The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you byEsther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowersbusiness owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. Welcomeback to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today we arejoined by Niamh Hogan, founder and CEO of Holos Skincare, and we're talkingabout consumer products marketing. Welcome, Niamh.
Thank you very much for having me on.
I'm here as well, just in case.
Yeah, we know you're here. The intro covered that you werehere. Remember.
This is like Vogue and Joanne McNally podcast here you two,fighting with each other.
We are. We're going to fight over who gets to ask you themost questions. So, Niamh, tell us about Holos Skincare. Where did itoriginate? How did it start? What is it about? And then we'll get into themarketing questions.
Yeah, so I suppose I was a natural health therapist, and Iwas using essential oils and plant ingredients in treatments like massage,reflexology. So I was kind of surrounded by these beautiful ingredients, and Ijust got curious about them, really. And I started to I kind of always thoughtessential oils were underused. People liked to smell them, and they made peoplefeel better. I was like, they're underused. They're going to do a little bit ofresearch. So I started researching and learning and then just started dabblingin my kitchen with ingredients, making oils and creams. And then I startedintroducing them to clients. And then my husband is a designer. He was just thehandwritten labels were upsetting him. He was like, can I design labels? Thenhe was like, I think we should put them in boxes. And then he designed boxes.And then it just became this thing. And I was like, that looks like a skincarebrand. And then I started to kind of work on, okay, maybe this could be becausepeople were buying them. I was like, maybe this could be a business. So I spentabout a year and a half, two years putting all the plans together. And then welaunched in 2014. Holos is plant-based skincare. It's all about nourishing skinhealth and helping to prevent the signs of ageing. We're very kind of focusedon skincare as being an extension of health care. And we harness nature,science and consciousness. So we use plant ingredients. We use scientificallyproven, plant active. And then we're also eco conscious, vegan, cruelty free,and always trying to grow our knowledge in that area to be better, a moreconscious brand. That's it in a nutshell.
Oh, well, that's it for today then.
I really appreciate you being here today. No, quiteseriously, as a marketer, I remember when I first started up my business, I wasquite concerned on how I would get out into the market, how people wouldunderstand what I did, where I did it, but you had to become even braver andbolder by having a product, a tangible product that out of literally nowhere,you had to market. What kind of mindset do you approach this with? And wheredid you start?
I'd say mindset, probably insanity. It helps to be a littlebit insane, helps to refuse to listen to other people and be really determined.Yeah, look, it's all been a learning process. When I started out, I hadn't aclue. Social media was there, but it wasn't as heavily used for business as itis now. So it was a lot of going to physical markets. That's kind of you whenyou start out and you do your market research because you find out whetherpeople buy them or not. And then it was just building kind of social mediapresence. It was just getting out and networking, going to talk to people. Itwas like trying everything. And obviously at the beginning, you don't have alot of money either. So I wasted so much money on things like traditional kindof marketing and paying massive money for ads in the top magazines and things like that that got me nowhere, really, or I couldn't measure it. There was noway of measuring if we were actually getting any results from these things. So it's been very much a learning process. A few years ago, we obviously saw that digital was becoming very big. And I find it hard to find somebody that know sall of us, like someone that understands the building of a website and the technical elements and the updating, and then someone that also can do Facebook ads, someone that can create and design and make things look amazing. It's very hard to get one person that can do all of it, like email marketing, the creative, all of that stuff. So I was getting all of these people that were kind of going, yeah, I can do that. But I found out they can only do the tech bit. They can't get our message across. So we actually kind of took everything pretty much in house. We started learning ourselves. So we have a team now that obviously we have our website developer. We have Ava, she does the daily updating of websites, so if there's price changes or discount codes or any thing like that, but she also designs all our MailChimp, she measures all the results from that. She also does all our Facebook Instagram ads. I do the creation, soI create the plan. I create the monthly plan. It's all on a spreadsheet. We know exactly what's going out every single day. We know exactly what campaignsare happening. And then I have a social media person who puts it all up there.So a lot of our business is marketing because we're a brand. And I think westarted out kind of just it started out where it was like, oh, we need to do something, we need to make money and we put up a campaign the next day.There'll be no plan around it. But often they worked very well. Then we werelike, okay, these work, so let's be more strategic about it and have them allplanned out. So there's a lot of people involved in making it all work, butit's nice that we kind of have it all in house, that we can control it. Andthen obviously we need to go out. Particularly with the American market nowit's different. We can do a little bit in house, but because the Americanmarket is things are done a little bit differently. With media in Ireland, youget coverage, you send them some details, some product, and they will put yourproducts in a magazine. In the States it's not that easy because they want toget affiliates and they want to actually make a little bit of money every timethey post something about your brand. So it's a different way of doing things.So we're learning that now and we're working with people in the States to kind ofhelp us in that. So you have to step outside your business as well and ask forhelp.
