Our story
This is our story about eyebrows, passion, grit, hope, prayer and serendipity.
Starbucks serendipity
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere... That's what Frank sang at Starbucks in the corner of the the 33th street and 5th avenue for two young women from different continents and so very different backgrounds. In the movies those moments of serendipity when roads of two strangers cross look so sweet and touchy. And we believe that those moments in life should be remembered to feel exactly the same. That's how it started.
At the first glance there was little in common when it comes to Eret and Loreen... however, if you took a closer look, you'd see how well the mindsets, dreams and ambitions of those two matched. They both love beauty, fashion, makeup, trends and every tiny thing that is related to helping a girl look as good as she ever could. They both have also dedicated a large part of their lives to learning to become professional makeup artists and brow technicians. And if they would not stumbled upon each other in that Starbucks they would most probably not have started talking about the horrible brow design of a model on the ad on the other side of the street and what exactly should be done to make those brows look dandy and RichBrows would never have been born. But they did... That's how it started. A simple yet beautiful moment.
From a brow product web (sweat-) shop...
I've been work, work, work, work, working on my stuff... We wish that our story would have been up and right and beautiful all the way. It was not. It consists of many many many failures and sleepless nights trying to figure out what brow products would work the best and what exactly is needed to make a girl look perfect. First, it was an endless struggle flavored with salty tears and a couple of dimples of smile when we finally moved closer to creating brow extensions and accessories that were so good that we would actually use those ourselves. Finally, we nailed it and the first RichBrows products were created. Great success, would some say... not really.
Waking up in cold sweat, realizing that all of your savings and a large junk of FFF* capital is tied up in a huge pile of boxes in your living-room containing brow extensions that you are trying to sell on yet another web site not knowing how much the world actually needs all that... Yes. That's not probably something too common for young women in their twenties. Well, when it comes to us, it was. And not only. Kick it up a notch by hyper-busy days trying to figure out how to build a global distribution network for a fresh beauty brand created from literally nothing, thinking up new ways to make it look big and prominent, selling, hustling, finding customers and partners and at the same time dealing with anxious phone calls from the two early investors of your business - Visa and MasterCard-, is not something any sane girl would want to sign up for. Well, on the other hand, we believe that's exactly what being a female entrepreneur is all about. And it is hard. Did we think about giving up? Well wouldn't it be cool to say "never". Of course we did! Gazillion times. However, something kept us going.
* Friends, Fools and Family
... to brow training, ...
I guess you must get lucky when you keep swinging for the fences... That something was an undeniable feeling. We never wanted to have it small. We never wanted to keep on failing and most importantly we never wanted to go work for a man (no pun intended). By conquering constant hardships we finally managed to sell enough products to beak even and pay back our first debts. That felt great and light-hearted... for a brief moment.
We soon realized that most of our customers were not very good at using those products. How to say... they messed it up. They did not know all the little secrets to make the end result look good and that made our product look bad. Of course, we could have blamed them (and at first we did) but what would that have given us? Nothing. And that was when we figured out that there are tons of girls around who would want to learn more about the techniques of using brow products. And that's when it hit us - we must start training them. Call it a pivot, a good idea or just a lucky strike, we sold out our first class in a day. We'll never forget the feeling that we had back then. Can you imagine four people signed up for a brow techniques training and all of them were actually willing to pay for that! Incredible! We had never felt that rich.
... to a fast-growing internet business
Soon enough however we understood that it would take us approximately 116 years to train all the girls that had either signed up or that would sign up if we gave some of our hard earned cash to Mark through Facebook ads. Well that felt odd. Even though we do believe that with the help of Google both of us would actually hit that age, training all that many people this way didn't seem to be the best strategy after all.
That's when the necessity pushed us to go for the masses and start our first Internet based course. Online we were not only able to train more girls, we were able to do it all over the planet. And that's how we hit it off for real.
We had no idea what angel investments meant (except that there was nothing angelic about those), nor had we ever heard about VCs. However, once again, there we were, doing our thing - pitching to people, having just a hope and a prayer and something that might have looked from an odd angle as a scalable startup. Be as it may, we got our first seed investment and we haven't looked back since.
We are on a mission...
Pay my own fun, oh and I pay my own bills... We believe in hard work. We believe that the ones who try the hardest get lucky and most importantly we believe in women.
There is probably no feeling that would be more rewarding than the feeling you get when you see a girl crushing it on her own. A couple of months ago we joked that we are responsible for creating hundreds of self-employed independent women. Now, it's not a joke anymore. And that, let us tell you, feels great.
We are on a mission to give every girl on this planet an opportunity to become independent. And we're crushing it. We have started two additional lines for training programs, we have a team of 6 girls and we have dedicated trainers in all capitals of the world. We are moving and we are moving fast.
It's on, girls - let's go and rock the world together!
Eret & Loreen