Ep.33 How Viral REFY Beauty Broke All The Rules with Co-Founder Jenna Meek
Working Hard with Grace Beverley
sophie@grace-beverley.com
4.2 • 901 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2023
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jenna Meek is a Manchester-based entrepreneur and CEO, whose passion for all things beauty led her to creating two powerhouse beauty brands. Her latest venture is as co-founder and CEO at REFY, Instagram’s hottest and most disruptive beauty brand, famous for its three-step brow collection which became an overnight social media sensation.
Jenna launched her first business SHRINE, formerly Gypsy-Shrine, from her bedroom in Manchester. A brand born out of the festival culture in 2016, Jenna set up a cosmetic glitter and gem business initially bought and sold in festival tents around the country. However, within 2 years SHRINE saw worldwide success, hosting residencies at festivals including Under the Stars and Coachella, and being stocked at global brand Topshop. After creating an entire line of festival gems and starting the ‘glitter boob’ movement, Jenna relaunched SHRINE to sell creative hair products and dyes. Most notably, Jenna created the world's first line of reusable, semi-permanent hair drops that mix when mixed with ordinary conditioner would produce a colour customised to you.
In November 2020 Jenna launched her second beauty brand REFY with model and influencer Jess Hunt. Launching with innovation at its core, REFY’s first product - the Brow Sculpt - was revolutionary, selling out within 6 weeks and becoming a firm fan favourite. After expanding its product range to include lip-liners, blush and primers, REFY is now stocked in Selfridges & Sephora across the UK, US & Canada and has online customers worldwide. The brand has also captured the attention of celebrities including Bella Hadid and Shay Mitchell and makeup artists Patrick Ta and Hugo Vango. They've since sold more than 2.5 million products, with more than 8 million visitors to their website and a 50 million GBP valuation.
Today, Jenna shares her story of how she engineered one of Instagram’s favourite beauty brands and made REFY defy the odds of entrepreneurial success.
- brief overview of Jenna’s career
- the beginning of SHRINE
- why did Jenna want to be an Entrepreneur?
- how was the idea formed in SHRINE?
- the effect of the pandemic
- how did Jenna keep up with the demand the pandemic generated
- Jenna’s decision to take on the hair industry
- how the REFY partnership first started with Jess Hunt
- why Jenna decided to start REFY
- the timeline of REFY
- what Jenna’s expansion plan looked like
- how did the 1st launch go?
- would Jenna have done anything differently?
- how Jenna hired well
- biggest hiring mistakes Jenna has made
- Jenna’s experience as a working Mother
- what is next for REFY and SHRINE?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the first customer of the day. |
| 0:02.0 | The unexpected 20% tip and the 100% boost to your confidence. |
| 0:07.0 | Business is a numbers game and sum up has the tools you need to stay ahead. |
| 0:12.0 | With tap to pay, you can accept contactless payments using just your smartphone. |
| 0:17.0 | And with our free business account, you can manage all things money with zero hassle all in one place. |
| 0:24.4 | Make it count with SumUp. Download the app or find out more at sumup.com.uk. |
| 0:32.1 | I made a decision. I was quitting my job and I was doing this. I met Jess on a shoot. I was watching |
| 0:37.3 | do a browse. We were just talking about this product that needed to happen. I was doing this. I met Jess on a shoot, I was watching do a browse. |
| 0:37.9 | We were just talking about this product that needed to happen. I was like, I wonder if |
| 0:41.4 | Jess wants to launch a business. Yeah. I sent an email like, hey, really random. I know |
| 0:45.7 | we were talking about this idea the other day. Do you want to start a business? No worries if not. |
| 0:49.2 | No worries if not. Kiss. And I was like, well, this is just disaster. We launched a product and we rebranding the company in a pandemic and it just blew up. |
| 0:57.0 | We couldn't even get the stock. |
| 0:58.0 | The morning I got announced, I got like emails of all of our retailers. |
| 1:02.0 | We had about like half a million pounds of purchase orders cancelled within two hours. Today we're going on a journey, guys. We're going on a journey behind the scenes of Instagram's |
| 1:23.0 | TikTok, social media's viral brand, Refai. I talked to to Jenna Meek about the journey building the brand. |
| 1:29.9 | She is the co-founder and she talks in depth about how the brand came about, the obstacles they've had, |
| 1:35.5 | the things that they completely scrapped and changed before even launching, and just how crazy |
| 1:40.3 | the journey has been. I mean, after this conversation, it is so clear to me how much of an |
| 1:45.4 | entrepreneurial spirit Jenna has. I mean, she is clearly a natural born risk taker, but at the |
| 1:51.4 | same time is maybe not quite a perfectionist. She says that she's a perfectionist, but I would |
| 1:56.3 | say that she clearly gets things done as well. And I think that's really, really, really, really important. |
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