Episode 13: Aishetu Dozie

Beauty Meets Wisdom with Aishetu Fatima Dozie

Today, we are joined by Founder and CEO of Bossy Cosmetics Inc., Aishetu Fatima Dozie. After 20 years in investment banking, Aishe took a sharp turn and directed her focus toward discovering her purpose and her passion. Thus, the mission-driven women's empowerment company masquerading as a beauty brand, Bossy Cosmetics, was born. In this episode, we hear about Aishe’s inspiring journey and why she considers her identity to be her journey. We discuss the painful process of having to divorce yourself from what you think the solution is when in actual fact, what the customer wants is all that counts. Aishe fills us in on the power of wording in design, the importance of communicating with your customers, and how Bossy Cosmetics uses language to connect with and empower their customers. We also touch on the crucial topic of inspiration and how to defend the time you need to fill your cup. Tune in to discover the power of confidence in transforming your life, how to navigate failure, and which Bossy Cosmetics products are Oprah Winfrey’s personal favorites!

Episode S2E13: Show Notes

Key Points From This Episode:

•    Aishetu Fatima Dozie’s transformational experience at the Stanford Design School.

•    A painful lesson she has learned in her business, Bossy Cosmetics Inc.

•    A real-life example of Aishe’s customers’ wants not matching the solution she designed.

•    How to navigate instances when your product doesn’t hit the mark with customers.

•    The genesis of Bossy Cosmetics.

•    How confidence can transform your life.

•    The intersection of purpose and passion.

•    Aishe defines “founder market fit”.

•    The role her identity has played in her journey.

•    How Aishe came to identify her purpose.

•    The importance of talking to and connecting with your customers.

•    Which Bossy Cosmetics products Aishe feels hit the mark.

•    The importance of wording in design.

•    The four Bossy Cosmetics lipstick colors Oprah Winfrey picked.

•    How Bossy Cosmetics Inc. conveys its messaging to customers.

•    The color that recently resonated with Aishe and the bestselling product she created with it!

•    What analogous exploration is and how Aishe fills her cup of inspiration.

•    The importance of defending time to fill your cup.

•    Aishe’s advice for those who have not been raised with privilege.

Tweetables:

“The beautiful yet difficult thing about the design process is that you really start with connecting with humans.” — @TheAishetu [0:04:09]

“You have to almost divorce yourself from what you think is the right solution to what the customer actually wants.” — @TheAishetu [0:05:42]

“I wanted to move from being almost successful to having a significant career, or at least significance in life.” — @TheAishetu [0:12:02]

“Bossy Cosmetics is actually a mission-driven women's empowerment company that masquerades as a beauty brand.” — @TheAishetu [0:17:28]

“My advice is, you create your own path. You really have to believe that you are the right steward for yourself.” — @TheAishetu [0:38:55]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Aishetu Fatima Dozie

Aishetu Fatima Dozie on LinkedIn

Aishetu Fatima Dozie on Twitter

Aishetu Fatima Dozie on Instagram

Bossy Cosmetics Inc.

Musée Bleu

Bossy Cosmetics Inc. on Instagram

Bossy Cosmetics Inc. on Twitter

Bossy Cosmetics Inc. on TikTok

Bossy Cosmetics Inc. on YouTube

Jeremy Utley

Marcus Hollinger

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] AFD: We created a product called Beauty Meets Wisdom, which I thought was amazing. I have always used coaches throughout my own career. We thought, okay, it would be great if somebody spends a minimum of $50 of products on Bossy’s website. We would give you a free hour of coaching services. We would introduce you to a company that we had a project with, that we had worked with. They are a bunch of trained coaches, and you would be able to tap into any of their trained coaches for a free hour, which we would underwrite. We thought that was, again, Beauty Meets Wisdom. We are matching up the philosophy of what we thought our customer loved, what I personally have loved over my own professional career, which is coaching, but our customers would love it. I mean, nobody wanted it.

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:50] JU: Welcome to The Paint & Pipette Podcast. My name is Jeremy Utley, and it's my job to illuminate the tactics of world-class performers across domains. As a day job, I teach at the Stanford D School helping students learn what it takes to come up with ideas. But I've realized I need to stay in the classroom learning myself, and this podcast is my classroom.

[00:01:14] MH: Hey, I'm Marcus Hollinger. I lead marketing and creative at Reach Records, an Atlanta Based Independent record label. And I'm also co-founder for Portrait Coffee, where we are seeking to reimagine the picture that comes to mind for folks in specialty coffee. I'm so excited to pull up my desk alongside my good friend and fellow learner, Jeremy, and I think you all are going to love what we have for you this season.

