Industry: E-commerce / SaaS B2B
S founderStudent name(s): Janvi Shah, Sylvan Guo, Nicole Clay
Brief description of the solution: Hue is an AI-powered SaaS platform that empowers every beauty shopper to find the perfect makeup products for their unique skin tone. Hue’s technology matches shoppers with their Hue Twins™ – a community of real people who share the same skin tone, skin type, purchase history or beauty preferences as you. We integrate directly with beauty brand and retailer websites, so shoppers can browse authentic video and photo reviews of their recommended Hue Twins™ to get a clear view of how a product looks on real people like them.
Funding Dollars: We have raised $2 million in seed funding and have also won several non-dilutive awards including the $75,000 Grand Prize at the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge and the $15,000 Project Connect grant from Unilever Prestige & WWD.
What led you to start this adventure? We came together as three women across the skin tone spectrum. We struggled to be represented in beauty and find makeup products that worked best for our skin tone — despite all being at different points on the shade spectrum. And we’re not alone – 80% of beauty shoppers say it’s the #1 problem they encounter when shopping for beauty items online. During more than 150 customer interviews, we realized that we were not alone: people want to see real, ordinary people like them try products. However, the process of finding someone who matched his complexion and skin conditions was time-consuming and often unsuccessful.
We realized we had an opportunity to join forces to solve this problem through our background in technology and beauty. Janvi (co-founder and CEO) brings product and technical experience from her 5 years at Google as product manager on Google Photos and Google Search. Nicole (Co-Founder & CMO) brings 6 years of beauty industry experience as Marketing Director and Chief of Staff at L’Oréal. Sylvan (co-founder and COO) brings startup experience from her time as a growth and analytics manager at fast-growing startups (Airbnb, Tubi). Our team met as MBA students at Harvard Business School and have been working on Hue together ever since.
What has been your biggest achievement so far with Venture? This summer, we launched our technology to several B2B customers, including Credo Beauty, the world’s largest clean beauty retailer, and Lawless Beauty, a beauty brand that retails at Sephora, and Exa Beauty. which retails at Ulta and Credo. We are growing rapidly to meet market demand with over 30 brands/retailers in the pipeline.
How did your MBA program help you move this startup forward? HBS’s entrepreneurship programs and ecosystem have been absolutely critical to the success of our startup. Our company was ‘born’ at HBS – we came together as a team through the HBS Startup Bootcamp program in our first year, where we incubated the idea. We were among the 4 finalists for 2 consecutive years in the HBS New Venture competition and we received a grant to work on Hue over the summer as part of the Rock Summer Fellows program. We’ve also been in touch with some amazing HBS alumni advisors, including Chris Hobson, CEO of Rare Beauty Brands, and Dawn Dobras, ex-CEO of Credo Beauty. The entire HBS alumni community has been extremely helpful in opening doors for us. Finally, we were blessed to be surrounded by many other talented founders and startup teams in our class who continued to support each other even after graduation.
Which founder or entrepreneur inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How has it turned out to be motivating for you? We have always looked up to other female founders in our entrepreneurial journey. For example, Rent the Runway founders Jenny Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman also started their business at HBS. We were inspired by their early “trunk show” days for on-campus customer testing, and did something similar through “shade-matching pop-ups”, where we brought in the best background brands. complexion and matched over 100 students and their partners as part of our initial research. We love how they brought revolutionary technology and business model concept to the retail space and hope to do the same in the beauty industry.
Which MBA class was the most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? There were so many valuable courses, but the most valuable for us was Entrepreneurial Selling, taught by Professors Mark Roberge and Lou Shipley. Our team had no B2B sales experience at our startup, and we came back time and time again to the frameworks and practical skills we learned in this class to learn how to run an effective sales process.
Which professor has made a significant contribution to your projects and why? We have been incredibly lucky to know many teachers at HBS, and we have to call 3 of them who have supported us:
1. Professor Christina Wallace – She was our advisor during the Startup Bootcamp and was previously a fashion entrepreneur herself.
2. Professor Julia Austin – She teaches a course called Startup Operations which covers the practical aspects of running a startup and has done an amazing job fostering the founding student community.
3. Professor Jeff Bussgang – He is a practicing VC and has been incredibly generous with his time and network to help us fundraise.
How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to the development and success of your business? Most of our investors are based here in Boston. Especially after graduating, we found that the wider Boston tech/startup community was very supportive and willing to help each other.
What is your long-term goal with your startup? Our long-term mission is to enable every buyer to find the perfect products for their skin tone, skin type and preferences. We want to power the future of the beauty business with our technology and we will rapidly grow from foundation to lips, eyes, skincare, haircare and more.
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