Brianne West crowdfunded over $200,000 in two weeks last year to fund the expansion of her solid beauty product company, Ethique Limited. That’s her up on the right ringing the bell at the launch of her equity crowdfunding campaign.
Since she crowdfunded, she’s been busy. Really really busy. In fact, so busy she’s almost gotten over her fear of flying. Instead of us telling you about crowdfunding, we thought we’d get Brianne to put it in her own words. Here are a few things that she’s achieved since she went to her crowd:
1) Two weeks [after our campaign closed] we had to change our name as we couldn’t get the trademark in the US. We crowd sourced the name with our new shareholders & customers: Ethique (the name of the company already, but the brand was previously called Sorbet).
2) We created all new branding/packaging and website.
3) We brought on brand ambassadors like Jamie McDell, Makaia Carr and some more exciting ones in the wings…
4) We engaged a new director with extensive experience creating a start up in the industry (Miranda Bond) who also specialises in Digital marketing. [editor note: this is in addition to Brianne’s right hand man, Bryan Pearson, who was already a director of the company alongside Brianne.]
5) We grew our crew. Now we have two new team mates; Margot our Miracle worker (operations) and Moses (Digital Dude) who implements our digital strategy.
6) We’ve prevented 53,000 bottles from being made/disposed of.
We also asked her for some lessons learnt from the campaign
While listening to others with a wealth of experience is important, don’t neglect your inner voice because you are afraid you might be wrong. I’ve learnt that the past couple of months.
Get a dog. You can have the worst day at work but coming home to an ecstatically happy puppy is an instantaneous pick-me-up.
Things will be twice as expensive and take three times as long. (SO MUCH YES to this one.)
Get people who believe in your vision and most of the time the rest will follow.
I still miss the pledge emails. I get ‘you got a new follower’ every now and then- that’s almost as cool.
Here’s a recent blog on the 10 things she’s learned in her ten years as an entrepreneur.
You can purchase her product here, follow them on Facebook here, and and follow her personal twitter account here.
