydroxy Acids. The customer pours the vials into the bottle with the base serum, shakes, and applies. This process means the product is fresh and at its most efficacious.

While the pandemic temporarily derailed Dearborn’s plans, she used the time to regroup and improve her processes, website, and packaging. Her most recent win was being featured on the QVC channel, which drove more sales in a single weekend than she had done in the entire prior year.

Maine Startups Insider spoke with Dearborn about her journey founding Fresh Chemistry, what challenges she’s faced as a first-time entrepreneur, how a brand works with Instagram influencers, and what advice she’d give others looking to start their own ventures. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MSI: I’d like to start the interview by diving into your background. I know this is your first company as a founder, but besides Fresh Chemistry, can you tell me what you consider to be your first entrepreneurial experience?

Nisha: I wouldn’t call myself an entrepreneur before this experience. I was very much a corporate-ladder climber, if you will. You know, my love of skincare, though, started when I was a kid. My mom is a dermatologist, so I grew up spending summers in her office. And then I went on to join the corporate world and kind of turned that love of skincare into a career and spent almost a decade in the beauty industry. I was a marketing director of big household brands. I had some experience running beauty brands like Aveeno and also non-beauty brands like Listerine and Tylenol. So I wouldn’t consider myself an entrepreneur, but very much a corporate person.

Okay. How did you go from corporate-ladder climber to becoming an entrepreneur? Tell me the story.

I still wonder that myself. You know, there’s the “Why” and the “How,” so I’ll give you both. I think the “Why” was because I always had this thought in the back of my head that I should try entrepreneurship. But I was always scared.

At Johnson & Johnson, where I worked, we owned a human performance institute, where their focus is how to get the most out of people as humans and how to optimize their performance. They used to run these simulations to help us as employees become better. And one of the exercises was to close your eyes and imagine your 80th birthday. It’s a great exercise if you ever take the time to do it. You close your eyes and think about your 80th birthday celebration. Are you inside? Or are you outside? Is it cold? Or is it warm? Who’s there? Who’s not there? And they take you through these questions, one by one—and one of the questions was: “What are you most proud of in your personal life? What are you most proud of in your professional life?” And one of the questions was: “What is something you didn’t do, but you wish you had?”

When I was going through that simulation, I thought, “Oh, I need to start my own company, but I’m too scared to do it.”

It was when I made a move to Maine a few years ago, I thought, you know what better time than now to just check the box to say I tried it. Then I can go back to the rest of my life. I knew that I needed to kind of overcome this fear. I liken it to people who think they need to run a marathon, but I don’t think they want to run the marathon. It’s a hard thing, but they feel like they need to check off the box. So I started thinking about entrepreneurship for that reason. And then once I got into it, I can’t ever imagine going back. So that’s the “Why.”

And then the “How” was… I had spent basically my entire life and career in skincare. And then when we made a move to Maine a few years ago, I noticed my life getting healthier on many fronts. I became more active, I spent more time outdoors. And I also started paying more attention to the food I was buying and the meals I was preparing for my family and to the ingredients. I was always making sure that I was reaching for fresh ingredients whenever I could, because I knew that was better for my body. That’s when I had this Ah ha! moment—just like we know fresh food is better for our body, I knew from my experience growing up with a mom who’s a dermatologist and in my corporate experience, that fresh skincare ingredients are also better for your skin, because just like the ingredients in foods, they break down and get weak and stale over time. So if we as a culture are demanding higher quality ingredients in our food, in reality, I knew we should really be demanding that in our skincare, too. So when I realized that, I looked out there and thought certainly there’s got to be someone addressing this issue. And when I didn’t see it, I figured I should try it myself.

Can you explain a little bit about what Fresh Chemistry sells so people understand.

