Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’ve got a beverage in your hand, you’re sitting comfortably on a couch, and you’re ready to learn about how Dianna built a brand that will do almost $20m this year and they run no Meta ads.
Before we dive into today’s newsletter, I wanted to share a guide the Sharma Brands team contributed to alongside Post Pilot, Social Snowball, Kendall Dickieson (social media Kendall) and others. It’s a free guide, you can download it here: Beyond Paid Ads Guide.
Also, how gorgeous is the new Ripple Foods website? Ripple makes plant-based milk and you may have it in your own fridge! The Sharma Brands design team just launched a whole new site for them, combining what was 3 individual sites before. Check it out — RippleFoods.com! If you’re ready to take your own brand’s site to the next level, fill out this form.
Okay, let’s get into today’s newsletter…
In the first episode of Limited Supply’s Season 9, which just came out this past Wednesday, I sat down with Dianna Cohen, who’s the founder of Crown Affair. If you’re pretty involved in DTC, there’s no way you’ve missed Crown Affair as a brand. While they’re maybe not a brand to go search up their ads library (because they don’t run any!), they are absolutely a brand to study from a standpoint of — how do you build a BRAND, not just a product business?
Dianna, like an artist, has nailed the brand identity, the lane she is building in, and just like a good creator brand is an extension of them, Crown Affair feels like an extension of Dianna. The business isn’t more than a few years old and will do close to $20M in revenue this year, without running Facebook ads. It’s all from retail (SEPHORA) and their own DTC website. I had to talk to Dianna about how she did it because I wanted to understand how replicable it is.
In order to understand how Dianna could transcend the brand of Crown Affair, it’s important to understand her background. She interned at several places and her last internship which turned into a full time role was at Into The Gloss (Which was before Glossier was even founded) in 2012. This was the heyday of DTC. She got started in the world of content and commerce in the middle of Everlane, Warby Parker, and Dollar Shave Club’s iconic growth.
From here she went to AWAY Luggage where she was the 8th employee as Head of Partnerships. After Away, Dianna went to start her own brand marketing agency, Levitate. She worked on brand campaigns for Outdoor Voices, Flamingo (Harry’s’ womens brand), Buck Mason, The Wing, and more. She learned what works, what didn’t work, and once you are so deep in it that you have an agency, you’re also able to really understand where the “arbitrage” opportunity is, in that space.
A few years ago I realized that if you want to understand where the arbitrage or the opportunity is within a space, an industry, or a sector… just find someone who is DEEP in that world and ask them. They already have a great understanding of what is possible, because they know the extent of the possibilities. For brand marketing, that was Dianna.
When she was ready for the next chapter, in 2020, she started Crown Affair, a brand all about bringing ritual and love to your hair routine.
In my opinion, Crown Affair is a perfect example of how to build a DTC brand the right way. They have been very capital efficient (they only raised $6.7M to date) and are on track to do $15-18M in topline this year. Because of their business model not being reliant on ads, they are also not donating 30-40% of their raised capital directly to Meta.
For today’s newsletter, I wanted to try out a slightly different format where I keep it more focused on the tactical nuggets that founders can take away from Dianna and how her team built the Crown Affair brand. If you want to listen to our full conversation, you can listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Dianna is someone I’ve been lucky to know for almost 8 years now and it’s been so intriguing and fascinating to watch her build Crown Affair. Everytime I walk into Sephora, I can’t help but feel excited the Crown Affair endcaps!
Okay, now knowing the context, here are some of the nuggets from my conversation with Dianna. I hope some of these can translate to something for your business, but I highly recommend listening to the full conversation — there’s likely a golden nugget for you in there, that I maybe didn’t pick.
It’s okay to start small and scrappy.
Dianna built Crown Affair on nights and weekends while she was also running Levitate. She didn’t go all in until she had enough traction to prove to herself this was a viable path. Honestly, considering most consumer brands don’t make it, it was a wise choice. She had 1 designer, 1 copywriter, and 1 person to help with all things product and formulation.
I love this as a founding team to start your first brand. You don’t need a fancy branding agency, $500K in capital, or a large squad of FTEs to get started. You just need a great product, a V1 brand design, a landing page/website, and a way to sell and fulfill orders. I know founders of billion dollar brands who are doing this as we speak right now. If they are fine being scrappy, you should be too.
In fact, when I think about what second time founders care about most, it’s product innovation or just what makes their product or system so much better to sell in the market, compared to what is already out there. There’s a reason they’re focused on that, and not just getting eyeballs at launch.
Pick a market you want to be in, and find your angle.
Dianna chose hair care because she’s obsessed with the category and making a product that she’d be happy to recommend to her friends. She’s a student of the DTC game and saw a clear whitespace to create a premium hair care brand that was all about doing the fundamentals right. Also, in a world of maximizing margins and accounting for the cost of acquiring customers, sometimes the quality of a fine product goes away. You substitute or completely omit certain materials or ingredients… but Dianna wanted to do the opposite.
She started by creating products that she’d be proud to sell to her friends. I love the framing of, “I’d be proud to recommend or sell this to my friends,” because it sets the bar high for the quality of the products. It was clearly not what I call an, “Excel sheet business.”
