Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Pivoting a Brand During the COVID-19 Pandemic w/ CEO Brenda Mierzejewski of Mizzi Cosmetics

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Great marketing typically involves great innovation and on this episode, Ryan talks with the CEO of Mizzi Cosmetics Brenda Mierzejewski about the story of her brand and most recently pivoting into hand sanitizer immediately as the pandemic hit. Brenda shares a ton of value behind how she built Mizzi from her kitchen into one of the most respected natural Lip Care businesses in the US. Links from this Episode: https://mizzicosmetics.com/ Please share, review, and subscribe! Radical Podcast is always looking forward to meeting both aspiring, and grounded professionals across the country! Slide Ryan or Radical a DM on Instagram and let's make it happen! @radical_results on Instagram @ryanalford on Instagram https://www.radical.company/ Sponsorships: off for this e If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey guys, on this episode of the Radical Marketing Podcast, I sit down with Brenda Mershitschikki, the CEO of Mitzie Cosmetics. We talk about Brenda's path to entrepreneurship and her incredible pivot here during the COVID-19 pandemic into hand sanitizer. We talk about some of the ups and downs and the organic nature with which Brenda and Mitzie has grown using both influencers and just the realness of her story to grow a brand, and now be helping those at the time of need. A really great sit down with Brenda.

I hope you enjoy it. Hey guys, it's Ryan Alford. Welcome to today's episode of the Radical Company podcast. It's Bizarro land out there, Brenda. We're trying to hold it together here. You know, in our Zoom follies, you know, which will be on Instagram later. Jokes aside, we, I'm really excited to have you on. you know, Brenda, we've been, you know, indirectly and directly, you know, following each other

and helping each other, doing different things and, you know, I've been an admirer from afar, but Brenda Mersheesky, the CEO of Mitzie Cosmetics, joined us today. I had to drill the, again, Bryn and I've been talking for a couple years, but like that pronunciation of the last name. I'm just, you know, it is. Oh, you got it. But you know, you did good. You did good. Good. You did good. I'm proud.

Well, it really excited to have you on and, you know, appreciate you, you know, finding the time. It's an interesting time, obviously, you know, being an entrepreneur, running a business, you know, and myself doing that as well. It's interesting navigating. But I do want to, you know, dig into some of that. But I'd love to just start and give people, again, you run a. successful cosmetics, you know, natural beauty cosmetics. Am I saying that right? I stay away from your word organic. I've done enough on that to know the natural versus organic. Yeah. So actually it's, so I will tell you it's a, it's a clean beauty. So clean, clean mixes in with natural, safe,

sustainable, clean products. So, so it's a combination of natural, organic, sustainable, and safe. So that's what we are. Clean beauty. I got another category. Let me make a note of this clean. We've worked with a couple of companies in the in the natural space and in the you have to be pretty, the organic is an interesting. You've got to be pretty tied up, you know, on a certain, all the ingredients, you know, we've got. Right. Had to learn our, take our battle knocks a few times with that on what can be organic and not. But I'd love to just start with, you know, Brenda, let's tell kind of your background, you know, what led to Mitzie and then, you know, let's get into Mitzie and where you're

at. Let's talk about it. So we've been in business for six years now. I started Mitzie soon after my little boy. had open heart surgery. So prior to that, I worked in big pharma for some big names for over 16 years. I was a materials manager and I did a lot of the importing and exporting of, you know, some of the drugs that you see on the market now from places like Bayer Pharmaceutical, Amgen, stuff like that. And then I found myself at home with my kids, which was wonderful. And my little boy, Brady,

ended up having a heart condition that we found out about at four months old. So when that happened and we realized he had to have open heart surgery, you know, our world kind of completely changed. And while we were in the hospital, which is just so strange, but while we were in the hospital, seeing your little one there with, you know, all these, you know, everything on his face, these tubes everywhere, open mouth breathing, and you see your kid in this ICU, cardiac ICU. His mouth was getting very dry. And they were putting what, you know, you would call petroleum jelly. And there's other brand names that everybody knows out there on his lips. And I at that time was still a breastfeeding mother. And I asked the nurse, because they're putting so much on his face,

Is he going to ingest that? And is it okay? Is it okay that he's going to actually, you know, ingest this petroleum? And they didn't really have an answer for me. They ended up like wiping it off. And when we got home, everything kind of changed for me. The way that I was feeding him, my daughter, what I was putting on their skin, because I don't know where this heart defect came from. And I was worried, did it come from me? Did I do something? Was it anything I was. Anything I was using on my skin, was it anything I was ingesting, you know, really going back to what do I need to do to make it safe going forward. So, you know, I had a background in essential oils. And from my mother, my mother is the reason why we named the company Mitzie. That's her maiden name.

