Makeup artist and influencer Desie Perkins has a little bit of a golden touch. In twenty sixteen, she had a collab with a major sunglass company.
So they offered me this deal and they said, it'll just be a quick, little three month collaboration. You'll have about four sunglasses.
It'll be great.
While this was originally intended to be a collaboration between Desi and the sunglass company, Desi was way more hands on.
I showed up to the first meeting with them and they laid out a bunch of sunglasses on the table. They said, is there anything that you like here that you can pick? We can put your name on it, market it whatever. I said, I would really love to design my own sunglasses if that's a possibility.
So when it came time to renegotiate their contract, Desi wanted to be recognized as more than a collaborator. She was designing, marketing, and successfully selling. She asked for a contract that reflected her work.
We had met with the company to try and renegotiate a more fair contract, and the CEO at the time, he was there running the meeting, and he really downplayed my contribution to the brand and as we were sitting there trying to negotiate, he looked over at me and said, that's a lot of money for a little girl.
I was actually in disbelief.
For me, that was something that there was really no coming back from. And after that, we all looked at each other and we all walked out.
Welcome to The Unshakables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business.
And I'm Tanya Neibo, a lawyer and consultant for business owners.
Well it's hard to believe we're here, but this is the final episode of season one of The Unshakables. For the past few months, we've been sharing the daring moments of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. We're going to close out this season with the story of an influencer turned entrepreneur who was willing to take the biggest risk of them all on herself.
Hey Tanya, Hey Ben, I'm so sad the season is over, but I am pretty excited to hear this next story. I loved Desie's design. They're so stylish and they're unique, and I just I love them.
Well, this one's a doozy.
Well, I'm here for the doozy. Let's get to it.
On today's episode, Desi Iwear from Los Angeles, California. You just heard from Desie Perkins, who today is a designer, makeup artist, and beauty influencer, but years before that, she was a cocktail server and her husband, Stephen Perkins, was a freelance photographer.
I was a cocktail server.
I had a toxic work environment, really hated my job, and Stephen came in to visit me one day and I just started crying because I was so stressed and my manager, you know, was horrible.
So I just looked at it and I was like, look, you don't have to work here. We're going to figure this out, Like literally, you should quit tonight and we are going to go from there.
Well, Desi was figuring out her next step. Stephen was working as a club photographer, and in October of twenty twelve, Stephen asked Desi to help him with a costume for a Halloween party he had to shoot. Desi had always loved makeup, so she helped Stephen with his before he went to work for the night.
Because I was a painter and artist.
I watched this YouTube video and it was telling me how to do special effects makeup, and I said, listen, I've never done it before, but let's try it. And I did this really cool special effects goal. It was really awesome.
At the party, everyone asked who had done his makeup, and he said that Desi had.
He went out that night and all of these people asked if he had got his makeup professionally done. I was with him and he said no, my girlfriend did it. And they said, do you do this for a living? And I said yes. I had no kid, no experience. I just said, yes, I do. And then I started taking appointments for like fifty dollars a face out of our apartment.
I faked it till I made it, let me tell you.
Soon Desi was getting off her gigs doing makeup for TV. Even though she had no experience, she still said yes. To help drum up even more business, Stephen recommended she joined a new social media site you may have heard of it.
Instagram was brand new at the time, and convinced her to download Instagram. She used it as kind of like a portfolio, as a creative escape and it took off. You know, someone reposted one of her photos and it got ten thousand followers overnight.
I remember sitting in our apartment and my phone was on the couch and it.
Just started going through.
Like notifications were going off like crazy.
Someone commented on one of her Instagram photos that she should launch a YouTube channel.
We had no idea what we were doing with YouTube either, but Stephen had his camera that he did club photography with, so we took and we got a couple of lights and we set it up and I just went and started filming.
Stephen was her de facto manager. He helped film all of her content and after a year he left his job to focus on Desi and her brand full time.
And it was just makeup tutorials and it kind of just took off. She had a really good personality. People loved her story and just like hanging out getting ready with her next thing.
