I Bet Against the $60 Billion Skincare Industry. So Far, I'm Winning.
By Jeffrey Frese
The first time I told someone I was starting a skincare company built on beef tallow, they laughed. Not a polite laugh — a real one. The kind you get when you tell a stranger you're about to launch a perfume scented like wet dog.
I get it. The $60 billion skincare industry has spent decades convincing all of us that good skin requires a fifteen-step routine, a science degree, and a serum that costs more than a tank of gas. The bottle has to glow.
The ingredients have to sound vaguely Swedish. The marketing has to whisper "synthetic peptide complex" in a way that sounds like a compliment.
I went the other direction. Grass-fed tallow. Organic oils. Non-nano zinc oxide. Ingredients my grandmother would recognize. A brand voice that says, out loud, the thing nobody else will: if you wouldn't eat it, don't wear it.
That's how I built Eat My Face.
And it's working — not because I outspent anyone, but because I refused to play their game.
Founder obsession beats venture money.
I am the entire company. Product development, manufacturing relationships, marketing, fulfillment, customer service, the photoshoots, the labels, the website, the ad accounts, the email to the woman who needs to know if our SPF works on a kid with eczema. Me. All of it.
Most founders would tell you that's a problem. That I need to delegate, raise money, "scale." I'd argue the opposite. The reason Eat My Face works is because I'm the one in every decision. Every choice carries my taste, my standards, and my willingness to walk away from anything that doesn't pass the smell test.
Venture capital would have asked me to grow faster, water down the message, add five SKUs the customer didn't ask for, and chase a bigger TAM. I would have shipped a worse product to a wider audience and called it progress.
Bootstrapped, I'm slower. I'm also profitable. And I still own all of it.
Clean isn't a marketing tagline. It's a competitive moat.
Every legacy skincare company is one viral TikTok away from being asked, on camera, what an ingredient in their formula actually does. Most can't answer. They've outsourced their formulation to a chemist who outsourced it to a contract manufacturer who outsourced it to a database of patents written in 1994.
When a customer asks me what's in our moisturizer, I know. I can name every ingredient, what it does, and why it's there. That's not a flex — that's the bare minimum when you're asking someone to put your product on their face.
The brands that survive the next decade are the ones that can answer that question honestly. The ones who can't are going to lose their customers to founders who can.
What I'd tell any woman starting out.
Don't wait for permission. Don't wait for the perfect logo, the perfect partner, the perfect round. Build the thing. Use your own money so it actually has to work. Talk to your customers like they're people, not segments. And for the love of everything — don't sell anything you wouldn't proudly put on your own skin.
The industry will laugh at you. Then they'll watch you eat their lunch.
Connect With Jeffrey
Comments