It recently occurred to me that of our 83,000 followers on Instagram, 82,000 on Tik Tok, and 100,000+ email database, that there’s a lot of you who know nothing about Fluff, or me for that matter. And perhaps you don’t care, perhaps you never will. Part of me loves that your relationship to Fluff or beauty is purely transactional, and that you don’t give it much more of a thought than that. The fact that beauty has become so complicated, so personal, is all a bit strange, really.
The other part of me thinks it’s worthwhile telling you our/my story, and why we started. At a time when our world feels so desperate, why should we care about beauty? Or is this the whole point?
My original post about founding this brand can be found on Medium, some 8 years ago:
“What I’ve come to realise is this: I’m 28 years old, and I’m still figuring out so much about myself. We all know the pressures and confusion of social and digital media, and how it can challenge our sense of who we are. And I was part of the last generation to grow up without this level of noise and confusion during my teens — the time when figuring myself out was at its hardest.”
Today, at 36, I feel much the same. I’m still figuring out a lot, alongside an industry and world that seems to be just as lost, just as fragmented.
“A brand that helps girls figure themselves out. A beauty foundation without a foundation.”
Today, almost a decade into running this brand and business, my approach (and thinking) has somewhat evolved.
“A brand with an invitation to change your relationship to beauty.”
In 2017, we launched Fluff with just shy of $1 million in investment, a double frontage retail store in Fitzroy, Melbourne, and six team members. I was ambitious. I had previously co-founded and exited a skincare brand where I learnt most of what I know today about the industry, and felt emotionally driven to create a brand for my younger cousins, that introduced an alternative narrative: that it’s ok to feel more with makeup, so long as you don’t feel less without it.
I remember the first time I said this, to one of our initial employees, when she was rightfully interrogating our mission, and trying to understand how Fluff was different from any other brand. Were we for or against makeup? What was I trying to change? What was wrong to begin? It was this line that stood out to her, amongst the pages of investment thesis and brand building decks. This, she said, would be our point of view.
And so it appeared to resonate with many more people. We had young (women in particular) come sit on our floor for three hours, telling us about their lives, about their relationship to beauty, explicit or subconscious. We had Makeunders instead of makeovers. We traded old powders for new ones. We had art exhibitions and tattoo pop ups in store. We had an editorial platform for our audience where we published articles no matter the topic, no matter their writing experience.
We had a community back then. A real one.
If you lived in America, you probably had no idea who we were. But if you lived in Fitzroy, you almost definitely did.
Of course, we are business, as well as a brand. We sell makeup. We are for profit. Selling products allowed us to have a store, and today it allows us to share our message. We need to be in the game if we really want to change it.
Which is why today our message speaks to finding a balance, or rather, having an awareness of the flux. We call it conscious consumption.
Beauty was, can, and should be fun. An extension and expression of who we are.
Beauty was, can, and should be responsible. Good for the industry, good for the economy, and conscious of its footprint.
When we launched our Refillable Cloud Compacts and campaign, ‘Reduce, Reuse, Refill’, we were one of the first in the industry to do so. Today refills are becoming the standard, and I’m proud that we were one of the few leading the conversation along the way.
To many we still appear like any other beauty brand, selling products, posting content, the list goes on. We no longer have a store, selling exclusively online, and run a small team of 8, working in remote, fractional roles around the world. Occasionally we have in person events and pop-ups, something I am excited to grow, if Fluff can maintain its presence and connection.
Our community today feels less local, more global, and with that, a dilution of sorts. It’s inevitable, it makes me a bit sad and frustrated at the best of times, but it’s also normal.
It’s hard to be something for everyone. But we like that we can be everything for someone.
For these people, we’re still an approach to beauty that feels different, that feels intentional, that feels responsible. We’re a simple product line that doesn’t promise you the world, that simply wants to complement your world. We’re an editorial platform - this Issues Page features contributions from our customers and followers around the world, about issues they care about, not beauty interviews or celebrity trends. Our podcast talks about other peoples’ relationship to beauty and how it changes over time.
Recently I had a conversation with beauty writer Jessica Defino, in which she commented that she hopes one day she’ll stop caring about beauty so much, about wanting to change this industry’s present state, that things will course correct and she won’t have to write about it anymore.
I feel very much the same.
Fluff will have achieved what we set out to do when people the world over feel like they have a conscious and comfortable relationship to beauty. It’s not an easy task, it sounds rather lofty and vague, and this very aspiration goes against the “growth at all costs” method of so many in our industry. It may very well be our demise. At least it’s a worthy purpose.
I’ve been writing (read pausing, stalling, resuming,) a book, Pretty Hard, for almost six years. It’s all about this dance, the ebb and flow. It’s all about the conversations we have on Fluff’s podcast, with different people sharing their own experiences around beauty, identity, and meaning, in parallel with my own experience, and learnings within the industry. I’m in the editing stage. I care about it a little too much. I don’t know when it will be ready, but when it is, you’ll know.
I hope that in the meantime, Fluff’s offering: our products, our content, our narrative, will give you the feeling that you can be yourself, as opposed to aspiring to be anyone else.
I think there’s something really beautiful in that.
Thanks for being here.
Erika.
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