Niambi Cacchioli has been building Pholk Beauty since 2018 when she launched the line of clean skincare products for people of color from her home in Jersey City, but her the brand’s story starts long before that. Cacchioli grew up in Kentucky at a time when she says, “Most Black folk were green folk.” She adds, “Everybody had a garden, regardless of how much money you made.”
From an early age, Cacchioli learned about the benefits of botanicals, and that they were easy and affordable to incorporate into everything from baths to meals. Now, she says, “Part of what I do is reclaiming the botanicals that the beauty industry already celebrates like hibiscus, aloe, rose, honeysuckle, moringa and really giving these ingredients that are already in the natural beauty aisle their cultural roots.”
A former historian focused on the African diaspora and an aesthetician, Cacchioli’s appreciation for natural ingredients deepened during her graduate studies. She traveled to Iran, Turkey, Egypt, India, France, Morocco and the United Kingdom, and often visited local markets and apothecaries. “I would see artisans selling holistic remedies like I grew up with, and it was so wonderful that, even if I didn’t speak the language, there was that connection through not only the ingredients, but also the textures and the uses,” she says. “And so I began to think of that as Pholk beauty, which is a mixture of taking the memory of beauty traditions and, then, adapting it to what you could find locally.”
Pholk currently sources collards and hemp seed oil from a Black-owned farm in Kentucky, hibiscus seed oil from Senegal, okra seed oil from Georgia, and moringa oil from Ghana. Cacchioli creates what she calls soul food for the skin with the ingredients. “It’s a love letter to the botanicals and the beauty of wisdom that Black folk across the African diaspora have infused in the globe,” she says.
Cacchioli’s mission is being recognized by the broader beauty industry. It recently beat out 11 other brands to win Tower 28 Clean Beauty Summer School’s 2021 pitch competition. As a result, Pholk will receive a $10,000 grant from the New Voices Foundation, $20,000 worth of services from retail strategy consultancy Headkount, a service retainer worth $12,000 from public relations and content strategy agency Six One, and $10,000 worth of legal services from Weinberg Gonser LLP. Cacchioli plans to put the money toward sampling and hiring a copywriter. She says, “I’m plant-obsessed and shop by ingredients, but I realize that we need to make it easier for women with melanin-rich skin to understand how our ingredients help them achieve their glow goals.”
Participating in the pitch competition and gaining mentorship prompted Cacchioli to ponder the future of Pholk. She shares that future includes fundraising. “I’m working with a financing strategist to think through low-interest lending options and raising my first round of friends and family,” she says. “Pholk is set on a path of a 75% revenue increase YoY, and that type of growth will require an angel investor in the next year.” She also shares that the brand went from grossing $30,000 in 2019 to $270,000 in 2020. It’s on track to reach $450,000 in 2021 revenues.
Niambi Cacchioli has been building out Pholk Beauty since 2018 when she launched her line of clean skincare products for people of color from her home in Jersey City.
In the early days of Pholk, in-person interactions were key sales drivers. “I would do a lot of high foot-traffic shopping venues like Afropunk in Brooklyn or Essence beauty carnival, and that was great because it allowed me to talk to thousands of women one on one,” says Cacchioli. “Those conversations were so important to me and, as an aesthetician, it was easy for me to match our skincare products with a person’s skincare needs because I could see their skin and do a very quick analysis based on the questions that I would ask them.” She moved away from in-person interactions in part to establish a better work-life balance for herself. “I wanted to automate some of our selling because, while I love our customers, I also was so tired,” says Cacchioli. “It’s hard to scale your capacity when it’s just you and a couple of other sales associates.”
Cacchioli had already begun shifting to digital and engaging in conversations with retailers when the pandemic hit. Pholk’s direct-to-consumer revenues increased 20X from May to August of last year amid calls for support of Black-owned businesses. Cacchioli estimates Pholk was featured in 90% of the lists promoting Black-owned beauty brands that were circulated following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. Pholk’s in-house manufacturing helped the brand fulfill orders as many brands were struggling to do so.
Cacchioli has discovered she can relate to customers through a screen. “I can still have those intimate conversations with Black and brown women by using our social platform, IG Lives, the DMs, the comments. We added Zoom one-on-one skin consoles,” she says. “We took our expertise at relating to our customers, and we translated it. There’s been so much growth over the last year because we really leaned into connecting with our Pholk fam.”
Wholesale account conversations Cacchioli had pre-pandemic picked up after Pholk’s surge in sales. Today, the brand is available at Credo, Goop and Urban Outfitters. In addition, it’s gearing up for a launch at Thirteen Lune’s outposts inside J.C. Penney. “As an emerging brand often sought out by retailers, I quickly learned that getting the PO is just the beginning of a very steep learning curve,” says Cacchioli. “Having a safe environment where I could ask questions from both our cohort, our mentors, and the industry instructors helped me troubleshoot some of the growing pains that Pholk was experiencing.”
“My goal is to be a part of a movement that recognizes [melanin beauty] as a beauty category in the same way that anti-aging and textured hair have become.”
She brought on growth strategist Josanta Gray Emegano, who’s guided the brands Beauty Bakerie and Coloured Raine, to assist with cash flow and fulfilling large purchase orders. “We have so many questions,” says Cacchioli. “For me, getting rid of the statement, ‘I should know this,’ has been very helpful because there are just things that I really don’t.” She’s also brought on shipping, social media and press outreach team members. “At the beginning of 2020, I was definitely a solopreneur and, whenever I did bring someone else in to assist or support what I’m doing, I would often take the work right back,” says Cacchioli. “Assembling a team was really for me the hardest because there were some parts of the business that I just had to let go of.”
Circling back to the pitch competition, Cacchioli says the best insight her mentor, Kendra Kolb Butler, founder of Alpyn Beauty, gave her was to link Pholk’s botanical ingredients and its aim to serve women of color. That advice served as the framework for her 10-minute pitch presentation. “There was a moment when I was speaking that everyone in the virtual room was nodding all at once, and I felt I was building a community that could move my business forward,” she reflects. “Winning this competition helped me believe that the feeling from that was real.”
Cacchioli adds, “My goal is to be a part of a movement that recognizes [melanin beauty] as a beauty category in the same way that anti-aging and textured hair have become. We’re becoming even more explicit about what melanin is [and] what ingredients work with melanin-rich skin because I find that sometimes with brands that emerge from a certain subculture, when they go into more mainstream markets, they lose a little bit of that, and I think, for us, we’ve decided we’re going to really triple down on that because we feel like there’s so much education that needs to happen to care for melanin-rich skin—and we’ve only just started.”
Source link : https://www.beautyindependent.com/clean-beauty-summer-school-pitch-competition-winner-pholk-fundraising-retail
