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Our marketplace makes it easy for folks to find products that are curated and tailored to meet their values: GEENIE founder

Chana Ewing, Founder of GEENIE joins the On the Move panel to discuss her intersectional beauty brand.

Video Transcript

- Well, [INAUDIBLE] the Black Lives movement, there's also been a lot of reemphasis on living intersectionality in all aspects of your life, including your buying decisions. So people are looking to buy products that are made by makers who they respect or they feel are representative. Our next guest is pushing forward on that front. She is Chana Ewing. She's founder of GEENIE, and she's joining us as part of our "Women and Money" segment, sponsored by USAA. She's joining us from Brooklyn.

So GEENIE is effectively a beauty marketplace, a beauty product marketplace where you try to focus on independent brands. So first of all, talk to me about the genesis of this, because this is a new effort on your part. It just launched in late July.

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CHANA EWING: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. So yeah, so GEENIE is a culture-first beauty marketplace and community rooted in intersectionality. The idea is that we are enabling consumers to shop-- to better shop with their intentions. So that is from Black, Indigenous, and POC-owned, LGBTQ, women-owned brands to inclusive, sustainable, and toxic-free.

So we like to-- we're putting all of those values into one space and enabling to consumers to better shop with their intention. And then for the small brands, for these indie DTC brands, we're, you know, we're helping them better utilize their marketing investment by becoming this discovery platform and enabling them to meet consumers who are interested in their value propositions.

- You know, when [INAUDIBLE] for this segment, I was thinking back to the days I lived in Indianapolis, and there's the historic, you know, CJ Walker, Madam CJ Walker. So this is not a story that's new, and that demand has always been there. But I'm curious, among your clientele, because you talk about intentionality, do you see and do you share the data on people who might be white or privileged or in positions of power buying from the people who you represent in the marketplace?

CHANA EWING: Yeah, that's actually a great question. So when we launched just this last week, we actually launched with both the marketplace and a community, with the idea that there would be a group of people who would also be very interested in being-- discovering products together, connecting with each other, and being able to amplify those products. And so as a part of the application, there's actually-- we ask-- it's a very robust application, and one of the things we ask is around demographics.

So of the folks who have applied to the community so far, about 43% are Black folks. About 33% are white folks, actually, and then we have about 10% mixed race, and I think it's like 9 or 8-- 9% Asian, and about 5% Latinx. So we're really seeing already out the gate a super diverse group of folks who are interested in this concept of shopping intentionally.

- I wanted to get your take on the whole COVID situation. I know that you're a recent upstart, but there could be some tailwinds here for people who are just looking for trying to support local businesses or smaller businesses, as opposed to being on Amazon. I'm just wondering if you've done any research, and what your initial results are showing.

CHANA EWING: Yeah, absolutely. So I think what's interesting with the twin pandemic that we're in right now, which is, you know, COVID, and then the uprising, what you've seen recently is a lot of like-- I'm sure you might have seen it in your own emails or your lists or-- there's been an uptick in the amount of spreadsheets that have gone around that are listing Black-owned products, and listing Black, Indigenous, POC-owned products and saying, well, here's 100 brands that you can support, and here's the 50 brands that you can support in beauty or in lifestyle or what have you.

And so part of what we are doing here is that, you know, that's a little bit of an overwhelming scenario for the consumer. And so that's why we sort of-- we're-- though we thought about this marketplace before this moment, we see in this moment it'll be super easy for folks to come in and find products that are a little bit more curated, that are a little bit more tailored, and they don't have to, like, wade through long lists in order to find things that meet their own values.

- So Chana, [INAUDIBLE] finally about that curation, right? How are you finding these brands? Are they coming to you now that you're up and running? And then how do you figure out which are the best? Do you have like a team of people who's testing the stuff? How does that process work?

CHANA EWING: Yeah, so we're looking at three things when we're evaluating brands. One is, you know, who are the founders, like what are their backgrounds, so, you know, how do we support intersectional folks. The other is what's their mission. So you know, what is the cultural lens that they're looking at, and what-- how are they using their business to move society forward on one dimension or another.

And then lastly, it's like what is the actual product. You know, how are they designing the product, how are they building the product, what are the ingredients behind the product. So we evaluate vendors along those three dimensions. We have seen vendors who are reaching out to us. We're also lucky enough that, prior to GEENIE, we had a subscription box company, which was a precursor to this. And so we had over 100 brands that were actually in that model. So we're not starting from scratch, in a lot of ways. We have a little bit of an edge because of the brands that we saw in our other model.

- All right, Chana Ewing, thank you so much. GEENIE.world is the site, and she is the founder. Thank you so much.

CHANA EWING: Thanks for having me.