You know, I'm doing this for a few months and I get an email from a company and they say, we would love to.
Send you some free product. And I was shocked.
It wasn't a thing yet to get paid to post videos or pictures or promote product. All of that we were learning and the brands were learning at the same time, so it was really tricky.
It was a wild West of influencing because no one knew what was going on or how it could be. Like when Desi got that first offer, it clicked in my business mind, like, wait a minute, there's an opportunity here. If they want to send you something, they might have money behind it. And that's where like we kind of went back in and we started negotiating these deals.
After a few years, Desi's YouTube channel had a million followers. A big following brought bigger opportunities. In twenty sixteen, a sunglasses company reached out in hopes of collaborating with Desi. She and Stephen took the meeting.
This sunglass company approached me and they said, hey, we've done collabse with a few other celebrities and we would love to do something with you.
So they offered me this deal.
It was a one page, typed out paper napkin contract deal, and they said, it'll just be a quick, little three month collaboration. You'll have about four sunglasses, it'll be great. I showed up to the first meeting with them and they laid out a bunch of sunglasses on the table. They said, is there anything that you like here that you can pick? We can put your name on it, market it whatever. I said, I would really love to design my own sunglasses if that's a possibility.
The company agreed, and Steven and Desi dove in.
Desi scoured her archives of sunglasses that she's had. We've gone online and we started pulling just different inspirations into photoshop and Desie and I were literally sitting together at night dissecting sunglasses, putting them together in Photoshop and making them into the exact frame that she wanted to develop.
Finally, the collab launched with four different styles. Desi promoted the glasses on her social media.
I remember the day before launch.
I was super anxious and I said, are we sure everything's okay? And they said, we've done this before, Everything's going to be perfectly fine. The day of launch happens and the traffic for launch was so massive that their whole website shut down. Wow, everybody was panicking. We were freaking out. All the sunglasses sold out, and I was shocked. I had no idea that I even had that selling power. It was an incredible feeling.
The line was originally supposed to be a limited release, but it was a home run.
Everyone loved the glasses and then it instantly became a call from them like, hey, we need to keep going.
Desi and Stephens signed on for another year. While they were hard at work designing their next round of styles, the sunglass company grew and had even been acquired by a private equity firm.
We'd go in their meetings with them and they'd show us drafts of Desi trending and totally attribute a lot of the success of the company back to Desi. The sunglasses she created became the number two selling skew in nordstromp So after a while we decided, hey, we want to get a little bit more stake in this game.
At this point, the brand got so big, and once they got acquired, we went into a meeting to really renegotiate and see what we could do to make it more fair.
They came to the next meeting prepared for the discussion of a new contract and they made their ask.
The CEO at the time, he was there running the meeting, and he really downplayed my contribution to the brand, and really through the whole meeting kind of of devaluing me as a business partner.
And as we were sitting there trying.
To negotiate, he looked over at me and said, that's a lot of money for a little girl.
Wow.
The room fell silent on both sides.
I was actually in disbelief.
The only thing I remember doing is turning around like, I know you're not talking to me.
I couldn't believe it.
Hold on, Ben, what that's a lot of money for a little girl. The audacity of that guy to say that?
What an ass?
Yeah?
Really, Well, as awful as that was, I think you're gonna love what happened next in the meeting Tanya, in.
The moment where I was actually shocked, couldn't get a word out, one of my agents stood up and looked at him and said, well, this little girl has made your company a lot of money.
Oh so he came back with the little girl line. I mean, that's pretty fantastic he did.
He said, this little girl has made you X amount of dollars. It is the reason why we were.
He dropped every fact that we had done for that company and every number that we had sold for them.
That's really powerful.
After that, we all looked at each other and knew it was time to go, and we all walked out. That meeting was a turning point for me, and I think for a lot of women in business, moments like this happen all the time. I knew that it was time for us to start our new chapter, and it was a scary decision because this is at this time my only collaboration that I've ever done, my only form of steady income. It was a huge passion project that
I was in love with doing. I was so sad to walk away from, but I just knew that it was the right thing for me.
