We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Anthony Lawrence. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Anthony below.
Anthony, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
The initial idea for J.Laurant was inspired by my mom and her experience of 25+ years working in the fragrance and beauty industry. Growing up in Denver, CO. I would spend many weekends watching her work the fragrance and beauty counters as a vendor for some of the best known luxury brands. From a very early age I was drawn to the clean design elements, packaging, and detail that went into creating these products. I didn’t know it at the time, but those early years would serve as my training ground for what would later become J.Laurant. In late 2019 I was working in the world of real estate by day, and at a local grocery store at night to help make ends meet. Feeling completely burnt out and uninspired I knew I needed to make a change. Funny enough the idea for J.Laurant came to me one night while I was working in the candle aisle stocking candles. Looking at all of the candles on the shelves I thought to myself, why not us? Why couldn’t we start our own line of high-end candles, that were made with safe clean ingredients, premium fragrances, and beautifully designed. At the time it almost felt as if J.Laurant was an idea whose time had come, an idea 25+ years in the making.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
J.Laurant is a black-owned premium fragrance and personal care brand with an ambition to create simple everyday luxury experiences through meaningful products for the home and body. Our vegan cruelty-free formulations are hand crafted in small batches using high-quality ingredients and materials that are safe for everyday use, beautiful in design, and accessible in price. Growing up in Denver, CO. my biggest inspiration has always been my family, and family is at the heart of everything we do at J.Laurant. For me when I first started J.Laurant it was more than just starting another fragrance or beauty company. To me it has always been about representing the idea of what’s possible. Growing up we didn’t have many examples of black-owned brands in the fragrance and beauty industries, especially in the luxury space. I wanted others especially the younger generation to know that if we’re able to do it, they can too.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
When we started J.Laurant we had no idea we would be starting a business in the midst of a global pandemic. We initially planned of launching the business at the beginning of 2020, but we ended up launching in December of that year. What seemed like a major setback at the time, actually gave us the opportunity to really hone in our product. It gave us the time we needed to hone in on creating the best possible products, and learn more about the fragrance and beauty industry as a whole. We also were faced with a series of supply chain shortage issues that really tested us early. Being able to create beautiful products is one thing, but maintaining the quality standard of your products during a global shortage is a whole different level of problems. We actually had to switch our candle vessel supplier three times, and our wax supplier four times during that year because of shortages. We were able to get through that storm because of our resiliency, and without having to sacrifice on the quality that our customers have come to expect from us.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Social media in particular Instagram has played such an integral part in everything we do. I’ve always been a visual person, and I can remember from an early age having this love for beautiful design. One of the principles that J.Laurant was founded on is simplicity, and it’s something that extends across every touch point our of business. Simple, clean, minimal design is something that we put a great deal of emphasis on from our website, product design, and of course our social media. With Instagram being a visual platform it really allowed us to create content that resonated with our target audience. After the initial launch we began receiving requests from fragrance and beauty creators saying how beautiful our candles were and asking if they could collaborate with us. We took that as an opportunity to build relationships with content creators from all over the world who feature our products on their pages and websites. From there other brands and online retailers began to take notice and so did the requests to stock our products! We never would’ve imagined starting this business from a small kitchen table two years ago, to now having customers from around the world enjoy our products all because of power of social media. My advice to anyone just starting out is to just be patient, and really just make sure your product or service is the best it can possibly be. Take the time to build genuine relationships, and look for ways you can add value.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jlaurant.com
- Instagram: @jlfragrances
- Facebook: @jlfragrances