Felix: Today i’m joined by Rachael Corson from Afrocenchix. Afrocenchix creates safe, effective products for Afro coily and curly hair and was started in 2017 in Bahasa, London. Welcome Rachel.
Rachael: Hey.
Felix: So, your journey started with you looking for a product that was like yours, but couldn't find anything. We were just talking earlier off air about how this started almost a decade earlier. So tell us more about that. Where did the journey begin?
Rachael: Sure. So my business partner Joycelyn and I met at university and we bonded over haircare problems we both had. So she was suffering from traction alopecia, which is hair loss caused by tight styling. So things like braids and weaves. And I also had some hair loss and I've got really bad eczema. So I'm allergic to most of the haircare products out there. And Joycelyn actually used to relax my hair for me. So chemically straighten it using sodium hydroxide. That's the same active ingredient that you find in drain unblockers and an oven cleaner. It's caustic soda and is really, really strongly alkaline. Dangerous stuff that you should not apply to your hair. And both of us had had our moms do this for us since we were about three or four.
So my scalp was a mess, my neck was a mess, and one day she just said, "I'm not doing this for you anymore." And very long story short, very long story short, we got talking. Joycelyn had started looking into natural ingredients for her hair loss and she'd made an oil for her hair. I used it on my skin and got really excited because I wasn't allergic to it. And I tried to get her to start a business. She said, "No." And here we are 10 years later running Afrocenchix making safe, effective haircare products for people all around the world.
Felix: Yeah. We'll definitely get into how you convinced her in a second, but what made you make that jump from, "Okay, there's nothing out there that is safe that is going to help me treat my hair, but then also not cause all these issues." And then to make that leap to say, "Let's start a business with it."
Rachael: Yeah. So it started off with that initial conversation. So after Joycelyn had given me a DIY oil and I wanted her to start a business and she'd said no, I started thinking that there have to be other people like us and other people like me who struggled to find products that work for them. So we would both joke that we are product junkies. And the reason we bought so many products is that nothing really worked. So at this stage it was all about research and I was studying law at the time. If you're a law student, you get super into going into journals and doing research. So I did manage to convince Joycelyn to do that with me. So we did a little research project and I said to her, "Okay, look, we've got at least three years at university. Let's put in £50 each," so about $65, "And let's buy the best possible ingredients."
Like, "Let's get some organic oils, let's research, which ingredients work best for all our problems. And let's make our own cosmetics to last us through university and then we can just sell the excess." And worst case scenario, we don't sell anything. We've got products to last us through university. Best case scenario, we sell some and it covers the cost and we've essentially got all cosmetics for free and find a fun hobby on the side. So we agreed on that basis and then I've always been a bit of a hacker, I like to mess about with websites. So I built a really basic website. It was kind of rubbish, but it was very, very basic and we were getting traffic from all around the world. People asking us questions because we would just like reading these science papers, putting it into basic simple language and putting it up on the site and people really loved it.
And then we ended up entering a competition for ethical and sustainable business innovation at our university. We won some money and they encouraged us to properly register the business. So it wasn't a real business yet, but we registered it in order to access this money. And then it wasn't until much later, as you said, 2017, that we launched our Shopify store and things started to really take off.
Felix: Got it. So what was the timeline? Because the story that you just gave us now sounds pretty smooth. Might've taken some time, but like how long did it take? Were there any obstacles along the way between you two both saying, "Let's make our own product for our own use cases." And then eventually winning this award eventually establishing it as a real business. Like how long did this take?
Rachael: Oh yeah. It was struggle upon struggle. So me and Joycelyn used to just have these little hustles. And initially this started off as one of many little schemes and we had to just survive the university. We came from quite poor backgrounds, so we didn't have families that could support us financially. So we both had part-time jobs and we used to do stuff like notice which flats where people ordering lots of pizza and we'd like text the guys there and saying, "Hey, we'll make your first dinner. You bring this ingredient, you bring that ingredient." And they would turn up with a bunch of ingredients. They would get a plate of home, cooked food. They'd be really happy and we would have like our cupboard stock for a week. And in a way it was another one of these little, "Okay, let's do a little scheme to survive," kind of thing.
But then what changed is we had all this traffic to our website. We had this award that we won for the idea. And it's funny because we had this huge vision from the star. It was all about health and wellbeing and helping people who have allergies like me or who had hair loss like both of us. And we really cared about people having an option for their beauty needs that didn't mess with their health. Because if you look at the research, 78% of products that are aimed towards black women contain toxic ingredients linked to cancer, fibroids, respiratory issues, all these really serious conditions. So we had this huge vision which was that every single person around the world who has Afro and curly hair will be able to access safe, effective products. We just didn't have the confidence to think we could do it and we were students, right?
