Meet Sarah Chung of Landing International in Downtown
Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Chung.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Sarah. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Starting this beauty technology business in LA was an unexpected life turn. When I made the decision to leave NYC after 12 years, I was headed to Washington D.C. to Georgetown Law School. While I was waiting to hear back from law schools, I spent some time helping consumer brands launch in Asia and two things happened. First, I realized that trying to find a partner in another country was like the Wild Wild West. There was no transparency or reliable resources to find contacts or standard for agreements. Second, I’ve never been a good self-promoter but I found I was really good at promoting other people’s visions and brands. In short, I fell in love with the cross-border space and I started dreaming of ways that I could turn this into a scalable business. So instead of DC, I ended up in LA and left the law school dream behind for Landing.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
No start-up is ever easy and mine wasn’t either. Bootstrapping a tech platform and getting brands and retailers to trust you without a proven track record was definitely a challenge. The biggest hurdle was that investors didn’t see my vision for a universal buying platform for beauty. At first, they didn’t believe that the beauty space was big enough and they didn’t believe there were enough brands and retailers that would use this platform. So I set out to disprove those two assumptions.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Landing International – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Landing International is a B2B platform that standardizes the discovery, purchasing, and marketing of beauty products at retail. We enable emerging brands to do business with small and large retailers and connect marketing investments like PR and sampling to actual sales performance. We are the only B2B platform that specializes in beauty and our brands sell at major retailers like Ulta, Target, and Nordstrom as well as independent boutiques like C.O. Bigelow and Nigel Beauty Emporium. We equip and grow brands through our retailer partners. Our guiding vision is transparency, innovation and equality for brand builders in beauty and wellness. Our proudest moments are when our buyers say we have the best curation and when we successfully launch products that buyers have passed on in the past because it wasn’t presented/marketed properly. We also love and value being part of the brand’s success story.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We’ve proven the product market fit and now it’s time for us to scale. We still specialize in emerging beauty categories such as K-Beauty, J-Beauty, Clean Beauty, Cannabis Beauty and we are really excited for this fall when we will be launching our upgraded platform. We help our brands grow by applying market data, past sales performance, buying trends to their product development and marketing strategies. We’ve learned the ins and outs of how to succeed at retail and we standardize that knowledge for our brands.