Nomfundo Njibe – Founder & CEO of Chick Cosmetics

Q: For those who may not know you, how would you describe yourself?

A: I’m a visionary and I’m detail oriented. I love trying new things, creating and introducing new ideas.

Q: What were you doing before founding your beauty brand?

A: I worked as a Training and skills development officer for a gaming company in Durban. Launching a beauty brand is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. However, the largest barrier has been growing a new business with a tiny budget in an overly saturated marketplace.

Q: What inspired the birth of Chick Cosmetics?

A: During a short stay abroad, I ended up losing my makeup bag and found myself in Sephora. I was amazed of how many indie brands are available in other countries. I knew right then I wanted to be a part of this, and the rest is history.

Q: What does your brand’s name represent to you?

A: The name Chick Cosmetics occurred to me while I was walking around London. At the time, I was playing around with abstract words—I wanted to create something that didn’t have a specific definition and that wasn’t too complicated. Ideally, it’d be something light, airy, and quick to say. No fuss. I knew that Chick Cosmetics was the right name when I realized how easy it was to pronounce. It just rolls off the tongue and feels nice to hear out loud.

However, it doesn’t mean anything—the brand, as a whole, embodies the name and meaning. Also, it’s not an acronym, but more of a representation of the community of people who use our products for its functionality and beautiful design.

Q: What birthed your love for the beauty industry?

A: My love for this came natural to me. Being a millennial exposed to the growth of social media only fueled my passion as I was influenced by other brands and how they built communities around their products. It’s such a phenomenon.

Q: What has your entrepreneurial journey been like thus far?

A: It has been challenging and rewarding. The industry has constant newness and fierce competition. You have to create a good product and know your customer better than anybody else. We built a brand based on community so it’s always great to hear what our customers want first.

Q: What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in launching and establishing your beauty line?

A: Launching a start-up is terrifying, and overcoming that fear was definitely one of my greatest challenges. It’s easy to look at many successful businesses out there and not know how much hard work it takes to be who they are.

Funding is our biggest challenge at the moment because we are bootstrapping. Every businessperson knows you’ll need a steady flow of funds, especially in early stages, to turn those ideas into reality. We are one of the fastest growing local beauty brands and it’s crucial for improving our tech, hiring the right people and having a comprehensive marketing strategy to get a foothold in our market. Only 2% of women are funded, and only 0.2% goes to women of color.

Q: What keeps you motivated when you face challenges as an entrepreneur?

A: Being very misrepresented, I’ve always had a lot of conviction and I really work hard, you need to believe in yourself. I don’t have a traditional beauty background nor business school.

What keeps me going is knowing we’ve built something in a cutthroat space where there are a lot of gatekeepers. It’s unexplainable when you know customers love what you created that was a little idea, it works for them and just people advocating for your product by themselves. It’s like our very own cult.

Q: What was the process establishing your brand – from conceptualizing it, production, distribution and marketing?

A: Beyond the basics of registering the company and securing the social handles and researching on beauty production in general, I was lucky to meet my business partner who is a young tech and business focused person who has a nick for modern beauty and has been very helpful with our creative direction, branding and morphing into the socially aware brand we are now.

Building relationships with manufacturers were very essential in our production. We knew what we wanted and what we wanted it to look like. Mostly, our ideas are very under-budgeted and manufacturers won’t help if your order doesn’t reach their minimum quantity. Luckily, I haven’t had any bad experiences. We’ve had some hiccups on production timelines, but that came about more from unforeseen circumstances. It’s best to make sure that you find people with excellent communication within their company structure. By doing so, they’ll be able to relay information and updates as quickly as possible to you. Efficient communication is definitely the key to working with others. I’ve learned that the product development phase is crucial and equally important to marketing and distribution. Every day I’m learning or doing something new that I’ve never done before which is an exciting change of pace.

Being a self-funded startup, we try to keep overheads at a minimum, so most things are done by us especially branding and marketing. We do everything by ourselves, sometimes it’s a bit hard to juggle everything but we’ve made it work. We outsource experts for special tasks like accounting, taxes and fulfilments; this helps us focus mainly on our brand and its image.

Q: You currently distribute through your own online store. Will Chick Cosmetics be available through other online stores and physical outlets in future?

A: Going direct-to-consumer was an easy route for us as for most startup brands too. One of the things we strongly believe, as a customer-centric company, is that we can form the meaningful relationships that we value with our customers through our e-commerce system, something physical retailers won’t do for us. Being able to communicate and engage with our customers across various channels and ensuring that we are delivering the true Chick Cosmetics customer experience we are proud of. At the same time, it’s important for us to reach a larger customer base as online shopping isn’t perfect in this country -- which is costly for a small brand. In the last year we have been lucky to have partnered with large marketplaces like Takealot and Zando to help with our online distribution.

