671: Tori Quit The Barber Shop, Built a Brand In Her Spare Room, and Hit $1M In Under 2 Years
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan ChanShow Notes
Tori Gill was still cutting hair on weekends when she sold her first 20,000 sunscreens. A former hairdresser with two kids, no e-commerce background, and a product that took two years to develop, she launched Sun & Daughter on Boxing Day 2024 and hasn't really stopped since. This is the follow-up episode - and a lot has happened.
In this episode, Tori gets real about what scaling from $100K to a million-dollar brand actually looks like from the inside: the stockouts, the 54-hour Facebook ad account lockout, the $20,000 orders she had to back herself on, and the retail decision she's made that could either be her smartest move yet - or, in her own words, "the biggest mistake of my life."
What you'll learn in this interview:
How a consumer watchdog report on failing sunscreen SPF tests became an unexpected growth moment - and how Tori moved fast enough to capitalise on it
Why she packed every order from her spare room for a full year, alongside two kids and two days a week in the barber shop, before finally moving into a warehouse the week before Christmas
The exact moment a Choice magazine article turned into a sales spike, and how having your formula independently tested can become your most credible marketing asset
How Tori used a trending audio format - kids in hats, waiting for SPF results - to make an ad that outperformed every polished campaign she'd ever run
Why she treats her Instagram like a reality TV show, and what that means for how she handles UGC, consistent visuals, and the decision never to post other people's faces on her brand page
The average order value lesson she learned from Founder that led her to build out hats, brushes, wet bags, and bundles - and push her AOV from $75 to over $111
Why she skipped Black Friday, never ran a sale in year one, and then sold 1,000 sunscreens in 24 hours the first time she did - and why she hasn't done it since
Lessons from adding 5 to 10 new ad creatives every single week, and why she's changed her entire campaign structure three times in 15 months
How she uses Instagram Stories polls to let her community choose product colours, hat designs, and packaging - and why it's as much about solving her own indecisiveness as it is about building loyalty
What she's learned about going into major retail - the upfront stock commitments, the hidden marketing costs, and why she still doesn't know if it was the right call
If you're building a product brand and starting to feel like you're holding multiple plates in the air at once - ads, content, stock, manufacturing, team, retail - this episode is worth your time. Tori doesn't have it all figured out, and she says so. But the way she thinks through each decision, tests before she scales, and keeps backing herself anyway is exactly the kind of thinking that turns a spare-room operation into something real.
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