Yo Pretty Boy: Building the Active Men’s Skin Care Brand
Kevin Niehoff and Ben Feys are building a skin care brand for the active man called Pretty Boy.
Kevin played football in college and struggled with outbreaks and rashes on his face. He was diagnosed with a type of eczema and suddenly was very focused on skin care.
Ben also struggled with acne when he was young and knew the impact an outbreak could have on your confidence.
They, like you I’m sure if you’re reading this, were the type of friends who always chatted about business ideas. A simple, effective skin care product for men was the one they decided to start.
Cleansers were already used by most men so they decided to work on a moisturizer, which was a growing category.
After two years of working on the formulation they had their product. They put in their first order with a 10,000 minimum. It cost them $70,000 and they funded it from savings. They launched in February 2022.
An interesting tactic they used in the early days was to use a third party survey company to reach out to dermatologists. Their ingredients were chosen as the best and for $1,500 they could include the below comparison on their site.
The first year was testing ads and agencies. They rolled through three different ad agencies and eventually moved the work in house to avoid the large retainer fees. By the end of the first year they had sold $187,000 and cash was tight.
Then a few ads started to take off. A UGC style ad by Kevin and a comparison ad vs. Kiehls were bringing in customers.
They started with a high cost cap on Meta at $50 and slowly brought it down by $5 increments. Meanwhile customers kept coming back. In fact their cohort analysis is amazing. As shown below their average first order in January 2023 was $39 and by month 11 they spent $96.
The business is pretty sticky. From each monthly cohort there’s about a 10% chance in a following month that someone from the group buys again.
Their second year they sold $1.1 million. And the margins? They’re good.
Average order value is now $45
Cost of goods including packaging: $6.18
Merchant fees: $1.94
Returns: 1%
Average cost to ship: $5.50 (including fulfillment)
So nearly 70% landed to customer margins. Beauty of a skin brand!
The main problem right now is the lead time. The components take four months from China and the product itself, which is made in the U.S. takes 20-24 weeks lead time. Ben and Kevin are looking at additional manufacturing options to speed this process up.
Before their inventory was getting low and they had to reduce ad spend they were selling 8-9,000 units a month on their site and 2-2,500 on Amazon. Or over $4 million in annual sales if they had enough inventory.
Pretty Boy is going to be a big business. They landed on a niche. Solved a real problem. Have a high margin product with a high lifetime value.
If I was them I’d work on including sunscreen, as that’s something others and I look for:
Then I would introduce a cleanser to increase average order and lifetime value and then grow profitably or start reaching out to see if a large competitor would like to buy the company.
Brilliant brand. Brilliant business.
There’s money everywhere!
Sources:
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