written by Stacey Lindsay

If you know Doré, you likely know of its backstory. And if you don’t, let us indulge you because it’s good. Longtime fashion influencer and blogger Garance Doré launched the modern French pharmacy skincare brand with her business partner Emily Yeston two years ago. Doré was a fast hit, beloved for its clean and minimalistic French approach to skincare. As Emily says, Doré delivers “the only things you need in your beauty closet.” 

The brand’s success comes from its products speaking for themselves and the large following Garance had built for more than a decade for her honest, witty commentary on fashion, style, beauty, and culture. She and Emily had been producing Atelier Doré, a digital publication that featured essays, Q&As, home tours, and fashion photography when they both realized it was time for a change. From an outsider’s perspective, Garance and Emily were wildly successful in their content creation. But in their bones, there was something anew on the horizon.

What’s so compelling about the story of Doré is that it’s based on Garance and Emily’s gut instincts. They each knew when it was time to end a project, even when it was successful, and when to take a giant leap into something unknown.  

Nada recently caught up with the two founders on ‘The Liberty Road Podcast’. Here are five key takeaways from their conversation on instinct, intuition, and staying rooted in what’s real. 

#1: Gut Feelings

Emily: We had started doing these retreats with our readers, which were amazing. Garance and I decided to go to a silent meditation retreat together for research. I was in it. I was having a moment. And [during the silent retreat] I had a moment of, We're done with the blog. This is not a thing that we need to do anymore. And it's okay. I was trying to continue to make it work because I felt like if I said that we shouldn't do this anymore, it would be a failure instead of just the closing of one chapter and the start of something else. I think that, finally, at that retreat, I realized that it was not sustainable anymore for either of us. It was intense. So during that retreat, I sort of gave myself permission to be like, It's okay. If this is not the thing that we will keep pushing forward, we can move on to something else.

#2: Time to Build Anew

Emily: I was talking to a friend about what's happening. And she said, 'You guys should obviously start a beauty brand.' And I was like, Why would we ever start a beauty brand? It shouldn't have been surprising to me because a year prior, someone had reached out to G about starting a beauty brand. It was an avenue that we had sort of explored a little bit, but never so seriously, that I felt it would be the next chapter for us. So I waved that friend off in that conversation and just moved on with my life. And a few weeks later, I was buying micellar water on Amazon, and it was one of those light bulb moments where I thought, No one's done anything in the French pharmacy space in such a long time. It was one of those things where everything just clicked into place in your head. We could do that with authenticity because of Garance, who she is, and what she's represented to [her audience] through the lens of beauty, as well as the other French women we've featured. I could just see it. And so, I remember talking to my husband about it and being like, 'Is this a crazy idea?' And he said, 'No, I think it actually makes a lot of sense.' I called G, saying, 'I have this idea. What if the best way out of the blog is basically through a new incarnation of the brand.' She had the same reaction I had with my friend: 'Why would we start a beauty brand? But then, a couple of days later, she called me back, and I felt like she had the same sort of experience that I had, where it kind of clicked suddenly. She could see it in the same way it clicked for me. So the conversation was, ‘We can do this.’

#3: Authenticity and Essentialism

Garance: We knew that beauty was turning a page in terms of the standards that it was setting for itself. For us, it wasn't a question that it had to be clean beauty, and it had to be sustainable. These, to us, were just like breathing. We want this to be the background of everything we do. People will trust us because we're doing real, clean beauty, real sustainability, and all that. And then, it was all about the knowledge we had developed over all these years and our personalities. I'm not somebody who's going to do a 10-step routine in the morning. I like things to be easy and quick. So, we just built on all of these things; we just were very clear that we needed to do something that resembles who we are because we've had the experience of trying to be not who we were before. There was going to be no concession. So we wanted to be very authentic so we could stand behind everything we did.

#4: Creating a Brand that They Want to Use

Emily: And we grew up with a similar approach to beauty. I grew up with drugstore brands. I remember my mom used the same Olay moisturizer until we launched Doré. That's what I grew up with. It was always drugstore; it was never prestigious. It was always super accessible. And I know we had access to this incredible beauty closet for years, which was amazing. Still, when it came to thinking about how I would purchase beauty, I was not someone that would naturally go toward a higher-end luxury product. Also, the more complex my skincare routine got, the worse my skin got. So, that essentialism had always been a part of how we both experienced beauty. But what we kept returning to and could trust were more of the basics, and we really wanted to make them modern for today's consumer. Also, a lot of the industry talks to itself a lot and thinks that the consumer is the person who works in the industry. Most of the women that I know, including a lot of my friends, are young moms right now, and they're happy if they've washed their face and maybe put a moisturizer on.

I know a lot of people who were using bar soap to wash their face up until very recently, or maybe still are not interested in the complexity. The customer that we're talking to is who we are. I'm in my mid-30s. Grace is going to be 49 soon. We are not obsessive beauty junkies. There are a lot of people in the market who want something that's going to work, that's not going to cost them a lot of money, and that they can feel good about using it. We wanted to create something that would talk to that woman because that's who we are, too.

#5: Life Is a Million Things

Garance: We're told so much nonsense, every day, all the time, about everything. One of my favorite things to do is to find the truth. And the truth is never black or white. It's never easy. I don't have kids. It was a big moment, but it's not one sentence. It's not; oh, that's great, or Oh, that's horrible. It's a million things. I see it as every time I put a step on the floor, the flowers grow, like in a Disney movie. I'm trying to keep that spirit. We all do what we can with what we have at any moment.

You can listen to Nada’s entire conversation with Emily and Garance here.

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