BE A BALLER -"Building a lifelong legacy"

Kristen Jones Miller: Faith, Resilience, and Building a Legacy in Beauty Entrepreneurship and Education

• Coach Tim Brown, Uncommon Life • Season 5 • Episode 3

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Kristen Jones Miller's entrepreneurial journey is both inspiring and transformative. Driven by a personal frustration with the lack of suitable nude lip colors for darker skin tones, Kristen co-founded Minted Cosmetics with Amanda Johnson, turning a light bulb moment into a multi-million dollar success. Their story is a testament to the power of creativity and resilience, as well as the vital role of community support. Kristen shares how her faith and the encouragement from Second Baptist Church empowered her to pursue her dreams. This episode is a must-listen for anyone keen to understand the intersection of entrepreneurship and legacy-building, especially in the context of addressing the needs of underrepresented communities.

We also tackle the challenging landscape Black founders face in securing venture capital, with Kristen detailing her journey and the strategies she employed to overcome these odds. After pitching to 70-80 investors before receiving an initial $50,000 investment, Kristen emphasizes the importance of persistence, market demand, and mentorship. She also highlights the  influence mentors like Coach Tim Brown and others have had on her journey. Transitioning into her role as a full-time professor at The Ohio State University, Kristen explores her passion for teaching and her unique philosophy, prioritizing class participation and critical thinking over traditional exams, offering invaluable insights for aspiring entrepreneurs setting out to create their vision for the future.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Be A Baller where we're building a lifelong legacy for our families, communities and the world. Your host, coach Tim Brown, is excited for you to join him on this journey. On each episode, we'll be talking about how to be intentional about building a lasting legacy. We'll be exploring what it means to leave a mark that goes beyond just our lives but has a positive impact on those around us and even generations to come. So if you're looking for inspiration, guidance and practical tips on how to build a lasting legacy that makes a difference, then you're in the right place. So grab your earbuds, get comfortable and let's dive in. It's time to be a baller.

Speaker 2:

My name is Tim Brown and I'm the host for Be A Baller podcast. I want to welcome you all to our Be A Baller podcast live event and, today, what we do in our podcast. We talk to people in the community who are building a lifelong legacy. Guests a young lady named Kristen Jones Miller, who's the co-founder of Minted Cosmetics in 2017, along with her Harvard graduate business classmate, amanda Johnson. Today, minted is sold in retail stores and online all over the country, and today it's a multi-million dollar company. We can do better than that. Come on, now we got a millionaire sitting here. So, kristen, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:

Kristen is also a graduate of Gahanna Lincoln High School, so she's a Central Ohio native as well. Kristen, I've known Kristen for a while. We grew up well, she grew up I was older at Second Baptist Church. We used to hang out at Second Baptist Church, kristen was in our youth group, and so it's just been a blessing watching her grow up and become the gifted and talented woman that she is today. She's also a mother and a wife as well, so we're blessed to have her in the audience today.

Speaker 3:

One thing, kristen, as we get started, can you talk about your faith foundation and how that's grounded you in your purpose in life? Sure, well, first of all, thank you for having me and thank all of you for allowing me to come speak. So my faith foundation I did grow up in church with my family. We went to Second Baptist and, honestly, what it gave to me and that I'm still so grateful for is community.

Speaker 3:

I think, regardless of your faith right or regardless of if it's something you continue to practice as you age, having a community when you're young and having people older than you who you can look up to and say, oh wow, this person is a doctor, this person is a lawyer, this person is a reverend, this person is an accountant, whatever it might be. Seeing all of those models, I think, helped shape me into believing I really could do whatever I wanted to do, even if that thing I wanted to do was some far-off entrepreneurship goal. That didn't feel too out of reach to me because I had so many people in my community, at my church, doing so many different things. So that was one of the things that was really so helpful for me growing up.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. You have said the idea for minted cosmetics was shortened for pigmented spark, because you've been looking for a perfect new lipstick for your dark skin for more than three years. Can you share with the audience when was that light bulb moment that happened in your life to say, hey, I can do this?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely Well. First of all, my guess is a lot of you have similar light bulb moments in your lives because you are trying to do something and you realize the thing that you've got to do it with doesn't work that well. I was speaking to a young lady earlier who makes her own fashion. She's, she sews, she's from Gahanna Lincoln and she makes her own dresses. And my guess is part of the reason that she started making and you can tell me if I'm wrong her own dresses is because she realized a lot of the things in stores didn't fit her the way that she wanted them to, maybe didn't have the fashion, the design that she wanted it to, and she said I can fix that. I don't have to wait for someone else to do it for me, I can do it for myself.

