We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elaine Gong a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Elaine, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

The last time I complained to my co-founder that we should just have a regular job was about a month ago. At the time, we had just finished reviewing the company’s financial tables for the first half of 2023 and discovered that, despite our team having doubled in size, our company had not experienced overall growth compared to the first half of 2022. This meant that our overhead costs had increased significantly but our revenue had not. We appear to have matured into a company with highly strong departments and all necessary divisions, yet there is a clear lack of competency. As a result, we must inject further capital into the firm to tackle the urgent challenge of turnaround our core business as soon as possible.

For now, we wish to retain SIMPLY THIS as an independent brand with no external funds. For this, sometimes I will imagine that if I only had a regular job, I wouldn’t have as many concerns; that despite putting in a lot of effort, I’m still not making a profit. Most importantly, I’m devoting more time to my job thus losing out on lots of chances to spend time with my 3-year-old son. A mother’s natural shame always kicks in at this point.

Yet, deep down, I prefer my current status as a business owner, where I have a larger stage to exercise, learn, and grow, and moreover, I am also more motivated in stressful situations. “It’s good to have a problem, when knowing what the problem is, you will figure out how to solve it” is the feedback I received from my co-founder. Truly, identifying the problem is often half the solution already. As a business owner, I have more freedom to organize my time, for example, I can locate my company a few hundred metres away from my home, so I can see my son even during working hours, and play with him for a while downstairs at the company.

This type of high-intensity working environment allows me to obtain an unparalleled feeling of accomplishment. I become a happier mom, spend more quality family time, recharge, focus on my work, and build my leadership.

Elaine, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Elaine, and I co-founded the first ecological skincare brand in China, SIMPLY THIS, with my husband Bill. I’ve been in the skincare industry for 12 years, and before that I studied chemical engineering at university. I returned to China after graduating from University of Cambridge with a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering to work for the Unilever global research and development center in Shanghai, China. With a wealth of experience in the entire product development process, I chose to leave my comfort zone and start my own business.

Prior to SIMPLY THIS, I engaged in the founding of two skincare brands and was in charge of from-0-to-1 processes of product development, market research, brand development, and marketing. The most recent company I co-founded, UNISKIN, focuses on offering anti-aging products to Chinese women. It is now having great success in China and expects to surpass 1 billion RMB sales by the end of the year.

Back to our brand: SIMPLY THIS.

With a focus on the matured skin, SIMPLY THIS aspires to be an advocate for the ecological view of skincare. It is inspired by the “systemic view” philosophy from the East and uses whole-cell fermentation technology in our self-research with the intention of regaining the intrinsic order and capability of the skin.

The brand’s genesis in the spirit of poetry and reason—the words “poetry” and “reason” are inscribed in the brand name—makes it stand out among other brands. With the grace of poetry, we seek to overcome mediocrity and with the spirit of reason, we withstand the turmoil of the outside world. This profound underlying philosophy informs every decision we make, which is inscribed in our perception of the skin as an ecosystem, the importance of efficacy and skin feel, and the notion that formulas are more significant than ingredients. Such a brand with a stable innercore is relatively rare in the current Chinese market.

Due to the fast expansion of the Chinese market, many brands are responding to market trends or simply “mimicking” certain well-known brands to create some inexpensive but similar products with very successful sales, but the brand itself does not convey more value. Simply This, as a new-generation Chinese brand, it has a strong eastern philosophy, yet it is established by a team with an international vision. It is believed to earn a position in the world market as a Chinese pioneer in terms of technology, R&D, vision, and brand ideaology.

In terms of product positioning, we focus on the skin concerns of those aged 25 and above, specifically sensitivity and aging. The solution idea behind the products is to take a balanced and dialectical stance to explore the principle of skin trait correlation. Based on the trait mapping, we develop skincare products with both efficacy and enjoyment, to reorganize the skin order in a balanced and upward way. All these principles are backed up by a lot of complicated science and dedicated research.