Crown Affair also didn’t launch with dozens of products. They picked a wedge and launched with 4 products only. The Brush, The Comb, The Towel, and The Oil. Many people thought they were crazy to launch a hair care brand without a shampoo or conditioner. They did it anyway and it worked.
Speak like yourself, and let consumers join you.
Dianna looked at the market and saw how haircare products were being positioned to her ideal audience today. It was all about achieving perfection, looking like a model, or products that used harsh and negative language around taming, fixing, or managing your hair.
Dianna took the opposite approach and made her brand about the “care” in haircare. She used subtle counter-positioning to go against the trend to make something different. Instead of achieving perfection, Crown Affair is centered around daily routines and rituals, simple and approachable language, and benefits that are kind and positive when talking about taking care and loving your hair. Their language has nothing to do with “taming, managing, or fixing” your look. Instead it’s about slowing down, taking your time, and better care for healthier hair.
In general, I think there is always an opportunity for counter-positioning for all brands. One of the most obvious things any founder can do is look at the status quo of what exists today and try to take the other side of that perspective. It’s similar but not exactly the same as why the David vs. Goliath positioning works so well in marketing.
This gives your brands’ consumers, whether they’re customers or not, that desire to “join” you. The reason people love tagging brands on social media is because it signals to their followers what they stand for, what tax bracket they’re in, how much they care about their hair, etc. Having some sort of counter-positioning opens that opportunity. Does that make sense?
Remember that consumerism is still a form of art.
The Crown Affair brand is simple and elegant. Dianna described their logomark as an art piece. She stayed patient and resisted the urge to follow trends and memes to build her brand. She easily could have hopped on the trend of bright packaging, large blocky text, or gimmicky ads. She could have run countless discounts and increased their revenues at the expense of profit. She didn’t because she knew what she wanted to build and stayed patient over time.
Because of that, today Crown Affair feels like a high-end brand, not just another hair brand.
Embrace retail, especially for acquisition.
Crown Affair has a large presence in Sephora, which has been a major channel for growth. Being in Sephora not only means you’re generating sales, but to be a Sephora brand is a huge piece of social proof even when they sell on their own website.
So many of the most iconic cosmetic and haircare products that exist today are sold through traditional retail stores like Sephora, ULTA, Target, Walmart, MAC, Saks, Nordstrom, and others. Being there is about being where your customers are. I like this because Dianna wasn’t romantic about being 100% DTC. She knew retail was important and prioritized it early on.
When you look at successful CPG exits, especially lately, a many of them had launched DTC first, then tested with 1-2 [potentially exclusive] retailers. Once that was proven, then they leveraged that as “Meat on the bone” for the acquirer who would come next.
Getting on-the-ground in slower velocity regions.
As they expanded across the US, they got data on which stores were performing and which stores were not. Dianna said that her team now uses the retail data as a kind of war map of where to double down and launch new campaigns.
Some doors in NYC, LA, Texas, etc., have products flying off the shelf. Other areas like SF, Omaha, and Orlando need more work. This is where they strategically focus on marketing to boost volume in those stores by investing in field teams, event marketing in those locations, city-specific campaigns, and partnering with local influencers to drive TOF awareness to those doors.
The interesting callout here was Crown Affair’s first instinct is never to run geo-specific Meta ads. It’s to go and figure out how the locals need to be talked to, in a way that’s contextually relevant to them. That may be events and influencers, but it’ll speak their language. It’s different than just running ad creative you know performs best to certain zip codes.
It can be helpful to build a personal brand, as a founder.
Over the last few years, Dianna built a following on both TikTok and Instagram and she said it’s been incredibly valuable to her business overall. It helps with distribution, hiring, fundraising, and it also gives her a stronger and closer connection to the creators she works with at Crown Affair to grow.
She said that being a creator helps her connect more with the influencer talent because she knows the struggles they share, or the platform challenges going on. Side note — 99% of what creators talk about is what’s working for content, so this checks out heavily.
In her consumers’ feed, Dianna positions herself as “Your no makeup hair care bestie” and actively makes videos using and demonstrating the products from her brand. She also gets a ton of insights from her comments and is building direct 1:1 relationships with her community by engaging with them on social every day.
Lastly… don’t give up.
Dianna said that she’s taken hundreds of investor meetings to raise capital for her brand. The no’s never deterred her and she kept going because she believed in what she was creating. Now they are on track to do almost $20M in topline this year. They are in 75 Sephora stores with endcaps, and have a plan to be in 200 by the end of next year. She’s kept going and I think the brand has an exciting future ahead.
Okay, that’s all for this week! Listen to the episode and let me know what if there’s anything you loved that I didn’t call out here. Now onto some fun stuff…
Oh and be sure to find Dianna on the internet:
Vendor of the Week:
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That's all for this week
I hope today’s email was a fun read — short, sweet, and hopefully it got you thinking about brand marketing a bit differently. Dianna is one of my favorite people to run into. This podcast episode was setup because we ran into each other at the Sporty & Rich store (I know, so NYC of us) and we started chatting about Crown Affair’s growth. Let me know what you think of the podcast and how you liked the format.
Tonight’s Sunday night so that means we have a 9-hour night of sleep forecasted. I hope you have an amazing upcoming week as we move into August, aka Summer Shutdown month in Europe. Get a sweat in, stay hydrated and keep that sleep locked in.
I’ll see you next week!