Interview with Veronika Strotmann [Co-Founder of Yepoda]: ‘The Good Path for You’ – The Italian Rêve

by Maria Luisa Fasano, October 28, 2024

He is half-Korean, so we go to Korea a lot, and more and more friends from Europe were asking us to bring them some K-beauty products because they would see those on YouTube. So, we would experience on some personal level that people outside Korea wanted to try K-beauty, so at some point we thought: “Okay, maybe we should stop bringing back the suitcases and bring K-beauty to Europe on a more professional level”. So, we started thinking what it could have looked like and planned a strategy, and it really came together quite naturally. We wanted to bring the innovation – the skincare routine – together with what we saw in the European market a lot, like sustainability, vegan, cruelty-free.

That was the beginning of it all, and then we spent a long time in product development; in 2019, we talked with a lot of different laboratories in Korea, but it was not easy because if you want to do all things innovative and vegan, so with a high amount of natural ingredients, it becomes tricky in product development, but eventually, we solved all issues. From the beginning, we said we didn’t want to make compromises on the products: we only want to launch products that fulfill all our criteria, and that we’re 100% convinced of.

We had to delay the launch of the whole brand for four months because our cleansing balm has a very particular formula without microplastics that was difficult to make. It took a lot longer than expected, but we really wanted to make sure that it was how we really wanted it to be.

We wanted to set five pillars for the brand: clear beauty, clean beauty, sustainability, effectiveness (because sometimes with clean brands you also lose a bit of efficacy of the products, but we want our products to be very effective), and fun. We wanted to make it easy for our people to use our products, make it enjoyable, and be present on social media so that people can easily engage, and ask us questions. With our pop-up stores, as well, we want to create a very fun and special experience.

These five pillars are already very balanced because we never come to compromises on anything, we always check that our new products are true to all of our five pillars. I think that’s how we remain balanced. Of course, what’s also very important for us is to always talk to our customers and community – we ask them questions about our products, how they like them and their experience with online shopping. These are valuable insights on where you can improve: the customer is the center of it all, right?

I think that’s the nice thing about being a small brand: you are a bit more flexible, while if you are in a very big corporation, it takes much more time to get approvals, while we are way more agile, we’re faster in doing stuff, so I think that’s our advantage and we just need to use it.

I think if you build a brand like that from the very beginning, maybe it’s easier than changing afterward – we’ve always been like, “This is how it should be, this is what’s important to us”, since the beginning. What’s important as well is to find the right partners, especially with the laboratory and all the production phases: they need to be aligned, share the same values, and understand why it is important for us. If you have the right partners, you try to make it all happen together.

We’ve recently reached a sustainability milestone because we launched a refillable product for most of our assortment, which is something we’ve always wanted to do since the very beginning, but it was difficult, we got a lot of nos and it really took our team quite some time to figure it out. Anyway, here we are now! Finally, most of our products are refillable, and for most formulations, we tried to make completely biodegradable packaging also not to create extra waste. That’s something we’ve worked on for a long time and it’s now a major project, larger than life, but we also have other good initiatives. For instance, since the beginning, we’ve been partners of One Percent for the Planet, an initiative by the founders of Patagonia, which are pioneers in sustainability and they are pushing boundaries. If you’re a member of it, you donate 1% of all your revenues to environmental projects – not of your profits, which is really a big difference. I think it’s a really nice initiative because if every company did this, it would really mean a lot, if everyone donated their 1%, it would be insane.

For us, we started as a very small company four years ago, but every year we grow so much, and it really creates a bigger and bigger impact, even if it’s just from 1%. The feedback we’re getting is amazing because we’re growing a lot!

Of course, this topic has been around for quite some time, and some people say it’s just hype, it’s a trend and it will be over at some point, but I don’t really see it like that, I think it’s here to stay. You know, you have German cars, Swiss watches, Italian leather, symbols of quality, and I think K-beauty is the same: Korea sets new standards in the beauty industry because there’s more and more innovation coming there, new ingredients, new technologies. It changed the whole game on a global scale and now everybody’s looking for Korea, that’s why I think it’s not a trend, but rather a whole movement that changed a whole industry.