So the timeline in a nutshell is we finished our degrees, we graduated around 2011, Joycelyn 2012. We got full-time jobs. After a while we realized that it wasn't sustainable for us to carry on doing this on the side because it was growing too fast. So after work, Joycelyn would get on the train, come to my house, we would make literally six bottles of shampoo, post them out and then we'd have to do the same the next day. And it was quite exhausting that every other day we were having to travel to one or the other's kitchen, and then we were having to go to the post office for these really small little orders. And around this stage, it got a bit unmanageable. We realized that, 'Okay, this has been a hobby. We like to learn, we like to make things simple and share that information with people."
So we're getting traction on our YouTube and on our blog and people are really interested in the product, but all the money we were making we were reinvesting into the business. So we weren't making enough money to sustain us, but we realized that we had to make a leap of faith and we had to either quit our jobs or go part-time in order to give it a real shot and in order to help our customers. And we always used to joke that if we knew how hard it would be, we would never would have started the business. So we're really glad we didn't know how hard it would be because what products would we use otherwise? But essentially we had struggles all the way through.
So when we started making the products, we literally sat there with a pipette and a Petri dish and we would drip out the essential oils until we found our signature scent and got that right when most of our competitors were just using artificial fragrances, which were much easier to blend. And because we were paying so much attention to detail, it was difficult having to move huge, heavy bats of olive oil or coconut oil, having to mix things by hand. It's not glamorous at all. It's quite physical strenuous work to do. And doing that in the evening when you're tired, after a full day of lectures or a full day of work, that's really hard.
So there wasn't that much space to think about strategy, to think about when we wanted this to be a real big focus for us. And what pushed us over the edge was in 2016, I was doing my masters at UCL and we won another business competition there. And we started talking about raising investment and realized, 'Okay, this is kind of the tipping point." I had to quit a full-time job to go back to study, Joycelyn quit a full-time job to go part-time so that we could sustain the business. And we realized, "Okay, we're either going to raise investment, do this big and become a global brand, or we're just going to stop." So clearly we didn't decide to stop and now we're building a global brand.
Felix: Yeah. This balancing act that you're talking about that I think a lot of entrepreneurs out there are in where it's like a home grown operation where the potential is probably bigger than maybe what was really dreamed of. Because it sounds like you guys were just hustling doing this for yourselves, sell some, make some profits. It'd be nice, but it wasn't the main focus. And then something happened, the tipping point that you talked about. During this balancing stage between working part-time like your business partner did, or both of you were working full-time and just spending nights and weekends putting together. How were you able to manage this transition where you went from...
Because it's a different mindset, right? Where you're not thinking about, I have this main focus either school or work, and then this thing on the side to now this thing on the side is going to be the main thing. So talk to us about that transition that you made and the things that you've learned during that transition that there are others that out there might be going through this too, that you can share with us.
Rachael: Yeah, really good questions. So the main things that we learned were probably that it's really important to just do your best work. If you do your best work and if you publicize that, the rest comes along. So we started off saying, "Okay, let's make a new strategy." And every year around the time the annual accounts are due, we always set the strategy for the company. Set the budget for the next year, and we'll present it to a couple of investors that we have. And we were doing this even back in 2016. So we had a couple of angel investors who had put in like a really small amount of money, like around £10,000. And that had gone on equipment because it's really expensive to start off the kind of business that we run and also on a training course.
So I studied trichology, which is like super specialized dermatology, the science of the scalp and hair. And that really helped us to lay a strong scientific foundation for Afrocenchix. So when we decided, "Okay, we're going to take this a bit more seriously. Let's see if it can be a full-time job. Let's see if we can hire people and grow a team." It started off with me getting in touch with a friend who helped us out a lot, who did a lot of volunteering and who I'd worked with at Tesco head office. So I knew what her work ethic was. I knew she was really smart. She was really clued up and she loved the brand and she cared about what we were doing. And I just said to her, "Hey, we can't afford to pay you three people, but we can afford to pay you."
She had to quit her job to go traveling and she'd come back and was super qualified, super smart, could get a job really easily, but she didn't know what she wanted to do. So we sold her on the vision and she became employee number one. And the first project that she did was to help us migrate our buggy glitchy, broken WordPress site over to Shopify. And that was major for us. So just to give you some context, when we had our WordPress site which was a very much a bit of a DIY job, we had a great developer, but they were super busy and we didn't have much budget. So I was doing a lot of the work on that, and I'm not a developer. I literally learned how to code from Myspace and the Neo Pets. So we're talking really basic stuff here.
And every time someone would try to buy something and check out, that basket would end up abandoned. Not because they abandoned the basket, but because the site was so buggy that I would literally have to call the customers to recover the baskets over the phone. So that was time consuming and it was the worst kind of website you could have for what was attempting to be an e-commerce brand. And when we switched to Shopify our sales, I kid you not, they tripled overnight. Like we went from doing... We were still doing really low amounts. So we went from doing say 10 orders a week to, say we were doing 30 orders a week, which for us was a big deal because we were still making batches of six bottles of hair product at a time.
