Introduction
In this post, we dive deep into how Erika Geraerts, after co-founding the $20M brand Frank Body, decided to start from zero. We explore her journey on how to start a makeup brand with a strong purpose, the challenges she faced with product development, her unique anti-influencer marketing stance, and the importance of building a community-first business. This is a raw look at walking away from success to build something with lasting value.
Founder Success Story QnA
How did you get your job?
I didn’t save people a lot of money. I think Fluff came about because after being at Frank Body for about three years, I felt like there was something missing. Frank was an incredible place to work; I started with my two best friends and two others, and we learned a lot in that time. But I was super young, so I’d like to think that I’ve changed a lot as a business person. One day I woke up and I didn’t want to go to work, and that was my own job. I thought that that was pretty crazy, so I knew that I had to make a pretty hard choice.
What was the catalyst for you leaving Frank Body?
We were actually seeking investment from an American company at the time, so that was a catalyst for change for me because we were all asked to sign on for five years as co-founders. I had to really look down the barrel at my future, and in a lot of ways, it was a really successful one, but I thought it would be an unhappy one. So I made that call. It was super hard to have that conversation with two girls that I started Frank with, but I had to do it.
What’s the vision for Fluff?
I really want to change the face of the beauty industry, that’s what we like to say, without changing the face of our audience or our customers. What I felt like about two and a half, three years ago was that there were no brands in the beauty industry being responsible for the message that they were putting out there about consumption of makeup and how it was affecting especially young girls and how they saw themselves. There’s a lot of research out there about rising rates of depression, especially amongst teenagers. They’re spending so much time online, and it’s really easy to connect the dots. For a lot of brands who are driven by profit, that is pushing out product after product and telling girls to wear more, whereas we really want to tell girls to feel more comfortable with themselves. Their makeup can be fun, it’s great, but it’s not necessary; it’s just an addition. That’s why we call it fluff culture.
You launched with one product, was that strategic? Can you tell us a little bit about the product and why you chose to launch with that particular product?
I could definitely tell you it was strategic, but we intended to launch with four products. Another big thing for me in the beauty industry is about transparency of ingredients in products. We have a pretty strict blacklist in terms of what we don’t want in our formulations, and one of those things is palm oil, just because it’s harvested incredibly unsustainably. Our biggest problem, however, is that most manufacturers use palm oil in beauty products as a base ingredient. There’s nothing wrong with the ingredient in itself in how it performs, or whether it’s bad for your skin, but just in terms of how it’s harvested. That’s something we’ve had to compete with with our manufacturers, making them understand why we don’t want it in our products. We’ve been able to take it out of our first product, our bronzing powder, and then we’re still working through formulations for mascara and a lip product. Once you take out palm oil, you need to reformulate and find substitute ingredients, and then you still need the product to perform.
To actually manufacture this product, is it going to be quite expensive? Are you manufacturing locally or overseas?
When I first started working on Fluff, I really wanted to work with Australian manufacturers. With Frank Body, we had an incredible manufacturer here in Australia, but cosmetics is a little bit trickier. The best cosmetic manufacturers are actually overseas in Europe. We work with manufacturers in Italy and Germany. Basically, you put a brief out for a product, you get central base formulas to work from. If it’s a mascara, we might find that the best ones come from Italy; eyeliner products might come from Germany. We work from there, make tweaks, add specific care ingredients, or take out ingredients that we don’t like, and then we do a lot of testing.
When you talk about the testing and the formulation, are you doing that here, or are you just going back and forth with the manufacturers?
We talk to them just online at the moment. We’ve gone to Hong Kong for packaging and expos, which is really interesting. Once we develop a really great relationship with the different manufacturers that we’re working with, we’ll go over to see them. A big thing for me is making sure that we’re happy with how they work, their processes, their factories, and how they treat their staff. But again, these sorts of things cost a lot of money and take a lot of time. This is where we’re starting, and we’ll keep going from there.
Are you able to share how much you raised?
Yes. We’ve raised to date about $700,000. I put a fair amount of my own money in after leaving Frank Body, and then I always knew that I wanted to raise because I had really big ambitions for what I wanted this brand to be. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do that without money. With Frank Body, we started that brand with maybe like seven grand because we were making that product by hand at the back of a cafe’s kitchen. It’s not the same with cosmetics; you have minimum order quantities of anywhere between ten and twenty thousand units, so right off the bat you have a lot of costs going into your product development.
Why do you care about this problem so much?