We are also in talks with a few huge physical retailers we can’t shed too much information on at the moment. We are blessed to have these key outlets recognize our hard work and reach out to us. Our social media has helped us to be noticed by a few international stores like Beauty Bridge, H.E.B and Target. We have also been invited to join a few incubation programs overseas.

We’ve definitely gotten our fair share of no’s but have learned from them and have moved onto other opportunities. Overall, I try to keep a positive outlook on these things—if a retailer says no, I believe that it wasn’t meant to be.

Q: Has the rise of social media made entry into the beauty market easier?

A: Yes of course. It’s never been easier to start a brand from your home like we have it now. Most of the digitally native brands we know started from a little blog or a little garage at home and they are some of the most followed and active accounts on social media. These days you need not worry too much about cost of production, hiring a warehouse filled with employees, retaining a PR firm and the traditional launch method. We will never be here if we weren’t fueled by social media.

Q: You’ve leveraged Chick Cosmetics’ notable social following as a marketing tool in promoting the brand. Was that a conscious strategic move and how has that worked for you?

A: Instagram was never a conscious move. Rather since we started every lean, it was our only choice and the best platform to spread brand awareness. Fortunately, we are a very young team and social selling comes naturally to us. There are so many brands in the world and I wanted to create one that’s so desirable and also create temptation around our products. Chick Cosmetics is focused on community, storytelling and engaging with the day to day beauty lover. We found that social gap especially in South Africa and It was easy to see who was engaging with us -- women DMing us, liking our posts, taking pictures of products and tagging us in them, etc. We leverage our influencer and creator relationships; we consider them as family. We have both grown together as a content creating unit, we don’t take that for granted. Lately, we are growing TikTok and Snapchat community because that’s where most of our audience are migrating to- we want to be a close to them as possible. We also create regular playlists on Spotify because we believe a brand shouldn’t only be visual but sonically have an identity.

Q: How important has social media been in connecting with your target demographic?

A: We found our true core demography through social media. Our customer data is diverse. Our products are mainly marketed to young adults specifically millennials and Gen-Z. Most beauty products are not marketed towards the younger generation. Millennials are changing the way consumers purchase their makeup. This group is also increasing the demand for cruelty free and non-toxic makeup, as they are more aware of harmful chemicals in their products than previous generations. The beauty consumer is changing in how they define beauty and demanding an inclusive and authentic image.

Our target consumer is at a time in their life where they are starting to play around with beauty and are slowly figuring out, which is where Chick Cosmetics fits into the role of big sister. A personal bond with the audience is essential as creating the sense of consumer-brand relationship. Our objective was not to create a brand exclusively for one segment of the population, but rather to design a product that would appeal to beauty consumers regardless of their background. Diversity and inclusivity have now become the norm among young audiences, which is why we looked to make it part of our brand DNA from the beginning.

Q: How do you decide which products to develop based on the local market?

A: Each product developed is fully demand-driven, we gather individual customer’s needs and requirements to develop personalized products. Being in the forefront of digitally native beauty and also being local, we get a lot of requests to make products that fit the local market while being clean and modern.

Q: Do you think traditional beauty brands who have long dominated the market will lose market share as more digitally savvy, independent beauty brands such as yours arise?

A: Customers are continuously looking for communities online who share same interests and values. With the rise of social selling, it’s quite easy developing a brand reputation and acquiring new customers and having a direct dialogue with your consumers. Some traditional beauty brands are adjusting to that; those cant is either acquiring brands like us or they will lose market share. Our fair advantage of being a digitally native brand is decision making, transparency and authenticity. Our agility in terms of direct-to-consumer allows us to make products and market them faster than larger competitors, this keeps our customers regularly entertained and surprised. For example, Chick Cosmetics drives customer demand through the release of limited editions and seasonal capsules, something traditional brands can’t do quickly enough because of their extensive decision making and supply chain.

Q: What can we expect from Chick Cosmetics this year?

A: We are focused on growing our skincare line. There has been a major shift in beauty from color cosmetics to skincare. The rise of a more knowledgeable consumer is starting to impact the industry as a whole as consumers are becoming more focused on a skin-first approach to results-driven beauty. Our first skincare products were a success and we want to make more of that. Expect a lot of limited beauty drops as that has become our signature way of releasing products.

Q: Where can we purchase Chick Cosmetics and on which social platforms can we follow you and Chick Cosmetics?

A: You can find our products on chickcosmetics.com for limited launches and exclusives, we are also on Takealot.com, Zando and Dupe Factorie Store in Sandton City Shopping Mall.

We are fifty-thousand plus strong on Instagram our most engaged platform (chick.cosmetics_) , we have presence on Facebook, twitter, TikTok and Spotify as simply @chickcosmetics. We can’t wait for you to be part of our family.

My social media handles:

Instagram @nomfundo_njibe Twitter @NomfundoNjibe