And from there, we were able to grow really rapidly. Every month we had massive growth because of the fact that with Shopify, you can add plugins, you can change the code really easily. Everything just kind of works pretty smoothly. So that helped us a huge amount and then also, we had an employee now. So I was still working. I was working as a contractor though, so I had a lot more flexibility to my time. We had employee number one. So it was starting to all come together. And then we were able to focus on, "Okay, what would a marketing funnel look like for us? What kind of campaigns can we set up? What extra value can we give our customers? What kind of content should be created?" And that's helped us to get to the stage where now we're doing a thousand orders a month, which two or three years ago was a bit of a pipe dream.
So balancing things was about having the humility to ask outside help, to look for opportunities and take advantage of them, but also to make sure that we were constantly realigning ourselves to our vision and to our strategy and making sure that every single move we made was something that would take us to the next significant milestone.
Felix: So lots of great advice in there that I want to unpack. So you mentioned this humility to ask for outside help. When you think about this, I think, when you think about entrepreneurs and I think that the kind of gifts and the curse of the ambition of an entrepreneur is that they can do everything themselves, right? Which is the reason why I think a lot of people go down this path that they want to make something of themselves and again, do it themselves. How do you recognize, how do you diagnose a time where you need help either for yourself or for the business? How do you as a team recognize, "Okay, this is a gap that we need to fill?"
Rachael: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that you always can do with help. Which is a separate question, I guess, to whether or not you need help, but even if you are the world's top expert on something, there's always something you can learn, or you can always get together with another expert and get real leverage and multiply your efforts. So I think that the African proverb applies if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And for us, me and Joycelyn both have what you would call a hurry up driver. So we had some exact coaching together, which I jokingly call founder therapy. And we identified the different drivers that lead you to action. And some people will be a perfect driver. Some people have a hurry up drive.
There's all sorts of things that drive people and both of us have this thing where we're obsessed with speed and doing things quickly unlike many founders that means that we are forced to react to opportunities and we're constantly innovating, coming up with new things. But the detrimental side of that is the quality isn't always where you want it to be, if you're constantly going fast. So we kind of, I guess, put in breaks by creating processes so we will write out, "Okay, so if we're going to write a blog post, rather than just throw anything together and put it out there, this is the process we go through." It starts off with research. So what are the questions people are asking? What all the Google keywords that are important to hit for SEO? What the questions our customers have come up with recently?
And then you go into, "Okay, these are the sources we'll use for our research. This is the length of the article. This is how many pictures. This is where the alt tags will go. This is going to be the H1 heading, this will be the H2 heading." And there's literally a whole process in place where you're thinking about snippets on Google and you're thinking about how the different algorithms work, and you've got a clear purpose in mind, and then you're going to also need to plan out, "Okay, when will we release this article? It can't be a standalone article. What other articles do you need?" And you go from, "I'm just going to quickly write this article to, Oh, it has to fit within this process and it has to fit within this wider system and it needs other things to hold it up so that it works." But when you do that, even though you introduce breaks and you slow yourself down a little bit, it ensures that the work you do will actually achieve the purpose that you wanted to achieve instead of just being a bunch of effort that you put in and nothing comes out of it.
So I think that's probably the key. Making sure that you plan things out and you force yourself to slow down and think, "Okay, what's the aim in this?" Because when you start to do that, you realize that, "Oh, okay. So in this area, perhaps I don't know about much about the latest algorithm, or maybe I need a little bit more help in how to do research into costumers, or maybe I'm not the best person to look into keyword analysis." And at that stage, you'll either be thinking, "Okay, let me speak to a freelancer, let me speak to a friend, or let me put together a job description and get ready to hire someone who could be like an intern, work experienced person, or it could be an employee." So I think the easiest way to identify where you need help is to do a bit of research, do a bit of planning, and it will become very evident.
Felix: Yeah, I'd never heard this before, but I like this concept of hurry driver, be perfect driver. I think it's definitely relevant for almost different stages of a startup of a company where maybe the hurry up driver makes a lot of sense, right? At the very beginning to get things moving and I like how you counter the kind of weaknesses of that driver with this process. But this still requires a discipline though, right? To stick with it and follow this process, especially when that's not your natural inclination. Now you mentioned that one of the benefits of the hurry up driver is that you're able to quickly identify opportunities and seizing opportunities. Tell us more about that. Like what are some ways that you or you as a team have been able to find opportunities and seize them?
Rachael: Yeah, sure. So I've got a good one from about 2018, which was just before we hired a team. So we were raising an investment in 2008, and we are both black women. We're relatively young and there's been loads of research recently about the investment gap for black founders and a really interesting piece that came out, I think last week showed that for black women, the gap is a bit ridiculous. Guess how many black women have had VC funded in the last 10 years in the UK?
Felix: I would not be able to get... I can't even recall that. So I'm sure it's a super, super low amount.
Rachael: Yeah. It's eight.
Felix: Wow.
Rachael: Yeah. So we're talking not even one a year. It's really, really low. So we didn't know, obviously that piece of information that came out recently, but we did know that less than 1% of VC money went to black founders and even less to female founders. So we knew it was going to be really hard, but we thought this is a venture backed proposition where building this huge global brand, we're planning to be available to every person with Afro and curly hair around the globe. So we need to do this big, otherwise there's almost no point. And when we started to speak to people about pitching, we found that we just didn't know that much information. So we'd go to events like Startup Grind, we went to any kind of fireside chat that was happening, that we heard about.
