Each week, I'm spilling the tea on how each of our products came to be, what's brewing, and all things beauty and drama.

Feel free to discuss each post on social with me via comments and I'll give responses each week on the blog.

Xx,

Yasmine (Founder)

--Spicy Sauce Extreme Lip Plumper--

First of all, #teambrooke.

Okay, do you remember during lockdown when that super shady lip plumper that was all over the internet? It looked like a little pill with one side that was pink and one side that was purple. Well I ordered it for my small AF lips (pre-Spicy Sauce). This product screamed scam to me when I received it in the mail. The packaging had vague ingredients and the "brand" name was one of many that sold the exact same product. Despite my better judgment, I tried it on. OUCH. That stuff (whatever was in it) burned the crap out of my lips and didn't even make them look irritated--it just hurt. I thought, if everyone on the internet is during this and they're loving it I can 1000% make something better. I reached out to a smaller lab that had lower MOQs (minimum order quantities) because I quit my job (I can get more into that another time) and couldn't risk much. After much back and forth the plumper was perfect. It was gentle, yet powerful. I launched the product on my website in October 2021. My boyfriend paid my rent for 3 months (or was it 5 months I can't remember, I'm just a girl) because I either had to go back to a corporate job in beauty or invest everything I had into making Scrandie work. On my last dime, Elizabeth Cooper (literallylizzi on TikTok) posted a video (which you can watch here) on January 29, 2022 using my plumper to prank her boyfriend into thinking she got lip filler. My phone was blowing up with dings one after the other and I actually got annoyed because I thought it was an angry customer messaging me on chat (that's the only time my phone incessantly dinged). When I looked at each notification that had different order numbers and names assigned to each. I freaked out. I was screaming "WHAT'S HAPPENING?!" I thought one of my videos was going viral, but I remembered that earlier that day, Elizabeth had tagged Scrandie in her video and through her video I made $75 in sales. When I went back on TikTok after all the dings, it was clear that her video was going viral and the sales were a result of it. I sold out of the 400 units I had left from my original PO (purchase order) of 500. After much more success to follow, the same brand that I had ordered the bad lip plumper from began to steal all of my popular TikTok videos to repost and run ads to scam people into buying theirs. Each week I had a customer DM me about various so-called "brands" stealing my content. Some of my customers were actually scammed into buying the other product. Sometimes the order would never come and sometimes it would, but it would look totally different from the product in the video (my product). I kept a folder titled "Brands knocking me off" (pictured below) to have evidence of the scam. I tried to get Google, Shopify, Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram involved and none of them did anything to help. I sent a cease and desist to one of them and they just denied it. After year later, Spicy Sauce is used and loved by many people around the world and I'm so happy I quit my job and followed my dream. BTW I paid back my boyfriend in full when I received enough from sales shortly after and that felt so good.

To this day, I have sold over 40,000 units of Spicy Sauce and it has been featured in various popular media outlets and podcasts.

For those of you who have supported this product in any way, THANK YOU!

July 24, 2024