How To Bootstrap Your Startup With madebySUNDAY Founder Chaymae Samir
Named one of the Forbes Top 50 Women Behind Brands in 2019, entrepreneur Chaymae Samir is shaking up the overpriced, overcomplicated world of skincare with her revolutionary brand, madebySUNDAY. Chaymae is obsessed with crafting “no BS”, sustainable, conscious products that really work and delivering them to madebySUNDAY’s die-hard fanbase at prices that disrupt the beauty and wellness market of good quality skincare. A successful and sought-after columnist and speaker, Chaymae is passionate about inspiring others to achieve their goals and settle for nothing less than the extraordinary.
Chaymae stepped up to the mic for a special episode The Change Officer Podcast at the 2022 Step Conference to share why she chose to bootstrap madebySUNDAY as a woman in business, how she focuses on offering real value to her customers and the harmful impact that the glamorisation of entrepreneurship can have on new startup founders. Her episode can be found here.
Do you want to do things differently with your startup? Keep reading to dig into 9 of Chaymae’s most valuable lessons for founders who want to bootstrap their companies.
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#1 Start small and grow from there
“When I started, I sold sponges. I didn’t have that fancy idea of getting the product perfect from the get-go. If you’re okay with starting in a very imperfect way, that’s fine. We want the PR. We want the covers in the magazines. We want the perfect products. We want the influencers to back our products. We want the followers and everything. Investment gets you that because you pay for the PR, you pay for all that stuff, right? If you’re willing to do the work and be someone no one cares about for a few years, [it can pay off in the long run.]”
It’s a familiar adage, but there is something to be said about keeping things simple. Chaymae started madebySUNDAY with one product: a makeup sponge that absorbed 70% less foundation that the other sponges on the market. Choosing to launch her company without any external funding meant that she prioritised different things in the early days of madebySUNDAY’s story. Instead of concentrating on flashy marketing, she focused on delivering a lifechanging product into the hands of customers who resonated with her brand’s message and understood the value of what they were getting. After its humble beginnings in Chaymae’s living room, in 2022 madebySUNDAY will be opening a store on Oxford Street, as well as opening a warehouse and offices and the Middle East and expanding their e-commerce trading operations. Starting small pays off.
#2 Give customers real value
“There’s something else in the skincare market. The markup is up to a minimum of 700%. It’s a huge discrepancy between the cost and the price. I didn’t want to go the investment route. I wanted control over the production of the products. I wanted to control the cost because you can’t really give that to someone and then pretend that you’re saving money. Give those savings to the customer.”
As an industry outsider, Chaymae had no interest in conforming to the conventions of current beauty and skincare industry. Her background is in investment, not cosmetics. After moving to the UK, she noticed that everyone was into makeup and beauty and skincare. She also identified that there was a huge need for a brand to meet the needs of a consumer like herself: the consumer who doesn’t have the time or attention to sift through thousands of expensive, overcomplicated options to find something that worked for them. madebySUNDAY was started on the foundation of bringing something refreshing, easy to use and uncomplicated to anyone who has ever needed good quality skincare, but felt drowned by the number of options and excluded by the exorbitant pricetag.
#3 Control your production
“The way skincare has been done is that to formulate the product, you go to a company. To research ingredients, you go to a company. To make the product, you go to a company. So there are so many guys in the process that by the end of it, along with the marketing and the fancy celebrities and all of that, you need to make money, so you increase the prices. So here’s how we’re different. My sponges allow me to start my production. We control the process, so we are able to control costs. ”
Her status as an industry outsider made it easy for Chaymae to recognise the inefficiencies in the way that most skincare companies create their products. She decided to handle things differently at madebySUNDAY, and this allowed her to focus on what mattered most: her customer’s needs and experience. If you want to learn more about how madebySUNDAY got started, check out their brand story on their website.
#4 Have a vision and a mission
“It was helpful that I wasn’t coming from that [existing skincare] ecosystem. I had a completely fresh look and managed to spot the opportunity. At madebySUNDAY we come from the consumer’s perspective. Our goal is to make the best product at the best prices and break that classicism that the best things in life are for the richest.”
madebySUNDAY’s vision and mission are simple: 1) Make the best product. 2) Offer it at the best prices. 3) Dismantle the narrative that only those with a lot of money get to have the best things in life. These three statements guide everything from how the business is run to how their products are marketed and how they engage with their customers. This clarity and single-mindedness is evident in their online presence and is a testimony to how clearly defining your vision and mission from the outset can guide your startup in the right direction from the get-go.