We joined Product Hunt. We started looking on AngelList. We just Googled a lot and thought, "Okay, that's a place to go. Let's do that." And eventually we started to make friends with people who were in the VC space and that was really helpful. But one of the things we did is we started to engineer opportunities. So if we saw that a VC that we wanted to invest in us was speaking somewhere, we would get tickets, we'd go to the talk, we'd take notes, we'd make sure we've watched their talks beforehand. And then we would always ask a question where we'd start off by introducing ourselves and doing a little elevator pitch, and then go into our question. Not those annoyance statement questions that everybody hates, because those are awful. But a question that shows that we were actually listening to them. A question that if it was answered would be useful to ask also to the audience and that got attention.
So we did that with Arlan Hamilton, and that was the first place that she heard about Afrocenchix. And then she actually ended up being part of the round because we were then selected from thousands of entrepreneurs for the Backstage Capital Accelerator program via inaugural one in London. And we raised some investment there. Similarly, we would just go into different events and just talking about the fact that we were raising an investment, which some people said was not the way you do it and you're meant to be undercover. And people even said, "It's embarrassing for people to know you're raising investment." But it worked for us. We were trying to raise £350,000. We actually raised well over £500,000. We've got to turn down money from investors who weren't aligned with us. So we raised a little bit of money from SoftBank via WeWork.
So we ended up winning WeWork London Creator Awards, and then they flew us out to LA and we won some money in the Global Creator Awards as well. And the judges were people like Gary Vee, Ashton Kutcher, Vanessa Kingor, who is a Vogue editor. People like Kirsten Green, who is from Forerunner Ventures and one of the first investors in Glossier. And the way we got that opportunity is kind of crazy. It was just from a WhatsApp group I was in and I was just sending out messages like, "Hey, I need some advice." And you know how the old saying guys, "Ask for advice, get money. Ask money, get advice." I genuinely wanted advice. I was asking for advice in this WhatsApp group, someone had added me to, when they knew I was raising investment and a few people in there ended up investing in us.
And one of the angels who was soft committed at the time said, "Hey." He worked in tech and he was like, "My company is based in We Work. WeWork have this competition you should enter." And that was like this huge opportunity, but I didn't take it seriously because I knew the staff about black women, not really doing very well when it came to investment stuff. I thought this is a big PR exercise, but it's VC investment. And that hasn't gone too well for people who look like us. Also, Joycean was on holiday. So it was just me and Nadia, who's employee number one in the office and we had other stuff to do. But I was like, "Okay, I respect this guy. He's saying, he's going to invest. Let me just do it just so that Gary will know that I take him seriously."
So I threw together an application and we were prepared for the opportunity because we did a crowdfunding campaign. So we already had a video ready. We were raising investments and we already had a pitch deck and that meant the application process was pretty quick because I just got Nadia to chop up the video and change it to meet the parameters of the We Work one. So when we got shortlisted and we went to the semifinals and we did our pitch, we didn't actually expect to get to the finals. We were shocked that we did. And when we got to the finals, I did not expect us to win at all. I did the pitch because I thought, "Hey, I'm like two days off of given birth." It was my due date to give birth to my son, but it was my second pregnancy.
I'd had my daughter. I felt like I know when my body's going to give up and that wasn't the day. So I was like, Joycelyn was ready to jump in if she needed to but I thought, "no, no. I'm going to do the pitch because I think it would be great PR and I want to send the message that being pregnant isn't some kind of barrier to doing things. You can still do a pitch when you're pregnant." So I did the pitch and then afterwards I thought, "Okay, it went fine. It was okay. I think I like fluffed." It was like a 60 second pitch then Q&A. I thought Q&A went great. Kind of fluffed the pitch. It was too much pressure, too many bright lights and I just like went for a walk around the place.
And then they were calling the winners out and I didn't think that I needed to be on stage when they were announcing the winners, because I just didn't think we would win. But I wanted the opportunity just for PR and I thought it would be great practice to do a pitch. I thought, "Hey, the photos will be great." And it's something that people talk about, right? Turns out I was completely wrong and we did win. So there was a publicist who was running around and trying to find me and like dragged me on the stage just as they were announcing it. And we won this investment, which was pretty crazy. And that was a massive lesson to me that when any opportunity arises, you should always take it because you don't know what can come from it.
So we got loads of press. Well obviously you've got the investment. We also got flown out to LA, we got to meet Diddy, Gary Vee. We got to hang out with Ashton Kutcher again and get loads of really useful... I mean, we didn't have long conversations with them backstage, but the things they did say were so helpful that we still bring those things up today. So I'd say when it comes to seizing opportunities, luck is like 50% preparation at least. If you want something, make sure that you've done all the foundational work so that when your lucky break comes, you're prepared to take it.
