Nomad Cosmetics has built a brand based on romance, imagination and personalized touches.
Felicia and Antti’s advice for other start-ups
- Find the right business partner
“God bless the people who can be entrepreneurs by themselves, but I am not one of them,” says Felicia. At Nomad, Antti specializes in operations, while Felicia, a former chief marketing officer, offers a wealth of creativity. “The reason why Nomad is working so well is that we have very complementary skills to each other between Felicia and myself,” says Antti.
- Self-fund where possible
Felicia says it’s important for brands to “take the time to grow, but not having investors that you have to worry about.” Being self-funded does start with a significant personal investment, but the freedom it lends you is priceless.
- Get started
Felicia and Antti’s only regret? That they didn’t do it sooner.
Over the past six years, Felicia Rintanen estimates that she’s written more than 30,000 postcards.
But although Rintanen is a keen traveler, none of these postcards were destined for her own friends and family - or sent from far-flung countries. Instead, most were written from the comfort of her Dallas office.
That’s because she and her husband Antti are the co-founders of Nomad Cosmetics, a beauty brand that creates makeup palettes inspired by some of the world’s most exotic locations, from Marrakech to Berlin.
Whenever a package is shipped to a customer, Felicia includes a handwritten postcard with the products to echo the travel theme.
The Rintanens say that personalized touches like this, as well as an evocative storytelling approach, are the keys to the success of the brand, which has experienced solid growth since launch and is on track to increase sales by 40 per cent this year.
“In corporate world, we learned the importance of front-building and storytelling, but what we wanted to create was a brand that had personality and something that people can relate to, to get to know, and be their friend, versus just selling product,” says Felicia.
A lean approach
For the Rintanens, Nomad Cosmetics combines their two passions – beauty and travel. They launched the brand in in 2015, after spending decades working for international brands like Max Factor (where they first met).
“We wanted to leave behind that bureaucracy from the bigger companies that we’d worked with, we wanted to be small and nimble and be able to make quick decisions. And a part of that is having a lean organization.”
While the production of the products – which are cruelty-free and without parabens, phthalates, or mineral oils – is based in the Guangzhou district of China, the rest of the business responsibilities are shared between Felicia and Antti.
From social media to influencer marketing, product development and fulfillment, Felicia and Antti split the tasks between them.
One-on-one with customers
“If you reach out to us on Instagram, Twitter, or email, it’ll be me responding,” says Felicia, who adds that communicating with their customers helps them better understand their market.
Nomad’s major sales channel is their own website, and that’s very deliberate, says Antti, “because we’re able to have that connection with the consumer.”
Growing their audience
The only exception is their affiliation with beauty box subscription provider Ipsy, which has allowed them to reach new customers and broaden their exposure through samples and full-size makeup palettes. “We’ve been lucky to work with Ipsy because they are able to provide us with a larger scale than what we would’ve been able to do on our own,” says Antti.
Nomad Cosmetics has also teamed up with about 150 micro-influencers, who are brand devotees with high engagement and a following of less than 50,000. “We made a decision years ago that we're not going to do paid collaborations. We want to work with people who are very excited,” says Felicia.
This is an approach that works with their budgets but also helps build genuine relationships.
“What's great is when you work with these influencers for a while, they start to grow… This one girl we work with just hit 30,000 followers, and she started with us when she had 1,000.”
Where Afterpay comes in
Partnering with Afterpay has also helped Nomad Cosmetics attract a younger demographic.
“We’re in our 40s,” says Felicia. “So, a lot of the conversations we were having about getting an instalment payment provider was understanding how this new generation thinks about buying and paying.”
She believes that, as a new brand Nomad also benefited from the reach and brand equity of Afterpay, “Partnering with Afterpay also gives us some credibility, because even though we're an indie brand, we both come from big companies where we really want to have that infrastructure so that anybody and everybody can have access to our brand.”
How Covid changed the brand
The impact COVID has had on Nomad is similar to that of how the pandemic has affected the economy as a whole.
“As online business, we saw some lift initially on our sales last year as the lockdowns started and people shifted their spending to online,” says Antti.
“Then, this year we saw some softness with the reopening and people shifting spending back to brick-and-mortar.”
It also encouraged a shift in their creative approach, too. For a brand that draws so much inspiration from the personal adventures of its founders, a global pause on tourism forced Felicia and Antti to look local. A palette that draws from the rich and bountiful colors of America’s national parks felt like a natural move for Nomad.
“We were like, ‘OK, we can’t jump on a plane, but we can get in the car,” says Antti.
“We’d visited these beautiful national parks many times before so we decided to do another road trip and Felicia would create a palette that draws inspiration from that.”
Felicia and Antti’s advice for other start-ups
Find the right business partner. “God bless the people who can be entrepreneurs by themselves, but I am not one of them,” says Felicia. At Nomad, Antti specializes in operations, while Felicia, a former chief marketing officer, offers a wealth of creativity. “The reason why Nomad is working so well is that we have very complementary skills to each other between Felicia and myself,” says Antti.
Self-fund where possible Felicia says it’s important for brands to “take the time to grow, but not having investors that you have to worry about.” Being self-funded does start with a significant personal investment, but the freedom it lends you is priceless.
Get started Felicia and Antti’s only regret? That they didn’t do it sooner.
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