Live Chat!
Innovation Uncensored: A Live Chat with Jane Park, Founder of Julep
Join Fast Company's Erin Schulte for a live chat with Julep's founder and CEO, Jane Park, at 12:00 p.m. ET on Friday, November 7th.
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We're excited to be speaking today with Jane Park, founder and CEO of Julep, a fast-growing beauty brand with a unique approach to blending e-commerce, bricks-and-mortar retail, customer engagement, and social media. With $56 million in venture capital, Jane transformed her Seattle-based nail salons into a company leading the beauty industry in tech-savvy marketing and development.
The stroke of genius that sets Julep apart from its competitors is Jane's focus on combining development and a mix of grassroots and social media marketing to customers in a way that re-creates a social salon atmosphere. The company recently released the "Plié Wand," an innovative nail-polishing tool created with the help of Ideo, and funded by their customers. -
If you want more background on how and why the former Starbucks exec launched the company, check out our profile on her from earlier this year.
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You can also learn more about the development of the Plie Wand here. Accurately applying nail polish is much harder to do well than you'd think! After years of fumbling with too-short wands, this is the first real innovation in decades in at-home nail-polish applicators. And the idea sprung in part from listening to women on social media.
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From the beginning we've always been about collaboration and working transparently with our customers to develop better ideas and bring them to market much faster than any other beauty company. I believe in collaboration! It leads to better ideas and better results. It's exciting to do collaboration at scale with Julep as a fast-growth social beauty company.
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Jane, just wanted to say that your journey is such an inspiration! I am electrified by seeing what little I understand of your career thus far, the variety of Julep products are of such impressive quality, and I appreciate such local, small-town charm when it comes to Julep's marketing and content
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The "Idea Lab" is a group of 5,000 women who help us make real decisions about our innovation roadmap. For example, our Idea Lab helped us design the Plié Wand, which recently won an Allure Beauty Breakthrough Award and is now available nationally at Sephora. Whenever we have a question about a fork in the road in product design, we like to take it to our community for real input. Our community members have true impact! You can join our Idealab by emailing us at idealab@julep.com.
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Every time we launch a product, we're actually looking for input to see if we should remanufacture it. So I LOVE this product called "Doublestep" (it helps when you wear shoes without hose or socks, as most of us do these days), but it never got traction with our community, and we're not remanufacturing it. On the other hand, our Bare Face Facial Oil Cleanser has become a cult favorite, and so we went into re-manufacturing right away. Americans are so unnecessarily afraid of cleansing oils!
Bare Face Cleansing Oil
JulepThis lightweight, antioxidant-rich cleanser gently and thoroughly dissolves makeup, dirt, and excess oil without over-drying skin, then rinses clean with no oily residue. Recommended for all skin types. -
I LOVE our Eyegliders too - they last even when you fly overnight (they last like a gel but are easy to apply like a pencil - it's MAGIC).We love meeting women face to face - I think the reason we're collaborative and are breaking the rules of traditional beauty companies is that we STARTED OFF in physical retail with our Julep parlors. So I'd LOVE to do some flagship locations - and also I want to do a Julep Airstream and drive it across the country!
Gel Eye Glider
JulepClinically proven to last for 10+ hours, this easy-to-use eye pencil delivers the creamy formula & intense color payoff of a gel eyeliner. The waterproof formula glides on, sets in 30 seconds, and then stays put. Because eyeliner shouldn’t stand in the way of adventures. -
@Jenny - I'm SO excited you love the Plié Wand! You know, there's no other ergonomic tool in the world that is only an inch tall in the handle. Pencils, scapels, paint brushes are all long to enable better control and precision. I hate it when women tell me they can't polish their nails - it's not them - it's the tool!
Plie Wand | Julep
Julep -
I started doing Maven Meetups because I wanted to connect with our customers face to face. As a dynamic online company we miss the chance to see women and feel their emotions. What started as a drink with a few Mavens has now expanded into over a hundred women showing up in some cities - it's CRAZY and I'm so incredibly grateful. We actually get input on the location of the next meetup via online voting. My team is so excited that we do a raffle each month to see who gets to come with me to experience the excitement. We get product feedback on innovation in the pipeline, and share sneak peaks.
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The whole idea of what a "brand" is is changing, and so much more transparency and collaboration is possible today than ever before. In the past, brands developed expensive media campaigns to tell consumers who they were - it was a one-way conversation. Today, we believe that we can build our Julep brand TOGETHER with our community - it's not about talking at, it's about talking WITH. We want to let customers into our tent and help us create our future together.
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Jane, thanks so much for speaking with Fast Company and our readers today. If you want to learn more about Julep, Jane will be speaking at Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored event on Nov. 10-11 in San Francisco. More information is available here:
http://www.fastcompany.com/section/innovation-uncensored-sf-2014