Felix: Yeah.I think one of these things is that the way that you've taken us is that you've taken approaches that most people don't think of or maybe know of, or have considered, but are afraid to take. Now as you grow the business and there's more at stake now where there's more eyes on you. How do you make sure this attitude maintains that as the company grows and becomes more mature? And again, that there's now more at stake than when it was just you and your co-founder in your apartments making this stuff?
Rachael: Yeah, really great question. So we're now a team of seven and we're hiring for a growth hacker. We're just about to start a new cosmetic chemist on Monday. So we've got growth happening at a team level. And I think the biggest thing when you're scaling up your business in terms of maintaining positive attitudes that got you to the point where you could even afford to employ people. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that your people are your company. So your customers are your company, your employees are your company. And it's more important as you scale for you to be visible and actually do the training, talk to your team. So the way that we ensure that we keep these values, that we ensure that we keep our power authenticity or collaboration or excellence is we literally write our values out on the wall.
So we've got company values on our office wall. We do quite intensive training for everyone who joins the company. And we personally deliver that. So there are a few bits and pieces that we get external people to do for training, but I'm a really firm believer in founders training their teams, training their people, being super involved in the hiring definitely for the first 100 hires. I think it's so important. So because we've got employee handbook, we have training and we regularly revisit the training. So at least quarterly we'll do some new form of training or some new refresher. But we do it in a way that's really fun and engaging. So we make sure that we keep up-to-date with the latest research that we add references to our training, that the team know what they're going to get from it. And we focus on ensuring that our team can achieve mastery in the area for which they were hired.
So we know that if you want to motivate someone, it's like... There's a book called Drive by I think it's Daniel Pink, maybe. I'm really bad at remembering people's names. It talks about the three main components of motivation being autonomy, purpose, and mastery. So for us, when we're training people, we're making clear to them, "Okay, if you learn these things, if you manage to do these things, well, if you have this attitude, you will be able to have mastery and having mastery means we can give you more and more autonomy." Which is what we want everyone to have anyway.
So we hire people who are entrepreneurial, who have a growth mindset, who really care about our community. And that means we can hand over more and more things to them so we can grow the company. And then the purpose part is all about reminding people, "Hey, this is about health and wellbeing. This is about giving every single person in the world, access to safe, effective natural products." So people will want to work for us for all sorts of reasons. It might be because we're like the only vegan certified brand for Afro hair products in the UK. It might be because we win all these awards.
It might be that they just love our products, but whatever it is, we still have to make sure that we sell them on the dream, we sell them on the narrative and we let them take ownership of that and be part of the process. And I think that if you do those things, if you focus on motivating your team and training them, it will help you to maintain the things that helped you to get to the stage you're in and it will help you to grow even further.
Felix: Yeah. This training that you're talking about, I don't often hear entrepreneurs talk about investing in training for their employees. What kind of training is? Is it specific to each role or how is it set up?
Rachael: Yeah, so we have general and specific trainings. So we have kind of, here's an introduction to Afrocenchix that everybody gets, we have product training so that everyone knows everything about the entire range. We have hair science training. I know way too much about hair. It's a little bit weird and embarrassing, but it's important that way more than you need to know so that you can pass that information on and so that you can answer customer questions well. Because we could just train people on a script or like FAQ's. But rather than saying to people, "Okay, if a mom comes to you and says, 'Hey, I've got straight hair. My child has Afro hair and I don't know what to do with it because it gets really dry and then it tangles and it breaks. What do I do?"
We could just tell them, "Okay, you sell them the Moisture Surge Set and you explain that it's got coconut concentrate and it's got shea butter from an organic fair trade cooperative in Ghana, and it's got aloe vera, which is a humectant which seals in the moisture. And that if you use these products together, these are the results you'll get." We could do that but the danger you have there is people, they learn a script. Things are not personalized. They end up selling features rather than benefits. And if someone presents a question in a way they're not used to, it falls apart and it's a hot mess. So what we prefer to do is we train people on the basics so that they can construct their own answers. And then we go through case studies to kind of test that knowledge before we get them to speak directly to customers and we're speaking to customers or prospective customers every day.
So rather than doing all that we say, "Okay, well, the head is made up of bundles that have Keratin fibers, it's held together by water bonds. You've got the structure that's made up of the cortex and the cuticle." And we show them the diagrams and we explain all of these things so that people understand, "Oh, okay. So you have to strengthen the water bonds with water based products." And that means they know to direct customers who complain about dryness towards a base product. They know, "Oh, you have to smooth down the cuticle with oil." So then they know, okay, you tell customers to use oils after the moisturizers and not the other way round. And those things are really important because it means people always go on and on about how knowledgeable our team is and how helpful our customer service people are because they quite enjoy just being able to flex on the community and be like, "Hey, I know all this stuff I can help you with your problems."
And we hire people that really care. So we do stuff like the hair science training. We do stuff like SEO training. Not everyone on the team will get R&D training, but we will do training or just how you develop a product and that's very intensive. We do it in our mini lab that we've built in London and we literally show people how to go from research of the product, to prototype, and then all the way through to testing product trials and release. And then we do other stuff. Like we have communication training, we have GDPR training. So like data privacy, which is really important. Everyone has to do that. We have customer care training. So we've got this customer care manifesto and every single member of the team has to understand what our promise to the customer is and how we intend to keep it.
