0:00

Hey guys, it's me, Sean Hayes. I come here

0:02

to you today, not with Smartless' typical celebrity interview,

0:04

but rather to tell you about another podcast interview

0:06

series I'm just really excited about. It's

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called How I Built This with Guy Raz.

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Every week, Guy speaks to an innovator, an

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entrepreneur, or an idealist and breaks down their

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road to success. One of the interesting interviews

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was with Tiffany Masterson, the founder of Drunk

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Elephant. It's a skincare brand. I found it

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really interesting. Here's a little bit of that

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story. Tiffany Masterson was a stay-at-home mom of

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four in her forties when a passion for

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skincare drove her to research every ingredient out

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there and its proven effect on the skin.

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With no formal training and very little business

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experience, she worked tirelessly to develop her first

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line of products and launched Drunk Elephant in

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2013. Just six years later, Drunk

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Elephant was the top-selling brand in Sephora's across the

0:41

country. If this conversation doesn't inspire you, I don't

0:43

know what will. I'm about to play a clip

0:45

from this episode of How I Built This. To

0:47

hear the rest of the episode and much more

0:49

of How I Built This, follow the show on

0:52

the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00

So what would you do? You would just buy

1:02

a bunch of skincare products or you would buy

1:05

individual ingredients, oils.

1:07

Never ingredients. I never was the one, I'm not the

1:09

one who made products in my kitchen. I

1:12

wanted to read and understand like

1:14

toxicity levels of ingredients. And yeah,

1:17

I remember buying like this avocado

1:19

oil and I got it, I used

1:21

it. I broke out exactly

1:23

like 10 days later and

1:25

I looked at the ingredient deck and sure

1:27

enough, there's essential oils in there. But I

1:30

didn't recognize that to be essential is because they

1:32

came under different names. So that would force me to

1:34

then learn the all the names of essential oils. They

1:36

can, things go by different names. And

1:38

I couldn't understand why everybody was using them. So

1:40

this is like a research phase, right? Basically, were

1:42

you thinking, I'm going to come up with a

1:45

basically a new bar or I'm

1:47

eventually going to come up with like a cream cleanser

1:49

or did you not quite know yet at that point?

1:52

I wanted a line that was formulated with ingredients

1:54

that I chose and that I could be in

1:56

control of and that I would know what was

1:58

in the product. And then I... I also wanted

2:00

a solution like I could say, look,

2:02

you don't have to go out and buy a serum

2:04

or a sunscreen or this or that. This is the

2:07

whole thing right here. And you

2:09

don't have to worry about ingredients affecting

2:11

your skin from another product because I'm

2:13

not gonna use the ingredients that could

2:15

potentially trigger a breakout in your skin.

2:17

But then Charles, my brother-in-law, wanted me

2:19

to make a bar because he

2:21

happened to love the bar. So that'll be

2:23

the cleanser portion of the line. And then

2:25

I'll make a vitamin C and I'll make

2:27

a sunscreen and I'll make an acid so

2:30

I would go read dermatologist articles and

2:33

I just read so much and tried

2:35

to teach myself about what this line

2:37

would need. And then a lot

2:39

of what I would want as a consumer. How

2:42

would you keep track of all these things?

2:44

Like, did you have like a journal that

2:46

you would write things by hand or did

2:48

you have like a spreadsheet? I had a

2:50

spreadsheet on a computer. Were you intuitively

2:53

naturally like a spreadsheet, P&L

2:56

kind of numbers organizational

2:58

person or? I'm

3:00

not, I hate it. I'll tell you, I don't think

3:03

I have those skills so much even today. When you

3:05

show me a spreadsheet, my brain kind of goes numb.

3:08

But I'll tell you, when you're passionate about something

3:10

and when it's all you think and care about at

3:13

the time in the moment, yeah, I mean, I opened

3:15

up an Excel spreadsheet. I may not have really

3:17

known totally how to use

3:19

it completely but I knew how to fill in

3:21

four squares and I was excited to see this

3:23

kind of come to life. You'd

3:26

mentioned to me on the phone that you wouldn't have been able

3:28

to do this in your 20s, that you actually had to do

3:30

this in your 40s. And

3:33

that makes a lot of sense to me because as a

3:36

mother or father, you know, to

3:39

raise children requires a lot

3:41

of organizational skills. It

3:43

requires a lot of like making

3:46

sure the calendar, like the school events and

3:48

the sports and getting this kid there and

3:50

that kid there. And so I

3:52

was thinking about your sort of methodical

3:54

approach to ingredients, spreadsheets and writing things

3:56

down like, but I have to

3:59

imagine that just raising four. kids also

4:01

gave you skills that enabled

4:04

you to kind of think very

4:06

methodically like spreadsheets, calendars, like lists.