Speaker 3:

Similarly, for our minted cosmetics my brand, my co-founder and I we could not find lip colors that we felt looked good on our skin. She and I are both darker skin, african American women and particularly nude lip colors. So nude and neutral being your, you know something that looks good or complements your skin tone, your lip tone. And so we kept finding that people wanted us to wear these beiges and these pale pinks. And in order to make it look nude, they told us we had to mix it with a brown lip liner and a gloss and a balm and four other different things. By the time you've done all that, first of all, it's taken you 10 minutes to put on a lip. Second, of all, that's going to separate throughout the day. I don't want to have to wear four different lip colors to achieve the shade that I want, and we just thought that's silly. Why, if I'm pale, do I get a range of nude lip colors for me, a bajillion different types of pinks and beiges but if I'm brown skin, I've got to put in all this extra work and try to make what's available work for me.

Speaker 3:

We didn't think that was right. So we said you know how hard can it be To make a nude lip color that looks good on us? And we bought the necessary ingredients. We bought the colorants, we bought the micas, we bought the molds, we bought the oil and the wax and we actually started making lipstick on our own in our apartments. We lived in New York at the time, in Harlem. We started making it on our own and realized oh, it's not that hard, you just have to want to do it. It's not rocket science, we're talking about lipstick. You just have to want to make shades that will work for people who look like us, and we did, and the shades that we developed literally in our apartments in Harlem this would have been 2015 or so are still top selling shades for us today. So we just we had to want to do it.

Speaker 2:

You know you kind of glossed over that, but can you talk about sitting in an apartment watching YouTube channels, you know, and just, and how long did that? How long did you do it? Was it just one time you had the right formula, what was it? Talk about that experience.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, so you mentioned YouTube. We did learn how to make lipstick on YouTube and I am a firm believer you can learn anything on YouTube, anything. Your am a firm believer. You can learn anything on YouTube, anything your little heart desires, right? So don't ever let the fact that there's something you don't know how to do stop you, because someone has done it and they have almost certainly also filmed themselves doing it. Um, so that's, you know something that I, that I learned and took with me. But yeah, we, we watched a bunch of a bunch of videos and then we said, okay, let's try it.

Speaker 3:

And this was weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks of kind of perfecting the formula that we thought would work well for us and then perfecting the shades. And then, after we had a set of shades our first six shades that we wanted to launch with, we started testing them on people. We didn't just say, okay, well, you and I like them, let's go to market. We said, all right, well, let's start testing them on other people. So we would bring in our friends of a bunch of different skin tones, our Indian friends, our Hispanic friends, our black friends and try the shades on them and get their feedback and then tweak. So it was definitely an iterative process, right. It wasn't just like oh, we got something we like, let's launch. It was we got something we think is good, let's try it on some people, let's get their feedback, let's see what they say, and then we were ready to sort of send it out into market.

Speaker 3:

And then from there, before we even launched, we actually started sending those lip colors to influencers. So we were reaching out on Instagram. We were DMing people every day on Instagram saying, hey, we're these two black girls from Harvard and we have this lipstick and we want you to try it. And that was kind of the pitch. I mean, we made it sound a little bit nicer than that, but that was kind of the pitch because we weren't a real brand. You couldn't buy these lipsticks anywhere. We were asking these people to take a chance on us. Let us send you our homemade lipsticks and if you like them and you wear them, post them for us. And a lot of influencers started doing this.

Speaker 3:

So, before you could even purchase the lipsticks, we had people on Instagram wearing our products and showing it off and saying I just got sent these lipsticks. And this started happening before we even had a name for the brand. So then it was like oh snaps, now they want to tag us. We don't have a name and we don't have anything to tag.

Speaker 3:

So we quickly thought of a name and Minted, as you mentioned, is short for pigmented. We thought of a name, we got our tag on Instagram, our handle on Instagram, so that people could tag us. But then it was okay, people are looking and people want the product, but they can't buy it, and so we sort of had demand before we had an actual product people could purchase, which is something I always recommend. If you can do that, if you can start getting whatever it is you're working out in people's hands and prove that there's demand for it before you start selling it, then when you actually launch the business, you can feel a lot better, a lot more confident that there are people out there who want what it is you're making.

