Fashion is big business, but when Liah Yoo started her small YouTube channel in 2011, she had no intention of making it big on the fashion scene. Many years later, and with a multi-million-dollar business on her hands in Krave Beauty, Yoo realizes what it takes to get to the top of the pile.
Setting Up a YouTube Channel With No Expectations
In 2012, Yoo set up her small YouTube channel, offering insight into makeup and tips to help people get started. She admits that she didn’t expect anything to come of it. She just started posting regularly and built up a following over time.
At the start, she would spend time interacting with people. Back then, YouTube wasn’t the same engagement-farming place that it is today, and Yoo would spend hours forging genuine relationships with her followers. She learned much from them about why they followed her and heeded her advice.
Pivoting Into Full-Time Content Creation
Yoo quickly realized that she could turn this content creation business into a full-time business. Three years after she started, she decided to take it full-time and spent even more time building and enhancing her relationship with her audience.
She realized that because of her individual approach and small follower numbers, most larger businesses would never be able to get the same sort of interaction on their posts. She leveraged this into something she could capitalize on as she contemplated launching her business brand.
Founding a Brand Built on Her Ideals
When Yoo founded Krave Beauty, she wanted something that no one else in the beauty space had. In 2017, Krave Beauty was established to be a cruelty-free, vegan brand that others would be proud to use. She could guarantee that her products were what she said they were because she was intimately involved with their production.
Yoo says that content creation pushed her to launch her brand, and she has never been happier. In 2021, Krave Beauty registered sales of over a million dollars, turning a brand that came out of a content creator’s mind into one of the best-selling beauty brands on the market.
Yoo Preaches Minimalism
One of the things that Yoo tells people who want to follow in her footsteps is that she decided to build a brand that is mostly the opposite of all the other people who do it. Instead of having a product or a service that appeals to everyone, she developed a handful of products that showcased her idea of beauty.
Krave Beauty stands for limiting exposure to skincare products, both to the skin and the planet. Her brand, therefore, only has a handful of products with particular uses. Her Instagram page is all about keeping makeup to a minimum and seeking beauty in other ways.
Focus On Customers First
Being a sustainable brand means that Yoo doesn’t look at the business world the same way others do. She sees it from the perspective of “How can I benefit my customers while still being able to put the plant first?” In such a case, the customers are the most vital part of her business outlook.
The people who buy her product also share her idea of sustainability. She’s cultivated a social media following of people who believe what she does about beauty, chemicals, and the environment. Because of that focus on customers, she can develop a product that doesn’t destroy its sustainability.
Be Transparent With Your Goals and Marketing
Yoo’s claim to fame comes from how she markets her products to her clientele. Unlike other beauty brands that try to sell ten products to one customer, she sees Krave as a brand that tries to do more with less. In that sense, she wants to sell one product to ten people and keep the footprint small.
She attributes her success to the transparency of her marketing and goals. Her audience follows her because of her dedication to the cause. By being transparent in her marketing, she reaches out to people who share the same core values as she does. Those are the people she makes her product for.
Stick To Your Guns
Social media is populated by people who want to sell people a product that they’ve come up with overnight. It’s all about engagement farming and people telling others what they want to hear. Yoo doesn’t hold with this view of social media marketing and believes the true goal is not to get taken in by easy gains.
As a dedicated entrepreneur who believes in what she does, Yoo says that sticking to your guns in the face of adversity is crucial to demonstrating your character as an entrepreneur. Everyone has beliefs, she says, but many of them are willing to sell those beliefs out for quick financial gain.
Take Advantage Of Your Size
As a smaller influencer, Yoo doesn’t have the same massive reach as more prominent beauty brands, but she sees this as a plus. She thinks that it makes it easier to interact with her audience and forge legitimate bonds with them.
Big brands have so many followers that they can sidestep anyone without even noticing. Combine that with their penchant for pleasing everyone, and you’ll have a brand whose goal is to cover as many bases as possible but not actually do anything that they believe in. Yoo never wants Krave Beauty to become a brand like that.
A Brand Unlike Any Other
Yoo has been working with Krave Beauty to develop the #PressReset campaign, which intends to introduce people to navigating skincare without complications. As Yoo continues to show off why her brand is the way it is, it’s not surprising that she’s made it onto several top entrepreneur lists in numerous publications.
It’s not every day that a person can turn their passion into an online business that makes over a million dollars in sales. Yoo’s success seems to be as sustainable as her business, and we’ll probably be hearing about Krave Beauty for a long time to come.