So it's probably more than a lot of startups have and perhaps it's a bit overboard, but we're gearing ourselves up and we're preparing for the fact that every single person who we hire now on our journey to get to offer us 12 employees, each of them should be able to lead a whole department and train up other people. And the only way to ensure that is to pass on the information that we have to people who are competent and help them to be confident, to be their best so they can develop that mastery. They can have that autonomy. They can work towards the purpose of getting our products out there, making them accessible to improve people's health and wellbeing. And by doing that, by really investing hard in training, even though it's not this urgent thing to do is really important.
And we find that things that are important and not urgent often get squeezed out because of noisier things that grabs your attention or emails that appear in your inbox or press opportunities, conversations with investors, all of these kinds of things are a lot more noisy and can grab your attention. Things like training, your team, creating company processes, investing and things like the SEO of your website or setting up sales funnels and training your team to do all of those things. Those are not activities that are celebrated or talked about a lot in the startup community. But I think that that will change over time.
Felix: Yeah, certainly long-term thinking, especially, long-term thinking for a company of your size. What I often hear are a lot of people that just put together these standard operating procedures and these checklists and just have their employees walk through them without explaining why. Like the why behind certain steps or why they are even executing this process. Was this a good lesson that was learned that makes you and your team want to take this long-term approach? Was there something that happened that made you say, "You know what, we have to stop taking short term and just creating these documents and process documents and instead actually invest in training," which it costs money, right? It's an investment in your business to have more of a long-term process. Was there something that you learned along the way that made you decide to take this approach?
Rachael: Yeah, so I think that the fact me and my business partner worked for a bit before we went full-time on the company really helped. So I worked at Kraft head office in the UK in what used to be Cadbury's and then it was bought by craft and it's now Mondelez. And I worked as a data analyst and I saw that the way I was trained kind of sucked. I didn't enjoy the training and it wasn't like my manager was already cool. It wasn't their fault. It was just that there were parts that had clearly been planned way in advance. So my first day my orientation was fantastic. They indoctrinated me into the Cadbury's World and I had so much love for the brand after that. And then they sent me to Cadbury World, which is basically a theme park and gave me loads of free chocolate.
So that was great. That was a good initiation, but then the training to actually do my job... So that general stuff, everyone was good. The training to actually do my job, it was just really boring and it was like, because I was a data analyst. I was dealing a lot with Excel spreadsheets and VLOOKUPs, that kind of thing. But no one at any point explained why I was doing what I was doing. I'm a curious person. I need to understand how things work in order for me to care otherwise they just feel like it's wasted time. So what happened is they were kind of treating me and everyone in my department like a cog in the machine, who was just taking data from one place, running some analysis, and putting it in another.
And I would ask questions to figure out what exactly I was doing. And I was in the supply and demand management department. So it was about making sure that the factories produced enough chocolate, like Easter eggs, for instance, to meet demand from all of the different retailers, but not too much that it ended up in landfill or getting thrown away or again destroyed. And balancing that was the super complex thing. That's actually really interesting, but no one told me that. I had to work the how and... big organizations often have this thing where you can just go into folders you're not meant to be in and just read about the company. So I did that because I wanted to be good at my job. And I just thought it was interesting, but I took those lessons and I thought, "Okay, I never want anyone in Afrocenchix to feel like a cog in a machine who's just doing something and to not understand what they're doing.
So every single member of the team, whether they're customer facing or not, they're going to hear customer reviews. They're going to hear these transformative stories. They're going to understand how happy they make our customers and one huge impact that they are making. And similarly, my business partner Joycelyn, she worked in recruitment. So she worked with like underprivileged kids, getting them into the corporate world, meaning she worked with a lot of people on improving CVs, cover letters, that kind of thing. And her training was okay, but she didn't love it. It didn't really help her to feel a sense of purpose and to feel engaged. And she saw that, "Okay, there's high turnover in a lot of these places." So we had a lot of conversations about it and we tend to just talk about things, metaphorically and just explore topics.
And one of the things we explored was the fact that high turnover is often due to companies becoming too big, too fast, not having clear processes, not taking their people on the journey. So that showed us that, "Okay, we want to build a company that we enjoy working at and that anyone who joins us will like working with us." And the way to do that is make sure that you bring your people on the journey. You help them to understand why you do what you do. So for us, the most obvious way to do that was training. I did work in education for a bit. I worked in schools and I worked in the private chief stuff. So training people, I guess was an offshoot of that. Before we had our first hires, we used to have work experience students or interns from local universities come and work for us over the summer.
And we just decided, "Okay, we're going to train them up. We're going to give them a leg up so that they can get a job when they graduate and we're going to give them some real life work experience, because we know it's quite hard especially for women to get experience in stem. And as we were doing that and an unintended consequence of this thing that we just wanted to do something decent going to be a bit kind, we ended up getting like first hand training on how to manage people, how to lead the team. And we thought that training was so important that before anyone has to think of anything, you almost have to download your brain and pass it on to them. So those were the main things. We did have a lot of luck with employee number one, because she was really smart, really diligent, really honest.