Speaker 2:

That's powerful. That's powerful. Hand clap, hand clap, hand clap. Y'all can be slow with that. She was sharing that.

Speaker 2:

Some of our older audience remember Jet and Ebony magazine, remember the old Jet and Ebony magazine. Young people don't know about that, thank you. Got a few hands back there. But Bob Johnson started that. This is what he did.

Speaker 2:

He went to a store, went to a grocery store. He said just take a chance on this, now let me put it on the rack and see if it sells. So what he did? He took him to the rack, put him on, put him on the stand and he had all his friends going and buying. He had all his friends going and buying. And so he comes back, oh, this is empty. And the store owners think, oh, this is great, this is great, all these sales. So he brought some more, brought some more, had more friends going and buying them out. Basically, they sold out.

Speaker 2:

So what happened was he piqued them with what Christian is saying If you have an idea, you just got to put it out there. You just got to put it out there. And here's living proof of what happens when you really believe in what you're doing. And there's a need, there's a demand. Now, there's another side to this as well that I want Kristen to share about, and that's the financial side, because to launch a company, it takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of money. So how did you, as an African-American union, you and your co-founder, african-american women I'm sure you're going around all these men you know, trying to convince them that this is the deal invest in me? Talk to the young people about that process as well.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So we did end up raising venture capital. Venture capital, of course, is a type of capital that you can get from large investment firms who will put half a million, a million, a couple million dollars into your company, and they'll do that because they want to purchase a stake of your company. So we did end up raising venture capital. We ended up across, I think, three different rounds, raising about $9 million in total, but in the very beginning we were just looking to raise a quarter of a million dollars $250,000. We thought that was going to be enough for us to get our idea off the ground and the reason we were able to do that. First of all, something like less than 2% of venture capital goes to black founders, right, so we were up against incredible odds, but part of the reason we were able to do it is because of that work that I was just talking about, because we weren't coming in and just saying, hey, we've got some lipsticks and we think they're great.

Speaker 3:

We were coming in and saying we've got some lipsticks that people are already trying to buy. People are already trying to buy. Before we had a brand name, they were looking for it. Once we had a brand name, but we didn't have a shop. People were trying to buy it, people were buzzing, influencers were talking about it and that made investors say, okay, well, there's really something here, because before they even were able to sell the lipsticks, people were wanting to buy the lipsticks and that that gave them a bit more confidence and willingness to invest in us.

Speaker 3:

But it was extremely difficult and you know I don't always advise young founders to try and raise money only because it is such a difficult thing to do. But I will say, if that is a path that you want to go down, then the most important thing is being able to walk into the room and say there's already demand for my product. People have already shown me that they want to purchase it. That's going to speak volumes well, and far beyond what you can just say about the idea that you have. So if you do want to go down that path, that is something that we had going for us.

Speaker 3:

But I pitched at least 70, 80 investors before I got my first yes, and my first yes was a woman who wrote us a $50,000 check. But I had pitched dozens and dozens and dozens of people before I got to that yes. So that's what I'll say about that. But if you're not looking to raise outside capital in order to launch your business, you can still launch your business. That just means you're going to grow it bootstrapped, as they say money to make our lipsticks and to start shipping those lipsticks out to influencers. We used our own money to do that, and we could have also used our own money to buy the domain mintedcosmeticscom and use our own money to start shipping that way as well. So you can do it. A lot of times what you need outside capital for is to grow more quickly, but it is possible to do it if you're savvy and you save. It is possible to do it without raising outside capital.

Speaker 2:

Good, that's a good word. You know, I know that as we're talking, I know our important mentorship and investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs is so important to you and you kind of alluded to that because of the fact how hard it was for you. You know again, I know now you're an angel investor and giving back, you talk to the, to these young people, why that's so important to you. Mentorship and giving. Yeah um.

Speaker 3:

So mentorship is incredibly important to me because I know what it did for me.

Speaker 3:

I know what it did for me. I know what it meant to have people like Deacon Brown in my life, who were willing to pour into me and were willing to answer my questions, were willing to sit with me, willing to take time out of their busy schedules to mentor me. I know what that meant for me. So that's why I like to pay it forward. But I will say and I think this is incredibly important people will rarely just hop up, step up to mentor you. That sometimes that will happen. Sometimes someone will see you and be like let me be your mentor, but that's rare. Typically, what happens is you have to be the person. When you meet someone who you think can pour into you, and you have to say I would love to learn from you. And then you have to make it easy for them to pour into you. So by that I mean don't say I would love to learn from you and then ghost them. Don't say I would love to learn from you but say but only if you can come meet me at my school on these days, between these hours, why would I go out of my way to do that. You want something from me, right?

