Hey, guys, it's me, Sean Hayes. I come here to you today, not with SmartLust's typical celebrity interview, but rather to tell you about another podcast interview series I'm just really excited about. It's called How I Built This with Guy Raz. Every week, Guy speaks to an innovator, an entrepreneur, or an idealist and breaks down their road to success. One of the interesting interviews was with Tiffany Masterson, the founder of Drunk Elephant. It's a skincare brand. I found it really interesting. Here's a little bit of that story. Tiffany Masterson was a stay-at-home mom of four in her 40s when a passion for skincare drove her to research every ingredient out there and its proven effect on the skin. With no formal training and very little business experience, she would tirelessly develop her first line of products and launched Drunk Elephant in 2013. Just six years later, Drunk Elephant was the top selling brand in Sephora's across the country. If this conversation doesn't inspire you, I don't know what will. I'm about to play a clip from this episode of how I built this. To hear the rest of the episode and much more of how I built this, follow the show on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Wondery.

What would you do? You would just buy a bunch of skincare products or you would buy individual ingredients, oils?

Never ingredients. I never was the one. I'm not the one who made products in my kitchen. I wanted to read and understand, like toxicity levels of ingredients. I remember buying this avocado oil, and I got it, I used it, I broke out exactly like 10 days later, and I looked at the ingredient deck, and sure enough, there's essential oils in there. But I didn't recognize that to be essential. It's because they came under different names. That would force me to then learn all the names of essential oils. Things go by different names, and I couldn't understand why everybody was using them.

This is like a research phase, basically. Were you thinking, I'm going to come up with a Basically a new bar, or I'm eventually going to come up with a cream cleanser, or did you not quite know yet at that point?

I wanted a line that was formulated with ingredients that I chose and that I could be in control of and that I would know what was in the product. Then I also wanted a solution. I could say, Look, you don't have to go out and buy a serum or a sunscreen or this or that. This is the whole thing right here. You don't have to worry about ingredients affecting your skin from another product because I'm not going to use the ingredients that could potentially trigger a breakout in your skin. But then Charles, my brother-in-law, wanted me to make a bar because he happened to love the bar. So that'll be the cleanser portion of the line. And then I'll make a vitamin C, and I'll make a sunscreen, and I'll make an acid and I'll make I would go read dermatologist articles, and I just read so much and tried to teach myself about what this line would need, and then a lot of what I would want as a consumer.

How would you keep track of all these things? Did you have a journal that you would write things by hand, or did you have a spreadsheet?

I had a spreadsheet on a computer.

Were you intuitively, naturally, a spreadsheet, PnL numbers organizational person? I I'm not...

I hate it. I'll tell you, I don't think I have those skills so much, even today. When you show me a spreadsheet, my brain goes numb. But I'll tell you, when you're passionate about something and when it's all you think and care about at the time, in the moment, yeah, I mean, I opened up an Excel spreadsheet. I may not have really known totally how to use it completely, but I knew how to fill in four squares, and I was excited to see this come to life.

You'd mentioned to me on the phone that you wouldn't have been able to do this in your 20s, that you actually had to do this in your 40s. And that makes a lot of sense to me because as a mother or father, to raise children requires a lot of organizational skills. It requires a lot of making sure the calendar, the school events and the sports and getting this kid there and that kid there. And so I was thinking about your methodical approach to ingredients, spreadsheets and writing things down. But I have to imagine that just raising four kids also gave you skills that enabled you to think very methodically, like spreadsheets, calendars, lists.

Is that right? You don't have a choice. You don't have a choice. And I'm not like that. I was never like that. In fact, I didn't think of myself as anybody that would be able to raise or handle kids. I remember thinking I could probably could handle two, but I ended up just, you just do it. You do what you got to do. Yeah.

And what would you put on the spreadsheet? Like the name of the ingredient?