[00:01:44] JU: We've got some amazing stories on deck, and we can't wait to dive in and learn alongside you.

[00:01:49] MH: So, grab your pipette and your paintbrush, and let's make something beautiful together.

[EPISODE]

[00:01:57] JU: Okay, so Aishe just held up a trophy. We're just diving right in today, Aishe held up a trophy that I myself and Perry and Katherine gave her when she was a student in our class. And Marcus, of course immediately asked about it. So, Aishe, drop some knowledge on Marcus. What is that about?

[00:02:12] AFD: Oh, my gosh. So, this was, I did a one-year fellowship at Stanford four years ago, I can't even remember now, three or four or five years ago. And everybody told me you got to go to the design school, you have to go to the design school. And then at once, I was like, “Okay, let me go check out this design school.” Everybody was like get into D leadership. It is mind-boggling explosive, but you're unlikely to be able to get in because of the fellowship you're in. Anyway, lots of luck. I think somebody chucked out at the last minute. I can't remember, but lots of luck. I got in.

It was the most amazing transformational experience for me as a student, an older student in my 40s, just amazing. So, I had a crash course in just the whole design thinking process. But from a leadership standpoint, I got to work directly with the gap on a sustainability project, and lots of students worked with other companies. So, I got to really experience design across tech consumer product, sustainability, et cetera. Amazing, but super hard. I want to be clear that it was not a walk in the park and this is the trophy we got.

[00:03:19] JU: Aishe, what does it say?

[00:03:21] AFD: Learning hurts.

[00:03:24] MH: Okay. Whether it remains relevant or not, I feel like that's such a good either title or subtitle for this conversation.

[00:03:35] JU: Let's see if we can bear it out. So okay, okay, I'm just going to rip on that subject here. So Aishe, fast forward to your current business, Bossy Cosmetic, what is a painful lesson you've learned, if you believe as the trophy that hangs on your wall there suggests that you continue to that learning hurts, but I would say, but is valuable. There's no other way to learn but through that discomfort and pain. What's a painful lesson you've learned in your business recently?

[00:04:04] AFD: Oh, my gosh. Where should I start? I would say the beautiful thing yet difficult thing about the design process is that you really start with connecting with humans, right? To really get to a very sort of bare-bones problem or situation in their life, and then you are trying to design a solution, which in my case is not exactly obvious, is beauty products, which this is a very fragmented market. There are billions of brands. How do you get into that, when you're not a celebrity? You're not an influencer? You don't have millions of dollars?

I think my superpower was actually being a designer and really getting into how do women think about building their confidence? What is the secret confidence hack? And in my discussions are running through a design sprint basically, a real-life one was how we look, right? I call it war paint. You put on your face, you put on your clothes, like you get yourself together, and then you go out to war. And war could be running a business, it could be pitching to a client, it could be whatever it is, right?

But you don't realize. It's easy to write it and draw it out, but the painful part is, customers not liking what you design or customers saying, there will be many experiments you run that people don't connect with, and sometimes when you put your emotion into something, you really need to understand that the market needs to tell you whether they like it or not. Sometimes they'll tell you, they hate it, or they don't care about it. So, you have to almost divorce yourself from what you think is the right solution to what the customer actually wants, and that's been a very – I don't know if I call it hurtful, but difficult process.

[00:05:53] MH: So, can we go into how do you navigate that?

[00:05:56] JU: Maybe Marcus, let's start with the what, rather than the how, because the how felt like to me, Aishe, give us an example of one thing you made –

[00:06:06] MH: That the market didn't like.

[00:06:08] JU: You said divorce yourself and what you think the right solution is. Tell us about a solution you thought was the right one that people hated, and then let's get to Marcus' question, which is how did you navigate it. But give us the gritty details of the pain.

[00:06:20] AFD: Perfect. So we created a product called Beauty Meets Wisdom, which I thought was like amazing. And I have always used coaches throughout my own career. We thought, okay, it would be great if somebody spends a minimum of $50 of products on Bossy’s website, we would give you a free hour of coaching services. We would introduce you to a company that we had a project with, that we had worked with, they are a bunch of trained coaches, and you would be able to tap into any of their trained coaches for a free hour, which we would underwrite. And we thought that was, again, Beauty Meets Wisdom, we are matching up, kind of the philosophy of what we thought our customer, loved what I personally have loved over my own professional career, which is coaching, but our customers would love it. I mean, nobody wanted it.

It failed. A few people used it, it sounded much more exciting than it was. The user experience was absolutely awful to go to the site to pick and figure out which coach you want, the matching process. Everything was terrible, as opposed to just coming to our site and buying products, which is really visual. We really failed to help people connect very quickly with a visual purchase. And this other purchase, which is building a relationship with an individual, so nobody did it. I think like five people signed up.