4:08

Is that right? You don't have a

4:10

choice. You don't have a choice and I'm not like

4:12

that. I was never like that. In fact, I didn't

4:14

think of myself as anybody that would be able to

4:17

raise or handle kids. I remember thinking

4:19

I could probably could handle two but I ended

4:21

up just you do it. You do what you got

4:23

to do. Yeah and what would you

4:26

put on the spreadsheet? Like the name of the ingredient

4:28

and I would take a product just

4:30

to write and I look at the ingredient

4:32

deck and then I would list out all

4:34

the ingredients and then I would had three

4:36

categories you know it's like the way I

4:38

understood it as a consumer here's three categories

4:40

these these ingredients are there for skin it's

4:43

a this is a humectant or an oil

4:45

or a cell communicating ingredient you know the

4:47

second category were ingredients that were there for

4:49

the formulation itself that you have to have

4:52

a preservative a stabilizer

4:55

things that help the product do what it's

4:57

supposed to do and keep it they keep

4:59

it safe yeah and then the third bucket

5:01

that were I used the word suspicious I'm

5:04

a suspicious person like why are these in there well

5:07

there's only one answer they're in there

5:09

that either make the product smell pretty

5:11

look pretty feel pretty there's dyes there's

5:13

fragrance there's essential oils there

5:15

are silicones that create this silky feel yeah

5:18

but a lot of ingredients can't get through

5:20

silicone so why are they there and drying

5:22

alcohol why is that there it damages your

5:24

skin straight up damages your skin chemical

5:27

screens every time I used a chemical sunscreen

5:29

I broke out so it's physical better like

5:31

mineral so that's what I was thinking like

5:33

at the time like these are ingredients that

5:35

don't need to be there these are ingredients

5:38

that do yeah I'd love to do something

5:40

with ingredients only ingredients that need to be

5:42

there and let it let the formulation

5:44

come out like it will you keep mentioning essential

5:46

oils and I'm like not essential oils would

5:49

get like or or is all

5:51

of it a problem or suspicious well

5:54

they do have some good things about

5:56

them but the cons outweigh the pros

5:58

yeah and the good things

6:00

about essential oils, you could say those

6:02

same good things about non-fragrant plant oils.

6:05

Right. Like marula oil or apricot oil.

6:07

Okay, so let's talk about one of those

6:09

oils, marula oil. Yes, made from the

6:11

seed or the pep of the marula fruit. Is

6:14

that an edible fruit? Yes,

6:16

it is. And there's a

6:18

liqueur called amarula, it's from South Africa. Okay.

6:21

And at the time, the kind of it

6:23

oil was argan oil. And

6:25

I remember thinking like, this could be a good moment

6:28

to introduce a new oil out there. Not a lot

6:30

of people had heard of marula. It was out there,

6:32

but it wasn't like, very well

6:34

known and very popular. I remember the people around me

6:36

had never heard of it. I love the way it

6:39

felt, it absorbed really easily

6:41

into my hand. One of the things that was

6:43

important to me for whatever reason was adorability and

6:46

not sitting on top of the skin. So a lot of

6:48

the products I used in the past sort of sat on top

6:50

of my skin. So marula

6:53

oil, you sort of land on

6:55

this ingredient because you're looking for

6:58

something that could kind of be the anchor

7:01

for at least one, maybe all

7:03

the products in the line. And this

7:06

to you felt like it

7:08

could be the one, marula oil. Let's talk

7:10

about the name. Because obviously

7:13

marula oil is a key ingredient, was going

7:15

to be a key ingredient that comes from

7:17

a tree that with fruits, I think they're

7:19

a little bit like loquats maybe, they

7:22

grow in Africa. Right. And the name,

7:24

trunk elephant, where does that come from? So

7:27

I'd been searching for a name and

7:30

I'm pretty shy. I didn't really see

7:32

myself calling it Tiffany Masterson. And at

7:36

the time I looked around at brands,

7:38

it's like doctors and French names and

7:41

I just felt like what am I gonna call this? So

7:43

marula oil was what I wanted to use as the

7:45

moisturizer. And so this oil

7:48

felt great. I went home, I googled it and

7:50

a video came up of animals

7:52

in South Africa eating marula fruit off

7:54

the ground, fermented and they were

7:56

like stumbling around. So the implication

7:58

was they get they eat them. fermented fruit, they

8:00

get tipsy. Probably not

8:02

true. Probably

8:04

impossible, but still it was... They're

8:07

getting drunk off fermented marula fruit, basically.

8:09

Exactly. Drunk elephants. Yes.

8:11

And so I remember thinking, well,

8:13

this is kind of my personality. Yeah. Should

8:16

I call it drunk elephant? When you went to

8:18

friends and you're like drunk elephant, where most of them are

8:20

like, yeah, that's cute. Or were they like, hmm, this is

8:22

a little weird. My best friend said, no way.

8:25

She took me out to get pizza and she was like, I got to tell

8:27

you, I hate it. I don't

8:29

like it. She changed her mind quickly

8:31

though. And my mom didn't like it. My grandmother said

8:33

it was the most asinine thing she'd ever heard. Yeah.

8:36

A lot of people said that sounds like a

8:38

bar, pub. Yeah. I mean, were

8:42

there any, I don't know, people who were like,

8:44

what? The result is you're not going to sell

8:46

this product. Like any professionals or people in the

8:48

industry that you consulted with? Yes. I

8:50

hired a... So in 2013, when

8:52

I launched the line on

8:54

my own website in Houston, actually, August

8:57

15th, 2013, I hired

8:59

this big fancy publicist in New York and I was

9:01

super excited to work with them. And she actually

9:03

asked me to put together a focus group. It

9:06

was going to cost me $30,000 to talk about the name. Oh,

9:10

they would convene a focus group. It would cost $30,000

9:12

and you would pay them to find

9:16

out what people thought. Okay. Right. Right.

9:18

And? I knew what they would

9:21

tell me. So I got her a new publicist. Oh,

9:23

you decided not to spend the money because you knew people were going to

9:25

say, I hate the name. I knew. I

9:27

knew what they would say. Oh, and by the way,

9:29

the consultant was Gutty Ranker. I told her, I've

9:31

chosen the name now. And she said, what is that? I said,

9:34

Drunk Elephant. And she said, I'm out. Wow.

9:36

She's like, I'm not into it. I'm not the... She's out. Never

9:39

heard from her again. Wow. You can listen

9:41

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