CEO of homegrown makeup brand blk shares advice for small business owners

With years of experience under her belt managing two big makeup brands at once, Jacqe Yuengtian-Gutierrez can surely offer a wealth of business advice to those who are just starting in the industry.

Jacqe, the CEO and co-founder of homegrown brands blk Cosmetics and Happy Skin, noted the importance of coming up with a good product to offer.

“My best advice is make sure you create a very, very good product,” she told GMA News Online on the sidelines of blk’s recent event for their multi-use product, All Over Paint.

The entrepreneur said that branding, marketing, and social media “are all secondary.”

“People will always go back to you when you create a good product. For example, ‘yung All Over Paint, we launched it six years ago,” she said.

Six years later, All Over Paint is still the brand’s number one product. After launching four new shades last week, the product now boasts 15 shades to choose from with a formula suitable for the cheeks, lids, and lips.

“We’ve launched so many other products, but because it’s just spectacularly good, people love it, people buy it even without watching any commercials, without getting influenced by anyone. We haven’t seeded that product in a long time but people keep on buying it because when they test it in the store, they see it works,” she said.

“So for me, at the end of the day, if you’re a business owner, it all boils down to how good your product is. You don’t need to have a lot of products, you need to have quality products,” she added.

Jacqe agreed that it’s actually a good thing for the beauty industry that more brands are popping up these days.

“I started Happy Skin 10 years ago, right? Five years after, I launched blk. When I did that, both brands are growing double digit,” she said.

She continued, “Because the penetration in the Philippines, meaning people who use makeup, is less than 25%. It’s surprising, but one out of every four women lang ang gumagamit ng makeup. That means there’s 75% more who I can convert to using a makeup product.”

With more makeup brands present in the Filipino market, there are more chances of brands’ products getting discovered.

“The more brands that enter, the more noise it makes, and the more chances of you converting someone to actually try a makeup product, right? Because not everyone starts from the same product,” she said.

For example, Jacque said that there are users whose first products were blushes, others started with lip products, and so on.

“Iba ‘yung point of entry, and one single brand cannot do that alone. So the more brands there are, the better it is for the industry,” she said. “If I didn’t believe in that logic, I wouldn’t start blk. Since we launched both brands, it has been growing tremendously and growing very well.”

“Even ako naman, I’m not gonna lie and tell you that [my makeup] is all Happy Skin and blk. It has a lot of other brands din, because I feel like every brand has something special that they can offer, and as a woman, I want it all,” she added. —JCB, GMA Integrated News