For example, in the case of sensitivity, we investigated the underlying target network and uncovered approximately 14,000+ connected targets. Based on these studies, we developed product formulations, and created an ingredient network, which then supports the development of mild yet potent treatments to reverse sensitivity by tackling the core causes. This is why many customers re-purchase our products as they have improved their sensitivity dramatically. Our anti-aging products are designed through a similar methodology, based on the three dimensions of skin color, texture, and form, fulfilling customer demands in all aspects.

In addition to solid product development, I’m proud that SIMPLY THIS was one of the first brands to deploy replaceable packaging, which reduces the amount of plastic used in each refill by up to 55%. Additionally, we accomplished carbon footprint verification and certified all of our products as carbon neutral, establishing us to be the first company in the world to offer zero-carbon poducts to our customers.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Bill and I are both life partner and work partner. We met in elementary school and were in the same high school class, when we began a very inexperienced romance. At a random class reunion gathering after university examination, we got involved and started a 10-year long-distance relationship. We had been studying in separate cities, meeting each other only in summer and winter holidays. When I studied in Cambridge, we were exotic for some time. After which, I returned to Shanghai, while Bill worked in Nanjing, 300 kilometers distant. This status lasted for two years even after we married until we eventually met in Shanghai.

Since my graduation, I have been working in the skincare sector, from international corporate like Unilever to serial startups in China, whereas Bill has worked in sales, management, and investment in data centers, industrial real estate, and biological industries. We decided to create the SIMPLY THIS brand over 3 years ago, when the epidemic was just beginning. Coming from different professional backgrounds with our respective fields of expertise, we crafted this brand from scratch, hand in hand and little by little. While Bill worked on complete construction of the brand, I focus on product development. Slowly, we attracted a group of like-minded partners. With everyone in our team, we become what we are today. Bill and I often joke that we now spend 24/7 together, making up for the ten years we were apart.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

We could share a marketing case that featured SIMPLY THIS’s early marketization. Influencer marketing is very important in China. Influencers not only assist in brand communication but also directly increase sales for the brand. By 2021, when our company had barely been operational for 1 year, hardly anybody had heard of us. “What kind of brand are you, why do you sell at this price, and what differentiation do you have?” were common questions we encountered while speaking to others.

Every month, we gave away some samples to influencers, but there was not much reaction. One day, we unexpectedly received a message from an influencer offering to create a video promotion for us on the douyin platform (the Chinese equivalent of Tiktok), saying he particularly loved our cream mask. His quoted price for this particular video was rather high—about $15K USD for a 2-minute video recommendation—meaning that we would need to sell 300 masks in order to break even. It was risky for us at the time since brand awareness was inadequate, and even if an influencer recommended it, it was challenging to convince people to try this new brand, notably as this influencer did not have an extensive following in Douyin at the time. We reviewed all of his previous videos, understood his style and follower profile, and decided to give it an attempt.

As a result, we sold 1000 bottles just 2 hours after the video was aired. Tragically, but amusingly, the platform censoring algorithm diabled the link to the product page immediately after 1000 bottles. We can only resume normal sales after 24 hours because our store is still in the “newbie” stage and over 1000 sales need to be audited. In astonishment and delight, we restored the link after 24 hours and rapidly sold out the remaining inventory, forcing us to switch to pre-sale. Pre-sale products need a one-month wait, but I did not expect the pre-sale inventory would be sold out as well. We ended up selling roughly 5,000 bottles and earning $300,000 USD revenue. The process was exhilarating, with us initially terrified and apprehensive, then thrilled and astonished. We are so grateful that the influencers chose us and grateful that consumers trusted a new brand.

The best part is that people offered us really positive feedback on various social media platforms after receiving and using our products. Later, when the same influencer recommended us for the second time, it directly sold more than 1.5w bottles of this mask due to the good word-of-mouth foundation.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.simplythis-global.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simplythis_official/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/simplythisofficial
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimplyThis_US
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@simplythisus
• Other: Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/simplythis_official In Mainland China: Official Store: https://simplythis.world.tmall.com/ XiaoHongShu: https://www.xiaohongshu.com/user/profile/5db824c60000000001001366