It's been a real learning curve. Less than ten years. In less than ten years, you're now going for world domination, which is brilliant.But it must also be really hard to do it all yourself because I see on social media that you are the face of Holos, that you are the person who is sampling the product, you're the person showing your daily skincare routine, you're the person who has all the moving parts going on, plus product development, plus planning, plus...
Yeah, look, it is but that's like every founder of a company at the beginning finds himself doing all these things, doing lots and lots of things. And I have a team of the seven of us now, so a lot of the things that I was doing all myself, I do now have other people doing them. So there's a lot more time for planning for me and development. I'm the face on videos and things but I can sit down for a day and record videos and then put them outthere. And then sometimes I go on in real time, say in Instagram stories or whatever, but that doesn't happen every day. It has to be kind of planned outas well. But with a brand, I think nowadays people do like to know the peoplebehind the brand. They like a personality. So that is important. There's pro sand cons to it when people want to deal only with you, say, when they get incontact with us. So if I'm on holidays, I still need to kind of reply to them.So it is a bit of pressure. But at the same time, I do have support in other parts of the business. I'm not physically going on and posting the Instagram posts every day, I just couldn't do it. But at one time I was but it's just every bit you just little bit by bit by bit and I think the more I realised how important all these things were, the more I went, okay, we need to dedicate time to this. I can't be just doing this when I get the time. This needs to be scheduled in and done every day at this time. And that just comes with experience, I suppose, and seeing what works, trying loads of things, failing at loads of things, and then seeing what works and putting all of your resources into that.
Yeah, I know the fact that you've actually put this all into practise has been phenomenal and that's obviously where you've got the successyou have today. But the specific area I wanted to ask was, you've got all these strategies in place, which is what we always encourage people to do, but on a daily basis, maybe daily is a bit of a stretch, but even a weekly basis, a query comes up, there's an issue with the product, maybe there's supply chain issues. How do you convey sort of a more rounded understanding of the problem and pain points that your customers are experiencing whilst still keeping to your strategy as well? I mean, who's the voice? Where's the brand persona for that?
Look, I am a stickler for transparency and honesty and sometimes things go wrong, like it does - supply chain issues, or we run out of one ingredient and that means there's like four products that can't go out, soit usually is. We put those messages out everywhere, basically. If there's something wrong, we're very honest. I would personally go on live or Instagramstories, whatever, we put it on the website, we will put it on our grid, we put them everywhere, we send it out in our email marketing and if it affectsanybody in a negative way that they might be upset about it, we will always compensate in some way. Luckily, we haven't ever had anything terribly big.Actually, we did have a couple of issues at the beginning. Coming up toChristmas, we were short on a product and it was supposed to be in and we were taking orders and it didn't come in. We had all of these orders, but what we did is we sat down, we emailed every one of those customers individually, we put information out everywhere, we put it on the website that it wasn't going to be in stock or delivered until a certain date. And everybody kept ordering, everybody kept ordering it. The people who got in contact were just sounderstanding because people appreciate you being honest and any time there's any issue, anytime there's any, I think people can get very upset if there's aproblem and they're straight away attacking when they contact you. And if you just be kind and say, look, we can fix this, don't worry, we're going to fixthis for you. It changes straight away. Just being honest, being kind, beingdecent always works.
Yeah. And I don't know, you said about having an emailmarketing list. Do you provide affiliate support? Like not support, but links?And if people refer you, if they say to their friends, do they get a discountif they come back and buy more products, what sort of way do you gain morecustomers and retain the ones that you have?
Yeah, that's something that we're working on at the moment,retaining the customers. We do this little, like private discount sometimes toour email list. We put some out for everyone and then sometimes we'll just senda private one. This is only for you guys and people love that. And it's alittle reward for people being loyal to you. And something that we are lookingat is that on a more reward system for referring somebody to you particularly,we're looking at the US. Because we're finding that a lot of our US customersthat are coming to us are actually Irish. So they're being told by their Irishrelations and friends in Ireland. So what we're trying to do at the moment islook at some sort of system that we can reward our Irish customers forintroducing our Americans to our American website and making them just go,look, this is this Irish brand, it's available in the States, it's shipped fromthe States, so it's going to get there really fast. That's an element thatwe're looking at right now because I think it's a great way of getting newcustomers and retaining old ones in one swoop.
