Introduction
In this exclusive interview, we speak with Anne and Kevin, the founders behind Glamnetic, who achieved extraordinary ecommerce growth strategy results. They scaled their business from $1 million to $50 million in annual revenue in just one year. This remarkable growth trajectory demonstrates how a focused ecommerce growth strategy can transform a startup into a market leader in record time. Read on to discover their journey, challenges, and the strategic decisions that fueled their success.
Founder Success Story QnA
How did you get your job and find yourself doing the work you’re doing today?
Anne: I went to UCLA for a pre-med degree, then became a full-time artist for about four years. I was also kind of a micro influencer because I was running my art page and becoming an influencer at the same time. Kevin had another brand and they were gifting me ponytails. They asked me to come and be a model for one of their photo shoots. It wasn’t paid, so initially I was like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to go.” Then I realized I was at a state where I was actually wanting to start my own brand because I felt pretty lonely. I felt like I was stopping being an artist because it wasn’t scalable. With entrepreneurship and having a brand, you can replicate the product, mass produce it and sell it. My creativity was stuck on a canvas, but I couldn’t pay someone else to paint it. That was the reason why I started wanting to start a brand. I was in product development mode, had finished developing my products, and was going to start the brand. Then I met Kevin at the photo shoot, and that’s when he said, “I really want to be part of this, let’s partner up on Glamnetic.” That’s when we became partners.
Kevin: Every day I’m like, “How did I get here in my current job?” But when I backtrack to my career, it all sort of makes sense and comes together. I started in the mail room at the talent agency WME, a huge talent agency in LA. I started on the entertainment side, working with talent for a long time. Then I got really deep in the influencer space, managing really large digital influencers. I parlayed that into the brand space. Like Anne mentioned, I co-owned two other brands in the space. When we linked up, you kind of know when you know from a partner perspective, and that’s when we partnered up.
Can you talk about the product development, manufacturing, and the early stages?
Anne: I had never developed a product before. I fully committed to this idea because I had been obsessed with lashes my entire life. I immigrated here with my mom from Thailand when I was seven, so I was the only Asian person at my school. I always felt like I didn’t quite fit in. Once I got into makeup in my adolescent years, I realized it helped boost my confidence, and lashes were one of the main things that helped with that. I was addicted to lashes – I wore them every day of my life and tried every single type. I saw this wave of magnetic lashes, but when I tried them, I was excited about the concept, but they didn’t work as easily as they should have. You had to align all the magnets perfectly, and they were the type that sandwich your natural lashes in between. I thought, “This needs to be rethought.” The lash styles were thin and plasticky and not flattering. I loved lashes that were longer with more volume, so I was like, “Why can’t lashes have more volume, be more glam, but also be magnetic and easy to apply?” I went down this rabbit hole of doing research online – YouTube, Coursera. I used all the courses online to figure out how to source products and develop products, how to get in touch with manufacturers. I got in touch with a bunch of manufacturers, had 300-plus conversations, hundreds of samples later, and came up with the prototype we launched with. I was like, “Take a full glam lash and glue five magnets on it.” The manufacturer was like, “We’ve never done that before.” It was very technical, a lot of trial and error to come up with the final product.
Kevin: It was a lot of outreach on Anne’s part to all the different manufacturers and coordinating with lots of samples back and forth to get this thing into existence.
How long did product development take?
Anne: It took a year because nothing like that was on Alibaba or anywhere. Magnetic lashes were glam and had multiple magnets. A lot of them were really thin and plastic looking. I never understood why they hadn’t progressed to the next level of looking like a full normal strip lash. I was confused why that wasn’t out on the market. When we came out with five styles that were pretty glam, people were shocked. They were like, “Wow, and it actually works.” That was when I thought, “Oh, this thing has legs, let’s keep launching more styles.” I was so scared that this was going to end tomorrow because it was crazy what was happening. As a founder, when you start getting momentum, you have to keep working 24/7 to keep it going.
