Imagine inviting 16 million people to watch live as you launch your first product into the world—a product that might fly off the literal and metaphorical shelves, or, you know, a product that might be a huge flop.
Giving that many eyeballs access to what could be the best or worst day of your professional life would be enough to terrify any entrepreneur. But that’s exactly what beauty influencer Mikayla Nogueira and beauty industry veteran Ani Hadijinian did. The cofounders of POV Beauty, a line of skincare-adjacent products that prep skin for makeup application, sat in a New York city board room last March and watched orders roll in via their Shopify-powered DTC site—right alongside Mikayla’s formidable base of loyal followers.
Mikayla’s online community has been her north star for the five years she’s been posting—the deeply devoted following can’t get enough of her easy-to-follow makeup tutorials and product reviews. Some in her audience have been there since the very beginning of her content career, bearing witness to her pivot from Ulta Beauty employee to influencer to, now, brand founder.
Mikayla’s community inspires much of her content, so it made sense to her to invite them into the development and launch of POV. But Ani, her cofounder, comes from the hypercurated world of luxury beauty—her resume includes stints at Augustinus Bader, Tom Ford, and Bobbi Brown—a corner of the industry where a brand is “always supposed to look a certain way to an audience, and anything outside of perfection is pulled,” she says.
Ani confesses that livestreaming POV’s launch that day in March gave her heart palpitations. “I’m all for being optimistic,” she says, “but generally I like to look at the risks: What if the day doesn’t go as planned? And Mikayla said, ‘Then the day doesn’t go as planned, and that’s okay.’ From my perspective in the world of luxury, it was so refreshing to hear her say that. So I said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
As it turns out, Ani had nothing to worry about. Mikayla’s community showed up in digital droves, and POV raked in $1 million in sales within eight minutes of the site going live. All products sold out shortly thereafter.
“Taking the whole community along with us was such an incredible joy,” Ani says. “You felt them in the room. At the end of the day I was thinking to myself, imagine if you let your history dictate how this day would’ve gone. Imagine what you would’ve lost out on. It’s [a reminder] as a leader to stay curious and learn. Just because it’s been done a certain way doesn’t mean that’s always going to be the playbook. You have to be open to change.”
Here, Ani shares more about community engagement, finding white space in saturated industries, and how founders can turn early failures into future successes.
What initially drew you to Mikayla and her idea for POV Beauty—so much so that you became the brand’s cofounder?
First, she knew in her bones what she wanted to create. The first time we met, one of the things that struck me was how incredibly in-tune she was to the art of makeup and product in general. She sees thousands upon thousands [of products] because of her job as a creator . She knows in an instant what customers want. Makeup artistry isn’t always relatable because it’s so much more advanced than what the customer is doing. But Mikayla’s perspective was that of customer and creator. Her point of view was so focused, it blew my mind.
Second, she was truly invested. A lot of people white-label products by picking something and slapping their name on it. That’s not what she was going to create, which was really important to me. If I’m going to partner with someone, I want that person to be in it 100 percent.
The third piece is her relatability. What she has created she has created on her own. There are two things that stand out about that to me: First, the purely innate drive you must have that will make you stand out from the rest. But also the ability to relate.The best example I can give you is that my teenage daughter is a huge fan of Mikayla’s, and so is my mom, who is 76. My mom didn’t even know I was running this business with Mikayla until she saw a photo of us and said, ‘Why are you with Mikayla?’ My daughter and I were like, ‘How do you know Mikayla?’ You can’t have that kind of generational reach if you aren’t hitting on something that connects human-to-human.
Were you approached by any other celebrity or influencer brands before getting involved with POV Beauty?
Yes, by many. But Mikayla was so distinctly different from anybody else I had met. Having done this for so long, you just know when you’re sitting in front of someone who is so talented at what they do.
Let’s talk white space—every founder’s Holy Grail. POV Beauty offers a curated line of “skin prep” products that sit at the intersection of skincare and makeup, and it’s the first line of its kind to break into the beauty space. Mikayla has said she’d help customers with their skin prep when she was working at Ulta. Was that the inspiration for POV’s positioning and value proposition?
Yes, absolutely. Mikayla understood that nothing exists like POV. [The consumer] takes one [skin prep product] from this brand, one from that brand, and kind of pulls it together. But when you use skin prep products from different brands that aren’t formulated together, they pill when layered.. That’s why Mikayla wanted to make her own line: Each POV product can build on the others, but you can also use them alone. We didn’t see anything like this in the market, so we created it.
What are some of the lessons you’ve learned from risks you took with POV Beauty, especially in this new skin prep space?
