We were lucky to catch up with Megan Gustafson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Megan, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

The idea behind Frankli came when I was noticing the huge presence of shaving & grooming brands that focused their branding & marketing specifically towards a particular gender. Why should grooming products be so gendered? Aside from color & branding, there are no significant differences in the grooming products that are marketed towards women vs. men. And what about people who don’t identify outside of the gender binary? Where do they feel most comfortable & represented while buying their grooming products?

These are the questions I found myself asking, which led me down the path to developing a brand identity that is more inclusive, and offers high quality grooming products to all gender identities. While working through product discovery & development, it quickly became clear that the status quo for purchasing grooming products is deeply unsustainable. More than 2 billion disposable razors end up in landfills every single year. Our flagship product is a high-quality metal safety razor, which lasts a lifetime & only requires that a new (recyclable) blade be changed as needed. Switching from a disposable to a sustainable razor not only reduces carbon footprint, but reduces costs as well.

As our business grows, we’ll continue developing products that are suitable for every body & that help to curb the carbon footprint of the grooming industry.

Megan, 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?

We’re also really proud of our Frankli Gives Back program, which uses 1% of profits each year to help provide basic hygiene products to the unhoused population. We incorporated this as a part of our business from the very beginning, after noticing that basic hygiene products at pharmacies are often locked up in neighborhoods with large houseless populations, indicating that people are stealing items like soap, toothpaste, & tampons. We understand that being able to purchase sustainable grooming products is a privilege, but strongly believe that access to basic hygiene is a human right.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

We’ve chosen to sell solely on our own website for the time being, primarily because we believe that our brand identity is our strongest asset & we can tell that story best through our site. We may expand to marketplaces like Amazon & Etsy in the future, but prefer to keep things in-house for the time being.

Our site is built through Shopify, which has an amazing suite of tools for launching & growing an eCommerce brand. My business partner & I are also marketers, and we’ve found that clients using Shopify are generally set up for the most success across all aspects of business.

The primary “pro” to selling strictly through our website is that we have maintain control over our marketing, branding, pricing, etc. The “con” to this strategy is not being able to get brand exposure from marketplaces that people are already visiting.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Recruit team members who are passionate about the brand, and then trust them to do their jobs.

We have an amazing team of designers, social managers, customer support, etc., and their belief in our vision combined with our mutual trust in each other’s skills & work ethic has helped us to build a fun & streamlined operation. We leave our egos at the door & collaborate equally across the organization, and we believe this keeps the team invested & interested in growing not only the Frankli brand, but their own skill-sets as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.befrankli.com
• Instagram: @be.frankli
• Other: TikTok: @be.frankli