Kevin: The other thing that really lent itself well to the product development process was Anne’s artistic background. Anne being an artist was a big benefit because she took the best of being an artist and creating something and threw that into creating product. What came out was a much higher quality, unique, innovative product that hadn’t been on the market before. You have to lead with a solid product if you want to get scale.
What did the pre-launch look like?
Anne: Launch for me was kind of a joke because there wasn’t that many followers on the actual page. I was like, “This is not going to get much attention. We’re not big at all, no one knows us. Let’s just get it out there so I can start building.” That was my mentality. I didn’t really think that out of the gate it was going to be a success. I knew it was going to be a grind because I didn’t have a big audience. I didn’t put a lot of pressure on myself to make launch perfect. I was like, “Let’s just get it out and say it’s launched so Shopify can start getting money.” Then I was like, “Okay, let’s grind it out, keep posting stories every day, keep outreaching to people to get followers, start turning on ads, collecting email addresses.” I was reading about the things you should be doing as a brand. Once we started really getting ads going and getting gifting on the influencer side going, that’s when we started seeing the snowball effect of the growth.
Kevin: In the beginning, we were religiously DMing every single customer and turned DM into a sales prospecting channel. If someone is following you, that’s a warm lead. If you DM them, it becomes even warmer. You can converse and assist and close via DM, which doesn’t cost any acquisition costs. Then we layered in ads that Anne mentioned, found her first ads because we didn’t have anyone else to shoot content. Shooting the content as the founder first worked really well for us. Then we moved into gifting, and now we have much more built-out teams across the board.
What advice would you give to someone looking to enter a crowded market?
Anne: You have to figure out what is your actual selling point that’s going to differentiate yourself from other competitors. For us, the main distinction between us and other lash brands was the innovation behind the lashes where the liners are magnetic and the lashes magnetize to the liner. That part was mind-blowing. Every time I showed or talked about that, people were mind-blown. You need to have that product that blows people’s minds, that “wow” factor of “I need that in my life.” Even for services, how are you mind-blowingly better than the service next to you? What is that distinctive quality that other people don’t have? As people enter our space, what distinguishes us is the amount of lashes we have – almost 100 lashes now, which is the most on the market. The quality of lashes, liner quality, and the power are way better than any out there. The branding and community, which is proprietary to the brand, is really strong. That comes from constant nurturing – me showing my face every single day and having that presence, like Huda, always being out there and talking to the audience so they get to know you and your story.
Kevin: You obviously have to lead with a unique value proposition, but before that, you need to know it’s really hard and it’s going to be a grind. None of this is easy. If you’re going to enter a category that’s crowded, you should know going in, even with a unique value prop and differentiator, it’s really hard. Be mentally prepared for that. The community and brand piece makes it bigger than the product and turns it into a brand. You have to have a high-quality product and then have the community to run in lockstep. You need to differentiate through community to lean heavy into a saturated market.
Anne: Timing is super important and often overlooked. For me, the timing was perfect, going into the market right after the sandwiching type of magnetic lashes were phasing out. I realized the idea of using magnets was genius, but it wasn’t executed properly. Seeing that gap is really important. Have a discerning eye around the market you’re entering and see the opportunity. Figs, for example, with scrubs – they saw there were no fashionable big brands around scrubs, so they rethought scrubs and made them modern. What is the gap that’s not there, and how can you execute in a high-quality way? Execution is key because everyone can have an idea, but execution is a whole other thing. That’s what you’re spending all your time and years doing.
What are common mistakes new e-commerce founders make?
Anne: Thinking everything needs to be perfect. You just have to get the thing launched and go and iterate from there. You can’t make it too perfect. That would be the number one thing – get the thing up and running, get it launched, see the response, take feedback, test, and go. If you’re always trying to wait until it’s perfect, it’s never going to launch. Another point is a lot of new business owners don’t know how to optimize or A/B test. That’s the game in e-commerce and any business – continually optimizing every single aspect. Our website is a never-ending project of optimization. Every channel – email marketing, SMS marketing – could always be better. That’s why we’ve grown so quickly, because Kevin and I are obsessed with improving every channel. How can we be better? How can we make our culture better? How do we improve our employees? Always thinking about that because your competition probably isn’t. If someone’s obsessed with improvement 24/7, you’re going to improve. Even one percent improvement each day compounds to 365 percent over the entire year. That’s a lot of compounding. Using the law of compounding, especially when you have more employees – if each person improves one percent, it just keeps adding and adding, but only if you have the idea that you always want to improve.