Absolutely. So just like the best ingredients in food breakdown and get weak over time, the best ingredients in skincare also come from nature. So for example, many people know that Vitamin C is a great ingredient for skin but it just breaks down really quickly. If you think about an orange on your counter, if it was sliced and open, it would break down really quickly. Retinol, which is a really famous skincare ingredient, and is actually the derivative of Vitamin A, also breaks down quickly. So the idea behind Fresh Chemistry is we deliver the active ingredients to you packaged separately. And when you get the product, which is a base product, you add in the actives yourself, you shake to activate the product, and then what you have is a freshly mixed, which makes it a more potent, more efficacious product that you use for the next month. And so what you see is better results faster.

This process of mixing the actives in usually happens at a factory nine months before you ever even buy the product. And that whole time, because of its exposure to light and air and time it’s been breaking down so what you get is weak and stale skincare. If you think about food, you have your fresh food that’s on the counter—it’s so fresh, it doesn’t even need refrigeration—then you have the food in your fridge, then you have your food in your pantry.

If you think about your food in the pantry—it was made a long time ago, filled with preservatives to be shelf stable, and can sit there for a long time. That’s essentially how the skincare industry produces skincare today.

Okay, so you had your Ah ha! moment shopping for food and making meals for your family. How did you go from the Ah ha! moment to building a company, building a product?

Because I had spent time in the industry, I knew people to call and ask to just bounce the idea off of. They pointed me to a chemist who had done product development corporately for over 20 years, but had gone out on his own to do it privately. So I called him and said, here’s my thought. I kind of wanted him to just tell me I was missing something. So I said to him, ‘You know in this day and age, we deliver so many things directly to people’s door, and we deliver it fresh. Why isn’t skincare that way? Couldn’t I package actives separately and send it directly to people to add in?’

And he said, ‘Yeah, absolutely, that would be stronger and more efficacious.’ But he said what we go through in a manufacturing plant, and even in formulating to make sure that everything is added at the right speed, at the right temperature, at the right time, is really complicated, and you can’t expect a woman to do that in her bathroom and still come out with the beautiful product that she’s expecting.

So I said to him, ‘Okay, so what you’re telling me is, this is no longer really a science challenge. You’re telling me the ingredients will work better. But this is really an assembly challenge. And how do we pick the right ingredients so they can be easily assembled in her bathroom? Okay, well, then let’s focus there.’

I’ve done a lot of work in new product development for companies and it’s always focusing on how do you find that next best ingredient that’s better than everything else. In reality, that’s super difficult, because that’s discovery. So when I realized this was not about the discovery of new ingredients, but just a new way of treating existing ingredients and delivering them in a better way that is more efficacious.

Even though I don’t call myself an entrepreneur, I thought this was not an idea I could walk away from.

So was your first step hiring this chemist to basically put together the formulas? Or did you take a step back and do market research first to try to test whether it was viable?

My training and my experience would tell me to do the market research first. I also knew that my personality was almost overly trained that I would move very slow and I would see all the problems before I saw the solutions. And so I actively worked against my own training. Because at the end of the day, we have to find out if we can make these products so that they can be added, shaken and exist. And that is an R&D challenge. So I started both at the same time. I started working with the chemist on figuring out the right ingredients and sending samples back and forth while I worked on questions like, ‘How am I going to talk about this? What are the right words to use?’

People aren’t walking around thinking, I need skincare that is freshly activated. But people are thinking, I need fresher things in my life and I understand that fresher things are better for my body.

When did the the product first launch?

I launched the company and the brand last fall, October of 2019. I’m self funding the business, though I do have some grant money from the Maine Technology Institute, which is an amazing institution. But the rest was completely self funded. So I wanted to spend as little money as possible. So I wrote the website, I built the website, all the backend logistics, I picked the packaging, I set up everything. So when I launched my thought was, well, let me just see what goes wrong. This is all glass, so I figured the chances of something breaking was pretty high. I thought let me just soft launch to friends and family. Let me see if the website works. Let me see if the packaging works. I knew the products worked, because I had already tested the products with people. I did that in late October through December, and everything was fine. People were starting to reorder and everything’s running smoothly. So then in January and February is when I started to do some marketing around it and started talking to some people and then the world turned upside down in March.