And then employee number two, not so much. It was a big headache and it was a real shame because we invested a lot into her. So that's, I guess the downside with a startup, you can train someone up, put a load of resource into them and then they either leave, or you have to fire them. In this case, it was just an issue with her not doing her best work, being a bit dishonest. And we went our separate ways, but we'd invested so much time in her and it was really frustrating. And I'd actually had advice from a friend in HR and some different advisors who were investors, who basically said, "When you're a small business, you cannot afford to invest loads in people. You've got a whole team, you have to support all of your team. So you need to make sure you hire slow and fire fast."
And I definitely agree with that, but I think that doesn't take away from the need for training. I think that it's better that you learned someone isn't up for the role during the recruitment process. And if they still slip through the net and you hire someone who maybe has the gift of the gab, is really good at talking, but not so great at doing the job, I think it will come out during the training process. And it's better that it comes out in training than that it comes out on the job in front of a customer or managing your website, or on a big marketing campaign. So I still think training is really important. I also think you need to be selective with who comes into your startup and who gets to benefit from that training.
Felix: Yeah, totally makes sense. So speaking of the job and these kind of big marketing campaigns, one thing you had mentioned to us was that last year you created what you called a 10X marketing strategy, which has led to incredible growth into hiring this larger team that we've been speaking about growing sales tremendously and expanding your customer base. So tell us more about this. What was involved in this 10X marketing strategy?
Rachael: Yeah, sure. So it started off with data. We had to go into our Google Analytics, open up our Shopify reports, look at the logs from our customer calls that we do at Afrocenchix and look at, "Okay, where do we want to go and where are we now?" And then map out the journey. So we currently get about 50,000 visitors to our website every month, but we've a lot to do in this. When we started off our 10X plan, we had like 3,000 or 4,000 people visiting the site a month. And we worked out at that point, we had a conversion rate of around 3%. So we thought, "Okay, if we want to 10X ourselves, here are the different routes we can take. We can increase our traffic, but keep our conversion rate the same, or we can improve our conversion rate and keep the traffic the same and we could achieve the goal either way.
But to improve the conversion rate, what do you need to do? Okay, here is the list of resources. We'll take this many people." You'll need a developer, you'll need a designer, you'll need someone to be managing that project. They could be outsourced people. It could be hiring more people. Even if we take on those roles within the team, that's going to be quite a large time commitment. You'll need serious deep work sessions. So that's going to be like say three, four months of work. It will take a certain amount of money and we looked at it that way. Then we also thought, "Okay, so if we keep conversion rates the same, but we increase our traffic, how do we do that?" So you can do it through SEO, which people say is free, but it's not really for you because you have to create content, which takes time and time is money. And you have to do research which you can pay someone to do, or you can do the research yourself.
Again, it takes some kind of resource. So we looked at that and we mapped it all out and we thought, "Okay, what we're going to do is we're going to do a marketing campaign. We're going to rebrand. We're going to go to this trade show and we kind of listed out all the different activities. And then we looked at our data and we looked at where our traffic was coming from and just made this huge table where it's like, "Okay, of all online traffic, this percentage is organic. This percentage is from Google. This percentage is from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. So let's make that into categories." So we looked at organic, social media, pay-per-click referrals and events. And then we essentially broke down the activities that feed into each of those channels, which got people onto our website.
And then we just broke it down into, "Okay, so these are going to be the steps. These are the milestones in order to 10X sales." Which we did manage to do. We wanted to do in a year, which was crazy. It took us about a year and a half, but we're quite proud that we've reached the milestone of 10 times the cells. And we're kind of working on a similar project now and what we learned from that is that if you get the whole team aligned in something, we literally sat in our office and we had the glass walls at the time and we got marker pens.
And we wrote the timeline out on the walls so that whenever we were in the office, we could kind of circle it and be like, "Hey, this is where we are. We're going to do a five-hour sprint now." And everyone is hard working on adding tags and adding alt tags to all of our blog posts. And then going forward, we'll make sure that we'll never have to happen again because we'll have it within a process, if that makes sense. So it was about identifying the low hanging fruit, the areas where you can quickly iterate in improvement and then scheduling in the time and lead in the team to do that together.
Felix: That's going to be my next question. When you spend the time look at the data to see where the traffic was coming from, do you focus where the biggest lifts coming from areas where you doubled down on things that were doing well, the channels that we're already doing well, or did you focus one where there was weakness in I guess, the source of traffic?
Rachael: Yeah, so we went the strength route. We tried to be optimistic. We thought, "Okay, if people on Instagram are loving us, let's do more on Instagram and see if we got more love." And it worked out quite well for us. So our biggest sources of traffic, most of it is actually direct and organic, which is really good. But we know that that comes from things like podcasts, speaking engagements, being on panels. We do a lot of pro bono stuff and volunteering. So like we'll mentor young people speak at schools and we don't do that because it's good marketing, but an unintended positive consequence is that if the has Afro hair or one of the parents hears about it, they take that as a signal that, "Wow, you guys must really care." Because no one really has time to go and do some fake volunteer that they don't publicize in order that people think that they care about the community.
