Hi, guys. Welcome back to Skincare Anarchy. This is your host, Ecta. I am super excited about our guest today because I am sure every single one of you have seen her line in target stores and all over Instagrams without further ado, I want to introduce you all to Melanie Bender, who is the founding president of Versus Skincare. Welcome, Melanie.

Hey, thank you so much. I am so, so excited to be here.

I'm so excited to have you. It's truly an honor and I've been waiting for this interview because like I said in the intro, like I've seen verse everywhere and I'm just so impressed by you know just how many people love the products.

I mean, you've really reached such a large audience. So I'd love it if you could get us started with talking about how you came to the idea for this line and just everything about your career.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think starting with with verse specifically, I was in an incredible role at who what where I'm working on their marketing for the media brands for their apparel brands, they have to to apparel brands in the market hit the work collection and joy, that target.

I'm really just working under an incredible founder and CEO Catherine power and Catherine had just a really forward looking vision to to take what was happening and working so well with creating content with creating fashion products with the community at who it where

but really to take that even a step further and to tap into this highly engaged community of 16 million readers and co create a whole brand with them and really focusing in the beauty space, seeing that it was so right for disruption and also just the really great business to be able to scale because of the nature of the products and and and how consumers use and repurchase.

And that was really the jumping off point for me and I was I can't quite say I was given the incredible position because I very much asked for it. I literally wrote brand development into my job description. I said, okay, here's my new title. Here's my mask and you fly me up my new role.

Exactly. And you know, it's the second time I've done that. And that's I think you're quite the master. You're quite the manifest.

You know, there is really when you have the support of incredible leaders, it is only a good thing to put out there what you're interested in and how you think you can help them.

And I'm always amazed that how hesitant people and honestly like especially women can be to put their their desires their ambitions out there. So do it, go for it.

Absolutely, that's how you do it. You know, bring bring that your your partners, your managers into that that process with you so that you can really build it around their needs.

But I think there's there's really something to be said for sharing that vision with with your own champions, your own cheerleaders and and getting their buying to it. But that was how I came into this role of of developing burst and burst and really we were given incredibly incredible free reign.

To co create with our community what we felt was missing from beauty.

And I was leading that charge with an incredible kind of skeleton team of people, two of which have gone on to be full time members of the brand with me.

And the people that were at that that earliest stage have stayed with us.

And you know, very quickly as we were talking to the community, you know, we knew what we used on our skin and we knew how different our regimen.

We looked now then let's say five years ago with the word as some ingredients and knowing the right, how to layer things, the right products and and actives to use for your skin.

But especially around the idea of clean and it was something that was kind of everywhere in the who are office.

And when we talk to, you know, real women in Milwaukee or in Georgia, you know, they said that clean skin care, it's not for me.

Like it's I'm not invited to be a part of it. It's for people that have high access.

You have a Sephora in your in your city, which by the way, it's not not a lot of people.

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