90. The beauty of emphasizing the obvious, w/Birchbox's Katia Beauchamp

Unconventional ideas define entrepreneurship: They fuel dreams but also spur naysayers and obstacles. Katia Beauchamp, co-founder and CEO of Birchbox, has repeatedly found ways to recast the unconventional as something obvious, enabling ongoing growth through repeated challenges. When Katia and her co-founder introduced Birchbox, its novel business model went against many beauty-industry norms. Then, as it caught on, competitors from Amazon to Sephora took direct aim by copying Birchbox's approach – and crushing margins in the process. To navigate the ups and downs, wooing investors, suppliers, and customers, Katia discovered how describing an industry-flipping idea in conventional terms could both accelerate and extend Birchbox's appeal. The road to differentiating the brand, it turned out, required emphasizing the obvious. Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Award-winning business advice from Silicon Valley and beyond. Iconic CEOs, from Nike to Netflix, Starbucks to Slack, share the strategies that helped them grow from startups into global brands — and to weather crisis when it strikes. On each episode of our classic format, founding host Reid Hoffman — LinkedIn cofounder, Greylock partner and legendary Silicon Valley investor — and a stellar lineup of guest hosts prove unconventional theories about how businesses scale. Guests share their stories of entrepreneurship, leadership, strategy, management, fundraising. You’ll hear the human journey, too — failures, setbacks, learnings. From our Rapid Response format, you can expect real-time wisdom from business leaders in fast-changing situations. Hosted by Bob Safian, past editor-in-chief of Fast Company, these episodes tackle crisis response, rebuilding, diversity & inclusion, leadership change and much more.