YouSaid · the spoken record

Tiffany Masterson

lines on the record: 161
first: 2024-01-29
most recent: 2024-01-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh, it's just that's exactly what happened. And so I didn't talk a lot about it. And I kept all the good news sort of under wraps. And I didn't, I just thought to myself, you know, one day they'll realize it's for real and I don't need to try to tell them about it. They'll have to read about it if it works out.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't talk about it much in Houston. I didn't try to sell it to my friends. I really just focused on the big picture and that came later on.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think so. It's pretty, it's a long shot to think that somebody in their 40s with four kids that just launches a skincare brand is going to make it. It's super hard, and I think even like two years in, people would say, Are you still repping that little brand that you were repping? Yeah.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was harder to get local attention than it was national. I got the attention of the New York editors really quickly. Houston, not so much.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worked, I sent this box out to 30 beauty directors, and it's hard to get people's emails right. So I had this system where I would create, like put their name, dot their last name at or their first initial last name or their first name, last initial. And I try every. Way that an email could be until I got through to these editors, and I got through to all of them. The packaging wasn't even final yet, by the way. In 2013, when I launched on my line and they published it, I mean, it didn't get into magazines, but it got into, got online everywhere.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that was just my personal taste. That was just me. I wanted to decorate my house in all white with pops of color. And I couldn't afford to do that. So I think I took that out on my line. It was the packaging people who pushed back, and it was just all along the way, everything I did was like skincare brands don't do that. Yeah, that's not going to work, you know, kind of thing. And so I was just like, well, this is. I wasn't trying to appeal to anybody. I was just trying to do what I thought looked great on the counter and thought was sophisticated.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I decided not to advertise early on. Never advertised till last year, actually. So I reached out to every beauty director of every major publication and sent them this gorgeous acrylic box with confetti and the whole line. The line was so photographable. It was so bright, the colors, which got a lot of pushback on, by the way, too.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes My brother was so close to Charles that he kind of ended up being the mediator between the two of us. Know he did introduce me to the two people who came in”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I called my brother and I said, Do you know anybody that would want to invest? And I said, Charles is not being very fair.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I did call Charles and say, listen, David's not working out. He doesn't believe in the vision. He's actually causing tension so much between you and me that it's hard to, you know, this is not going well. And eventually I came back to Charles. I said, look, let's kind of start over. Let's kind of say, look, we're equal, partners, and we'll bring in investors, or else I'll leave and go and It was just high emotions, you know? He's a great guy, and we still are very close. It wasn't like it broke up the relationship, but it was just this stressful time, right?”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can buy him out, no. And I didn't know a lot of people who would potentially invest, but the two or three people I did know, I called and told my story to, not asking them to invest, asking for their advice, but hoping they'd say, oh, maybe I can invest. None of them did. But I called an investor a friend and asked him like to help guide me. Like, what do you do? You know, I'm being deluded and I've got no money in it. And, you know, how do I protect myself? And how do I What should this be looking like? And he was like, well, you've got a $7 million accountant on your hands. Like literally like David had 7% of the company at that point.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it was. But that's all I had. I only had one shot. And I was tired of worrying about the future, and tired of worrying about if, you know, I just didn't want to worry anymore.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agree. I agree with you. I see why they did that and why they were scared. And I was just in my head at that point really, really focused. And I just couldn't see another way. I think I read an article of a brand that got into Sephora and this whole article was about the day she knew she made it. And I got that in my head. And I also shopped at Sephora myself. So that was my dream. And I felt like putting in a lot of, you know, strip centers around the country would be incredibly time consuming and difficult to manage. So I got probably defensive and I got my feelings hurt, all of that. And then it made me dig my heels in even harder.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, saying I've dealt with this kind of thing before, and this is what you need to do. You're going to lose your money. If you're waiting for the golden egg to hatch, it's not going to hatch I'm going to sit back and watch you lose your money again, and I don't want to do that.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did because again, it was part of my vision, and I really felt strongly that you don't want to spread yourself too thin. You want to get into one place and really get your feet on the ground. Now, that's, he had David in his ear.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had to not be there with the kids a lot, you know Also, at some point, I had to ask him to stop working Say, like, I can't focus when I'm traveling because I want the kids to be taken care of the way that I would take care of them. So would you be willing to stay at home with them until we can get through this period and I can get this off the ground?”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was both. I think that he believed in me and he was, you know, of course, I could not have done it without him. No way. Four kids. He had to give up a lot himself for me to go do this. And also, if I put myself in his shoes and I'm being honest, I don't know that I would have been like, yeah, let's go for it. I mean,”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was so stressed. I had, you know, we were struggling financially. I had a seventh grader who was Chloe at the time was, I don't know, she was going through one of her, you know, just a typical 14-year-old phase. So it was a hard age. I worked, I did everything from home. And so I would sit at the table and just trying to juggle all of this different stuff that was going on. And it was a scary time.