Tips From Pound Cake, Winner Of The $1M Black Ambition Prize, On How To Create A Persuasive Pitch Deck

After a little over a year in business, cosmetics brand Pound Cake won Pharrell Williams’ $1 million Black Ambition grant.

The money will be dedicated to staff, marketing and support of the brand’s new retail partnership with Credo. Pound Cake, which was in a pool of 250 semifinalists and eight finalists before nabbing the top prize, also hopes to break into Ulta Beauty, where it’s a participant in the inaugural Muse accelerator program, and has three lip product releases and a cheek product release on deck for next year. The brand sells six shades of the $24 red liquid lipstick Cake Batter.

Camille Bell and Johnny Velazquez, the personal and professional partners behind Pound Cake, almost didn’t apply for the Black Ambition grant. The lengthy timeline was a bit of a turnoff—brands applied in February and results weren’t revealed until November—and Bell says she thought Pound Cake’s chances of winning were “slim to none.”

Instead, Bell was gearing up to do a traditional fundraise this year, thinking it should strike while the iron was hot following a strong launch. She assembled a list of angel and venture capital investors, but quickly realized traditional fundraising wasn’t going to be easy.

“Raising funds, especially for Black women, is extremely difficult,” says Bell, who previously drew $20,522 on Indiegogo, secured a $10,000 Glossier grant and triumphed in Temple University’s Fox School of Business Innovative Idea Competition. “Black and brown entrepreneurs aren’t given as much money as our white counterparts.”

The funding gap between white, Black and Latinx founders is exactly why Black Ambition was created. In pitching to its judges, she’d be persuading a group of people who looked like her that Pound Cake was worthy of funds. White investors often told her the brand’s red lipsticks for women of color weren’t needed. She concluded Black Ambition “seemed like a great way to propel your business forward, and it was a different trajectory than what founders typically do.”

Ahead, Bell walks us through the pitch process that led to Pound Cake’s Black Ambition success and shares advice on how to put together a convincing pitch deck.

Flaunt your wins

Bell received feedback from Black Ambition judges that Pound Cake’s upward trajectory was undeniable despite it not being on the market for long. The brand has registered 496% year-over-year growth. “We were up against people that had been in business for four or five years, and we’re making over $1 million dollars, but a lot of those folks had investors,” says Bell. “So, we’re coming in like, yo, we are completely self-funded. When I applied, I was still working full-time. They took all that into consideration and were like, ‘Wow, these guys are really making waves with next to nothing.’ I think that helped us get to the next round.”

Along with Pound Cake’s numbers, Bell highlighted why its products stand out, its retail inroads and mentors that are guiding it. The judges were impacted in Pound Cake’s impact on the industry and its customers’ lives as well. “For entrepreneurs, that looks like impressive press features, awards, reviews, social media growth, product storytelling, naming who’s trying to steal your products (ha!), and naming anything that’s in the works that hasn’t been made public yet,” says Bell, who underscores the information brands present should be accurate “and not fudged.”

Keep it short and to the point

The pitch deck Bell uses for investors is 28 slides, but the pitch deck she used for the Black Ambition pitch competition was only seven. For live presentations, she recommends keeping the number of slides to 10 or fewer and keeping each slide to two to three sentences max. “The less info that’s on your slides while pitching is key,” says Bell. “Telling the story through your words is the most important.” Imagery is important, too, and most of Bell’s slides don’t have words, just pictures.

For Black Ambition, Pound Cake’s presentation couldn’t exceed four minutes, and Bell had to memorize its pitch. She suggests founders not break character when pitching even if they stumble over their words. She says, “Take a pause, repeat the sentence you just said before, it’ll come off as a dramatic effect. Just don’t show that you messed up.”

Here’s what Bell advises a brand to hit upon in slides:

1) The problem it’s solving

2) Why the brand is specifically solving it and should be funded.

3) The size of the market it’s in, the market opportunity and the percentage it will garner

4) Trademarks and other intellectual property.

5) Community reviews

6) The business model

7) The financial structure and projections

8) Competitors and how they compare to the brand

Solicit feedback 

Bell and Velazquez designed Pound Cake’s pitch deck themselves with graphic design platform Canva. She’s a fan of it for indie brand founders on a tight budget who aren’t artistic. She says, “While Johnny and I are both creatives, Canva has a lot of beautiful templates founders can use to spice up their presentations if their creative juices aren’t as high.”

Bell tapped her network for feedback on how to better the content in the pitch deck. During the Black Ambition competition, she was paired with pitch coach Jon Guydon, and he recommended she reduce her deck from 12 to seven slides. She also asked Devin McGhee and Brit Kirkland, co-founders of beaut and wellness brand Deon Libra, and Justin Wolff, founder of skincare brand JunkTheory, if she could see their pre-launch decks to get a sense of pitch deck construction.

In addition, Bell met with Vanessa Wittman, former CFO of Glossier and Pound Cake’s mentor, to get assistance on the brand’s pitch deck. Bell says, “She provided direct feedback on our slides, what needed to be included, removed, expanded upon, etc. Once that process was complete, we felt really solid in our deck.”

End with a bang

Bell counsels founders to end their pitch presentations, whether they’re at a competition, investor meeting or otherwise, with an ask. She details, “What do you want? Do you want to be in their retailer in six months? 500 doors? Do you want a SAFE [simple agreement for future equity] for $1 million? Do you want to do a massive marketing campaign with them? Be clear and direct in your ask.”

When Bell was preparing her pitch deck for Black Ambition, Pound Cake was being considered for the magazine Time’s Best Invention of the Year (spoiler alert, it won). She slipped that into her closing statement. Specifically, her final remarks were, “We ask that you join us as we reshape this dated exclusionary industry into one that finally welcomes all through its products and through its imagery. We ask that you make the best investment of the year by investing in the Best Invention of the Year.” Bell reflects, “That was a really powerful line that stuck with people.”