A lot of people have asked me that. As we have developed the brand and the more we looked into it and researched, we were talking to our customers for about 18 months, trying to figure out what their issues with the beauty industry were. The more girls I spoke to, the more I could relate in terms of what they had gone through growing up because I’d been through it at the same age. They have so much more noise in terms of the media that they consume. When I was a teenager, I just essentially had Facebook, and I’m 29. They have all of the noise of Kardashian culture. We can laugh about it and brush it off, but I don’t think we yet even realized the impact that it’s having on consumers or on the mindset of everyone. That’s what I care about: changing this awareness of everyone about makeup and consumption of brands.
Talk to us around the customer development standpoint. What kind of questions are you asking people, and how did you work out this is something that needs to be out there?
We have about a hundred girls that we speak to regularly across everything from our marketing to our product development to our message to our customer service. Any customer touch point, we talk to these girls. One of the biggest things for me was being able to talk to girls face to face, even before we opened this store. We started with my three cousins, who were very much a part of our initial brand development. They were of the age group that we were looking to speak to, and I just asked them to introduce me to a friend, and then again and again. Our biggest thing was that we wanted to discuss beauty with them. We would ask them about their current consumption of beauty products, what products they were using, how often they were replenishing them, how much they were paying, who was buying the products, and where their inspiration came from. We basically just asked them to invite us into their world around beauty and what their relationship was like with makeup.
Is that where you had the idea for the four staple products you want to launch?
Yeah. In terms of our product SKUs, we like to call it a foundation without a foundation. It’s the base of what you might use if you’re going to go out. We’re sort of against foundation products for now just because they have the purpose of covering up, as opposed to just showing who you are.
Talk to me about this influencer piece. Why are you so anti-influencer marketing now, and why wasn’t it a part of your launch strategy?
When we launched Frank Body, that was five years ago. We were, I think, at the forefront of influencer marketing, and it was incredible for us. It was a new concept, and it was very much genuine referrals. It has become a business in itself, and I think that’s one that should be credited. They should make money and be respected. But I think the amount of influencers that are online now and the amount of probably not credible ones has actually tarnished the space as a whole. I still believe in influential people, 100%, but I think it’s a lot more closer in terms of networks and groups. An influential person is my best friend referring a product to me. It’s sitting down with a girl and noticing that her eyelashes look amazing and asking what mascara it’s from. I saw the relationship and the conversations change with influencers over those five years, where it went from them being very curious about the brand to now being very much, “Here’s my rate.” I don’t even know if they care about our product, and I honestly don’t want people posting about our product if they don’t care because we’re so much more than our product.
Talk to me around the launch strategy. How’s it all going, and what would you have changed?
While we launched our website about two months ago, the brand has existed and had a social presence for a lot longer, almost a year. Our first move was really finding girls to talk to and take them on this journey about the brand and the company’s development. We were working on this magazine for maybe 9 to 12 months where we wanted our demographic to create the content for us. Our personality is a mirror, and we want to reflect what these girls are currently doing. We pay girls to create content for us, but it’s more like an early contract or freelancing role. The biggest learning for me would have been somehow knowing how much trouble we would have developing our products. It’s hard when you have one product to offer customers because not everyone needs that. A lip product or mascara would have been a much easier sell. But could we have predicted that after 18 months we’d still be battling with manufacturers to remove palm oil? I don’t know.
What advice would you have for somebody that wants to start a brand that could be recognized and have a strong voice?
The first thing I would say is that it does take time. If you don’t know who your customer is, you won’t know how to speak to them. People avoid spending that time talking to their customers and looking at their whole world. We really carefully studied for a long time how these girls were talking to each other because we knew that’s how they would want a brand to speak to them. They see through all the stuff of brands; they would just know if we were trying to be anything other than us.
When do you plan to be profitable, and how do you know when to focus on profitability versus growth?
It’s so interesting. In the last year, especially the last six months as we’ve had product delays and had to spend more time, you really have to start prioritizing and thinking about where that spend is going. For a brand like us where we want to do a lot of cool things, and cool things cost money, you have to rein it in and decide what is the strongest play. We know that our brand story has to come first; we have to get this message right because this demographic needs to trust us and feel like we get them. If we cut corners, they’ll see through it. We’ve mapped out the timeline to know when we would have to sit down and be like, “Is this resonating or not?” We’re doing a lot of paid spend at the moment to get people to consider the products and the brand, and that is always going to take a long time because we have to tweak our messaging and the visuals.
How long do you think it’s going to take to get to that tipping point or the scale that just blows up?
I’ve always felt that a five-year-old business is still an infant. I would never feel like I could stand and say that I’m an expert until maybe that ten-year mark. I do think that technology has accelerated the growth of businesses. We expect for our message to resonate within a year from launch, but I would say it wouldn’t be till maybe three or four years that I would sit down and be like, “Are we really on to something?” With our investors, we have conversations at that five and seven-year mark discussing what’s the next big move. I would love for Fluff to be around for 20 years.
