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Friends’ ‘Scrappy’ Side Hustle Led to a $1 Million Product
Even though Liis co-founders Alissa Sullivan and Leslie Hendin grew up within minutes of each other in Marin County, California, they didn’t meet until years later when a friend introduced them at a wedding in 2009. The duo immediately bonded over a mutual obsession: fragrance. “We both used to collect the little vials and miniature bottles in shoe boxes,” Sullivan tells Entrepreneur. “So that was a really amazing connection. Back then, it was more rare to find somebody [with] this same passion. It was before social media and all that.”
Image Credit: Emily Dulla. Co-founders Leslie Hendin, left, and Alissa Sullivan, right.
At the time, Sullivan had just completed her master’s at ISIPCA, a school for post-graduate studies in perfume, cosmetics products and food flavor formulation based in Versailles, France, and Hendin was en route to Central Saint Martins in London to pursue a master’s degree in design.
Related: Michelle Pfeiffer’s Fragrance Brand Took 20 Years (and Plenty of Rejection) to Build
As Sullivan launched her career working on product development for niche perfume brands Penhaligon’s London and L’Artisan Parfumeur, she and Hendin discussed creating their own fragrance line one day. “We did realize that we were a yin and yang of skill sets,” Hendin says. “Alissa with her perfume background and me with my design background.”
“But back then, we were like, How do you start a business?” Sullivan recalls.
“We want to be able to tell stories that are meaningful to us.”
When Hendin moved to San Francisco after graduate school and Sullivan to Los Angeles, the pair got serious about their own brand. It was 2017, and they’d accumulated considerable experience in the beauty and fashion world. Hendin was the second employee and creative director at Vintner’s Daughter, where she developed the company’s branding platform, and Sullivan was behind hit products for major brands such as Hourglass and Iris&Romeo.
Sullivan had crossed paths with renowned French perfumer Jérôme Epinette over the course of her career, so the co-founders approached him about a partnership for the nascent side hustle — and Epinette agreed. Liis, a combination of shared letters from Sullivan’s and Hendin’s first names, was born. The brand launched its beta discovery set, a fragrance sampler, in 2020; three full-size scents followed in 2021.
Related: These Sisters Started a Side Hustle After a ‘Light Bulb Moment’ Led to a ‘Versatile’ Product. Now It’s Done Over $45 Million in Sales.
The co-founders never approached the line from a place of What’s trending? or What are people buying? Instead, they focus on developing scents they’d want to wear themselves, in the type of packaging they wanted to see on their vanities. (It took about two years to engineer the click function on Liis’ spherical white cap.) “We want to be able to tell stories that are meaningful to us,” Hendin says. “Everything’s coming from, How do we want to express ourselves? [All Liis perfumes] tell really personal stories.”
The brand’s recent launch, Choux Choux, exemplifies that ethos: Sullivan’s mother is French and called her “chouchou,” a term of endearment similar to “darling,” but there’s a double entendre at play — the choux à la crème is a French pastry. Liis’ Choux Choux features top notes of whipped cream and lemon zest, middle notes of caramel, vanilla and salt, and base notes of cocoa, mocha and sandalwood. The scent, priced at $175, is on track to hit $1 million in retail sales this year, per the company.
“People can go into a shop and stumble upon us very organically.”
Liis, which has always been self-funded, is growing by 60% to 70% year over year. The brand produces nine fragrances and six candles stocked in Neiman Marcus, Violet Grey, Goop and more than 125 specialty independent retailers across the U.S., Europe and Japan. Liis sustains its impressive momentum by leaning into organic growth — and a distribution strategy that’s “really about discovery.”
“We are in smaller boutiques that we would probably shop at ourselves,” Hendin says. “So that’s another big piece; people can go into a shop and stumble upon us organically. Then it’s very word of mouth, talking about us online.”
Related: How and Why Luxury Brands Should Embrace TikTok
TikTok, in particular, has been a boon for the brand. Fragrance influencers and perfume reviews abound on the platform, though the co-founders weren’t aware of the space’s gold-mine potential when Liis entered the market.
“When we first launched, we had a TikTok go viral [and] immediately sold out of our discovery sets,” Sullivan says, “and the funny thing is, because we are self-funded and so scrappy, we were hand-fulfilling them.” That meant putting the perfume into vials and handwriting fragrance names on each one — a process that took about eight hours.
The brand continues to see viral social media success that doesn’t come from PR pitches or product gifting — it organically flows to Liis.
“It’s about looking at your business [and] seeing what your needs are.”
Despite the early and steady traction, like most businesses, Liis encountered some challenges along its path to growth. Between supply chain, warehouse and hazmat hurdles, the co-founders had to be open to creative pivots and problem-solving. For instance, when their first warehouse didn’t have the necessary level of attention to detail (“We want the package to be beautiful when it arrives”), they shifted to a different 3PL and moved their products to a different facility.
Related: Creativity Is Your Best Problem-Solving Tool — Here’s How to Harness It
“We didn’t go to business school, so we don’t have a framework that we’ve learned that this is what you have to do,” Hendin says. “I don’t think that there’s a one-size-fits-all. What works for our business might not work for another business. So I think it’s about looking at your business, seeing what your needs are and then figuring out what’s right for you and using common sense to put those pieces together.”
The business that started as a side hustle is still in a “transitioning phase” to a full-time career for the co-founders, but Sullivan and Hendin are well-versed in balancing their freelancing and consulting work with their growing brand — and look forward to allocating more of their time and resources to Liis. Sullivan and Hendin are excited to continue Liis’ global scale and reach new audiences with their perfumes and fragrance stories.
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