After that disastrous meeting, Desi and Stephen decided they'd start their own eyewear company. This was a huge moment, taking a social media brand to a physical product, but they'd get to own one hundred percent of the company and all the profit. It also meant they were now on the hook for everything, funding, source, product, you name it. It all fell on Desi and Stephen.
Did we know the first step to do that? Absolutely not.
We had learned all the creative side of the sunglass business, but not so much the other side. So it was definitely going to be a journey into the unknown for us.
While they knew how to design and market eywear, they still had no idea how to manufacture it. So they brought on two consultants.
Through that year.
I had them teach me the ropes, teach me manufacturing, teach me logistics, teach me freight forward, and teach me all the behind the scenes stuff.
By twenty nineteen, they were ready to design their first line of original eyewear. That brand would be called desi Ewear, not dies either way Desi spells it, but Desi with a Z.
I named the brand after myself. I felt like there was a lot of power in that, and I wanted it to be all of me. I think people told me, yeah, maybe you shouldn't name it your name, and so I said, all right, fine, I'll change it to a DEZ instead of dees.
Okay.
They were like, you're not being slick. It sounds the same, and I'm like, it felt right, So that's what I named it.
Desi's digital brand had also grown significantly in that time. She now had four million followers watching her every move, and if they wanted to launch, they had to go all in and launch big.
We didn't have room for air like most businesses do.
If we were to launch something in it was a complete flop, like that's all going to fall back on us. And knowing the numbers that we did with the sunglass company, we knew what the volume would be. So it made our margin for air extremely small because we had to launch at scale. Was obviously a huge risk for us because you could start a business right for close to nothing and grow it over time.
But we didn't have that luxury.
But they did have the luxury of doing everything exactly the way they wanted to. They had to be certain their line of sunglasses was perfect from the beginning.
The whole point of DESII Weear is like luxury product and an affordable price. Desi will never put anything out that she truly would not use or wear herself. So now a huge challenge is how are we producing the quality that we want for the price point that we're going to sell it at as a public figure and having a significant following.
Like that, everything is under the microscope, and that's.
Why you know, when it came to product quality, everything was meticulously designed.
After months of development, they were ready to roll out the sunglasses. They targeted their launch date for drum roll please March of twenty twenty.
This was a really stressful time for us because we were trying to sell sunglasses when nobody was allowed to go outside, which I feel like was really stressful for me. I was sitting there. We had put everything into this brand, and we felt like, not only was it a bad time, I thought to myself, it's not an appropriate time.
They delayed the launch three months, but every day they waited was just another day the product was sitting unused, wasting money in a warehouse.
So now this is a situation we're in and we're just sitting on our hands and just like what are we going to do? Like, shit, what did we just get into? How are we going to pivot from this? And then just decided like, okay, we need to at least put something out there. We can't sit on this. We need to launch it.
Let's just go. Let's see what happens.
They finally chose a launch date. Now all that was left to do was announce. They chose one day in July twenty twenty for the announcement, and Desi started this business the same way she launched her brand. With a social media.
Post, Dasi had mentioned like Okay, I'm coming out with a product. This is the Instagram go follow it, completely blank Instagram, nothing on it. Within the first i think it was twelve hours at gained three hundred thousand followers.
We were just like, oh my god.
The huge response to Desi's video wasn't just from her fans.
We were getting calls and emails from every brand that had worked as a wholesaler with the other sunglass company because they knew the power and the movement that Desi could do with her eyewear. But we turned down every single one of those because we wanted to launch as a DTOC brand, so we wanted to get it to our customers and knew that we wanted to hold on to that control.
And with that, it was finally time. They launched Desi Eyewear in July of twenty twenty.
It was amazing. It was a huge success. I think we were crying. We were like in disbelief, and then we went straight into panic mode after like the first moment of celebration, it was like, oh my gosh, we're customer service now too. We are handling all of the after now. Also it's us.