Speaker 3:

So the best mentorship relationships I have had have been people who have made it very easy for me to mentor them. They've said what's your schedule? When can you meet? Let's do virtual. Let's put these times on the calendar right, like so I have a daughter.

Speaker 3:

Weekend days I'm with my child. I rarely am going to leave her to come do whatever the thing is unless I can bring her. So that means the best time for me to meet with someone is actually weekdays, when I can find 30-minute pockets in my workday. I can find 30 minutes at 3 pm on a Tuesday Can you and you guys are in school. I'm not telling you to skip school. But, to be very clear, the point is when people reach out to me like you've got to do it on my time, so you've got to look for these people and then you've got to make it very easy for them to mentor you because people are willing to do it, them to mentor you because people are willing to do it. But if it's got to be on your time and on your schedule and the way you want to do it, then that just makes it tough for people to be able to pour in.

Speaker 2:

Wow, that's some great wisdom. That's some great wisdom. You know you're a teacher at heart. You know being a lecturer at Yale University and then at your alma mater, harvard, and now you're actually a full-time professor at the Ohio State University.

Speaker 3:

I am a professor at the Ohio State University. Yes.

Speaker 2:

I don't think you all missed that how big that is. We're talking about the Ohio State University and this young lady is a full-time professor at the Ohio State University. That deserves a bigger hand clap than that. So you come back full circle to Buckeye Land full-time professor. How does it feel being on the other side? Now you know you're a student at one time. Now you are the teacher. How does that feel?

Speaker 3:

I love to teach. I really, really do it is something that brings me a lot of joy, and the reason I love to do it is because I love when I'm watching sort of an unlock happen, when someone's listening and understanding and saying like, oh you know, you can kind of see the light bulb go off and I just know and I teach business. So I teach at the Fisher College of Business. Before that I taught at Yale School of Management. I think business should feel far more accessible to far more people, and so helping it feel accessible and tangible to students is just something I'm quite passionate about.

Speaker 2:

I also read where you wanted to teach. Because you wanted to. You wanted to be that teacher. You didn't have that. There were certain things that that. So talk, talk to the audience about what kind of? If I signed up for your class, what kind of teacher are you giving me a thousand page paper to do? You know you always homework. What kind of teacher are you?

Speaker 3:

Yes, a thousand pages. No, I so um. So I went to Harvard Business School, and one thing that Harvard Business School is famous for is we teach everything. They teach everything via what's called the case study method, and so the way the case study method works is you read a case about a particular business maybe about Google, maybe about Apple but then, when you get in the classroom, the whole class session is a discussion, and so the theory is that the professor is essentially guiding the learning, but every single student in class is helping teach, because everybody has read the case and everybody is bringing their experience to the case.

Speaker 3:

So I you know, before I got to Harvard Business School, I was working in retail. I was a buyer for several years. So I might you know, before I got to Harvard Business School, I was working in retail. I was a buyer for several years. So I might be reading about Apple. I've never worked in tech, but something about my experience in retail is going to be relevant to the case. So I'm going to raise my hand and I'm going to say what I think, based on my experience.

Speaker 3:

That's how every single class at Harvard Business School is taught, and I found it to be very impactful, because what you learn more than anything in that method is you learn how to be persuasive, you learn how to be compelling, you learn how to think when someone challenges you and says I disagree with that, and here's why, to take that information in, digest it and come back with a counterpoint. All of these things are so important in business, and so I have taken that method and that's really how I teach my class at Ohio State. That's how I taught my class at Yale, because I believe every single person in the room can contribute, and I think one of the most important things in business is being able to persuasively and compellingly make your point, whatever that point is, and so I actually put a lot of stock in participation. More than papers, more than exams, are you capable of participating in my class is something I care a great deal about.