[00:07:43] MH: Wow. And what did you feel? Maybe take us into that moment when you realized nobody wants to. Like you said, five people signed up.

[00:07:51] JU: How long did you fight for it to work before you finally divorced yourself?

[00:07:56] AFD: Why do you have to ask the hard question? Because I refuse to accept defeat, right? I kept saying, if I'm honest, I would say we waited nine months. I was like, maybe what we're not doing is we're not marketing it right. We're not letting people who are eligible know about it. We're not letting people who are close to having spent $50 know. I kept thinking that we weren't communicating effectively, and I was blaming it on a marketing problem. Because I thought it was such an amazing offer, that obviously it's because people don't know about it, that they're not opting for it. And so nine months –

[00:08:35] JU: What changed your mind? Was the moment that you said, “It's not a marketing problem. It’s just actually the product is no good.” How did you get out of your delusion?

[00:08:45] AFD: Well, I mean, I think, at the end of the year, when I saw that people were then – so we were really lucky. Last year, we got into like major distributions, we were picked for Oprah's Favorite Things. People were spending now hundreds of dollars. So, they were way eligible for this thing, and they weren't opting, and I was just like, “You know what Aishe, if you need to focus on something, focus on what people like. They love your products.” That's actually your business model, this additional thing is of no value. So, I don't know if the design is wrong, or whatever about it is wrong. Just chuck it out. I actually disconnected it from our website, took it down from all our flows, I just put it on ice, and thought, you know what, no one's interested in this thing. Maybe one day I'll do some focus groups to figure it out, out of my own interest, but just kill it. Kill it. Kill it. Kill it.

[00:09:36] MH: How did that feel when you – you say, you got your machete, and you got this idea, nine months, right? It takes that long to develop a baby. So, now you're getting ready to –you're laying your baby out. I mean, how did that feel?

[00:09:52] AFD: It didn't feel good, right, Marcus. I mean, first of all, I had a call with the partner who we had made all this noise with. We're going to do this together. We did this whole press release, and we did all this, and I had to tell her, “Listen, this is not working.” And I'm a student of failing quickly and failing forward. We did not fail quickly in this and we don't seem to be failing forward, and it's not working and I'm shutting it down. She did rightfully propose a bunch of other solutions, which I said, “Listen, I'm happy to entertain these maybe one day in the future. But right now, I need to focus on what my customers are telling me that they like, and really lean on it. Because we have limited resources, I really need to lean into what's working and cut off what's not.” So we cut it off. It was hard though. It was hard.

[00:10:39] MH: Yeah, that sounds really hard. I mean, to commit nine months to something in the face of your customers, practically screaming at you about what they like, the fact that you were doing so well with your products is, that’s a pretty serious revelation. Thank you for sharing that story with us. I want to take that original question and maybe spin it back, and I'd love to hear what was the moment, you realized Bossy Cosmetics is something that you should commit to? When did you know that?

[00:11:10] AFD: Wow, okay. It's a tough one because let me just not take too long. But let me talk about the genesis of how I started this because I'd be lying if I said, when I started the brand, I had this idea of building a global thing and spending my full time on it. So, prior to my fellowship, I had been an investment banker for 20 years. I had been in finance. And then I burnt out, basically, and took this year off to do this fellowship, to unlearn a bunch of things, relearn some new things, rediscover, like really get into kind of purpose and passion. All the stuff that I didn't feel I had the privilege to do when I was much younger, which I didn't come from privilege, so I had to work to make money, and you make money – finance is where the money was. So that's what I did for 20 years and then I burnt out and I was like, “Okay, look, we have a little bit of privilege in life, how do we think very differently?” I wanted to move from being almost successful to having a significant career, or at least significance in life.

So, that’s kind of what led me to taking a lot of design courses. And at the end of the year, I asked myself a question, I said, “What would you do if you didn't need to make any money?” Now, let's be clear, I do need to make money, but I wanted to strip away the thing that 20 some odd years before was my only driver, is that I needed to make money to pay off my loans. 20 some odd years in the future, I didn't have those financial burdens. So, I really wanted to key into what did I feel I was uniquely designed to do? What did I feel was my purpose? I'm a deeply spiritual woman. What did I feel like God had literally crafted me to do?