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He felt like he had you. You know, I mean, he felt like he had no control, and he was scared. And I don't blame them. There's no reason to think this would work. We had it online at that point. It was doing fine, but not great. It got a lot of coverage. I think my sister probably was behind the scenes prodding him along to because she really wanted this to work for me. David, the little brother, he had his ear. So he, like, I could tell when Charles had been on the phone with David because he would call and he would sound stressed and worried. And he was turning sour on the whole thing. And it was very upsetting because the relationship on the line with my brother-in-law more than anything else for me.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, what happened was his little brother started getting really nervous for him and basically held the belief that you're going to lose all your money. Again, Charles is in over $400,000 at this point. And not happy about it. So he's kind of saying things like he was deluding me.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not too many people registering drunk elephant, but you still have to spend money on the website and the packaging and your brother-in-law is pouring now significant cash into this thing to be able to make the product line, how was that relationship going? I mean, he's got the money on the line. You're in charge of this thing. Neither of you have any consumer product experience. You've never worked for a corporate consumer brand. It's not like you were at P&G. Again, not necessary, but still stressful, I imagine, for him, because he had a lot of money on the line. How was your relationship?”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“March, April 2014, before we brought in a second investor. And at that time, it was a second and a third. Not large investments, but something to kind of help.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, Charles, I mean, he ended up having to start putting his own money in at some point. And we did not take on another investor until 2014.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know how I'm not an artist. I sat down with a stack of paper with my daughter. I remember Chloe was sitting with me, and I said, okay, you're going to sit here with me until I get this logo out. And it came out the first thing First thing I drew and it came out, and I was like, that's her. That's it. That's our logo.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, I am stubborn. I know what I like. I know I make decisions very quickly. So, no, I knew. I did. Who's going to forget it? Gonna forget that name?”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it was my, it was in my gut. Like it was that was my personality. That was It was my taste, my style. And I knew that everything that touched this line, this brand was going to be me. And so it had to be me fully. I couldn't listen to other people because then, where do you go with that? Where do you go after someone tells you, change the name? You're like, wait a minute, now I'm completely lost because I wasn't. Then I wouldn't trust any choices I made I remember kind of thinking if I fail at this, I should fail all the way just being me. Like I should fail spectacularly right away.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew what they would say. Oh, and by the way, the consultant with Gutty Rancor, I told her I've chosen the name now, and she said, What is it? I said drunk elephant. And she said, I'm out.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I hired a. So in 2013, when I launched the line on my own website in Houston, actually August 15th, 2013. I hired this big fancy publicist in New York, and I was super excited to work with them. And she actually asked me to put together a focus group. It was going to cost me $30,000 to talk about the name.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My best friend said, No way, she took me out to get pizza and she was like, I got to tell you, I hate it. I don't like it. She changed her mind quickly, though. My mom didn't like it. My grandmother said it was the most asinine thing she'd ever heard. A lot of people said that sounds like a bar pub.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'd been searching for a name, and I'm pretty shy. I didn't really see myself calling it Tiffany Masterson. And at the time, I looked around at brands as like doctors and. French names, and I just felt like what am I going to call this? So Marula Oil was what I wanted to use as the moisturizer. And so this oil felt great. I went home. I Googled it and a video came up of animals in South Africa eating marula fruit off the ground, fermented. And they were like stumbling around. So, the implication was they get they eat them fermented fruit, they get tipsy, probably not true, probably impossible, but still it was.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. All right, let's talk about the name because obviously Marula oil is the key ingredient, was going to be a key ingredient. That comes from a tree with fruits. I think they're a little bit like loquats, maybe. They grow in Africa And the name trunk elephant. Where does that come from?”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you get a certain number of retries Before you have to pay them again, and then you own the formulation that money gets you that, then you go find a manufacturer.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was expensive. It could have been less, it could have been 15. But so a lot of times skincare brands will go ask for something to be made and they don't own it. Just can use it. We owned these formulations, which I don't know how I knew to do that, but I thought it was a good idea for us to own them.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't. The only contact I had that I reached out to and who actually was sort of her idea was this consultant from Gethi Ranker. Who said, you know, with the way you market and the way you talk about, with the passion that you talk about, you ought to consider doing your own thing. So we were kind of going to do it together. Ultimately, I called somebody who said, why don't you try to call this place called Benchmark Labs in Orange County? There's a chemist there who's great, so I called and. Asked her to make my vitamin C, my sunscreen, and this glycolic acid, which is nighttime exfoliating serum”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, marula oil, you sort of land on this ingredient because you're looking for something that could kind of be the anchor for at least one, maybe all the products in the line. And this to you felt like it could be the one, Merul Oil. So once you are ready to make a test line of products, where did you go? I mean, at this point you've been selling Wonderbar for a couple years and you had some context in the media because you had promoted that bar. Did you have any contacts in the cosmetics industry? Because a lot of these brands are made in the same places, right? Did you have contacts at some of these manufacturing facilities?”