Women Beauty Company Founders Create Two New Accelerators To Support Fellow Women Founders

AccelerateHER

In 2016, Sephora’s Accelerate mentorship and incubation program debuted with a cohort of eight female-led beauty startups, including the Ayurvedic-inspired skincare brand Sahajan founded by Lisa Mattam.

To this day, Mattam keeps in touch with members of that cohort—they discuss what beauty events are worthwhile, the inventory management systems they use and much more—and her mentor in the program, MidOcean Partners operating partner Pamela Baxter, formerly president and CEO of beauty for LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in North America.

“The Sephora accelerator was really helpful for me. One of the best things I got out of it was building my network,” says Mattam, who previously helmed consultancy The Mattam Group and advised corporations on advancing diversity in the workplace. “I was sitting down and telling this to one of my colleagues and said, ‘Eventually, I’m going to build an accelerator.’ She said, ‘Why don’t you do it now?’”

Mattam decided there wasn’t any reason to delay. She’s launching the accelerator program AccelerateHER to broaden the accelerator experience to a wider range of women entrepreneurs. The six-month program is open to Canadian women founders of product or service companies with revenues of 10,000 to 500,000 in Canadian dollars or about $8,000 to $400,000, own at least 50% of their companies and can commit a minimum of three hours monthly to it.

Applications for the first cohort, which is expected to contain five to 10 women, are due April 22. The application form is estimated to take about 10 minutes, and delves into where interested companies’ growth is coming from and the challenges they face. “We are looking for really unique businesses that have the capability to grow, and our goal is to support their growth,” says Mattam.

AccelerateHER’s program is designed to offer one-on-one mentorship and workshops on topics like venture capital, operations and digital marketing. So far, it’s assembled eight mentors and a dozen thought leaders to participate. Among the mentors are Katerina Juskey, co-founder of Lohn, Patrice Mousseau, founder of Satya Organics and Nancie Ferron, co-founder of La Maison Lavande. Among the thought leaders are Laura Janney, chief merchant at The Bay, Annie Gaudreault, founder of Veev Health & Wellness, and Jasmine Singh Malhorta, COO of IBM Consulting Canada.

“We are looking for really unique businesses that have the capability to grow, and our goal is to support their growth.”

“It’s really to provide a supportive knowledge base and advisory structure so people can scale and grow. Often when you have a network, it’s because you have hit a certain level of traction, but, at that time of starting and early-stage growth, you don’t have that network because you are not at the table you want to be at,” says Mattam. “So, it’s about building new tables.”

Dream Ventures Accelerator

After Laura Cox Lisowski, who co-founded the men’s grooming brand Oars + Alps, and Annie Evans, who co-founded the now-closed beauty service appointment app Beautified, raised $1.3 million and $1.2 million in funding for their companies, respectively, they began fielding questions upon questions from fellow female founders wanting to follow in their footsteps.

“I had to start balancing my own time, and I didn’t want to turn phone calls away. That’s where the accelerator came in,” says Cox Lisowski. “With all these questions I’ve gotten, I know what people are asking, so we decided, let’s develop a program around it.”

Evans’ and Cox Lisowski’s capital strategy accelerator is under the umbrella of female-focused fund and incubator Dream Ventures. It’s currently in the middle of the seven-week program for its second cohort with 22 female founders. The program costs $1,499, and there’s a payment plan available. Dream Ventures is receiving applications for the fall cohort.

The program culminates with a pitch competition and prize. In the recent winter program, the first for the accelerator, Modern Picnic, a brand reimagining lunch boxes for contemporary women founded by Ali Kaminetsky, walked away with the pitch competition prize. Evans says the winter prize was “$10,000 and, as part of the prize, we will do an SPV for her and put together a syndicate of angels.” In addition to Modern Picnic, the first cohort featured the beauty brands Flora & Noor and Osquo.

An SPV is a special purpose vehicle or an affiliate of a parent company that’s an indirect financing source. Dream Ventures specializes in arranging SPVs for brands like Chillhouse and House of Wise, and it’s assembled a network of roughly 500 female angel investors. Explaining an SPV, Evans, who has raised over $20 million for female-founded ventures, says, “It keeps your cap table clean because you don’t have a bunch of small checks, and the investors in the SPV become your community and tribe that you can lean on.”

“We have been in their shoes as founders to be able to say this is where we made mistakes.”

During Dream Ventures’ accelerator program, cohort members don’t only learn about SPVs. “We go into alternative sources of capital. It’s not just angel and VC money. There’s crowdfunding, small business loans and options like Clearco, where they give you debt funding,” says Evans. “Each week we have a different speaker, and they can be anyone from a well-known VC to an angel. We get them to demystify the process of exactly what makes them write a check, and the founders get to ask them any question they want.”

Members of Dream Ventures’ accelerator cohorts also have access to Evans and Cox Lisowski. “Everybody loves it because they feel like they have this big sister helping hold their hand through the process,” says Evans. “We have been in their shoes as founders to be able to say this is where we made mistakes.”

A mistake Evans says she made when fundraising for Beautified was meeting with practically any investor she encountered willing to meet with her. “I spent 18 months and met with all the wrong people that were not the right fit,” she recounts. “At the end, I finally got into the groove, and the way we found our angel investors is that they were our customers. They were C-level executive women—CMOs, VPs and CEOs—that were using our app because we were solving a pain point for them.”

Dream Ventures is interested in securing a financial partner to enable its accelerator to make equity investments in cohort members’ companies. Already, it’s been tracking the results of the accelerator such as investor and retailer introductions and deals for its cohort members. Evans says, “We are hoping to be able to show data points of actual transactions happening as part of the network effect.”