Female Founder World

4AM founder Jade Beguelin is on the show letting us in on the beauty news everyone's talking about: her brand's $4 million fundraise, launch into Target, and the sell-out success of the brand's Clean Sheets makeup wipes.

After years of bootstrapping, building an audience on TikTok, and tinkering with their product offering, 4AM just found product-market fit in a massive way. Their Clean Sheets wipes have sold out four production runs and grown the business more than 4x year over year.

But here's the thing: every dermatologist, skin influencer, and makeup expert will tell you to skip the face wipe. And yet makeup wipes are a top 10 best seller on Amazon. Customers were buying them anyway, ignoring the advice, because sometimes convenience wins. Jade and her co-founder Sabrina saw that gap between what experts recommend and what people actually do, and decided to just make makeup wipes that were better. This premise worked much better than trying to compete on another serum in a crowded category full of innovation.

Until now, 4AM was funded entirely by the founders' savings and a handful of $5K–$10K angel checks. The brand launched in 2021 with two serums and a simple mission: products for lazy routines and late nights. It wasn't until they reimagined the face wipe with Clean Sheets in 2025 that everything clicked — a product that's genuinely effective, built for the way people already live, and made for the kind of video content that stops a scroll.

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Jasmine, Natalie and Paige are back to debrief on the business and brand news we're thinking about this week.

First, Claire's is back, so we need to talk about who is behind the comeback and what their playbook is. Plus Meta just overtook Google in advertising for the first time ever, and we're breaking down exactly what that means for where you should be putting your dollars. And finally, Ulta Beauty World. We're talking about why this event has become the Super Bowl of beauty and what brands, at every size,can learn from it.

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When Untouched Blooms founder Max Summersett started selling handcrafted phone grips on Etsy in 2024 she made a couple of orders every day. Then, within a year of launching on Shopify, she sold 10,000 products (without a single paid ad).

She launched using a few hundred dollars saved from cycling around Miami Beach selling flowers. Today, the brand’s used by influencers like Alix Earle and Morgan Riddle, and is best known for turning pet photos into phone grips.

Right around when Max launched, a different brand was going viral on TikTok with a similar product.

They were racking up 600,000 to 800,000 views but didn’t ship to the US. TikTok kept serving those videos to US audiences anyway, and people looked for a local alternative. Max’s product appeared in the search bar, and because she could actually fulfil the order, the sales started flowing to her. Orders jumped from a handful a day to 35, then 60. The lesson she took from it: if something is trending in another market and isn’t available locally, you can capitalize on the search traffic.

Once Max saw that demand was real, she moved from Etsy to Shopify to start selling on a platform she owned, and stop handing over a portion of sales to Etsy.

Max built on the momentum with influencer gifting. She doesn’t have a PR agency or huge budgets for elaborate mailers, so DMs creators and focuses on making every package feel like it was created by a friend. She bedazzles the boxes, includes photos and spends energy making the PR look like it’s from a human, not a brand. Every influencer who has posted about her has mentioned the packaging.

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We need to talk about Acquired Style x Swan Beauty! Jasmine, Paige and Natalie are chatting about the brand almost nobody had heard of a week ago that just spent a small fortune sponsoring a bachelorette trip, and what it actually did for their brand. Plus, Parke just landed at Target, but what actually goes into a decision like this and what happens next? And, Gap made nearly a billion dollars in profit last year, so we are breaking down how they achieved this profitability and what other founders can learn from it.

Thank you to our sponsor Omnisend for making the show possible. Use the code FFW50 for 50% off Omnisend.

We'll be back with our regular Monday interview show next week.

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Paige, Natalie and Jasmine are back for your weekly group chat show discussing Emma Grede’s unmissable book tour, community marketing tactics we’ve been thinking about, and a brainstorm about how to tap into the release of Devil Wears Prada 2 as a brand.

Thanks to Omnisend for making this episode possible! Use the code FFW50 for 50% off: omnisend.com
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