AVA & BEC - ULTRA VIOLETTE
ON HOW TO NAVIGATE TENSION IN A CO-FOUNDER RELATIONSHIP AND CREATE A HUMMING TEAM
How do you scale a product-based business internationally without taking on any external investment?
We asked Ava and Bec, co-founders of Ultra Violette - a brand that, in 2019, erupted onto the beauty scene to shake up the sunscreen category. Or as they like to call it – skin screen. It’s the SPF you can wear without hating life. After launching direct to consumer, the brand achieved a cult like status pretty quickly, and is now stocked in Sephora and Adore Beauty with their sights set on overseas.
Ava and Bec have a long history together - they were co-workers in a previous life and fiends for many years so it was a no-brainer that they’d go into business together. We spoke about the ins and outs of their relationship, how they’ve been able to establish themselves so quickly as a category leader, and why they’ve taken the hard road to scale on their own dime.
You’ll learn:
How Ava and Bec designed their product and brand to solve a customer problem
How the two navigate tension and disagreements in their co-founder relationship
Why they advise any founders to budget 4x as much money and time as they think when creating a new product
The important things you should consider if you want to self-fund your business
Why ‘fun’ is a value that they inject into the business and brand each day
How they’ve designed Ultra Violette around their lifestyle, and not the other way around
THE BITS YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS
“We really wanted to solve a problem that a lot of people face every single morning. We all know we have to wear SPF every day, but we couldn’t find one that didn’t make our eyes water or make our skin break out, or one that wasn’t whitening. Ultra Violette was really about creating sun protection that women can wear everyday just like they would a skincare product, and creating a brand that people wanted to engage with and that you’d be proud to have on your bathroom cabinet or in your handbag.”
“In any healthy relationship, there are the points of tension. Like we’re not the same person. As strongly as we disagree on some things, we strongly agree on other things. We want tension in this partnership. We want to be pushing the envelope so that both of us feel uncomfortable. Over time, we’ve learned to communicate with one another about how we feel about certain things. That’s helped guide the tension process, because I know that Ava is like a dog with a bone, and I need to have some really good arguments if I’m going to convince her to change her mind.”
“Be prepared for any product to take 4 times as long and cost 4 times as much as you think. Your first attempt at a product will probably not be right. You might need to change it 3 times. But all that matters is doing whatever it takes to create a product customers want. No matter how long it takes.”
“A couple of things are really enabled us to fund the business ourselves. Firstly, at the beginning, we were laser focused on making sure we had good cost of goods and a high margin product. Secondly, we didn’t invest in unnecessary overheads. We’ve only just moved into a tiny office, we’ve hired only after we’ve rolled our sleeves up and done every single job ourselves. With the right planning and a strong financial team it’s possible to self-fund and grow at pace. ”
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