We ended up selling through you know, ninety percent of our inventory within the first I think four hours.
Turns out there was no need to worry if anyone would buy the sunglasses. Now, the problem was getting their sunglasses to the customers. The shipping company had picked up all the sunglasses, but they never got mailed out, and customers took to social media to complain.
Packages were getting lost for weeks and there was nothing that we could do as a company, and now we're sold out of product and customers are writing in my package never got here, and we're just riding them like normal customer service and just saying, hey, you know, packages delivered personally out of the warehouse, it's on its way
to you. Come to find out that FedEx parked our truck behind another truck and they never got offloaded at the FedEx's warehouse, and it took I would say, probably seven days for them to find that truck.
And we were.
Responding to now thousands of customers that have this trust and DESI and the brand that we're going to deliver, and our packages are nowhere to be found.
Steven estimates that twenty percent of that first release got lost in shipping. For reference, usually only one or two percent of shipment, let's get lost. So this was a major issue for Desi.
Iware the problem with a brand as an influencer is that you look at a bigger brand, there's no one really to talk to to yell at except for customer service. With us at being a personality, there's multiple avenues. There's the YouTube comment section, there's Instagram, there's Desi's personal pages,
there's the brand pages. So what happens with customer service is it floods to every single channel and it becomes very transparent to what's going on, and you have to handle that in a very careful way.
I think for me, it's just that I have had such a direct closeness to everyone that subscribes to me, and so they feel the closeness to be able to then tell me when there's a problem, and one of the things that hurts is that they're disappointed in their experience, and it weighed very heavy on me.
So all I could do in that moment is be super.
Upfront and say exactly what had happened and apologize and rectify the situation.
We spent literally two weeks of just responding to people like, hey, you know your package is on the way it's going to get to you. Check tracking. That didn't work. They respond back in and it's like, where's my shit.
After days of that, Stephen decided to take a more personal approach.
I would go in and I'd be like, Hey, this is Stephen. I swear to you. I personally back your package. It's on the way, And it's funny enough like when we would give that personal touch, it would diffuse the situation to where now we were able to maintain that trust and keep those customers and they continually come back and they are purchasing every single time something new comes out.
Well, I mean, you must have been writing emails until four o'clock in the morning.
But yeah, I was just going to say that, Yeah, it was exhausting.
Definitely learn some lessons from that. Built a team around customer service, was able to train them and let them know the tone of the company, the voice of the brand.
So they'd figured out the shipping catastrophe, and finally the brand started to really cruise. They released more styles. The company was by all accounts of success. They had made their initial investment back and then some desi iware is obviously a huge success. It sounds like every time you come out with a new set of sunglasses, people snap them up. And then you decided to launch another company, right yeah, is for punishment because I'm crazy.
This was This was also after having one baby, so we have a one year old. We launched this company, Desi Eyewear, and then we decide that we're going to do skincare as well.
They reinvested the profits from Desi Iware into the skincare line and just a few months after Desi Eyware launched, Desi Skin was born. Three years later, both brands are still going strong, and Desie and Stephen have worked hard to find the right balance of working together as a couple.
When we first started working together, there was arguments, there was fights. It was like things weren't, you know, working out, And I think the problem was we needed to find our proper positions, our roles right like. So in the beginning, Stephen was very much a content cre her husband, and he hated that.
I think like, deep down, you know, I'd be like, can you take my picture? He hated it. We would argue it was not it.
But once we started the businesses, I think that's where he really shined because of a lot of his background was in these kinds of tasks and websites and business management, and he started thriving. And then I feel like for me, that is not my place of expertise. Mine is the creative, the designing, the marketing, all of these things. And so we were both able to find our passions within building these companies. And I think that's what all of a sudden made us okay, working together.
You found your swim lanes, yes, and that's.
What key was finding your swim lanes. And now it's easy. It just like makes sense. I trust him. There's not going to be somebody else who cares about it more than him, you know, and vice versa.
There used to be a rule, no business before coffee and after the kids are asleep.