What have you had to sacrifice to get where you are today?
I think most significantly is two really important friendships that I had made over a long period of time. Making the decision to leave Frank Body affected them, which was hard for everyone. Salary is something I’ve had to sacrifice in putting everything into Fluff, but that’s okay. When I did have a great salary, I wasn’t fulfilled in other ways. Money can only do so much, and now I’m really fulfilled. I love getting up and coming to work every day. I never expected these things to get handed to me on a silver platter; I knew it would be a lot of work and a lot of time, and I enjoy that.
Where’s the best place people can find out more about yourself and your work?
People can find out about Fluff through our website, it’s allfluff.com. I write emails about the process, about building this company, everything from brand strategy to investment to hiring people. People can sign up to my newsletter. Our social is @itsallfluff, that’s the main one. They can also come see our shop, which is in Fitzroy in Melbourne.
Erika Geraerts Business Stats
Erika’s journey with Fluff is a masterclass in purpose-driven brand building. After a successful exit from her previous venture, she secured significant funding to tackle the beauty industry from a new angle. The stats below highlight the foundational investment and the strategic focus on long-term growth over immediate profit.
- Total Funding Raised: $700,000
- Product Development Timeline: 18 months for first product
- Initial Product: Palm oil-free bronzing powder
- Core Team: Led by founder Erika Geraerts
- Manufacturing: Partners in Italy and Germany
- Launch Strategy: Community and content-first approach
| Metric | Detail |
|---|---|
| Total Funding | $700,000 |
| Time to First Product | ~18 Months |
| Initial MOQ | 10,000 – 20,000 units |
| Key Challenge | Product Formulation (Palm Oil-free) |
Erika Geraerts Method
Erika’s method for building Fluff is unconventional in the modern DTC landscape. She prioritizes deep human connection and brand integrity over rapid, transactional growth. Her approach is a slow-burn strategy designed to create a legacy.
- Conducted 18 months of deep customer research before launch.
- Built a community of 100 “first followers” for continuous feedback.
- Co-created content with the target audience to ensure authenticity.
- Rejected traditional influencer marketing in favor of genuine peer referrals.
- Focused on a “brand-first” strategy, trusting that product sales will follow.
- Maintained strict ethical standards, like being palm oil-free, despite manufacturing hurdles.
Erika Geraerts Tools
To bring her vision to life, Erika leverages a global network of specialized partners rather than a simple tech stack. Her “tools” are the expert manufacturers and creative collaborators who share her commitment to quality and ethics.
- Manufacturing Partners: Specialized cosmetic manufacturers in Italy and Germany for product formulation.
- Packaging Sourcing: Attended expos in Hong Kong to find unique and sustainable packaging solutions.
- Content Creation Platform: Her own community of teenage girls, who act as freelance creators.
- Physical Brand Hub: A showroom/shop in Fitzroy, Melbourne, for face-to-face customer interaction.
- Communication Channel: An email newsletter where she documents the raw build process.
Key Notes
Erika’s story is a powerful reminder that success isn’t just about revenue; it’s about impact and intention. Her decision to walk away from a $20M company to start from zero underscores the importance of personal fulfillment and a clear “why”.
- Building a legacy brand takes a long-term vision, often 7-10 years.
- True brand differentiation comes from your values and how you treat your community.
- Sacrifice is often necessary, whether it’s friendships, salary, or short-term gains.
- Product development, especially with ethical constraints, is a major time and capital investment.
- Being “ahead of the curve” can feel lonely, but it’s where true innovation happens.
Get Started in Just 5 Steps
Inspired by Erika’s journey? Here’s how you can start building your own purpose-driven product brand, focusing on creating a strong foundation for long-term success.
- Identify a Meaningful Gap: Find a problem in an industry you’re passionate about that aligns with your values.
- Listen Before You Build: Spend months talking to your target audience. Understand their world, not just their buying habits.
- Define Your Brand’s Soul: Solidify your mission, vision, and the non-negotiable principles that will guide every decision.
- Tackle the Hard Product Problems: Choose to create something truly better or different, even if it means a longer development cycle.
- Build a Community, Not a Customer List: Involve your early fans in the process. Give them a platform and make them partners in your journey.
Conclusion
Erika Geraerts’ path with Fluff is a testament to building a business with soul. Her story teaches us that true entrepreneurship is about more than just financial exits; it’s about the courage to pursue a deeper purpose, the patience to build a community that trusts you, and the resilience to navigate the inevitable challenges of creating something that truly matters. For anyone asking how to start a makeup brand or any purpose-driven company, her journey is an essential blueprint.