Right. And how did the Coronavirus affect your business?

I think both positively and negatively. So the negative is that the head of my manufacturing and the head of my fulfillment—both those people came down with Coronavirus quite severely. They are based in New Jersey. And so, as you know, not only were a lot of businesses down there shut down, but their lives were shut down for a while. They couldn’t have phone conversations for weeks because they just couldn’t have enough air in their lungs. They are both fully recovered and doing great. So there was no decision to make; I had to obviously give them the time to heal and recover. So I obviously stopped all marketing dollars. Anybody who was under contract to help me with anything, I either cut in half, or pulled in, entirely back.

What had happened just before the world turned upside down was that I had actually met QVC, the TV Shopping Network. I had met them at an event in New York at the end of February. And they had called me in the beginning of March, and told me I was a finalist in one of their competitions called the QVC Quest where they look for the next thing in beauty. And so I was a finalist in their competition; and they wanted me to come on the show. So we were having those conversations in early March and had just come to kind of agreement on when I would come to the show and what that would mean, and then when all of this happens, QVC took two months to kind of figure out what they were going to do. But they came back to me and said, No, we’re ready to go full steam ahead, we’d still love for you to come. And so I basically took that time to say, Okay, I’m going to stop trying to market my current business and I’m going to put all my energy around getting QVC what they need for a show. They were asking me to make for them about five times as much quantity as I made for myself at launch. Anytime you launch, and then you have to scale up five times, there’s always going to be scale-up issues and challenges. The same machine can’t be used. I mean, literally in skincare, you have these pots, there’s like a 50 kilo pot and 100 kilo pot and things change when you have to change pot sizes. I mean, it’s it’s that simple. So not only is there a typical scale challenge, but now I had to source ingredients and packaging components from 15 to 20 different places, all of whom had their own Coronavirus shut downs, backlogs, new procedures that they were just figuring out. Making this quantity for QVC without coronavirus would have definitely taken all of my efforts. But in the middle of a pandemic, I thought, okay, stop the marketing, focus on this.

Of course, I’ll never leave well enough alone. There had always been these little things I wanted to make better. Some of it was in my packaging, labeling. Some of it was in the website that I had built myself. I thought if I’m really going to go out on QVC, I need this to be at a professional level. So I completely redid the website, created some video content, created new packaging, and then made the quantity that QVC needed. And actually was just on the show a couple of weeks ago. So I would say the Coronavirus obviously made things very challenging. As a business, there was some real risk to people being very sick, but it also kind of helped just funnel in what decisions I could make, what I had to make, and it turned out pretty good.

So before talking about QVC and the aftermath, I want to take a step back and talk about the launch. What was the transition like from friends and family to wherever you were by the time February and March rolls around? Walk me through the e-commerce strategy, the marketing strategy. 

After I passed the phase where I just wanted friends and family to know, so I could make sure nothing was really wrong, I then went into a phase of…not trial and error per se, but just trying different marketing things to see what started moving the needle. A lot of marketing efforts have to work together, but sometimes when you do them all at the same time, you actually don’t know which one’s working. So I started boosting Facebook posts, trying them at different dollar amounts to see if anything made a difference. I also looked at what kind of posts we were boosting and if there was any correlation between what type of image was shown and how they resulted, if we were asking them to go to the website or take any other action and how that resulted. So I started doing some of that testing. I also started doing some work with micro influencers—micro, like five to 25,000 followers. There were some influencers I talked to who are more in the 80,000 to 250,000 follower range to just see what those programs look like, what it would cost, if anything, and what kind of results they could drive.

What does it cost? Say you have a beauty product that you want an Instagram Influencer with 80,000 followers to promote to her audience. Can you give a sense of what that would cost? Because I think a lot of people know about influencers but don’t understand the business behind it.