So those trust signals of that and that means that teacher is going to tell their friends and family, "Hey, one of the founders of Afrocenchix came and I used their products and I really like it. And they did this talk for the kids and the kids loved it. And those kinds of things contribute to organic traffic. So it's a bit harder to trace, but we know what contributes to organic traffic because we call the costumers who come through as organic. We go through this kind of survey with them and then we write it down and we know word of mouth is one of the most effective channels. Events are really effective and obviously we've coronavirus. It's hard to do events, but there are online events we're doing. And then stuff like flyers is still effective or people reading about us in a magazine, that kind of thing is also beneficial.
Press often feeds into that. People might read about us in a newspaper and then they Google our name and that comes through as an organic search, or it could just be our blog. So SEO is huge. It's one of the biggest drivers of organic traffic along with word of mouth. And then after the organic, it's split quite evenly between social media and that's mainly Instagram and Facebook and then search, so Google and YouTube are the main ones who have a tiny bit of Bing as well. And with Google, Google has definitely overtaken Instagram for us in terms of the volume of traffic. And now it's probably because we're on this Google for startups program at the moment and we've had loads of support in how to like improve our Google ads and in doing so, we've also managed to improve SEO with that.
So our biggest sources of traffic are organic, and I think even though you can get false growth through paid traffic, I think it's really important to focus on organic because that's the real litmus test for whether or not you're offering value to people. If people are coming to your website spontaneously returning and telling friends, that's a good sign that your content is good and content in a website that works really well organically is going to do better when you then put money behind that and get paid traffic as well.
Felix: So speaking of the changing marketplace with the pandemic, you had mentioned to us that it has had an impact on your business, but you found ways to adapt. Tell us more about that. What were the impacts to the business with a pandemic?
Rachael: Yeah, so we sell in general, about 80% of our sales online through our Shopify store, then about 20% was retail and we managed to two large retailers. So the first mainstream retailer we went into was Whole Foods in the UK. And then we got to a point where twp large retailers were going to place an order that was worth about $120,000. And that would have come through in April for us to be stocked in the summer and that was like our biggest order. It was really going to revolutionize the business. And then of course the zombie apocalypse began and that wall fell apart. So because of all the changes with COVID, we lost out quite a bit. There was an interim we're going to start. We had to stop that. There was a new hire we are going to make, and we did go ahead to prevent, but we had to completely change the way we onboarded and trained her. She's great. She's passed probation from home, which is a first for us Afrocenchix.
We were going to release a new product and we didn't get to do that. But what we did to get to do was double down in supporting our community. So coronavirus is awful. It's hit lots of people and we have members of the team who've lost loved ones because of the virus. And we have so many people in our community who've lost loved ones. And then we have many people in our community who are key workers that they are on the front line. They're doctors, they're nurses, they're teachers that are at risk and what we wanted to do was support them. So we started to put out content that was more just using all of this knowledge that we have stuff like how to look after your hair and keep it clean and safe if you're a doctor, because obviously you have to wash it a lot more.
And if you've got Afro and curly hair, you typically wash your hair like once or twice a week, but you can't do that if you're going to have a high viral load. And then equally we thought at first, when the virus was announced and the lockdown was announced in London around March our sales dipped massively. It's like no one was thinking about haircare, which was fine and made sense to us. And we felt like it was a bit distasteful to keep running ads the way we were. So we turned them off. We stopped our campaigns and we just had a big discussion as a company. We came up with this cognitive risk management plan and we said, "Okay, if we are struggling as a business, and we've recently raised investment, like our cashflow is great. We've got a lot of runway. We have a lot of customers." We could survive really low sales for a year. But we know that our community's super entrepreneurial, that we've got lots of sole traders, lots of small businesses who are part of our customer base.
And if we've had a sells dip, they probably had to sell dip too. So what we decided to do was to use our platform to support our community instead of worrying about sales. So we did a community spotlight where we would talk about different service providers or different products being sold by members of our community. We started to do brand partnerships and promote other black owned businesses. And we found that when we did this, it got loads of traffic to our website, which is what we wanted for these other brands. And it got people buying products from these other brands, buying services from these brands and medical providers. So we also had like trichologists, therapists, all that kind of stuff. And they got in touch to thank us and say that they'd gotten more customers, which was great. That's what we wanted.
And then another wonderful unintended consequence of us just trying to do what we thought was the right thing to do was every time we'd send out an email with the community spotlight, people would buy our products and our products weren't even in the email. So I think the lesson there was, if you look after your community, they're going to look off to you.
Felix: Amazing. Love that lesson. So afrocenchix.com is the website afrocenchix.com. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your experience, Rachel.
Rachael: Thanks, Felix. Great speaking to you.