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#5 Use marketing that aligns
“We did a lot of viral content around [our products]. The difference with us is that we make fun of how they, for example, wash their faces on the Nivea ads and it’s all pretty and stuff. We don’t do that. We keep it real. If you go on our website, the content that we send is almost “bro marketing”, which is so against the beautification and instant gratification of skincare and beauty companies. So we keep it real and that makes it that we attract both men and women. ”
Chaymae didn’t come from the beauty industry originally. She frequently speaks about how she’s not a beauty influencer. As an industry outsider who doesn’t agree with how overpriced and sometimes pretentious conventional skincare brands are, she angled her marketing in a more authentic direction that goes against the grain of industry conventions. The results? A large, loyal online fanbase and passionate customers of all gender-identities that connect with madebySUNDAY’s vision and mission.
#6 Don’t glamorise entrepreneurship
“Entrepreneurship is very glamorised. In school and at university, we think of entrepreneurship as this pinnacle. It’s all pretty and we have to raise money and it’s investors and stuff like that. But at the core of it, you start a company because you need money. I keep it real. All of us want to change things and we want to make an impact, but at the core of it, at the first, we wanted to monetise something that was going to change people’s lives. But without money, we can’t make it happen.”
Stay true to your roots. It is evident from how Chaymae structures her social media presence that she has no interest in being anything other than radically authentic and dismantling this notion that being entrepreneur is all sunshine and rainbows. It takes courage to go against the grain, but it also pays off. With 227.2K followers on TikTok, 31.2K followers on Instagram and 3.8K followers on LinkedIn, Chaymae has attracted an engaged and invested audience who not only care about madebySUNDAY, but also want to hear what she has to say. There’s great value to be had in standing out and sharing your unique perspective on your industry.
#7 Focus your efforts wisely
“Something we don’t talk about is women. Women get only 2.6% of capital globally. So am I going to spend my time getting a smaller share at the beginning, starting my business, not later on? Spending my whole time focusing on getting a small share of 2.6% in the whole world? Or am I going to put that time and that effort and my brain and everything into actually making money, then having people come to me? I feel like that’s a more worthwhile use of my time.”
This statistic is one of the reasons Chaymae chose to bootstrap madebySUNDAY. Raising money takes time. Chaymae estimates that she would have spent at least 6 months raising the investment she would have needed to start madebySUNDAY. As a growth-minded leader, she chose to rather spend that first crucial period building the business and building her team. She used the profits from selling her makeup sponges as the capital to get madebySUNDAY up and running instead of seeking external funding. While some founders are better suited to the CEO role and taking that on with all the fund-raising responsibilities as a full-time position, Chaymae recognised that her advantage lay in being a business builder, and chose to rather focus her efforts on constructing a company that would attract investors on its own merits later down the line.
#8 Create jobs that people love
“I have always been driven by creating jobs, but also improving the way people work. We spend more time at work than we would spend at home. Something that drives me is that I want to create jobs that people love to be in. Especially as we see a lot of people want to be their own bosses, want to be entrepreneurs. Especially with the pandemic. People don’t even want to go back to work. [At madebySUNDAY] we are so invested in making it the best job they will ever have.”
COVID-19 has forever altered what people expect from their jobs and working environment. The effects of the pandemic caused many employees to reconsider the way they were working and who they were working for. For example, remote or hybrid working options are now expected by many employees, and many of them want to work in a position they’re passionate about instead of just mindlessly plodding along for a paycheck at the end of the month. As someone who grew up in Morocco and saw high levels of unemployment, Chaymae has always been passionate about creating jobs, but she also recognised the current climate in the workplace and has committed to making the positions at madebySUNDAY attractive to the right people. She wants to switch her employees up and make them feel passionate about what they’re doing. She believes this can be accomplished by giving her team members a sense of belonging and making them feel like they are a part of something.
#9 Hire the right people
“I know exactly what I’m looking for. So if you’re really good at what you’re doing and really have experience, I want you to want to still grow and be the best. But we’re a startup and we’re starting from nothing. We’re not L’Oréal or Estée Lauder yet. We’re not big beauty empires. So I want you to be ready as well to do the grunt work. You have to be able to work on both sides.”
After a lot of hiring and firing, Chaymae has figured out exactly what she is looking for in a new madebySUNDAY team member. She gives a lot of space of trial and error when hiring new people because she’s realised you can’t really tell from someone’s resume or how well they interview. If you want to dig deeper into the topic of working for a startup, you can check out our blog post on 10 Hot Takes On Startup Culture with RIZEK founder and international keynote speaker Abdallah Abu-Sheikh where he unpacks some of the common mistakes employees make when joining a startup.
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