That was the journey I took on that one year of my fellowship, and it came down to feeling like, I have a story to tell, and the story's about using confidence, to literally transform your life, to start from being somebody like myself who was born in the projects, raised by a single mother, to obviously lots of blessings. But hacking confidence sometimes when I didn't even feel like it to being a managing director in investment banking, and that 20 some odd year journey. I felt that was my purpose, was to talk to women about confidence. Talk to women about you may not always feel it, but you can do it, you are enough. What do we need to do to get a seat at the table? I knew that was what I was supposed to be doing.

[00:13:32] MH: So, how did you go from there to Bossy Cosmetics? You say, I got my purpose, I'm burnt out in finance, got me some skills, I know how to make a dollar appear, I'm tapped into my purpose. But at what point did you say, “Bossy Cosmetics”, and then turn the key on that get started?

[00:13:54] JU: Well, because cosmetics are probably like one of a thousand ways to build –

[00:13:58] MH: You could have picked a million things.

[00:14:02] JU: Yeah. So tell us about maybe things that you explored or I love that question how to get to Bossy and what I would say, Aishe, is, don't tell it like a lot of founders tell it, which is it's obvious and it was like the only thing. I mean, unless that's true, then please, tell us the truth. But what did your explore that didn't work out? Or how did you stumble your way? Because you did say when I started, I didn't have this vision of a global brand. So, as you go from confidence, and then tell us about the rambling winding path.

[00:14:29] AFD: Yeah. So I said, I actually thought about working in nonprofit. I thought, “Okay, if this is your purpose to work with women, maybe what you do is go work at a nonprofit that focuses on women.” So, I had been approached for the President and CEO role for Global Fund for Women, and I interviewed for that and I felt like that was God telling me, “Okay, this is the way I want you to realize your purpose”, and I didn't get the job.

So, I started kind of thinking, okay, let's play around with ways in which I can live my purpose out through working for people. Somebody told me that Jack Dorsey was starting up a foundation. I started talking to lots of people thinking, the right way to do this is to get a job with a salary that is focused on women. Honestly, one day, I said to myself, “Okay, what would you do if you didn't have to earn money? Like you're going back to this money thing. You're going back to this money thing, let's strip down the money, and let's now” – this is why I talk about the intersection of purpose and passion.

One day, I was going for a walk, and I was like, “What are you passionate about? What would you do that you would never be bored?” I always talk about founder market fit. What are you so into that is just like, you're always in a state of flow? As I was walking, it was color. I was like, “I love as you can see in my office.”

[00:15:51] MH: I've been trying to figure out a way to ask you a question about that. Because your room is very visually impacted. So, I want to hear about the color.

[00:16:03] AFD: If you are ever in Palo Alto, I’ll invite you to my house. I mean, I have massive paintings all over the walls downstairs. Every color under the rainbow. I love color. Color, just as you can see, I'm colorful, right? And I've always been this way. I said to myself, “Color.” If I had to think about doing something passion, it's color. I knew I can't paint, I can't draw. I was like, “Maybe I should open up a gallery that's focused on curating female art.” So, I started playing around with like, women in color. And then I was like, “Wait, I love lipstick.” Lipstick is actually my love language. I used to travel all the time. I used to travel all the time as an investment banker, and one of my things with my girlfriends is stop at the airport, buy up a whole bunch of lipsticks, get home and say, “I saw this beautiful red lipstick sending it to you, this will be good. Saw this beautiful eyeshadow. Saw this beautiful thing.” Beauty was and then my friend would come over, and we’ll be like trying on lipsticks together. It was our thing. And these were, by the way, like badass women. General Counsels, lawyers, superwomen, but we all just love this girly stuff. And then I was like, “What if I start a lipstick company, that is actually focused on the purpose, but we sell this product and use it to start to have a conversation.” That was it. Literally. I always tell people, Bossy Cosmetics is actually a mission-driven women's empowerment company that masquerades as a beauty brand.

[00:17:36] MH: That's so powerful and I like that phrase. I think that's for our listeners, there might be something that needs to go in our glossary is founder market fit. Can we talk a little bit more about that? Could you maybe just give us a definition of that? Or maybe, I don’t know. In fact, I just kind of really want to understand what you mean when you said if this sounds so foundational to your story.

[00:17:57] AFD: Yeah. So I think, and I touched on this earlier, what is very central to me in my identity is my journey. I was born to Nigerian parents who, in the US, they came to the US to get college degrees. So, I'm a US citizen. My parents separated very quickly after I was born. I was raised by a single mother, who lived in Section Eight housing in Cambridge. I did not come from anything that resembled privilege. And through a stroke of many things, of which, as I said, but God is at the helm of all of those things. I went through an entire journey of where I am today. That's how I came to be, and that is an essential part of my story.