She's from Sicily. And she has a big background with essential oils, taught me and my sisters. and, you know, I use that to try to do some, you know, safer things within my house, whether it was cleaning, whether if it was, you know, my kids had a fever or an ailment, I used these essential oils. And because he kept on having chapped lips thereafter because of the drugs that he was on to keep up with this heart surgery, I wanted to put something on his lips to not keep them from getting chapped and everything over the counter had petroleum in it. And after doing some research, I found out that petroleum is not okay to ingest. It is something that can't metabolize in any human being's body.

So after all the uses of the chapsticks and everything, car mechs, all these things that everybody's been using that is over the counter for years and years and years, a typical human being will ingest about 10 pounds of petroleum in their lifetime. Wow. And after finding this out from several studies and finding that this can lead to different types of lung issues, lung cancer, breast cancer, esophageal cancer. You know, my mind was blown. And, you know, working in the pharmaceutical industry, I called some of the people that I used to work with to find out, you know, is there something else that I can use besides petroleum? So they sent me all this stuff.

and my husband came home from work one day and was like, Brenda, what is happening in our kitchen? I had so many. Oh, my God. I had so many deliveries of all this stuff. I had all these different essential oils from all over the world. I had, you know, all these different bases that I can use, all these different emolients, and I just got cracking. So I just started making all this stuff. and what I ended up with was what we now call lip-lux.

And I started to use it on my kids. It was working. It was working for all sorts of stuff besides the lips. And I found myself with like literally hundreds of these little packs that I would buy from like Michaels. And I gave them out to everybody. And then what happened was kind of crazy, you know, weeks after I, people were coming back. Brenda, can I buy some of this? Can you make more?

It's working. My husband need it. My wife needs it. My kids need it. My grandparents need it. I want this in the salon. I want this here. And I'm like, I have no idea what's happening right now.

But okay, cool. I'm going to make some more stuff. This is fun. Let me make it. And at that time, my kids were about to start kindergarten. And I was ready to go back to work. And my husband's like, you know, I think you got something here. Why don't you try to sell this and see what you can do?

So six years ago, I named it Lip Lux. You know, it was called Mitzie Cosmetics. And I started to sell to local salons in my area. I created my own website on, you know, that wicks.com. And I started selling. I got out there with all these coupons to all these moms everywhere. And it literally took off from there. We had a family friend that lived near where we lived and moved to Beverly Hills.

And he's like, let me take it out to some surf shops out here. So he did, but his sister was a publicist. And she's like, hey, I want to get this in the Asker swag bags. Would you want to do that? And I was like, no. I was like, I can't do that. Like, I don't have, like, I'm using like a little eight-ounce Pyrex dish. how am I going to do this for the askers?

But my family's like, Brenda, you've got to do this. If you're going to make this into something, you've got to do it. So we did it. And needless to say, I got bigger dishes. And I was melting this stuff down in my kitchen. And it really just really took off from there. And that's when I realized, you know, I have a business here. And, you know, we made something out of it.