Yeah.
So what we've discussed so far is a lot of the problems thatpeople have to overcome when managing their time and their strategy. And whenit comes down to the consumer type area, I guess we're really lucky, Esther andI, because we are service, we don't have to store things in places, we don'thave supply chain issues. Do you have to be a certain type of person to manageall of this, do you think?
Back to the insanity part.
Yes, I think you do. And I think you can learn to be thattype of person as well. I think there's only a certain type of person who willtake on running a business, but often you go into running business not knowingwhat it's going to be like and you learn as you go along. And I think as longas you're willing to learn, you definitely have to be able to keep a cool headbecause I suppose I just have this thing in my head that it's always going towork out. It's always going to work out. And if it doesn't, we'll deal with it.Like, how bad can it be? And we're lucky. It's usually supply chain issues forus that something has shipped. And nowadays shipping is such a massive problem.Like, we're talking shipping gone up 800%. Like if you're shipping from Asiathen Brexit as well as has created more problems. Shipping is way moreexpensive, particularly if you're importing and then things that like withCovid, Brexit, all the big global things that have happened too, the war, thingsthat might have gotten here in 30 days are taking 90 days and you're paying800% more for it. So that is a knock on effect. So we're having to predictmore, increase orders, so we're spending more money. So it definitely is a lotmore pressure. But I suppose if you kind of just sit down and go, look,everybody is feeling this. The entire global economy is struggling with supplychain, with shipping. And I think most people, the consumer understands that ifyou actually communicate these issues, they understand it. There's a lot ofissues, day to day issues that you won't go into because there's no need tothey don't need to know everything. But if it's something that's going toaffect the customer long term, if there's someone who they buy this product andthey buy it monthly, religiously because it keeps their eczema at bay andsuddenly you can't get those ingredients, you're better just to be straight upand honest about it.
That transparency is so important.
It's so, so important and it's always been. And the wholeteam know that we're just extremely transparent and go, look, the reason wedon't have this product is this, this and this. It usually is supply chain.They're the biggest problem at the moment, unfortunately.
So just one more question before we wrap up. The brandstarted ten years ago.
Eight years ago, sorry, about ten years ago planning, Isuppose, and then eight years launched.
I stand corrected - eight years ago. So you test all theproducts on yourself, on your own skin. Does that mean then that your productschange and grow with your skin type or the age of your skin? Do you still havethose products from eight years ago? Do you have for younger? Obviously, skincare is an issue for all, I'm going to go for women here. I know a lot of menalso are starting with the whole skin care thing, but especially women. So I'mgoing out in a limb here and saying that your brand is for women. But is it forall ages or is it just did you niche down into just one specific age range?
No, it is definitely for all ages. But I suppose our biggestmarket would definitely be your 35 to 55. Because I suppose they're the peoplethat really start to kind of go. Oh, skin! Oh God! I need to do something here.But we do have products for younger skin as well. But it is very true that ourproducts have kind of moved as I've gotten older because I'm kind of gone,okay. And the ingredients have got more kind of age targeted and the issuesthat come up with skin health as you age, whether it be inflammation, rosacea,dryness, dehydration, things like that. So those issues become more prominentas you get older. So, yes, we've gotten more intricate with ingredients as thebrand grows. Absolutely, yes. It's like everything is a learning process, thewhole thing. Look at the products, there's a story, even if you look at those.
And you've got to see where the demand is as well. Youlisten to what people are asking for and supply it.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, this has been brilliant. Thank you so much for comingon. Where can people buy from you both either in UK, Ireland, US, all over theworld, where can people buy?
Yeah, so Ireland and Europe, it's holos.ie and then the US,it's holosskincareusa.com.
Does exactly what it says on the tin.
Yeah, brilliant. We hope that everybody has found somethinguseful out of today's podcast and if you do have any questions, or if you wouldlike to, I know I personally have had some of Niamh's products in the past andthey are wonderful. Do check her out and do get in touch, follow her on socialsand just see what she's doing and how she is reaching her markets. That's itfor today, guys. We'll be back next week with another Monday Morning MarketingPodcast. Until then bye bye.