LEARN TO DELEGATE — When we first started it was just me and my husband running the business. As we started to grow, we found it difficult to do everything, so we finally decided to hire employees. And now we have 15 full and 15 part time employees, I realize my job is mostly delegating and managing. So my day is full of following up with my employees via email or phone. It took me a while to realize that being productive is not necessarily doing a spreadsheet or PowerPoint, but making sure to delegate projects and empowering my employees to make decisions and drive projects forward without frequent touch bases.
As a part of our series about women who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alice Kim.
As a Korean-American Woman of immigrant parents, Alice Kim has mixed cultures in her businesses. After years of working in the corporate world, she was ready to explore her passion in beauty and implement all she had learned working in New York City into creating her own brands.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I’ve always had an interest in beauty, and actually worked in fashion in New York before we founded Hanalei. New York is also where I met my husband, Viraphanh, who was working in finance at the time. We both had a dream that existed somewhere outside of the corporate sphere, which inspired us to create our first cosmetics company, Elizabeth Mott, in 2010. Shortly after, we relocated back to Vira’s home in Honolulu, Hawaii. After the success of our first cosmetics company, we felt confident and inspired to start Hanalei Company.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
We are bringing high-quality and high performing beauty to the masses at affordable price points, with our direct-to-consumer business. While we aren’t the only ones doing this in the beauty space, we have seen a shift, where only the big global brands dominated previously; we are part of a wave of indie beauty brands that is disrupting the old way of selling products and scaling via ecommerce and social media — creating multi-million dollars brands without significant brick-and-mortar presences.
In addition to this shift, both our brands are inspired by innovative product development. When we started Elizabeth Mott, K-beauty was still relatively new to the US. Korean cosmetics use innovative technology and are at the forefront of beauty trends. With Hanalei, we’ve recently developed a proprietary nutrient complex made of locally-sourced, Hawaiian botanicals. This complex is unique to our company allowing us to bring new innovative products to our customers via our DTC model and at prices substantially cheaper than comparable products from the bigger brands who distribute through traditional bricks and mortar channels.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When we first launched, we thought we could just partner with a few bloggers and do some events and our product would instantly go viral, once everyone saw it! Of course, that’s not how it went, and it took us several years to realize that our first product wasn’t very good. This caused us to pivot our direction a bit, and we launched other products. We learned to focus a lot on social media and word of mouth, partnering with influencers and others with large audiences where we could get our products and brand in front of a lot of people. We also did a lot of online advertising using pay per click (PPC). Eventually, these efforts paid off, and what we know as Hanalei and Elizabeth Mott today was born!
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
If I had to pick one person as my mentor, I’d definitely have to say my mother. I wouldn’t have been able to pursue my dream and become an entrepreneur if it weren’t for her. She immigrated from Korea to the US in the 70’s and graduated from college, which was rare at the time, especially for women. I realize now that she sacrificed a lot for me and my brother, which I am grateful for. Having a very liberal and open mindset, she encouraged us to do what we wanted to do, which made me confident about choosing my path in a creative field although it might not always be stable. She taught me to devote myself to doing what I am passionate for and it keeps me going everyday with Hanalei and Elizabeth Mott.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I think the term “disruption” is overused in the business world and has taken on different meanings than what it was originally defined as. I don’t think every fast-growing business or new innovation is a disruption, rather it’s just the natural evolution of the industry. A positive disruption, to me, is usually a net benefit to the customers, whether through lower prices or higher quality for the same price. By definition a disruption has to add value to their customers. For example, as a direct-to-consumer brand, we eliminate the layers of markup, so we can provide high quality products that a customer would typically pay 25–50% more for at retail. As most brands use contract manufacturers to make their products, we are able to use the exact same contract manufacturers and labs that the large brands use, so from a technological and manufacturing aspect, we are on equal footing. On the flip side, a disruption can be “not so positive” as it disrupts the incumbents which not only ends up losing sales, (or even go bankrupt), which means lost jobs and lost shareholder value.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
LEARN TO DELEGATE — When we first started it was just me and my husband running the business. As we started to grow, we found it difficult to do everything, so we finally decided to hire employees. And now we have 15 full and 15 part time employees, I realize my job is mostly delegating and managing. So my day is full of following up with my employees via email or phone. It took me a while to realize that being productive is not necessarily doing a spreadsheet or PowerPoint, but making sure to delegate projects and empowering my employees to make decisions and drive projects forward without frequent touch bases.
PRIORITIZE — As we grew bigger, there were so many tasks to digest each day, so I had to learn how to prioritize and have a system to know what to address first. I usually have a couple of criteria that I use: is it urgent/not urgent? And is it important/not important? And then based on those criteria, I tackle the urgent/important first.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE COMMUNICATION — We’ve found that communication is key to our team working effectively, so we include all staff in relevant meetings and in our decision-making process — that includes our interns. When our employees feel that they have a stake in company decisions, they are much more motivated to see things through. They care about the future of the company because they are involved in the direction we take. This collaborative process opened up more opportunities for us in the beauty world.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
We are launching skincare lines for both brands, we’ve developed a proprietary nutrient complex made of locally-sourced, Hawaiian superfoods such as spirulina, kukui nut oil and coffee berry that are infused in our skincare line for Hanalei, and exploring Vitamin C based skincare for Elizabeth Mott. We’re really excited to diversify our product catalog a bit this year and introduce people to a new way to take care of their skin.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by ‘women disruptors’ that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
I’ve been lucky, as I’ve been in the beauty industry which is female dominated, so I personally haven’t been faced with much gender discrimination as most of my business dealings have been with female counterparts, but that’s not to say that there isn’t any. I think women disruptors generally aren’t taken as seriously and need to work harder to get an audience than their male counterparts and don’t get as many opportunities.
Do you have a book/podcast/talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us?
I love the podcast How I Built This, and listen to it regularly. As an entrepreneur hearing the personal stories of other entrepreneurs and how they got to where they are today is both insightful and inspiring. I don’t want to single out any one particular episode, but just overall listening to all the great entrepreneurs, what I’ve come to realize is that almost all entrepreneurs go through the exact same things and encounter the same issues as they scale their companies out. And by listening to their stories and experiences, I’ve been able to apply those lessons. The big takeaway for me in terms of thinking about my company and its growth, I continually ask myself, “does it scale” or “how does it scale?”. When I first started, I drove most of the decisions and I managed most of the workflow, but as we grew bigger and added employees, I moved further and further away from the daily decisions and tasks, instead focusing on the big picture. I realized that without standardized processes, procedures, and workflows, things couldn’t get done quickly enough as I was the bottleneck in terms of approvals or instructions. So we started putting together SOPs, and checklists that would guide our processes and govern workflows, which empowered my team and freed me from all the daily minutiae.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Treat people fairly. For me, I try to treat others how I would like to be treated. By no means am I perfect, but as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned how to course correct in my life, and it’s a continual process of trying to improve personally and professionally.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did.” Mark Twain.
My husband and I left high paying jobs in NYC; he worked on Wall Street and I worked for a major apparel company. But we weren’t happy at our jobs and felt that the corporate life was not for us, so we decided to leave and founded our first company. We knew that when we were older and looked back on life, if we didn’t start our own companies, we would regret it. Looking back we don’t regret a thing, as we’ve built 2 global ecommerce brands with employees in the US, Korea, and Philippines.
How can our readers follow you online?
They can find both our brands on Instagram at @ElizabethMott and @HanaleiCompany.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Female Disruptors: Alice Kim of Hanalei On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.