So, when I talk about founder market fit, what I'm saying is, and I want to be careful in the way I articulate this because I hate these sort of one-off stories where somebody has a really great life, and it's like, “Why does everybody not have a great life? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”

[00:19:01] MH: Yeah. Kim Kardashian is getting in trouble on Twitter for that.

[00:19:03] AFD: Well, yeah. I don't want to talk about that. I definitely don’t want to talk about that.

[00:19:06] JU: Come on. Stay focused people. Stay focused.

[00:19:09] AFD: Yeah, let’s stay focused. I don't want to talk about that. But I want to talk about the work that is involved. I'm very open about the imposter syndrome that I faced throughout my journey and that I still face today. I got a call recently to be on a board of directors, and I was like, “Are you sure you're talking to the right person?” These are things that I see myself go through, and many women and this is – when people ask me, is Bossy Cosmetics making products for only black women? I say no. You don't understand the brand, you would ask me that question.

Yes, I am a black woman, but my journey is actually quite common. It defies age. It defies race. It defies ethnicity. There are lots of people born in the projects. There are lots of people dealing with hardship, to varying degrees, and I think that being a black woman has a lot to do with my journey. But it is not the only story that I have. So, that's why I think that this founder market fit is really when I talk about empowering women, our mission statement is empowering women to look, feel and do good in the world. That has been my journey. When I talk about war pain, and going out there and like fighting to get the pay equity gap close, like fighting for your salary and fighting for a voice at the table. I am living it. I have been living it. So, I am so on brand and so consistent in the messaging because it is real.

[00:20:36] MH: That's awesome.

[00:20:36] JU: Aishe, this is something, I mean, it deeply resonates with me. Obviously, I'm not a woman, I'm not a woman of color. I didn't come from the projects. And yet, I can relate in the following way. We've got a personal mission on earth. I am also a person of faith, but even setting aside faith necessarily to believe that there's something you're stewarding in this world. I think I don't want to make that unnecessarily religious claim, even though I think it's deeply spiritual for me, and it sounds like for you as well. But I think it doesn't take a lot for someone to believe that you have to believe in God or have a personal religion to believe, I'm here, I'm a steward of something, my own experience, my own passions, my own interests, et cetera. What should I do with those things?

So, to me, that's a deeply human question. And for myself, again, coming from a totally different frame of reference, which is, by the way, why we're doing all of these interviews? Because we want to foreground and spotlight a way broader set of stories that are typically foregrounded and spotlit. What I love is I can connect with you. Here's the thing I'm wrestling with, I'm only going to just now figuring out my special part of my story. I mean, I kid you not, I woke up the other night, I talked to a friend who's an author, and she and I were talking about a couple of things. She asked a question, like, “What problem are you trying to solve?” And I was like, “Man, that's a good question.” I mean, I ask people that all the time in Launchpad. What problem am I here to solve? I think comes very close to what struggles have I overcome, in my identity, in what realizations.

But anyway, I don't mean to go on a tangent. What I mean to say is, I feel I'm just shy of 40 years old, I've been teaching at Stanford for 12 years, and I'm just starting to go, “Oh, I woke up in the middle of the night. There's a really important part of my story I've totally forgotten about.” And I frantically wrote it down, because I realized, if there's ever an origin story, I don't know the details, or you don’t know the details are relevant, right? So, all that to say, sorry, for a long-winded description of the question, how did you come into the knowledge of what the relevant details of your story and purpose were? Because at least from my own perspective, it's not like, there's a billion details in my life, not all of them are equally relevant to the thing that I'm here to do, and I imagine the same is true for you. What was the process by which you came to realize that one’s special? Bringing home lipstick and sharing it with my girlfriends is among a million other things that are part of your life and even your confidence journey. How did you come to discover the parts you go, “I got to remember that, or that's a part of the purpose, et cetera?”

[00:23:17] AFD: So, a couple of things. Great question. So the first thing is just realizing that there is no other Aishetu Fatima Dozie on this planet, right? I am so unique for a special cause and purpose, and I'm a vessel to accomplish a number of things. There is nobody else like me. That is a good thing. So, I could choose to make pencils and put the uniqueness of Aishe in those pencils, and they will be different from any other pencils. They may write, but they are very different from any other pencil. And there is, first of all, that belief. And I think you have this almost unflinching belief in self is super critical, at least that's the way I look at it is if you think that a red lipstick is a red lipstick, then you're not going to get into this business. I don't think red lipstick is a red lipstick. I think there is an entire discussion in journey.