And here we are six weeks later with a 35, square foot facility where we do all of our production. We have, you know, maybe about 50 or so skews. We're in over 450 retailers, including Neiman Marcus, most of them being medical spas and esthetician facilities. And it's just been booming ever since. That's how we, that's how we met you guys. I know. We'll talk a little bit about that. But, you know, it's, It's like the great American business story. I mean, like, this is the entrepreneur, like, story right here. Like, starts in the kitchen with the science experiment and but a reason,

you know, a heartfelt reason. And then you grow it into a, you know, a successful business. I mean, it's like 101, the American dream, I think, right? In some ways. Yeah, it's kind of cool. Like, when I'm able to tell that story over again, I'm like, oh, my God, we did that. And, you know, the first year, it's like, oh, I've been doing it. it for a year. I've been doing it for four years. And now it's like six years later, here we are still,

you know, pumping this out. And we've learned a lot. It's been quite the journey with the people that we've met and what we've done with Mitzi. I will say this. So, and this is a true story, you know, we, and I'll talk about how the samples and why they are here. To this day, the Cadmar, the men's Cadmar, the version is in my wife's. Now, she's, uses the men's cadmire because and she's kind of frugal and safe things or whatever and so we had those samples or whatever to this day she keeps that in her little thing she won't let anyone else use it like and now with everything going on it you know probably a smart move but anyway she is like protective of it because it's her absolute favorite product that's awesome that's awesome that's so funny yeah she's uh she's a

believer but uh and and uh and i was actually looking on your website because i need to order some some of the women's stuff. I don't, she needs to upgrade from the men's Cadmore. Yeah, she's got to get the stuff with the box and the bow. She needs, she needs the luxury, you know, lip-lux. Yes. So talk about like, from a marketing perspective, obviously, you know, having worked with clients, this is a crowded space, cosmetics and beauty. It's a really competitive space, you know, all of that. Um, what are some of the things, you know, some of the pillars that you look back on, obviously doing the Oscars things was a good launching pad. But are there other things that you feel like, you know, maybe some of the influencers and things like that are other things that have been part of your

secret to success or just reality of success. Yeah, you know, before I knew too much about, you know, digital marketing, you know, I was kind of doing my own thing, created my own Facebook page, created my own Instagram page, Twitter page, you know, updated it, put sales on there. Like, I didn't know what I was doing myself. Like I'm, I don't have that marketing digital background. Right. Um, so, you know, learning about the Oscars and how these celebrities kind of got their hands on it, I started to reach out to other, um, I guess you would call them influencers, um, at the time. and I went on some different websites to get their contacts, people that I really liked, people that I followed, different celebrities that I followed.

And I found their contacts, and I wrote to them. I mean, hard on my sleeve. I wasn't really asking for anything. I think that's the big thing. Everybody's always asking for something. But I wrote to them saying, you know, this is my story. I'm a fan of yours and I want to share my product with you. I'm not asking you to post or do anything.

I just want to share my product with you and share my story with you. And I ended up getting people to respond to that because I wasn't trying. I was just being myself, like I didn't know what I was doing. I was just writing a letter to this person, pouring my mind. heart out this is who I am this is what I made you know you're somebody I love watching your movies or I love watching your makeup tutorials and I'd love to share my product with you can I and because I wasn't asking for anything but to share it and they got to know me they they saw my Facebook page they read my story these people ended up posting about me

or wanting to write about me or you know these these editors and beauty editors and one of them being Kylie Jenner, you know, I reached out to her publicist, which I had no idea at the time was a cousin of theirs who I am great friends with today that I talk to every month and we have a wonderful relationship. And, you know, I wrote her letter saying I, you know, I see this girl at the time, which was in like 2015, who was getting flooded by the media because her lips looked different. And, you know, here's this girl who's very popular, you know, her sisters are very popular, these celebrities, they have their own reality show. And here's this girl coming into her, you know, 18, 19 years old. And she, you know, everybody was ridiculing her for her lips. And I felt bad. You know, she's like, you know, my sister, like a little sister, you know, I felt bad.

And I said, I just want to share my product with her. And she loved my email. She told me that she gets emails every day for people asking, asking, asking, and I wasn't asking. And she then asked me to send everything to all of the K girls. So all of the Jenner's and all of the Kardashians. And seven weeks later, unbeknownst to me, I was going to pick up my kids at the bus stop. I was stuff in my face with a chicken parm from a local pizzeria. And my cell phone started going off that Kylie Jenner just posted a video.