Speaker 2:

That's good. That's good For the young entrepreneurs in the audience or just for young people period. What advice, words of encouragement, would you give to them to pursue their dream? This whole day is about my vision plan. It's about creating that vision. What advice would you give to a young person to have this vision, to be able to pursue it?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I would say my number one piece of advice is I consider myself to be a lifelong student. I am always learning and I'm always excited to be learning. It's actually one of the things I like about teaching. I'm always having to learn and to read whatever the case study is or the text is before I can go teach it, which means I get to learn it again. And I think if you can approach whatever it is you're doing with that sort of learning mindset and that curiosity, then whatever, regardless of what it is you have on your vision plan and you should make a vision plan you keep yourself open for additional opportunities. So an example I'll give is I don't know if any of you are on TikTok, but I spend a lot of time on TikTok.

Speaker 3:

And I've built a following over there of about 300,000 people and I was able to do that. Oh, thank you, I need to join. But I was able to do that because I stayed curious. And so when I got on TikTok with the rest of the world in 2020 during the pandemic you guys probably preceded that because you know more, but I didn't get on TikTok until 2020.

Speaker 3:

And I got on it and at first it just was like, ok, this is a fun way to waste time, frankly. But eventually it became a fun way to learn things and to discover new things. And I thought what if I started using TikTok and posting one about my business to bring more awareness to my business, but also because there are things that I've learned? I've learned about business, I've learned about marketing, I've learned about all of these different things. What if I start chronicling that on this channel? Simply because I was curious what would happen?

Speaker 3:

And what's happened is I've now opened up a whole nother career avenue for myself because I make a significant amount of money via TikTok. But that also got me thinking well, what about longer form content? Now I post on YouTube, now that's become an income channel for me. Then I started thinking about well, what about written form of content. I started a sub stack. Now that's a revenue channel for me. So just because I was curious years ago about this platform, it has now opened up a whole nother income channel for me as a content creator platform. It has now opened up a whole nother income channel for me as a content creator because I approached it from the perspective of, oh, I'm learning something here that's interesting to me. So I would say stay curious, have a vision plan yes, absolutely. I think that's so important, but never feel so tied to the vision that you aren't able to look up and ask questions and think, oh, that's interesting, what's going on over there? Because you don't know what it might open up for you.

Speaker 2:

Boy. That's good. This is a legacy podcast. So what does the word legacy mean to you, First off, and then what is the legacy you're building through your company meant to?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, legacy took on new meaning for me once I did have my daughter. I see pretty much everything through her eyes. Now I look at this world, the politics of this world, the president of this country. I look at everything and think about, like, what is this going to mean for her? And I think, by extension, what is this going to mean for the generation coming after me? So to me, legacy is about leaving something better than you found it and creating something that is going to be useful and helpful to my child and to the generation coming after me, to the extent that I'm able to say that I've done that, done that more broadly, but certainly done that with my business as well that that's very meaningful to me. And so, when I think about it in the context of Minted you know the fact that so my daughter loves to play with makeup. She's three, she'll be four in a couple of months One of her favorite things to do is to bring out my makeup bag and for us to sit down and play with makeup, and one thing that I can say for her that my mom would not have been able to say for me is that every single product she is pulling out of that makeup bag was made with her in mind.

Speaker 3:

It is not something that she has to, you know, mix around and try and figure out. It was made with her in mind, and so her entire concept of makeup is different than mine, right? Because when I remember the first time I shopped for makeup at CVS or Rite Aid or whatever it was, and looking at a wall of beige and realizing the vast majority of this is not for me and I'm going to have to figure out how to make it work, that is not her experience. So, just in that, the legacy that I'm leaving is very powerful, at least to me.

Speaker 2:

Well, chris. This brings us to the end of the episode. I want to thank our special guest, kristen Jones, co-founder of Minted Cosmetics. I want to thank you for sharing your inspiring story. I also want to thank you for building a legacy and not just talking about helping the generation, because she's not just talking, but actually being committed to investing time, talent and treasure which is money into you all. So, kristen, thanks for being a guest on Be A Baller Podcast.

Speaker 3:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Before we go, you've got your phones out, so give them your TikTok channel and all that YouTube. Get them phones out, because I'm helping with these followers.

Speaker 3:

I keep most of my content high school friendly, so it's I am underscore KJ Miller. That's my TikTok, and for YouTube it's just I am KJ Miller. All right All right, thank you guys, thank you.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, Kristen, for your time.

Speaker 1:

If you've enjoyed this episode, please share it with family and friends. The Be A Baller podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. This podcast was created by Coach Tim Brown and recorded and edited by the video production class of Worthington Christian High School. Be sure to come back next week as we continue to discuss on how to build a lifelong legacy. Until then, don't forget to be a baller.