Kevin: It’s easier than ever to start a brand, but harder than ever to scale it. Everyone’s like, “I want to own a brand, it’s cool and fun.” There are a lot of fun things, but also a lot of really hard things. If you go into it thinking it’s going to be laid back, like drop shipping, that’s a big mistake. It’s going to be a grind, and you have to work really hard. Having the right mindset is the other big piece because you get what you put into it.
Anne: It’s really easy to make money doing anything online nowadays, but a litmus test I use is: when you go to work every day, do you want to keep working the whole time and never stop? For me, I kept finding excuses not to stop working. I always wanted to work. When someone was like, “Do you want to go to lunch?” I was like, “No, I want to work.” That’s when I realized things had changed. When I was an artist, I found every excuse not to paint. When I became an entrepreneur, I found every excuse not to stop working. I was like, “Oh, this is going to be successful because I’m so passionate about it.” I felt like I would die for the business and be cool with that. I’d never been in love like that ever. I wouldn’t stop until you find that one thing that makes you feel alive, because that’s going to make you an anomaly in terms of success.
What channels are working for you right now?
Kevin: Everything. We’ve got all the usual suspects down. We’re at scale on Facebook and Instagram. Every brand’s working through the iOS updates. We’re running YouTube, getting better at YouTube content. We’ve got Google, Snapchat, TikTok. The issue with Snapchat and TikTok is it’s hard to get scale like you get on the other platforms. But at our scale, you need to be everywhere. We’re doing direct mail, outdoor campaigns. We work heavily with influencers from a gifting perspective and paid partnerships. Obviously email, SMS, messenger. You literally have to have everything. Then when you think you have enough, there’s already three new things where the space is going. We need to be ahead. Anne and I are always looking for the next thing to layer into the business. It’s like this living breathing organism – once you get one thing set up, you bring in the next, plug it into the system, and keep iterating and scaling it.
Anne: There’s definitely not one secret winner channel. That mentality probably worked in the early 2000s but not now. In 2021, competition has increased, the market’s gotten saturated. You see that in the increase in CPMs. After quarantine ended, all these new brands are starting to market, so CPMs are going up across everything – Facebook, Instagram, even TikTok. Every channel has gotten saturated, so you have to layer in a little bit of everything to give yourself incremental revenue. It takes all of it. There are also the little things that add up. We have a filter on Instagram with a try-on lash filter. That doesn’t necessarily equate to direct sales, but it’s an assist to someone coming into our acquisition funnel. Other than price, which is always the number one barrier to entry, for a beauty product, “Will it look good on me?” is probably the next one. How can you layer in 10 different types of things that add up to one really large thing that assists in the conversion process?
Kevin: I think of our brand as an ecosystem. How do you add more animals to that ecosystem to assist in revenue growth? It’s not one big animal making up most of the ecosystem. Some founders are really good at direct response but lack brand or community. On the other side, some are really good at social and branded community but have no idea how to run ads or direct response. How do you merge those two worlds together and create that perfect cohesiveness? That’s what we’re always trying to do.
What’s the process for testing new channels?
Kevin: We’re still getting better at how we analyze this, but we really took a step back and have a checklist: How much scale does it give us if successful? How much does it cost to test? How easy is it to get a test up (how much time)? And maintenance and team member time over time. If you analyze it from that lens – if it can get us to medium to high scale, is low to medium cost to test, and takes low to medium time – then it’s like, let’s take a crack at that. Figure out a quick test, how we measure it, and if it works, scale it. If it doesn’t, maybe try one more time and kill it. If we see something that’s low scale, lots of effort, doesn’t do other things like brand building or community, we probably don’t test it right now and punt on it for later.