No, there is that rule for me. After dinner. No, we do not talk about work. I said, there has to be a line here because for so many years.
We were all work.
And I said, after six pm, now let's not talk about work, let's just be And that works out really well.
So tell me where is the Perkins Empire going next.
I'm tired, you know, I got two kids, two companies. I think I'm good, Like my mom told me in the past she said, you know, you have too many passions, And I think now what I see is me seeing these passions through, but again in a more collaborative sense, so things that I've really been wanting to do, but in collaborations with companies.
That already do them.
And I think that's something that I'm excited to see today.
Desi Iwaar sells over twenty different styles of sunglasses and can be found on Nordstrom's website and in twenty three store locations. And yes, Stephen still sometimes answers customer service emails.
I think a lot of my life experiences have made me feel.
A little bit out of control and.
People sort of dictating what my life is going to be like, whether that's in personal things or work situations.
And so for me, simultaneously starting this company and also starting a family that we so badly wanted and at the same time really made us stronger as a couple, as business partners, as parents, and I really love knowing that my son can like see what we're doing day to day and aspire to also want to go down his own path and my daughter, Now that I've had my daughter, it especially means more to me to see how you know your mom is kick ass and you can be too, and it just makes me so excited
to see her grow up and have the same courage.
Tanya, what did you think?
I loved that interview?
I think pretty cute.
I mean, come on, yes.
They're very cute.
And when there's so many lessons that came out of that story, so it was exciting.
I mean, I really liked it.
It's interesting because it's a different set of lessons than we have learned in other interviews, because there are very few where they say sort of like we started this thing and it just blew up and took off and it was out the Usually that part is sort of the hard part, is like making your first sale or getting your first contract. Whereas for them, because she was already a social media presence, like that was not even
an issue. She was just like they knew they could sell, and they were selling, so that a whole different set of challenges they did.
There's so many different ways to get this entrepreneurial thing done, and I like that this was another example of how you could do it differently and instead of, you know, like Steven said, kind of grow in a way that a more typical small business would grow. They had to jump in at scale, and they knew it from the beginning.
I was taken by the conversation about what happened when they launched their brand and the fact that the packages didn't get delivered because we talked about they had to do it at scale, and they had to do it at scale quickly, but clearly, Like you know, they couldn't deliver the packages themselves. They had to rely on logistics companies and shipping companies. And I think there's a real lesson in there. Just because you outsourced something doesn't mean
you can assume it's taken care of. You can have the best contract in the world, tell me about it, but if you don't have a way to know that it's done, then it might not be done.
Yeah, that is so true. And I hear this a lot. You probably hear it from entrepreneurs as well. You know, folks want to get into business and they want to kind of set it and forget it. They wanted to be passive income that kind of thing. And what we learned from this story is that they really had to get their hands dirty too. They had to jump in when things weren't going the way that they were supposed to go. Because you can't just say yes, and I paid so and so to get this thing done and
then just assume that it's going to get handled. It's on you to make sure that it actually gets done.
Yeah, it's never really passive, is it.
It's not.
Look and I give Stephen and Dezi even a ton of credit because they owned it different ways, right. So Desi went on her social media platforms and owned it and Steven got to work customer by customer and owned it in a personal way. The one other thing they did when they had that customer service challenge Tanya is they both were willing to say I'm sorry, I let
you down. We'll do better next time. And my experience with brands that when they make a mistake, they own it is much better than when they try to deflect and dissemble. You know, they told the truth, they were honest, and they did what they could to make it right, and I think people appreciated that direct honesty.
I think people definitely appreciate that honesty.
But they use the word transparency, and that goes along with kind of the relationship that Desi had been building with her community from the beginning, and when things didn't go as expected, they kind of fell on their swords and said, like, listen, we're sorry, this is what happened, and we're going to do our best to fix it. And I admire companies who take that approach and I
try to do the same in my business as well. Like, mistakes happen, things don't go as planned, and it's just how you address the issue that matters the most.
