Hi! I’m Doone, your hype girl in business. This is your weekly source of inspiration & information on all things in the e-commerce and CPG space, read by like-minded Entrepreneurs - that happen to be women - like you. If you find value in this content please like & share above, or forward it to someone in your network. I love it when you do that! If someone forwarded you this email you can subscribe here:

Bulletin 📌

Your tribe 💫

I don’t know if "community" is the buzzword of 2022, or if we're just all more in need of it than ever? Community is pretty central to the human experience. We are so hard-wired to connect, even introverts! I see you! That fuzzy feeling you get from knowing your neighbors by their first names, and the exact feeling that I get when I think about our community members.

& it's this feeling that has inspired me to create Majic. Community and network are so powerful. If you’re going through loneliness or overwhelm or just wanting more like-minded people in your lifem I would absolutely love to see you benefit from being part of this with us. Stay in the know, we're launching soon.

Industry News You Should Prob Read 🗞

What these big tech layoffs mean for the economy. Is Chinese ecomm (& Shein) moving to US shores? Levi's hires Michelle Gass as first female CEO in 169 years. Macy's to invest millions in minority-owned businesses. WellTheory just raised $7.2M on their mission to reverse the autoimmune epidemic. Adidas Originals has partnered with Sporty & Rich for an apparel and footwear collection. Starface is the first-ever acne patch to hit the runway during fashion week (see pics 💫). Janngo Capital Startup fund closes €60M new fund. Behind the scenes of the Maison Pyramide and Ego & East merger. Magic mushrooms are giving investors a bad trip. Sephora's fastest-growing skincare brand lands $10M series A. Maura Healey makes history as first openly lesbian U.S. governor and first woman elected governor of Massachusetts. There's a gender divide in curiosity.

🔑 Insights From This Week’s Episodes on the Female Startup Club Podcast

Directly from the women building the world’s most exciting businesses in the e-commerce and CPG space.

1. Are you planning yourself into prison? ⛓️

NORBY Presents EP440: Learning how Ellen Yin quit the 9-5 and built Cubicle to CEO from $300 to $2 million all before turning 28.

Are you obsessed enough with iteration? A wise someone once said "slowness to change usually means fear of the new," and I don't only agree, I'm actually quite guilty of this.

If you’re obsessed with planning, which is very common, you fall into this trap where you’re planning yourself into prison. You’re not putting anything out there because you’re too anxious to share anything before it’s perfect. In fact, over-planning often comes along with good old perfectionism (🙈).

The truth is, you don’t know what your audience wants until you put it out there and you collect data. The only way to collect data is to have live content to track data and analytics from. With this in mind, please let go of that need for your first attempt at anything to be the final version. Instead, fall in love with iteration. If you’re not embarrassed by your first version of something, you’ve waited too long to start (& no, this isn't a sign to start scouring the web for FSC episode #1).

2. Want a Life Hack? Be your own customer ✋

NORBY Presents EP442: How anxiety and depression led this founder to a high-growth cannabis business, with TONIC's Brittany Carbone.

At the end of the day, you should be making a product that you would want to be using. If you’re addressing your needs effectively, there will be other people out there that feel like you. You're going to make life SO much easier for yourself if you approach business this way. You'll have these three wild cards in your back pocket:

💫 Authenticity/ You have to be authentic. As a small business that’s what you have to rely on. You might not have a big marketing budget, but you'll have your own story and the ability to really convey that. If you're truly solving your own pain point, you can help others in the same way. That's authenticity.

🧭 Direction/ Having this as a guiding force, your north star, makes it really easy to make those big decisions in business. If you really stay true to that need that you’re serving, that mission you’re carrying out and have a very strong "why" everything else can kind of fall in line from there.

💘 Passion/ It’s so easy to lose that in the day-to-day and running a business, but actually, if you allow that noise to die down a little bit, so you can put into practice what you need without having that incessant anxiety so much easier when you're able to love your product the way a loyal customer can.

These are all tools to help clear out that noise and focus on why you started and why you’re doing this. It's so easy to make decisions when you listen to that voice inside of you, as a true customer.

Biz Wins & Failz 🎢

Straight from Hype Club.

We’ve got an ongoing Biz Wins & Fails chat going in HC. This is where we can learn what we can hopefully avoid in our own journeys, and what keeps us feeling like we are not alone in celebrating those highs.

This week, Kiyani's founder shared a low after receiving back long-awaited product pictures:

We put so much into our vision and waiting back on promotional material is always SO exciting - but it hurts when it doesn't work out how you wanted it to. Luckily Miranda took a second shot and the results were much better, "clean and beautiful." ✨

*The doors to Hype Club are open, now’s the time to join our community of uplifting entrepreneurs building the future CPG companies! It doesn't need to be lonely.

What’s on this week? 👀

Let’s see what we have in store for you this week…

MON: Meryl Montgomery from Barbari - botanicals blended with cannabis for a moderate, multidimensional high 💫

WEDS: Jenny Goldfarb from Unreal Deli - making the world's best deli meat from plants 🌿 & Hype Club's First Weekly Virtual Coffee Chat @ 11:00EST 💗

FRI: Doone's back - with a solo episode ✨ & Hype Club's Second Weekly Virtual Coffee Chat @ 09:00AEST 💗

What to Read, What to Listen to 🤔

📚 The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz: building a business when there are no easy answers.

🎧 Hidden Brain hosted by Shankar Vedantam: exploring the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior that lie at the heart of our complex world.

Job Alert Time! 💼

Check out these cool women-owned DTC job listings on our radar:

REMOTE 🌎

• Silk + Sonder, America's favorite self-care brand, has a couple of cool job openings. They're on the lookout for a Chief of Staff to the CEO, a Product Manager, and a Growth Marketing Manager. Something for you?

• Gelato brand Sacred Serve is looking for a CPG ROCKSTAR to fill a significant management role on their team. Read more here.

NYC 🇺🇸

• Fast-growing animal wellness brand Fable is on the hunt for a Head of Retail Strategy and Partnerships to strengthen their team. More here.

• Razor and wellness brand Billie is looking for a Senior Data Analyst to join their Data & Analytics team! Read more about it here.

If you resonate with something in this week’s newsletter we’d love to know! Share it with us on Instagram tagging @femalestartupclub & @dooneroisin ✨