Lisa Mayer, Co-Founder & CEO of Boss Beauties
For my next Tiny CEO interview, I talked to Lisa Mayer, the co-founder and CEO of Boss Beauties. Boss Beauties is a media and entertainment brand that inspires and elevates the next generation of women and girls to be everything they want to be. Lisa is also the author of Boss Beauty: Inspiration to Be Everything You Want. Lisa has worked with companies like Mattel, Neiman Marcus, Marvel, and NARS Cosmetics, as well as the New York Stock Exchange and the United Nations.
Before Boss Beauties, you started other businesses and organizations. I also recently started my first business, Beads for Good, where I sell handmade jewelry and donate 50% of my sales to a partner organization, She's the First. What was it like for you to start a business in the beginning?
Before starting Boss Beauties, I had started a company called My Social Canvas. When I started that company, I really kind of bootstrapped it. (As an entrepreneur, the term “bootstrap” means you're building the company without taking additional funding or institutional funding.) I was quite literally the only person in my company. I had no team. But I somehow got a meeting with Verizon and found myself pitching 10 executives to sell these phone cases which raised funding for girls’ scholarships. And they did! So that was my first company and how I got started.
What were some lessons you learned starting My Social Canvas?
With My Social Canvas, my purpose was always at the heart of it: Elevating the next generation of women and girls. I tried so many different things with that company, which is what an entrepreneur does. You may try something and it doesn’t work, so you make a little bit of what’s called a “pivot”. My pivot came in 2020: I had sold an order of My Social Canvas phone cases to Target, but when the pandemic hit, they had to cancel the order because they had so little shelf space. Which I understand, because hand sanitizer and other necessary things had to get on the shelves. But I found myself sitting there with a warehouse full of these iPhone cases. And iPhone cases do not last long, because Apple changes their phone model all the time. So I had all this inventory, and financially, it was really tough for me. I had experienced that before in my journey. There was a time when I had exactly $7.15 in my bank account; I even took a screenshot of that number, to inspire me to keep going. I almost quit, but as a founder, you encounter these roadblocks all the time, and you just have to keep going, and figure out another way. That’s how I started working on NFTs with Boss Beauties. By 2021, I had pivoted towards the Web3 space, which is digital collectible NFT space, and the rest is history.
So before you tell me about Boss Beauties and how you got to create this amazing company and platform, what is an NFT?
Think of an NFT as a digital asset. Before NFTs, you could own a book, you could own a phone, you could own clothing, all things that you can hold in your hand. With an NFT, for the first time in history, you can now own something digital. On what’s called the blockchain, there's a certificate that shows your ownership of this digital asset, and you can sell and buy and trade these digital assets. So back in 2021, there was a huge boom in NFTs, meaning a lot of people were making and selling and buying NFTs. I even found one NFT that was sold for $69 million! When I saw that, I thought: What if I could launch a collection of NFTs that connects back to my purpose and makes an impact on the world? So that's how it started. Working with my husband, we started working on this every single day, every hour of the day, for eight weeks, creating these digital portraits that you can now see examples of in my book. And we created this collection of NFTs that represents strong and powerful female role models. We launched 10,000 NFTs in this collection on September 25, 2021—I still remember the moment. Within 90 minutes, they sold out, generating $2.3 million dollars. So somehow I found myself in the Web3 space, and the rest is history.
How much money have people spent buying and collecting Boss Beauties NFTs to date?
People have spent approximately $40 million dollars collecting and buying and trading our NFTs! When we sold our first Boss Beauties I was in tears, because within 90 minutes we went from having no money to having $2.3 million to start a company that could make an impact on the world. That’s what I want you to remember–how far we came to make a difference!
What inspired you to write your book, Boss Beauty?
Because Boss Beauties started in a digital way, I really wanted to get our brand out there in a physical way. People have spent $40 million buying and collecting our digital assets. But to me it was never really about the NFTs. It was actually about the purpose behind the company and the impact I wanted to make. I wanted to get our artwork from these digital collectibles—that's the new term people are using, by the way—out there into the world in a physical format. So we launched them in this book. We're also working with William Morris Endeavor, one of the top agencies, on an animated TV show featuring the characters, to bring this all to life. But the bottom line is I really want this brand that started with digital collectibles to be out there in the world, so that girls and women can pick up the book or watch our show and be inspired.
I love reading the motivational quotes in your book. One of my favorite quotes is from NASCAR driver, Julia Landauer. (She actually recently came to my school!) This is what Julia says: “The longest relationship we're ever going to have is with ourselves, so take care of yourself. […] When in doubt, GO FOR IT, and make yourself proud.” There are also Olympic athletes, CEOs, women in fashion, and many other people in this book. How do you decide who to feature in Boss Beauty?
With Julia Landauer, who's a NASCAR driver, I went to her NASCAR race at one point, and I watched her walk up and get introduced, and there were 40 men that were going up to the podium to start that NASCAR race. And something about that moment just really made me emotional, because it's such a competitive sport. So I wanted to feature her, and I wanted to feature many other women from different industries, Olympians, CEOs, so that from the book, you can really see if you want to be a certain profession.
As I mentioned, I am the CEO of Beads for Good, a social impact company that supports girls' rights through our partnership with She’s the First. So I'm a 10-year-old female entrepreneur. I'd love to know what you hope other young women and girls my age will feel when they read Boss Beauty.
I really hope when you read this book that some of my journey is in there. My story, my $7 moment is in there. I hope you're not going to have that $7 moment, but you're definitely going to have challenges along the way. So whatever challenges you're facing, whatever that is—maybe there's something with school that you're facing or something you're dreaming about—I really want you to know that you can keep going and maybe take just one more step. It's like a staircase. You just take one more step. You might want to quit or give up, or maybe you don't believe in yourself at the time, but I want you to just keep going.
As a CEO myself, I'd love to hear your advice to anyone who wants to start a company or become a CEO, no matter how old they are.
I love this question. And for you as a CEO or anyone who wants to be a CEO, there's actually a quote in the book that I think is perfect. The quote says: “Say yes, then figure out how.” I believe as an entrepreneur or even if you're not an entrepreneur, there are moments when you might not know the full solution. You might not know how to get from A to Z, the whole plan, but you just need to say yes, and then you're going to figure it out.
What is your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part of my job is the impact we can make. Working with the next generation, that's the part that I love the most.