Yeah, there's just no such thing as not my problem. If you make a mistake, it's your problem. If your partner makes a mistake, it's your problem. If someone done stream makes a mistake, it's your problem.
The buck stops with you.
Can we talk a little bit about this. We've had a few husband and wife teams come on this show, so it's a common theme that we see successful husband wife teams. Do you work with a lot of them, What do you find makes them successful or less so in your experience?
That's a good question. I would say, like what we saw with the Desi and Stephens story is the importance of playing your position. I find that the couples who do the best in business are very clear on who is doing what in the business and what you know, what their responsibilities are, what the roles are, and working
together just like one would if they weren't married. And when it comes to my married clients and even just folks in a relationship, it's understanding what they're supposed to be bringing to the table in the business and being consistent in that regard.
So, Tanya, what percent of your clients would you say have more than one business? Is it a lot or is it very few?
I would say that a lot of them have had more than one business.
That's interesting, That's what I would say, say, more.
They have had more than one business.
But typically there's one business that is doing particularly well. But what I don't see much of is what we saw here, where there are multiple ones that are doing extraordinarily well, all at the same time. So, Ben, what do you think about, you know, running two major companies at the same time.
Well, look, so, first of all, as I reflect on it, I think it's two companies, but they're sibling companies. They're not even cousins. They're siblings because they're both selling physical products that are based on her social media personality as the core sales generator. So these are very closely related businesses,
which does make it easier. That said, we didn't get into the detail, but what I would be interested to know over time is how they plan to staff up to support that, because really, what I have found is that, and this is true in the corporate world and it's true in the small business world, is when you don't wake up every day worried about something all day long, it's easy for bad stuff to happen. And so I
apply that at work. You know, if there's something that is really important to my business, I make sure there is someone who is that's their job, not part of their job, not some of their job, but all of their job. And so I'm sure it's working quite well. But I would imagine as they continue to scale those brands that they will find that they need some infrastructure of their own.
That's such a good point. If it is that important, it needs to be someone's sole job.
Yeah. So look, I have to say, like we've talked to a lot of businesses, what I love about their story is that they are completely self made, and they are self made on their own belief in themselves and their capabilities, whether that was Desi's ability to design or her ability to generate following in sales, or his ability to rely on the things that he knew and to
support the business. They totally bet on themselves. They took their hits in stride and they stuck with it, and they've built something I think is going to last and create sort of last sting value for them and their family.
Yeah, it's awesome that they're in Nortrom and just continuing to grow, and I look forward to seeing what else they do.
Tania, you and I have pulled a lot of lessons from there, but let's go listen to the advice that they had for our listeners.
I think I would tell somebody who wants to start a business to sit down and try to have conversations with people who have started businesses and really get all the information about what the hard points are. What I've heard from a lot of my friends who have started businesses is that they were so blindsided by all the difficulties and all the things that go into starting a business.
So I think having as many conversations with business owners as you can and really getting all the information so that you can be prepared going into it.
When we were building these brands, nothing ever goes as planned. It's kind of like raising kids, and every stage is different. You have to adapt to every stage of the business. Every time you launch a new product, something else is going to happen. But it's really just about adapting to what's happening, to be able to roll with those punches and act quick on your feet. You're not going to
get all the advice from a book. It's really about adapting and like experiencing the business and then figuring it out as you go.
Before we wrap up, I want to take just a moment to reflect on this season's eight episodes. We call this show the Unshakables because it's no easy feat to start a small business. The stories we've told show the tenacity and guts it takes to build a business out
of what was once just an idea. There's something to take from each and every person's journey, whether it's Alex Vega's newfound appreciation for contracts, Desi and Stephen perkins dedication to customer service, or Doug in Jason Barrow's business saving risk management strategies. By any measure, these are great lessons to learn and fantastic triumphs to celebrate. Thanks so much for listening to the first season of The Unshakables. If
you haven't already, please rate and review the show. It'll help us reach more listeners. I'm Ben Walter and this is The Unshakable from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.
The Unshakables is a production of Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia and Wheelhouse