It really depends. The quick answer is it can cost you nothing, or some people came back with a proposal of $20,000 for like one post essentially. So there’s a huge range. They are business people, too, right? They have a following and they want to grow their following, and they want to keep their audience happy. So if what you’re providing them is something that they know will engage their audience, will give them something to talk about, will make their audience very happy, then they sometimes will do it for nothing but the free product. Or you could offer to give their audience a code or give their audience a giveaway product. Depending on where they are in building their business in your category, that could be something that you’re offering them, and they’re happy to do it. But if they are someone who sells a lot of things in your category, and they know just by posting this that it will perform and will drive people to your website and allow you to sell more products, then they’re going to charge more.

My conclusion, which I came to very early on, is that a lot of micro influencers can be really great at producing user generated content. They are basically photographers and they get really great pictures of themselves using the product that are always useful for your business. I think other larger influencers need to be a part of a bigger marketing plan where you have ads, and other promotions and other kind of 360 communication so that when people are also seeing it from their influencers, it just becomes one more touch point, but probably can’t stand on its own.

Let’s fast forward to QVC now. That’s obviously a huge platform from which to reach your audience. What what was that experience like?

It was great. The QVC team was great. I think that being able to get my foot in the door there was awesome. As a lot of people reminded me, a lot of people go on Shark Tank to get the chance to go on QVC. So it was nice to have just met QVC directly and have them ask me to come on the show. It was definitely kind of an adrenaline high. And the show went really well; they were very pleased with it. They want to do another show again soon. So that’s what we’re working towards.

Oh, wow. So what did it do for your sales? What was the business outcome?

It was good. We sold more in a weekend with QVC than we sold the entire year before. So yeah, it was great. I’m mostly self funding the business and just trying to see what works where, and QVC was definitely something that worked. I think there are as we move into the second show, definitely some learnings from the first show that we’re going to try to apply and see how we can make that better. QVC is known for incubating brands and really helping to coach brand founders. There’s some big brands out there—specifically It Cosmetics, which is currently owned by L’Oreal—that started on QVC with a founder. No one knew who they were. And they became huge. So I’m excited to continue working with them.

This is not my area, but I assume your customers are the type that once they find a product they like, they become returning customers, right? So you have a really good chance of capturing customers and generating recurring revenue through subscriptions. Is that part of your business model? 

Yes, on the store you have a choice to just buy one, or you can set up a subscription. If you subscribe, there’s 10% off that’s baked in. Different women act different ways; some people like trying new things all the time. Some people stick with one thing. Every woman almost has what I call the skincare graveyard, which is some drawer or back side of their medicine cabinet, where all the stuff they’ve tried is thrown back there because it didn’t work. They didn’t finish it because it wasn’t doing anything. But one thing is for sure is that if they see a difference in their skin, they will buy it again.

So is it too early to tell whether all those new customers you got through QVC will be returning customers? It was only a couple of weeks ago. Right?

Yes. It’s too early to tell. It’s been less than a month. But I sure hope so.

I like to give viewers or readers a sense of where you are in in the growth of your company. Is there anything you can tell me about where you are in terms of scale now?

Yeah, we’re still very early on. I would call October of last year, Launch 1.0. Then kind of everything stopped with the pandemic, and then October of this year I consider Launch 2.0. So I still consider things very early and very young. Having said that, the growth with QVC of selling more in a weekend than I sold in the past year is certainly a good trajectory to be on and I hope to continue it.

What’s been the biggest challenge for you in growing this company?

I would say for me personally, I love working with teams and I love the energy of that. You know, Whit, you and I used to both be at Cloudport as an office space and I used to go work there just so I could be around people. And I think what’s hard is there’s so many different pieces of a business that you want to move forward and do something about. And you want it done right. But then when you’re, it’s just you, either you have to go learn how to do something. So let’s say build a website, you know, logistics fulfillment packaging—either you have to go figure out how to learn how to do it, or you have to find someone with expertise that you could afford. And both of which are really hard. So I think for me, it is realizing that when you are self funding it, things aren’t going to be as collaborative as you want. Things aren’t going to necessarily move as fast as you want.

You moved to Maine around four and a half years ago. If you had not moved to Maine, would Fresh Chemistry exist?

