Zipporah will soon add eight brands founded by women of color to its list.
The retailer just completed the fifth iteration of its Accelerate program, a beauty founders bootcamp formed in 2016 with a mission to connect emerging female founders with influential industry leaders.
In light of last year’s renewal social justice movement, Zipporah shifted the focus of its acceleration program to Founders of Color. And, for the first time since the program’s inception, Sephora has pledged to add all eight participants – Glory Skincare, 54 Thrones, Kulfi Beauty, Eadem, Ries, Imania Beauty, Hyper Skin and Topicals – to its brand matrix. Already, Topicals launched with the retailer in March.
Sephora’s Commitment to Accelerate Participants Stems from Retailer’s Responsibility to Aurora James 15% commitment. Last June, Sephora’s offering included just seven black-owned brands. It now has 14, counting Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin as separate companies.
The retailer believes the eight Accelerate brands “will be successful” at Sephora, said Priya Venkatesh, senior vice president of merchandising, skin care and hair.
“We shortlisted this,” she said. “We were able to adjust the curriculum to what is specific to prestige at Sephora because, honestly, that’s where we found the big gap. When [we] measured our diversity of brands owned by blacks, even people of color, at Sephora and in prestige, we arrived quite short. We wanted to create a pipe[line] to increase the supply of brands owned and founded by BIPOC. We rotated Accelerate to focus on that and on Sephora’s brands and prestige beauty in general. “
Accelerate’s week-long bootcamp program, which took place at the end of March, covered topics such as product assortment and strategy, branding, public chemical policy, media training, digital marketing, navigating leadership as a person of color, fundraising strategy, diversity and inclusion, public relations, operational and supply chain best practices and marketing. Nancy Twine from Briogeo, Vicky Tsai from Tatcha, Janet Gurwitch from Advent International and Alissa Williams from VMG were the counselors for this year’s cohort.
Having two female investors – namely, Gurwitch and Williams – as advisers was “a big demand,” but a necessary issue because “finance is the part where a lot of brand founders struggle,” Venkatesh said.
“I was delighted to have two VC women on the advisory board,” she added.
Priyanka Ganjoo, founder of Kulfi Beauty, and Alice Lin Glover and Marie Kouadio Amouzame, co-founders of Eadem, all highlighted that Twine’s presentation on finance and budgeting was an exceptional session during the bootcamp.
“To be able to [hear Twine] how she thought about finance, how she thought about her first hire in finance, how she structures her team, brought that new level of insight to advice that you could probably find in other places, ”said Ganjoo.
For Amouzame, Twine’s ideas on building an economically stable business were invaluable.
“When you talk about beauty and the founders of beauty you always hear really glamorous stories about product development, the shades and all the shiny things we do, but finance is something we all need to at least understand or master, ”she said. “Building a financially healthy business from the start is very valuable. I don’t think any other accelerator teaches this.
Alice Lin Glover and Marie Kouadio Amouzame, co-founders of Eadem.
Courtesy of Sephora
Glover added, “You don’t have to know it all and have millions of dollars and figure it all out.”
After the bootcamp came an Investor Forum Day, during which brand founders were invited to prepare an investor brief for comments from Gurwitch, Williams, Hadley Mullin, partner at TSG Consumer, and Josh McDowell, partner at Main Post Partners.
And now, as Sephora prepares to launch the remaining seven brands, come the discussions about merchandising – a hot topic that has sparked debate following a growing awareness of the history of beauty retailers in terms of merchandising. segregation of black-owned brands in stores.
Sephora has a Black Owned Beauty Brands tab on its website. The retailer indicated a more in-depth look at its in-store merchandising practices when it published its study “Racial Bias in Retail” topped this year. Sephora appears to take direct inspiration from the brand’s founders, according to Venkatesh.
“This is an area full of heated debate,” Venkatesh said. “Some think you should put [all brands] together so that people can find [them], and it shows commitment. Some people, including brands, for that matter, don’t agree with this approach. They think it should be customer centric. And some brand founders are sensitive to being grouped together based on their race.
“In prestige, it’s difficult to bring together brands,” she continues. “A Danessa Myricks is very different from a Rose Ingleton. Our approach to in-store merchandising is that we don’t bundle them. We put them in a way that we believe is fair to the consumer and to the brand’s story. “
Hot topics, she noted, are in a Next Big Thing in Skin Care wall.
“Honestly, we didn’t think they would be ready for this this year,” Venkatesh said. “We had planned for it to be online, but it was so successful that we made the decision to post it on the wall.”
The retailer’s in-store merchandising approach appears to honor what Ganjoo described as the color founders’ desire not to be seen as a monolith of beauty – a topic that has come up frequently over the past year due to of conversations about the aftermath of George Floyd. murder and more recently the rise in anti-Asian violence.
Priyanka Ganjoo, founder of Kulfi Beauty.
Courtesy of Sephora
There is, Ganjoo noted, great diversity in diversity.
“I like that this year the [Accelerate] program has eight different founders [with] completely different brand stories, completely different brands, ”she said. “It’s just a start, but it’s starting to show how diverse we are and how many different brands can coexist. There is room for everyone. I would like the entire beauty industry to recognize that diversity is not a checkbox, but that there are so many individual brands and stories that can coexist.
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