about us. And sure enough, it was this big, fat video, you know, what's in her travel bag. And all of a sudden, I'm, I'm in People magazine. I'm in Allure magazine, Cosmopolitan, everywhere. Beauty editors are calling me, interviewing me, local places are trying to get me on. And then all of a sudden I'm on TV. Every six weeks, I'm going on my local news. So I wasn't expecting any of that and we were able to keep up with the orders but that really got us out there and I was just trying to be true to who I was I wasn't trying to do anything but be Brenda at that time and it worked and it still works for me to this day because I you know I'm not trying to ask for these things I'm just putting myself out there and I want to share my stuff and if they want to share it they

will and and they are and they keep doing it so you know taking anything from that digital, you know, I didn't have any digital people working for me at that point. You know, I know that you know, Mary, she's, you know, our digital manager. And, you know, we've grown very organically. And I like to keep it that way. You know, the followers that we have are organic followers through influencers and consumers and Kylie and whomever. Like, they're following us because they heard about us, not because of anything else that we did. Um, so. So it's been, it's, it's, it's, it's been organically growing, I should say. But I think, you know, we, we counsel clients all the time and, you know, I've used this phrase for a while, B to H, which is business to human.

People want real. Yeah. And that rings so true. People try to manufacture things and, you know, they think that they have to put on an error or act a certain way or do certain thing. But if you do it, if you're a good person and you're just trying to run a business and you've got a good product, look, hey, proofs in the pudding. You have a great product that you've put out there. And it takes care of itself once you get it in people's hands. But at the same time, the realness of your story, what you've been through and being transparent about getting that out there, people sometimes get so locked into the self awareness and like not being real.

and, you know, like it all comes back to more being scared of not being accepted, I think, in some way. Right. But I think that is a home run story for exactly that realness that really resonates with people. Right. Absolutely. And, you know, people want, like, you know, I see a lot of products out there that are great. But I always look like at the About page or who started there.

and some of them are really good and it's just an idea, which ideas are great because people need products. But when I see somebody behind it and I see their story, it just resonates more with me as a consumer, whether I'm buying stuff for myself or my kids or my husband or my friends. When I see that story, it's just, it means something. It just, for me, it means something, you know? Yep.

So let's talk, you know, you've been pivoting here a little bit, bit with everything going on, you know, so I do want to get into that, you know, like the world's changed. I don't know if it's ever going to be what it was in some ways, you know, we both taught pre-episode, you know, about, you know, your kids, your mince and my kid, you know, like, hey, what have you you been through? There's no reference point for what's going on. But I do think the brands back to both the story, the realness, and the reality of this, you know, your ability to pivot or to have the idea to pivot is how we're counseling clients. Now, it's no different than, you know, the easiest example is, you know, a restaurant going and doing delivery, you know, or takeout and in some ways

things they probably should have been doing already. But this is definitely a pivot for you guys. So let's talk about what you've been doing to kind of help serve a need with what's going on. Right. Well, I think what I've learned over the past six years is sometimes I've been afraid to do certain things because I'm like, oh, no, we can't do that, but why? And, you know, we have a fantastic marketing manager that works with us that really helps us think outside of the box. And, you know, for years, like even before I started this, I was making hand sanitizer for my kid. Like, I make everything at home. So I have, we have a whole other line that nobody else has seen because we're just not ready to release it to the world. We're hyper-focused on lip care. Um, so, you know,

when, when this whole corona thing started and we heard that it, you know, came to the U.S. I, it was literally on a Wednesday night. My daughter was done with her piano lessons and I, her name is Leanna. And I was like, yeah, let's go to the lab. Let's go make some hand sanitizers. Let's pass them out to daddy's school, to your school, to the teachers. And, Let's have some for ourselves. You know, you could put like a little one in your book bag. So we got into the lab and we made some stuff. And, you know, even though it's clean beauty, when it comes down to bacteria and germs,

you can only use four different things. And an essential oil is not going to kill that. So you need either isoprofoil alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, bleach, or some other type of toxins. that nobody wants to actually use on themselves, but it's like for surface spray. So we use a lot of isoprofoil alcohol here to sanitize our facility. So, you know, and I mix that with essential oils and aloe and whatnot to make it as close to our brand as we possibly can and to make it work, you know, through the CDC