Jeremy, what I want to say to you, one thing that was really valuable in learning as a deed leader was this notion of extreme cases. And this notion of not thinking about fixing problems for millions and billions of people, but one person, right? I think that's so important because in business, especially in Silicon Valley, you're thinking about scale, scale, scale, solving this massive problem from massive people. What's a huge pain point for millions of people? But I began to then break it down to how do I solve one person's problem? Okay, and that's not sensible in the business sense, but I can tell you that it has worked for me because what I have been doing is I look at Bossy Cosmetics as a learning journey for myself. And I look at it as where I started, versus where I am. We have changed the product, I think 15 times we've changed the logo, we've changed the website, a billion times. We've changed so much about this we are constantly iterating. We are doing loops and loops and loops that you don't even see. We just keep getting better. The lipstick gets better. The eyeliner gets better. The messaging, everything.

So I think that notion of how do you know the deep story that will connect, it is talking to your customers, it is being obsessed with your customers. Each time I share, one person can send me an email and say, you said, “Blah, blah, blah, and it reminded me have my grandmother when she did this.” I'm like, “Bing”, that's something that connects so deeply with somebody. I write it down and I talk about that again, it's touching people. So, it's as of the process of – it’s the process of – so, I didn’t write this massive 50-page business plan and pay marketing studies and do all this stuff before I started. I just stumbled, like our first set of products cost $5,000 to make. They were not pretty.

By the way, I just wanted to get in the market, and get their feedback and learn, and iterate, and iterate. And so, that's what I've been doing. When you speak, someone says, “I don't like the way you said that. That pissed me off.” You're like, “Alright, be careful. That's a bit triggering.” Or somebody is, “Love that you own this. I love that you talk about this.” That's how you learn what's connecting by doing. So, in the bias, that's where the learning comes.

[00:26:31] MH: That's good. You said something that really registered with me. You said, there's only one Aishe. Other folks can make pencils. But if I put Aishe in these pencils, then it's a completely different pencil that's never been done before. That registers with me, because honestly, I'm really, really into sneakers, and I just got – there’s this one shoe that I probably have bought 50 times over and sometimes the same color. There's like the sport royal blue, and then the game royal, and then there's the royal, and then there's the marina blue, right? I'm totally in love with that story. I'm totally in love with the variation. But as I'm looking at your products, I see stories in your colors. So, I'm looking at this Musée Bleu in the Jemaa Noir, and it's begging these questions. So, I would like to ask, maybe you could tell us the story of one of your products where you feel like we got it, we nailed it. We put identity in it and it registered, and it's one of our better ones.

[00:27:32] AFD: Wow. We have a few, but I will show you these. I have all my products here. These are – I don’t know if you can see them well are what we call power women essentials bullet lipsticks. Okay. Where does the name come from? Obviously power. So, I designed, with my designer, this collection because I wanted to tap into the power within women, right? And for us at Bossy Cosmetics, we always say words matter, like everything. We don't just throw words around, right? So, when I said today this lipstick is called Faith, I always tell people fake it until you make it. Faith over fear. I told you, I'm a woman of faith. So, I'm wearing faith lipstick. Like I said, names matter.

This is a lipstick called Resilient. I actually put it on my cheeks. It's supposed to be for lips, but I put it on my cheeks and it's called Resilient. Why is it called Resilient? Because I thought, women over the last two years. I mean, everybody over the last few years has had it, but women have really had it. Women have lost jobs. Women have had to not take jobs because they're managing their families. And I designed a collection around the resilience or the tenacity of women. So, our products are named with a convention that is deep. Every product has a story. These lipsticks, I mean, Lord God is good. There are 10 colors and their names like Confident, Inspiring, Ambitious, and Resilient. Oprah Winfrey, which, if you don't know Oprah, that’s where I can help you, picks four of these colors as her favorite things. I mean, could not keep them in stock.

[00:29:11] JU: Four? Wow. One is good enough.

[00:29:15] AFD: I know. She gets four colors and we designed this beautiful box. It's back there in the corner, and it was just – I mean, talk about affirming, and the four colors she picks listen to their names, Focused, Fierce, Vicious, and Confidence. Each of them have a story. Each of them have a story, about drive, about being focused on what you want, about owning the word ambitious. Remember when somebody talked about Kamala Harris being ambitious and people were like used it as like it was a slur. I'm like, “Ah, we should own being ambitious guys.” Fierce, like confident. Those are the four colors she picked.

[00:29:52] MH: That's amazing.

[00:29:53] JU: Is there a story that comes in the packaging or anything? When you say story, or there's a story behind the word, how does the customer – do they get to project the meaning? I mean, surely they do. But how do they discover what you mean? Or do you allow it to be more of a rush – however, you say that word, like they put their own meaning on it?