So I would take a product And I look at the ingredient deck, and then I would list out all the ingredients. And then I had three categories. It's like the way I understood it as a consumer. Here's three categories. These ingredients are there for skin. This is a humectant or an oil or a self-communicating ingredient. The second category were ingredients that were there for the formulation itself, that you have to have a preservative, a stabilizer, things that help the product do what it's supposed to do and it keeps it safe. And then the third bucket that I use the word suspicious. I'm a suspicious person. Like, why are these in there? Well, there's only one answer. They're in there that either make the product smell pretty, look pretty, feel pretty. There's dyes, there's fragrance, there's essential oils, there are silicones that create this silky feel. But a lot of ingredients can't get through silicone. So why are they there? And drying alcohol, why is that there? It damages your skin. Straight up, damages your skin. Chemical screens. Every time I use a chemical sunscreen, I broke So it's physical better, like mineral. So that's what I was thinking at the time.

These are ingredients that don't need to be there. These are ingredients that do. I'd love to do something with ingredients, only ingredients that need to be there, and let the formulation come It's not like it will.

You keep mentioning essential oils, and I'm like, God, I thought essential oils were good. Or is all of it a problem or suspicious?

Well, they do have some good things about them, but the cons outweigh the pros. And the good things about essential oils, you can say those same good things about non-fragrant plant oils, like marula oil or apricot oil.

Okay, so let's talk about one of those oils, marula oil.

Yes, made from the seed or the pip of the marula fruit.

Is that an edible fruit?

Yes, it is. And there's a liqueur called amarula. It's from South Africa. Okay. And at the time, the it oil was argan oil. I remember thinking, this could be a good moment to introduce a new oil there. Not a lot of people had heard of Amrula. It was out there, but it wasn't very well known and very popular. I remember the people around me had never heard of it. I love the way it felt. It absorbed really easily into my hand. One of the things that was important to me for whatever reason was absorbability and not sitting on top of the skin. So a lot of the products I used in the past sat on top of my skin.

So Marula oil, you land on this ingredient because you're looking for something that could be the anchor for at least one, maybe all the products in the line. And this, to you, felt like it could be the one, Marula oil. Let's talk about the name because obviously Marula oil is a key ingredient. It was going to be a key ingredient that comes from a tree with fruits. I think they're a little bit like loquats, maybe. They grow in Africa. And the name trunk elephant, where does that come from?

I'd been searching for a name, And I'm pretty shy. I didn't really see myself calling it Tiffany Masterson. And at the time, I looked around at brands. It's like doctors and French names. And I just felt like, What am I going to call this? So marula oil was what I wanted to use as the moisturizer. And so this oil felt great. I went home, I googled it, and a video came up of animals in South Africa eating marula fruit off the ground, fermented, and they were stumbling around. So the implication was they eat the fermented fruit, they get tipsy. Probably not true, probably impossible, but still it was-They're getting drunk off fermented marula fruit, basically. Exactly.

Drunk elephants.

Yes. And so I remember thinking, well, this is my personality. Should I call it drunk elephant?

When you went to friends and you're like, Drunk elephant, were most of them like, Yeah, that's cute, or were they like, Hmm, that's a little weird?

My best friend said, No way. She took me out to get pizza, and she was like, I got to tell you, I hate it. I don't like it. She changed her mind quickly, though. My mom didn't like it. My grandmother said it was the most asinine thing she'd ever heard. Yeah. A lot of people said that sounds like a bar, a pub.

Yeah. I mean, were there any, I don't know, people who were like, Look, the result is you're not going to sell this product? Like any professionals or people in the industry that you consulted with?

Yes. I hired a... So in 2013, when I launched the line on my own website in Houston, actually, August 15th, 2013. Yeah. I hired this fancy publicist in New York, and I was super excited to work with them. And she actually asked me to put together a focus group. It was going to cost me $30,000 to talk about the name.

Oh, they would convene a focus group. It would cost $30,000, and you would pay them to find out what people thought, okay?

Right.

And?

I knew what they would tell me, so I got a new publicist.

Oh, you decided not to spend the money because you knew people were going to say, I hate the name. I knew.

I knew what they would say. Oh, and by the way, the consultant with Gutsy Ranker, I told her, I've chosen the name now. And she said, What is it? I said Drunk Elephant. And she said, I'm out.

Wow. She's like, I'm not into it. I'm not going to- She's out.

Never heard from her again. Wow.

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