and what the CDC says to use, especially for this coronavirus. Very hard to kill without using specific ingredients. So, you know, I took a picture of it. I took a picture of Leanna with a tray with all this hand sanitizer. And, you know, after talking to my team, they're like, Brenda, you know, it started to get very serious around, I think it was the second week of March where, you know, schools were closing and, you know, everybody needed either masks or gloves or hand sanitizer. And knowing that we have a facility here, we just opened up our new production facility in November. we have the capability and we have the vendors to provide to us, you know, very, very quickly before anything happened, I reached out to those vendors and I said, can you provide such and such

per week if we were to order this in bulk? And I think we did that at the right time before everybody started to buy hand sanitizer. And I just spoke with my team. I said, we got to do this. I don't know what we got to do, we got to buy dispensers. You know, we have to, you know, buy gallons of lavender. We need to get the aloe in here. And these are all things that we were already procuring. Not in this type of bulk, but we were already procuring it. So we were already a customer for these people. And once they heard what we were doing for the state of Connecticut, providing, you know, donating to our town to first responders, you know, nurses, doctors, providing to the hospitals and then going outside of Connecticut, you know, these vendors wanted to help us. And we just literally, like the hat that you got on, just flipped it. And we just started doing it.

And even though we have other orders coming in, we have another team that's able to handle the lip orders. And then we have another team that comes in. And we work in pods so that no one isn't like, you know, if I'm with Rebecca, who's here with me, day. It's just me and her right now working in a pot here in the office, you know, 30 feet apart from each other. Then the production team will come in and make, you know, the hand sanitizers. And it wasn't even a question. It was just imperative for us to do it. And we just jumped on it at the right time. We were able to get the stuff in because if you go and try to be a manufacturer of this stuff, now you couldn't get your hands on anything right now. And, you know even even the type of products like the sprays like you you can't get that right now um it's

it's almost impossible so we just had to do what we had to do and we're working we are actually working day and night and on the weekends to get stuff out to to the people that need it the most and to the consumers um you know it's kind of hard to have that conversation with some people that are calling that need it but aren't going anywhere. We're like, you know, do you have access to running water and soap? Because if you do, I need to send this hand sanitizer to the nurse that needs it as opposed to you right now, but we'll get it to you. Right.

You know, so we're trying to prioritize everything. And we're catching up and it's we're serving everybody right now, which is great. That's great. Is it throughout the state? It's throughout the U.S.wide. It's the U.S. now. So we are providing, you know, we're helping everybody from, you know, we got called in the Navy called about the USN. It's the mercy and the comfort ships.

So we're trying to see if we're going to be working with them to help provide them. You know, even the New York hospitals, Columbia and Presbyterian, they're calling us local hospitals. a lot of the smaller urgent care places, the labs, and then now a lot of the people that are dealing with customers. So like you just said, like these restaurants that are doing delivery, these people need hand sanitizer because not that they're essential, but they're open and they're helping automotive places,

places that you wouldn't think of need it because they're dealing with consumers. Yeah. I notice it looks like, at least from a consumer standpoint, you're sold out on the website. I was going through the site. I mean, is it like as soon as you turn it on, it sells out? It does.

But we have, so what we're trying to do is really be able to manage the flow. So there's two different flows. There's an e-commerce flow, and then there's the flow to the first responders. So there's two different teams right now. So right now I'm managing a lot of the distribution for the e-combers. and then we have another team doing the first responders. But we manage it because we are delivering to all of Connecticut. We have a delivery service through Mitzie that's delivering through all of Connecticut.

And then the rest has to go UPS. And that's been a little bit hard for some of our consumers or just new consumers because what people don't understand, I think people take things for granted before this is that when when the demand is there and you have Amazon and all these other places, you can get things for like, you know, you pay no shipping. But now, you know, this is a flammable good. It's a dangerous good. I can't ship it normal.

It's expensive to ship. So we're actually eating some of the cost and offering a flat rate because somebody from Arizona that's ordering three, it's going to be $17. So we're just charging a flat rate of $8. So it's hard all the way around, but if we can, I don't know, help, and this might sound stupid, but we say this to it, help save the world one hand out of time by doing this hand sanitizer, we're going to do it however we can to make it feasible for everybody to get their hands on it, you know.

