This is an episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, which features candid conversations about how today’s trends are shaping the future of the beauty and wellness industries. More from the series →
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Richard Christiansen has learned many priceless lessons since he began fundraising for his brand, Flamingo Estate, around two years ago.
This includes his surprising realization that many investors care little about the brand or the founder’s story. Instead, he said, there’s a near-universal desire among the VC set for 90% margins across personal care products.
“Know your audience; they’re there to look at the numbers. … No one cares about the [brand or founder] story,” he told Glossy. “I, too, spent so much time on the storytelling, but at that moment, in those meetings, it’s only about the numbers.”
In the 160 investor meetings he’s attended in the past two years, he’s been told to abandon key parts of his business to increase profitability and to trade its sourcing practices — many of which reflect a hallmark of the brand — for cheaper, faster ingredients.
On the podcast, Christiansen also shares with Glossy that he has secured his dream investor and, pending contract finalization this week, will have funding for brand expansion in the coming months.
Christiansen launched Flamingo Estate in 2020, during the pandemic, by selling boxes of produce in a Los Angeles parking lot. Nearly five years later, the brand has become an in-the-know measure of luxury and has expanded to subscription produce boxes, candles, books, and personal care products available at Anthropologie, Nordstrom, Bergdorf Goodman, Forward, Mecca and many smaller retailers.
The story behind Flamingo Estate, which Christiansen shared on the Glossy Beauty Podcast three years ago, is a departure from the luxury marketing Christiansen was well known for over the past decades, but it still possesses the elevated luxury branding consumers love.
The latest in his releases is “The Guide to Becoming Alive,” out this week from San Francisco-based Chronicle Books. The 600-page coffee table book retails for $50 DTC and across the brand’s retailers. Its chapters are anchored around in-depth interviews with Jane Fonda, Martha Stewart, Kelly Werstler, Chrissy Teigen, Mecca CEO Jo Horgan and many more influential people. The book includes life lessons from Christiansen’s garden, anecdotes from his life and stories about growing his business.
Excerpts from the conversation, below, have been lightly edited for clarity.
On the 90% margins investors want
“I remember this one meeting where someone said, ‘What’s your margin on your hand soap?’ And I gave her the number — I mean, I’ll just tell you, it’s 72%. And I was like, ‘It’s a great margin, we worked so hard to get it there.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no. Come back to us when it’s at 90%. You’re wasting my time’. And I said to her, ‘I will never come back to you with a 90% margin, because to do that, we would have to source differently. We would completely have to pay people differently, and at the end, the farmers get fucked, and we’re doing this for that very reason.’ Even 72% is really pushing the limits for us, and I remember in that moment thinking, ‘Has the world gone crazy? Do we need a 90% margin on everything on the shelf?!’”
On fundraising lessons
“You need to know your audience, right? And I feel like maybe this was the mistake I made. I’m a good talker; I like to talk. [But] I think, in those meetings, it’s a one-pager that [you need] — like, ‘Here’s my idea, and I can scale it, and it’s got legs, and I’ve shown you it has legs. So are you in or not?’ And that’s a different conversation than, ‘Oh, you know, I started selling vegetables during Covid, and people liked it, and then I made olive oil, and I made a candle that’s really cute,’ and then it’s a different energy. Next time around, if I have a next time around, it’ll be a one-pager.”
On being copied by other brands
“I get so frustrated with them. … I see us now being copied so aggressively and just in plain sight. And I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s happening faster and faster and they’re getting better and better at it. … It just means we have to keep evolving and moving quicker. We have to keep iterating faster. The onus is on us to keep ahead of that, and so — just in terms of product development and packaging and messaging — there is no time to rest.”
On writing ‘The Guide to Becoming Alive‘
“I wrote the book in my goat shed, which is next to where my goats sleep, and I sort of work there during the day. And my mom, years ago, planted Wisteria. Some of you, the other gardeners, know that Wisteria is this beautiful vine that grows and grows and grows and grows and grows. You can put Wisteria in sand. You can put it in this terrible soil. You can put it in anything and it will grow and it will grow and it will grow. And so it was a really nice work metaphor for work ethic. And every chapter sort of starts with that. It starts with what the garden can teach us about living, and we connect it [to a person and a story]. And in this situation, I was thinking, ‘Who do I know that works like Wisteria?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, it’s Martha Stewart.’ And so I called Martha, and I said, ‘Hey, can we talk about work?’ And we have, I think, one of the funniest conversations in the book. …
For all the other chapters, I started to think about people as I was thinking about plants. And so that’s how we got to Jane Goodall and Jane Fonda, and Ellen DeGeneres, and Chrissy Teigen, and so on and so forth. And it’s not just celebrities. There’s also a very powerful conversation with a farmer in Mexico, a regenerative environmentalist, a gratitude expert in Tasmania — all of them are connected by this idea of just living really well.”