Social media is really core to what we do and it’s also an advantage that we have as a young brand because it allows us to be more playful, closer to the community and the “fun and helpful friend” throughout their skincare journey. That’s what we’re trying to be, and from the beginning, all our markets decided to use a localized approach. That’s why we have an Italian account, a French account, a Spanish account, etcetera because we want to talk to our community “directly”, and we want them to be able to ask questions and we don’t want to have boundaries, and that works better if we use the local language. We are very present on Instagram, we were one of the first brands to use TikTok in marketing, and I think that’s a smart move from our marketing team to integrate TikTok so much. For the customer is of course interesting because they get a lot of information, and they can ask a lot of questions, but that’s true for us as well, we can also ask questions to the community, and we can also get information, so it goes both ways. TikTok in particular is really going strong because you can show a product very nicely and then all of a sudden everyone starts talking about it. This happened with our Dewy Day, the cushion foundation that we launched with a big event: everyone started talking about the event and the product, which out of the blue became one of our top-selling products, and all thanks to Instagram and TikTok.

It’s interesting because I know sometimes people are a bit concerned with the many steps that the K-beauty skincare routine involves, they say it takes so long; however, most of our customers are buying a full routine of 5-6 steps, so they really want to take care of their skin. The Korean skincare routine was always like that, preventative so that every step has its particular purpose – you build a routine now that will help you maintain healthy skin in the future. I think nowadays, more and more people see it like that, they really want to follow a skincare routine for this reason.

Personally, my must-have is our cleansing balm, the Calm Balm, I really love it and cannot live without it. Other than that, what I use every day is the Bubble Double, and the Mist Have, about which, in the beginning, I thought, “I don’t need it”, but now I’m addicted to it, I cannot live without it. Then, I really like our new creams, the oil-free moisturizer that we recently launched, and either one of the SPFs, the cream one that we have and the sun sticks.

All of our products are also dermatologically tested for sensitive skin, so if you have sensitive skin, double cleansing is really fine. Also, for those who don’t like Korean skincare routines, cleansing is super important because if your skin is not cleansed properly, all the other products cannot work in the best way – for example, you are just putting serum on clogged pores, and it can only do half the job. That’s why I think cleansing should be the base of all skincare routines: you should cleanse to see the effects of all the other products you put on after.

There will be quite a lot of product launches this year. Now we have only one left which will come in December, and it’s going to be not for the face: we’re launching a hand cream. It’s one of the products that the community really wants to see and it’s asking us about, especially in the winter.

I think we had a lot of acts of rebellion against the laboratory because they always said, “No, we cannot do it like that”, “We cannot do the cleansing balm without the microplastics”, but we said, “We have to try again and again”. For instance, we couldn’t have sheet masks for the first two and a half years of Yepoda because sheet masks are a throwable product by themselves, unsustainable, and people from our community would ask me, “You’re a clean beauty brand, how can you not have sheet masks?”. But the laboratory was telling us, “We can’t make it sustainable, we are sheet masks expert, you have to do it like this”, while we said, “Let’s try a new solution”. In fact, in the end, we launched our fully biodegradable sheet masks, both the packaging and the mask.

You know, in the beginning, you think everything is possible, but this also creates a lot of doubt, sometimes, you wonder: “In which direction should I go?”. Now, we are four years old and this year has really shown me that we are in a good spot and I need to trust my intuition. Of course, I need to listen to the customers, I need to look at the data, and listen to the team, but I think especially as a founder, you also have to go with intuition. I think now, I learned for myself that sometimes you need to trust your guts and take the brand in that direction.

I’m almost 34 now, and maybe it took some time to figure this out, which goes hand in hand with what I was saying about trusting your intuition, but I’ve realized it’s about not doubting so much, but rather trusting your guts and going with it. To be comfortable in your own skin, with your own decisions, is something that throughout your life you learn more and more.

To be honest, founding a company is quite scary, there are a lot of things that can go wrong, and in the end, everyone’s way is different, so I don’t think there is so much right and wrong, there’s just the right-ish path for yourself and that you need to figure out, but there could still be multiple ways that lead to the good path for you.

Thanks to MM Studio.