The risks are endless in any business, especially when creating a new category, but for us, the biggest risk was product-market fit. Is what we’re producing good enough for people to purchase? Is the price set so that our target customer can afford it? Is our customer in the distribution model or channel we’re in?
When we launched, we said our average order value was going to be between $40-$60, but we were incredibly surprised to see that most started to purchase the $142 set versus a single product. So we knew right off the bat that there was product-market fit, but we saw another opportunity: Not only was [the consumer] ready to engage in the skin prep category, she was ready to dive deep. The set was the first thing we sold out of and very quickly our biggest challenge became managing inventory.
But we were able to take a breath on the first day when we saw the reaction—the market gave us the proof that there was product-market fit. From there it was about building inventory and trying to get more out there as quickly as we could.
Mikayla’s community really showed up for her! I know she dropped a series of “edutainment” videos on social leading up to POV’s launch, which seemed to both ignite her followers and create FOMO around the products. She also gave a few members of her community the chance to win a pretty insane PR gift box. Was that community-first strategy always part of the plan?
The community was always part of it. When we had conversations, her community members always had a seat in the room, and I will credit all of that to Mikayla. She always keeps them top of mind. When we produce events or our now-viral mailers, she is always looking for ways to include our community. Our POV Labs are a great example, where we’re partnering with other brands to bring education into the makeup space. That is all done for her community members. It was never even a consideration that her community wouldn’t be a part of this brand.
What can founders who aren’t in the social media space learn from Mikayla about bringing community into their businesses?
Even if you don’t have a built-in following, if you have a business and customers, that is your community. Reach out to them, have a Slack channel for them, invite them into the product creation, let them have a piece of the process, have them name some of the products. Go back to the customer for the full feedback loop: What’s the next product you want us to launch? Mikayla is constantly doing that within her own community and it’s proven to be magic for our brand.
Mikayla had her community show up for her on launch day. For you, community came in the form of support from the Shopify team. What was it about your partnership with Shopify that made the day go more smoothly?
As an entrepreneur, your biggest enemy is time. There are millions of decisions you have to make. It is so daunting, particularly as you’re trying to figure out what you’re putting your resources against when you’re running against the clock and your bank account. How you optimize resources is incredibly important: You have to know that if you’re going to pass something off to somebody else that they will take you to the finish line because they are experts. Shopify was a trusted source with thousands upon thousands of iterations in creating the best customer experience. And they had the capability to provide a completely customized experience that was 100 percent on brand for us.
The Shopify team became an extension of our team. On the day of the launch, I wasn’t thinking, Is this thing going to break? When you have that sense of comfort going in, it takes so much of the pressure off. Those are the partners that you need. In my past two brands, we had internal teams work off of older platforms. The amount of roadblocks we’d get into, the amount of money we had to pour out to get those resolved, and the lack of integration into what already exists became a block for us to compete. S
hopify allowed us to create a site with easy integrations that allowed us to keep our infrastructure costs lean: After learning that bundles do really well for us, we added the option to build a bundle; we wanted to add subscriptions due to customer feedback, so we integrated with Recharge; we launched TikTok Shop and turned on that integration. I didn’t need to hire a PM, didn’t need an entire engineering team, didn’t need to allocate three months to a sprint dev process. To me, that’s the power of Shopify. As an entrepreneur, I can’t imagine going with somebody else knowing all the other things you have to compete against and compete with.
One of the coolest things about POV’s Shopify partnership was a branded billboard in Times Square. What was it like to see your hard work in what’s maybe the most iconic advertising location in America?
First of all, it was a dream of Mikayla’s to have an outdoor advertisement in Times Square. So when the Shopify team came to us with this opportunity, it was a dream come true., And then to turn it into a moment to spotlight other creators, it was the perfect example of everything we stand for as a brand. The creators came out and there was so much content created about it. It was awesome. The other thing the billboard did was that it legitimized us—it’s no secret that getting one of those screens in Times Square is a big deal. To have that was such a stake in the ground, like we have arrived. It was an incredible partnership with the Shopify team.
POV Beauty has seen huge success since launching in March, including multiple sellouts. But any founder or entrepreneur is bound to encounter a few failures along the way. How can other first-time founders think about reframing their failures into successes?
Failure is going to come in many forms, and you have to be open to it. You can’t get down on yourself and look around to see who to blame. Take the learnings and apply them when the stakes are higher. It’s really about looking at everything you’re doing as a learning experience, whether it’s a launch, a hire, or setting goals. Stay curious about anything that comes your way, and don’t even make room for self-doubt. The only way you’re going to get better is to iterate.