No, for a couple reasons. One, as I mentioned, I’m just more comfortable being a corporate person; it’s less risky. Projects can go well or not go well, but as long as you’re making good decisions as leader, you still have a good job. That’s not the case as an entrepreneur. So if I hadn’t made the move to Maine, I would still have my corporate job and stayed there comfortably. Also in moving to Maine there was a lifestyle change. People are impressively healthy here. the number of septuagenarians and older that are running and biking on a daily basis put the rest of us to shame, so you have to up your game. So that lifestyle change and being here in Maine and outside the beauty industry helped me see it from an outsider perspective, helped me see it from a healthier perspective. And I also think people are super encouraging of entrepreneurs in Maine. You have your journalism approach and bring light to what people are doing. And there’s SCORE, the mentor organization; MTI, there are so many people who are happy to sit down and have coffee and help you and support you. I think that is a unique environment.

Even though you don’t think of yourself as an entrepreneur, I’ve got to say it sounds like you make a good entrepreneur.

I think I might be one now. Just like I never thought I’d be a school teacher, but I’m one of those now, too.

What are the long-term goals here for Fresh Chemistry?

A long-term goal would be to grow it and then get acquired by a larger company. One thing I know from being at the larger companies is innovation is incredibly hard. The beauty ecosystem, if you look at it, much of the growth has been driven by acquisition of smaller startup brands recently and that continues to be the case. The price tags are getting higher and higher. I don’t expect that to stay, but I do expect innovation to be driven through acquisition in beauty. And the reason is to be really innovative you have to go try things that haven’t been done before, which means at the beginning they are going be margin accretive; they are going to take more money than you want to spend. When you’re  at a huge company that is having to respond to shareholders, if you can sell one more widget at 75% profit or a widget at 50% profit, you can’t do that responsibly. You need to sell the 75% widget, so how are you going to innovate?

When I was at the industry event in February in New York, all I heard from the other corporate teams is we all know this is an issue, we know ingredients go bad, we know that the product we mix is not the same strength as when a consumer uses it. But we haven’t been able to figure out a way to solve it. What they said to me is this makes a lot of sense, and we’re so glad you’re trying it. Because they would not get approved internally to go out and try something this different. So what I’m bringing to the table is a test case, so if I can prove it works and people like it, then I think it would be ripe for acquisition.

It’s crazy. It seems like such a simple, but yet brilliant idea, but it sounds like if you were still at Johnson & Johnson the idea would be dead in the water. 

I’m sure this is true in other industries, as well, but particularly in beauty, the acquisition appetite has been super high and continues to be because it’s the only way to take something that’s different, but has been proven.

What are two pieces of advice you have for people looking to start their own company.

I even got on the phone with somebody who had a lot of experience in beauty a couple years ago and before she knew anything about me or any of the ideas I was thinking of at the time, she got on the phone and said don’t try it. It’ll take more money and more time than you have and you’ll never be able to do something a big company can’t do better. So I would say the opposite of that: Definitely try it. When she said that, that was encouraging for me because I though, wow, the bar is so low, let me try one thing at a time. Let me make some sample products, let me see what it would take to stand up a website. I can’t tell you how many things I Googled. If you want to fix a piece of the website. If you want to know where to get little brown bottles. There are a lot of things you can just Google. So I would encourage people to just try it; start it. You can always do something while you have another job, you can always do something on the side, just think of it as a one-year test and see if it gives you enough energy when you get up in the morning to keep going.

The other piece of advice is to ask for help. I asked a lot of people: Do you know someone who… Even if they don’t, everyone is always willing to help. No matter who someone puts you in touch with, take that meeting, tell them what you’re doing. At the worse, they’ll say this is really interesting, good luck. At the best, they’ll say, ‘you know, I know someone who could help you with that.’ It’s fascinating where those conversations lead.

And I”ll give a third piece of advice. When people ask to sit down with you, even if you don’t think you have anything to offer, sit down, listen to what they have to say, and think about ways you can help them. I think that’s how the ecosystem goes around.

 

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