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember thinking like this could be a good moment to introduce a new oil out there. Not a lot of people had heard of Marula. It was out there, but it wasn't like very well known and very popular. I remember the people around me had never heard of it. I love the way it felt. It absorbs really easily into my hand. One of the things that was important to me for whatever reason was absorbability and not sitting on top of the skin. So a lot of the products I'd used in the past sort of sat on top of my skin.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it is. And there's a liqueur called Amarula. It's from South Africa. And at the time, the kind of it oil was argan oil.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they do have some good things about them, but the cons outweigh the pros. Yeah. And the good things about essential oils, you can say those same good things about non fragrant plant oils. Like marula oil or apricot oil.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But maybe they don't. And maybe it's one of the ingredients they're using on a daily basis and they don't even realize it. And then once removed, their skin can reset and kind of do its thing.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's yes. The answer is that our skin has an acid mantle or a barrier that protects it. So if you're not stripping the barrier and you're not disrupting it, You're not sensitizing and inflaming your skin. Your skin will do what it's supposed to do It's because you're not doing anything to it. Skin knows what to do if you let it. And there are obviously issues with people's skin that you can't just fix like that. Like, I'm not a doctor and I'm not saying we can fix eczema and rosacea. It's not that. It's more of this, there are a lot of issues with skin that we actually create by using certain ingredients. And so a lot of people walk around like, I just have acne skin.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every single product on the market I could find had one or more of these ingredients in them. Except for a pure oil that you might buy at Whole Foods or something. People really rolled their eyes and thought I was just flat out stupid. And I was getting at the same time. People try the philosophy. And when they took this break from these six ingredients, it changed everything for them. It can be really transformational. And I believe that this was something that no one else had thought of. I remember walking around Rice University one day. And it hit me like a lightning bolt. It hit me for the first time. Like, it wasn't what was in the bar that was helping people's skin. It was what wasn't in the bar.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You wouldn't be the first. I kind of think that about myself too. If your cable breaks and they give you a list, the first thing you do is go down the list of things you can try. This is like that. This is just sort of a troubleshooter for people with troubled skin. So if you have something going on with your skin, try removing these six ingredients. See what happens”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Silic And then the last one is chemical sunscreen. And also, just to clarify, it sounds so crazy, right? I mean. Yeah. But”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Laurel sulfates. Yes. So it can strip your barrier, your skin barrier. One is essential oils, one is fragrance dyes, and I lumped them in the same category because they're just so, they're pointless.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm the same. I was a stay at home mom before. That's why I called the ingredient suspicious six because I at the time didn't know it for a fact. I am like, look, I've tried this. I don't know really why it works. But it's working for a lot of people, this philosophy.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wonder though how can you really say, hey, these are safe and these cause breakouts? Because, for example, I found the thing that has affected my skin more than anything is cutting sugar out of my diet entirely. All sugar. And some people are like, you're a freak. That has nothing to do. But in my case, I believe that to be the case. And please, anyone listening, I'm not a doctor, so please don't trust my advice. I'm an idiot. But I'm just saying that this”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, every ingredient on the list, I would look up. Were two or three websites that were helpful in the sense that they would rate the ingredient EWG, for example, rates ingredients one to 10 for toxicity. And so I can't say there was like one thing that I did that was like, oh, this light bulb, these six categories of ingredients are bad for your skin. It wasn't that. It was over probably two, two, three years of me reading about ingredients and kind of.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I was a lot of times it was somebody who called me and said, I'm breaking out, or I do, my skin is like freaking out right now. I would say, what are you using? They would screenshot, you know, take a picture. Of the ingredient deck, whatever, and send it to me, or read it to me, then I would go from there. I remember going online. And reading what a product had in it, taking that list and then analyzing it.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd love to do something with ingredients, only ingredients that need to be there, and let it formulation come out like it will.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the third bucket that were, I use the word suspicious, I'm a suspicious person, why are these in there? Well, there's only one answer. They're in there that either make the product smell pretty, look pretty, feel pretty. There's dyes, there's fragrance, there's essential oils, there are silicones that create this silky feel. But a lot of ingredients can't get through silicone, so why are they there? And drying alcohol, why is that there? That damages your skin straight up, damages your skin. Chemical screens. Every time I used a chemical sunscreen, I broke out. So it's physical better, like mineral. So that's what I was thinking like at the time. Like these are ingredients that don't need to be there. These are ingredients that do.”
2024-01-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT