There's a version of So Topical that never fully came to fruition, and even if it would have, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near something I’d be proud to put my name on. It’s the version we were trying to build 100% over email, without a single in-person meeting.
In the early days, it was fine because we had samples sent by post and email was a great platform for copy and pasting google translated text. But when every decision is made over a thread, things can get murky very quickly (and they did, shoutout to the gmail search function, there’s a special place in hell for you).
We were building a skincare brand from the other side of the world from our manufacturer and it was going surprisingly well. We actually felt kind of smug about it thinking “wow this will be such an interesting story to tell, how we did this whole brand over email”. Side note, this kept happening throughout the entire business build. We would find a new and exciting way to do something and think to ourselves “omg why does no one else do it like this, everyone does it such a basic way” only to find out some logistical reason that made the basic way the only possible way to do that specific thing. Continuously humbling to say the least.
About six months in, nothing crazy happened that suddenly made us realise this wasn’t going to work, but progress slowed so much that we were waiting for replies for weeks on end and wasting time on miscommunications fuelled by not being in the same room as our manufacturer. We felt like we were working so hard but nothing was getting done. And then, Soph said it first: "I think we have to go."
So we booked flights to Seoul.
In all honesty I wasn't sure what one trip would actually fix. If they weren’t replying over email, what was there to say in person? But you’d be surprised at the fire you can light in someone when you book an in-person meeting.
I can’t explain it, but every conversation we'd been having over email (the ones that lead to seventeen follow-up emails, still leaving us confused) took an hour. In person, a single conversation where someone could point at something, and you could look at it together, and you could say "no, actually, more like this" and immediately see what this looked like, that was the game-changer.
We talked through every wild dream we had for the brand on that first trip. And as those dreams got reality-checked in real time, we started to understand what was actually possible. One of those actually possible things was better than any random request we could’ve come up with. An innovative technology that could create a mask more effective than anything we'd tested.
We also saw our packaging printed live for the first time. Gave feedback that was actioned right in front of our eyes without waiting three days to find out if the thing we'd asked for was the thing we'd meant.
We have actually gone and looked back at some of our first-trip requests and have thought “what were we thinking”? But you don’t know until you learn by seeing it for yourself.
That's the other thing nobody tells you about visiting your manufacturer, it recalibrates your whole frame of reference. When you don't know what's actually involved, you ask for things that would take a week to produce as casually as you'd ask someone to change a font. Once you understand the process from the inside, you can appreciate the intricacies of your process, you have a more substantial connection to the process and the product and you are more knowledgeable on how to give feedback and move forward.
Trip two was different because we arrived knowing what we were doing so we could ask better questions and catch problems earlier. We left that trip having achieved more in one week than we had in the previous six months combined.
Building a brand is hard but building one 8,500km from your manufacturer, across a language barrier, over email, is harder. For a long time I think I told myself that the distance was just a constraint we'd learn to work within and that we'd get better at communicating remotely but that didn’t happen so we had to pivot (and thank god we did).