[00:30:10] AFD: It's a bit of both. When you go onto the site, when you click on that particular product, you should see a brief description. We had a product of lipstick called Unstoppable. I think it starts off with, “This is for the woman who eats no for breakfast.” We always kind of have a brief paragraph that this describes. Of course, as you know, people when they're shopping online, they don't have time to read paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs. So, you've got to keep it short. And then that's what we use social media for as well. We create a lot of imagery, we do a lot of photoshoots, we create Instagram reels, TikToks, all those things, to really reinforce those stories. But on the website, each product will have a brief description of what the emotion we want to invoke when you buy the product.

[00:30:52] MH: I want to do this really quickly. I'm reading – so far, I have focused and it says, “This color has been known to get you channeled so that you are productive and look good, too.” I love that. I love that. I love that. That's awesome. I want to ask because I love that you are very specific and confident to talk about your love for color, and how, in some ways that can be very abstract, right? So maybe, just for the fun of it, I'd like to know what is a color that has recently resonated with you? Whether you're thinking about channeling that into a product or anything like that. What's a color that's recently resonated with you?

[00:31:34] AFD: Blue. I don't know why, but I want to see if I have this shade. I should have it on my thing. But blue. I mean, I wear a lot of blue. I don't know if it's because I have three boys. I'm beginning to wear so much blue without even thinking about it. But I really do love blue. If you can see my eyes, I've got blue eyeshadow and liner on. So, I always try to infuse blue in the Marrakesh collection, the eyeliners that you were talking about. Blue was actually the central color that that collection was designed around. I went and visited the YSL garden and museums, and the house and the garden is this spellbinding Majorelle blue. And that, I said, “I need to create this in makeup.” And it is our bestselling eyeliner. It's unbelievable. It's called Musée Bleu, and it's like this color, basically. It's stunning.

Yeah, literally I was in Marrakesh for work and visited this place, and I just became so inspired to create – I was like, “I'm going to create something with this color.” And I eventually did.

[00:32:39] MH: Yeah, just looking at the product description for that Musée Bleu on here, that story, it's such a great example of how you went from owning this thing about yourself. I love color, to channeling it and harnessing it into a product that your customers can engage with in a very deep way. So, this isn't just arbitrarily blue highlighter. This is a story about an experience. I love that.

[00:33:06] JU: Let's stay on the theme of inspiration. Marcus knows this is one of my favorite themes. Because the notion of inspiration changed my life personally, not only from my wife, who was a fashion designer when I met her but also from Marcus's colleague, Lecrae, who has spoken with me about inspiration too. But here's the question for you. You mentioned you're at the YSL Museum. I'm sure that's like an inspiration trek. Tell us about a recent point of inspiration for you, and it doesn't have to be color necessarily. Although I know a lot of times, sometimes it is. But like what do you do to be deliberate about filling your inspiration tank? What do you do? Can you talk in terms of actual tactics like calendar, behavior, et cetera?

[00:33:53] AFD: I'll start first with – I love this question. And again, it takes me back to something you taught me, called analogous explorations. I have used that throughout building this business as a point of filling up my cup. And not only just filling up the cup, but looking at things very differently. So, I was in my supply chain, my factory is based in Milan in Northern Italy. I was there for a few weeks last month meeting with the team and working on new collections, and I was exhausted, exhausted, exhausted.

But before I left, I took a day off and I said, “Okay, we're not going to talk about makeup. We're not going to do anything. I'm just going to take the day off to explore.” So, I visited a castle in Monza. I visited the Duomo, which is just an unbelievably imposing church, and the museum next door to it. None of these were color-infused. What I wanted to do was visit these gorgeous historic places and almost observe how people are – like you go into the Duomo, yes, it's a church, but I bet you many people in there may not even be Christians, right? But it's so beautiful. The walls, everything. I wanted to just observe how do I get people to come to my site and feel this beauty and feel this stuff. So this is what I spent the entire day in Milan doing, going to these really gorgeous places, and how do I replicate that in my world, but not thinking about lipstick right now. So, I do that. I mean, I enjoyed visiting the museums. I mean, I took lots of gorgeous pictures and prayed at the Duomo, like, did so much.

But there is the other part, maybe 48 hours later that you're like, “Okay, let's debrief, let's reflect.” I do a lot of things like that. The other day I did my nails, alright, and you're sitting there and you're chatting with a nail lady, and you're figuring out what about this process is so relaxing. So, it's a lot of self-care things that I do and try to translate the experience to what I do every day.

[00:36:02] JU: How do you rationalize it? I'm kind of going somewhere with this question. So know there's a follow-up. But how do you argue for making space for such seemingly unnecessary activities?

