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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Tina Chen Craig started Bag Snob, her original claim to fame, in 2005. She hustled her way to the front row of New York Fashion Week when “blogger” was still a dirty word and before “influencer” was in anyone’s vocabulary. Then, in 2019, she did something she never expected to do and launched a beauty product, marking her first step in building a full beauty brand spanning skin care, body care and color cosmetics.
Called U Beauty, the brand launched on Net-a-Porter in November 2019 with Chen Craig’s original product, the Resurfacing Compound. Based on units sold, it’s still the brand’s bestseller. The product, with various sizes priced $88-$228, is a multi-tasking serum with ingredients including retinol and vitamin C. Typically, these ingredients can’t be combined, but the brand’s patent-pending Siren capsule technology makes the mix possible.
On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Chen Craig goes deep on everything from starting Bagsnob.com when a “Google domain thing” cost $10 to developing UBeauty’s most recent launch, its Super Intensive Face Oil.
The excerpts below have been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.
On hustling as an early blogger
“It was not easy. But, within two months [of launching Bagsnob.com], we made more than $400 from some Google ads. And so, as an international finance major from USC, my brain just went, ‘Oh, you can monetize this?’ So I started thinking of ways to [do so].
I remember calling Prada headquarters in New York — the woman I ended up talking to was a junior marketing exec. She’s now one of my great friends — Rickie De Sole. And I remember asking if I [could] go to the show. And she was so confused by me. … I was just cold-calling people. I’m like, ‘I love Prada bags. Prada is the reason for bagsnob.com. I’d like to come to the show.’ And she was like, ‘What? Who is this? Let me get back to you.’ She never got back to me. I remember that doors were just shut. But I just kept going. I would show up at New York Fashion Week with my baby, nursing outside of the Bryant Park tents.”
Identifying a white space in the market
“My frustration [with beauty] was in the endless products that didn’t do what they said they would do and the lack of true innovation. And I remember telling [U Beauty co-founder Katie Borghese], ‘I feel like technology hasn’t changed since the ’50s.’ … That’s when she told me about the medical grade lab in Italy that she had been working with for decades for private labeling [projects]. She told me their lead biochemist had invented a molecule and hadn’t done anything with it. ‘It’s very unique, and it’s a delivery system, and it will deliver whatever your skin needs only where it needs it,’ she said. … It sounded too good to be true, at first.”
When demand exceeds expectations
“We launched in Net-a-Porter in 2019. … We ordered the minimum quantity of products, thinking we’d sell through it in a year — we sold out in 21 days.
I’ve always believed in treating my followers as if they’re VIP influencers. So I said to my followers, ‘If you want to try this, we will send you a free sample, just like an influencer. But we need your phone number, we need your home address, and we need your email address, and you need to sign up for the newsletter.’ And we thought it’d be a really difficult thing to push. But no — we had 50,000 people sign up in the first week and 200,000 in 21 days. And people just tried it. We sent a three-day supply in little packets via the post office — we had no marketing budget.”