Who owns finding new channels? It’s a mix of a few people in the company. We try to empower people and give them autonomy. We let people know it’s okay to make mistakes. Anyone with a good idea can bring it. There’s a lot that comes inbound from services – 80 million new services a day. Some are good, some aren’t. Our head of growth, marketing manager, or even an intern might have a great idea. We’ll listen to anything. You have to be open. I get so many inbound emails from services, so I’ll go through and see which are worth exploring. The Shopify Plus newsletter is great too. It’s really hard being a brand founder today with so many choices in the Shopify economy. You have to have the basics down – email, SMS – but then there are 50 other potential plug-ins. They all look the same, with five competitors of each. It’s a lot of constant assessment. I suggest talking to other smart founders in your network or through blogs to help get answers.
What would you prescribe to someone doing $100k/year who wants to grow to $50 million?
Anne: If you’re not already using all these channels, I would look at that first. See what channels you can run ads through. Instagram and Facebook will probably be the start because they have the most sophisticated tools. If you’re already running through that and not seeing success, look at your product and see what’s wrong with it. A lot of people expect success overnight without making sure their product is amazing. Try to understand in your marketing messages – are you getting across the idea that this product has a special use case that other products don’t? What is that special offering you have that other people don’t? If you get that clearly across, theoretically you should be able to scale way above $100k.
Kevin: To Anne’s point, you have to be a marketer to sell products – get your marketing down. Make sure you have the other side of the house prepared. If you’re going to scale, make sure you have your supply chain in check and organized. Get the ops piece of the business with a decent foundation to build on. It’s never going to be perfect – we were airing stuff in, and it was crazy when scaling that quickly. When you start hiring employees, quickly learn how to become a good manager. Be direct with people but also nurturing. Team building and culture become important. People need to buy into a collective mission. Be clear with the direction you want to take the brand and apply a high level of focus. Get the entire team to buy into that if you want to scale that quickly.
What’s a recent brand you’ve seen where you’ve thought “I wish I made that”?
Anne: Passion Footwear. It’s a heel that turns into a flat. You take off the heel and it converts into a flat. I was like, “Wow, that’s genius.” She was gifting me and I was talking to her on DM. They were on Shark Tank, so I was like, “That’s really genius.”
Kevin: BruMate. It’s drinkware. My buddy is the founder. They scaled that thing – I don’t know what they’re going to do in revenue this year, nine figures probably. He did a great job on the entire brand. And FIGS that Anne mentioned earlier – crowded market in medical apparel, made it cool, awesome brand.
What trait do you believe every entrepreneur needs to find success?
Anne: Mental toughness. My dad’s a sports psychologist, so I think that subconsciously helped me a lot growing up. It’s up, down, up, down, good days, bad days. You have to be mentally prepared and have mental toughness to succeed. And passion – without passion, you’re not going to care about mental toughness or trying to improve. Everything falls to the wayside without passion.
Kevin: Mental toughness. It’s a roller coaster, and you have to be able to weather the storms.
What do you think most people misunderstand when starting an e-commerce brand?
Anne: They think it’s going to be easy. They think it’s going to be successful right after launch, and that’s it. Then they stop working. They don’t understand it’s a constant everyday grind to grow. You’re dedicating your entire life to it. I had zero balance in my life when I first started. 100% of my time was dedicated to Glamnetic. People don’t have that mentality when starting.
Kevin: How important numbers become. In the beginning, you’re ordering 500 units, it costs this, you make it for this. Then you start ordering half a million units, a million units. Your margins, how you negotiate vendor deals – there are two ways to make money in e-commerce: make more revenue and keep costs low. People underestimate how important that side of the business is.
If you could have dinner with any entrepreneur, dead or alive, who would it be and why?
Anne: Elon Musk, obviously. His vision – he’s such a visionary. He thinks of things further ahead than anyone else just by logic. It’s like, “Oh, this makes sense to do,” and he does it even though no one else has. He sticks to his belief 100% and will die and go to the grave for it. I love that mentality. It’s one of the mentalities I try to strive for when running my brand.
Kevin: Jeff Bezos. It’s an insane monster he’s created. I’ve always looked up to everything he’s done. It’s funny that this answer sums up Anne and me and our partnership – how we think slightly differently but similar. Kevin already knows I’m going to say Elon, and I’m going to say Jeff.
Glamnetic Business Stats
Glamnetic’s ecommerce growth strategy led to remarkable business metrics in a short timeframe. The company achieved extraordinary revenue growth by focusing on innovative products and omni-channel marketing. Their business statistics demonstrate how effective their approach to scaling was in the competitive beauty industry.
- Launched in 2019 with initial investment of $5,000-$8,000
- Reached $1 million in revenue in the latter half of 2019
- Scaled to $50 million in annual revenue in 2020
- Grew from 5 initial lash styles to nearly 100 styles
- Started with Anne as the only employee and expanded to a full team
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Initial Launch Year | 2019 |
| Year 1 Revenue (Half Year) | $1,000,000 |
| Year 2 Revenue | $50,000,000 |
| Initial Product Investment | $5,000 – $8,000 |
| Initial Product SKUs | 11 (5 lashes, 2 liners, 4 accessories) |
Glamnetic Method
The ecommerce growth strategy implemented by Glamnetic was built on several key principles that drove their rapid scaling. Their method focused on product innovation, community building, and aggressive marketing across multiple channels.
- Prioritized product innovation to solve real customer problems in the lash industry
- Used founder-led content creation to build authentic connection with audience
- Implemented direct customer engagement through DMs and personalized service
- Layered multiple marketing channels rather than relying on a single source
- Continuously optimized every aspect of the business for incremental improvements
Glamnetic Tools
Glamnetic leveraged various tools and platforms to execute their ecommerce growth strategy effectively. From their website development to their marketing automation, they selected tools that could scale with their rapid growth trajectory.
- Shopify as their core e-commerce platform
- Facebook & Instagram Ads for primary paid acquisition channels
- Email & SMS Marketing platforms for customer retention
- Instagram Filters for virtual try-on experiences
- Klaviyo for advanced email segmentation and automation
Key Notes
The success of Glamnetic’s ecommerce growth strategy provides valuable insights for aspiring entrepreneurs. Their journey highlights important principles that can be applied to any direct-to-consumer brand looking to scale rapidly.
- Product innovation is critical – solve real problems that competitors aren’t addressing
- Founder-led authenticity creates stronger customer connections than polished corporate messaging
- Direct engagement with early customers provides invaluable feedback for improvement
- Mental toughness and passion are essential traits for entrepreneurial success
- Incremental improvements across all business areas compound into significant growth over time
Get Started in Just 5 Steps
Implementing an effective ecommerce growth strategy doesn’t happen overnight, but following these five steps can put you on the path to success similar to Glamnetic’s journey. This framework applies to any product-based business looking to scale rapidly.
- Identify a genuine problem in your market and develop an innovative solution
- Create authentic content and engage directly with your target audience
- Launch with minimum viable product and iterate based on customer feedback
- Systematically test marketing channels and scale what works
- Continuously optimize every aspect of your business for compounding growth
Conclusion
Glamnetic’s journey from $0 to $50 million in annual revenue demonstrates the power of a well-executed ecommerce growth strategy. Anne and Kevin’s success was built on innovative product development, authentic community building, and a relentless focus on optimization across all business areas. Their story shows that with the right product, mindset, and strategic approach, extraordinary growth is possible even in crowded markets. For entrepreneurs looking to scale their own businesses, the key lessons from Glamnetic’s experience include prioritizing product innovation, engaging directly with customers, leveraging multiple marketing channels, and maintaining the mental toughness needed to overcome the inevitable challenges of rapid scaling.