[00:36:11] AFD: Maybe I didn’t say this earlier when I just said, I burned out when I left investment banking. What I didn't say is I ended up in the hospital. I was diagnosed with severe hypertension, and my father had died a decade before that of heart failure. So, I have heart-related issues in my family, and I found out then, I was diagnosed with severe hypertension, and my doctor was like, if you don't change your lifestyle, you're going to have a stroke, and you're going to die young, just like your dad did.

So, I always have that thought that I cannot run all the time. And that taking moments for myself, it's like, you have to drink water you have to do that. You have to constantly calm down, calm down. So, I have integrated that into my life. It's not a question of how do you accept that? I know that for me to go full throttle on the business and the creativity, I need the quiet time.

[00:37:10] JU: So, here's where I was going and I really appreciate that. I mean, that's like part two of the conversation, is let's talk about being in the hospital. By the way, it's not the first time that someone's transformation happened in a hospital. Diarra Bousso of DIARRABLU, she also has a similar kind of story. But the question I wanted to ask is, and maybe this could be the last thing because I know we're getting close to running out of time. We try to wrap in time to be able to give you back a little bit of your day as a gift.

You'd said earlier, something about you had to take an investment banking job because you didn't come from privilege. So, you had to do this. And then you said, the right way to do this is to get a job with a salary, right? I feel those are deeply ingrained beliefs. If I don't come from privilege, there's a right way. And by the way, like going to the Duomo’s not the right way. I mean, as far as anybody's definition of what the right way is, and yet it is what's right for you. So, I'd love to hear as you think about especially, think about somebody might be listening to this, maybe somebody in the projects now, maybe somebody who's in Section Eight housing, and they've got these ideas probably of what they can and can't do, and what's the right way, or what's the wrong way. How do you think about those rules now that you're on the other side of your journey? What's the right way? What does it mean to come from privilege or not?

[00:38:27] AFD: Yeah. So, there is no right way. That took me long enough to learn that. There is no right way. And I think just being a product of being a first-generation American, there's a lot of baggage that you are told what the right way is, right? Coming from communities of color, like you don't talk about pursuing passion. You go make some money. That's once you have the opportunity, you go to an Ivy League school, don't you dare waste that.

So, there's a lot of community that tells you what you should do. And I think my advice is, you create your own path. You really have to believe that you are the right steward for yourself. Literally, everybody's story is different. You can't look at anyone else and say, “I want to copy her journey.” You can't copy my journey. You are going to create your own path. You have to decide what that's going to be.

I mean, I have no regrets. I believe regret is an absolute wasted emotion. My children are growing up very differently from me. They're not growing up in the projects. But I really want them to understand that same hunger, though, that I had, and I want them to live that. I want them to know and believe that they can be anything they want to be. They don't have to go my path. They don't have to go their dad's path. They can create their own path. And guess what? I'm going to learn from it. What these guys are doing now, the young folks, I'm like, “Wow, this is amazing.” Trust that. Trust that.

[00:39:52] MH: That's amazing. I did go silent for a second because I feel like I was receiving that directly, and I hope our listeners will too.

[00:40:00] AFD: I hope so. I hope so. This has been fun, guys.

[00:40:04] JU: Aishe, what a pleasure to get to know you and your story. I mean, what's wild is, you can spend 10 weeks with somebody, see him in class every day, and still know just so little. So, I'm tremendously honored that you were willing to share time with us and share your story, and we hope to do justice and to share with lots of folks who can be inspired and be emboldened and be filled with confidence to be good stewards of themselves, as you said. So, thanks for that, really appreciate it.

[00:40:33] AFD: Can I say one thing, and you can turn off the recording if you have to. So, two things. One is, and I told you this before, Jeremy, you literally are a part of the journey, right? I've talked about this whole learning design, thinking through you and almost not being able to get into the class, and getting into it and learning, and all of that. For me, that is all God at work in my journey.

And then the second point, I want to say, when I say that I'm speaking only to one person at each point, I do believe that is part of my purpose. I speak so much, because I believe that is what I'm supposed to be doing. So, when I say that it's a women's empowerment mission driven brand that masquerades as a beauty company, I am being truthful. If one listener listens to this podcast and says, “I'm inspired to pray more. I am inspired to believe in myself more. I am inspired to do whatever.” One person, I have fulfilled my mission that God asked me to do. It doesn't have to be billions of people. So, that's what I do every single day.

[00:41:35] MH: That's awesome. Thank you.

[00:41:36] AFD: Marcus, it was great to meet you.

[00:41:38] MH: This has been amazing. I'm so excited to tap in more, and I'd said mission fulfilled today. I was deeply inspired as much as being able to facilitate the conversation for others as well.

[END]