But we release in batches. So we have it and we just release it in batches so that we can handle the flow that's coming in. Well, if you need some help telling this story in the future, I see a really nice brand video of coming together for this. You know, what's all the social distancing can come because this is a great story. I mean, you know, karma, I believe in karma and, you know, you take care of others and they take care of you and it looks like you guys are kind of living that day by day. Right. So as we kind of, you know, close out a little bit here, I'd love for, you know, just maybe some value for people listening if you have it, you know, I know you do, but like

thinking about like entrepreneurs or people. And I know everyone's a little bit. It's a weird time, you know, so like we're no one's, I think people should be thinking about these things, but knowing that there's some limitations on the ability to activate the ideas. But are there any like tips or like things that you would say, you know, what you've done with Mitzi and like, the growth as an entrepreneur, are there any learning lessons or tips for someone that's trying or thinking about this that might be hitting roadblocks or, you know, are there any just guiding principles for you as far as what's gotten you where you are? You know, I think your hat kind of says it all. So your hat says don't quit. And that's a very big thing for me. I'm a very passionate

person. And if you're very passionate about something that you really believe in, that you know that is going to work. You know, you need to do your due diligence. So just because you have a great idea, and I'm not saying that it's not a great idea, but you want to do that little bit of research, find out who's going to buy it or, you know, get it out there to people, do those samples, get those things out there and see what the result would be. And if you get a good result back, then you go for it. I'm a big risk taker. I think a lot of entrepreneurs. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are risk takers. But you got to do it with some, you know, some mindfulness, you know, in the background. You need to know what you're doing. You need to be safe. You know,

I work in cosmetics. I'm a cosmetic chemist. I have to be very careful with what I'm putting out there and making sure that it's safe for everybody. But once I have that and I could put that out there, I'm going to go and do it. I don't wait anymore. And it's almost like you need to come out of your own skin and get out of your own way and just get out there and do it because if you have that great idea and you've been thinking about it for a while and you know that it's going to help impact people and impact yourself. I think, you know, you have to be able to be that risk taker, but you have to have a really good team around you as well. And it's hard to find the right people, but once you do, you know, you got to hang on to those people because those people are going to

help you grow your business and you need to be able to feed off of other people and talk to other people about your ideas and what other people may think. Because, you know, I've had really great ideas over the last six years that I thought were great and, you know, talking to my staff or my consumers and doing surveys and they're like, oh, no, you know, we would never buy that. And I'm like, okay, I need to go back to the drawing board. But it's all, you know, excuse me, sorry about that it's all um you know trial and error and and i really think people need to go for it because you only got one life to live and you know time the life is short and if you don't try to do something that you're dreaming about or that you're passionate about you know you're going to

always wonder and you will regret that so that's that's my that's my advice i guess i should say i i love the risk taker part i if you show me a successful on a successful self-reesome made entrepreneur and they aren't a risk taker, I want to see their inheritance because I don't know many self-made entrepreneurs that whether or not they're billionaires or millionaires or not is not really the point. More like you've made it on some level. You can pay your own bills and you can have a staff and run a business. There's an inherent risk. I'm a risk taker and I'm a risk taker and I'm I have a family and I don't like, you know, jump off buildings or anything like that or like risk the farm on every decision. But, you know, I just think that's an inherent characteristic of self-made entrepreneurs that.

And if you're not, and that's sometimes self-awareness, if you're not that person, I'm not saying that you can't be it, but you're going to have to have someone that's with you or involved that's going to have to help push you towards that. You know, absolutely. Just the ones I know that are truly self-made, that's been a really guiding principle. But hey, Brenda, I really appreciate it. I want to do this again. I think, you know, I think, you know, just given the time period, I wanted to delve more into kind of where you're pivoting and things like that. I'd love to get and dive more into some of your products and some of the e-commerce side and a little bit more of the business.

So let's do this again soon. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to. And I know our listeners and watchers and all that are going to love hearing your story. And I think there's going to be some great lessons as well as just motivation for them. So I can't wait to do it again. And let's stay in touch as we move forward. And if you need to be here.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on Ryan. It's always a pleasure. All right, Brenda. Thank you so much. We'll talk soon. We don't want. We don't want.