Permission To Pamper – Perfectly Posh’s On-Trend, Retail Direct Selling Style

Perfectly Posh proudly says it owns its awesomeness and gives permission to its consultants and customers to do the same. It’s a pampering company that is a little edgy, mixing posh design with sweet, sassy and sometimes snarky messaging into fun and indulgent skin care products.

Ann Dalton

Sam Funk

Since its launch in October 2011, Perfectly Posh has upended the status quo with campy and irreverent branding, on-trend retail products, “give back” ingredient sourcing programs and pioneering business operations. Now with over $100 million in revenue, the company’s founder and CEO Ann Dalton say it’s poised for “world domination,” then shares a hearty laugh.

“We try not to take it too seriously because it takes the fun out,” Dalton says. But the company and brand she created could be one of the best-kept secrets in direct selling and that’s seriously about to change.

Falling In Love

In a past life, Dalton built a company providing marketing supplies and tools for a direct selling company. Dalton fell in love with direct selling’s business model and its ability to ease women’s burdens and help their families.

Dalton remembers a very kind woman that lived in the middle of Nevada in a trailer, who couldn’t keep her electricity on and her husband was not very nice to her. In the five years she was affiliated with the company, she watched her leave him, move out, build her own house, take care of her kids and send them to college, and marry a great guy. “When you see things like that it changes you,” Dalton says.

Perfectly Posh was born of Dalton’s desire to help women change their own lives and give them permission to pamper themselves. “As a busy mom, I learned that you give and give and give, and you give yourself away. One day you look in the mirror and you wonder what happened to you? If you take a few minutes every day to really take care of yourself, it really is magical,” Dalton says.

Retail Look and Feel

Skin care products are often straight out of the doctor’s office or packed with fillers and fragrance that do nothing. Perfectly Posh says their products are different—pampering, affordable, effective and ethical, made with naturally based ingredients that tell a story and inspire people to have a blast while using them.

They have set themselves apart through a unique approach to product development and product launches, along with quirky product names and packaging. It also makes business operations a bit more complicated.

Q&A with Ann Dalton, CEO & Founder & Eddie Silcock, Chief Sales Officer

(Click to read the interview)

“We are on trend. Trends launch every season,” says Vice President of Product Development Stacy Simmons. “We use the same trend agency that retailers such as Sephora and Ulta do. So, we are able to offer the same trends but in the direct sales space. It’s affordable luxury and high-end trend at your fingertips.”

From mermaids to galaxy collections, Perfectly Posh offers a whole lineup of fun products every trend season, as well as monthly product launches. “Our products create an awesome experience from the packaging to the names that get people taking to the formulas that feel amazing on the skin. All together it creates a really social product,” adds Simmons.

“We joke a bit about calling ourselves product whores because we love new things and fun new trends,” Dalton says. But innovation and quick-turn SKUs aren’t just fun, they produce more early adopters for this direct selling company, whose consultant base is young, fun, and forward thinking.

“There’s an immediacy around everything we do and it makes Posh that much more pampering when I can work today and play tonight or feed my family tonight.”
— Ann Dalton,CEO & Founder

In step with that demographic is Posh’s sustainable ingredient sourcing and “give-back” initiatives that have really resonated with the 20- and 30-somethings. They want to know what they’re buying and they are buying into something better, says Dalton. “There’s so much transparency with social media and easily accessible information, it’s been really nice for us to support everything we do, hold it up and say we’re proud of our products inside and out.”

Unconventional Pampering

Posh corporate culture is unconventional. They even dub their annual national convention “Uncon,” where in July they threw out the red carpet to Elvis and Dolly Parton impersonators and drag queens to launch new products in Nashville, Tennessee.

“One of our brand tenets is: ‘We’re serious about not taking ourselves too seriously.’ Part of pampering should be laughing and getting some levity,” adds Dalton. “We talk about intentionally shallow moments because so much of life isn’t,” she says. “It’s heavy and serious and busy. So, when we can take time to let our hair down and go crazy, we take the opportunity every chance we get.”

“We’re one of the first direct sales companies in the world to break into Salesforce technology.”
— Ann Dalton

Unconventional also describes the Posh view of tech and the risks they will take for their consultants and future growth.

In early 2018, Dalton posed the idea of paying Perfectly Posh consultants instant commissions. President Sam Funk says after they were all done laughing at the prospect, they got down to the hard work of making it happen. Several solid months of IT development working with third-party vendors, finance and other logistical folks created a pioneering payment system that went live August 1, 2018.

They commit to pay commissions on personal volume in less than three hours for any consultant with $1,000 lifetime volume. That stipulation lets Posh know the consultant is a real person. The money deposits into pay portal accounts at no extra cost.

The success of the program was immediate. Funk says Posh has been paying on average about four minutes after a sale has been made. “I don’t think anybody is doing it this fast,” he says.

“It’s very much how the world works today. There’s an immediacy around everything we do and it makes Posh that much more pampering when I can work today and play tonight or feed my family tonight,” Dalton says.

“People are excited and they’re looking at it as a way to both find new team members as well as re-energize existing teams,” Funk says.

Breaking into Salesforce

This isn’t the first time Perfectly Posh has taken a big risk with technology. Not quite a year ago, the company moved on from a direct selling industry technology’s platform and placed their faith in Salesforce flexibility.

“We operate much more like a retail skincare company. It’s a lot of SKUs that turn very quickly, a lot of SKUs and movement and we needed software that could keep up with us. We’re one of the first direct sales companies in the world to break into Salesforce technology,” Dalton says.

The old platform crashed with 11 concurrent transactions at checkout, so Perfectly Posh moved more quickly than they or their platform advisors would have liked. Development began in January with round-the-clock work from a world-class team. The site went live September 2017.

“The first couple months were a little bit rockier than we would have liked because we just ran out of time, but now there’s a tremendous amount of functionality and reliability,” Funk says.

Now they can handle over 800 concurrent transactions. Of course, there is still refining to be done, but Dalton says it swings the door wide open.

“It gives us a lot more flexibility. We can be a lot more promotional. We can put bundles together. We can encourage people to build regimens. There’s a lot that we’re able to do on the platform and that we need to do because our product line works more like a retail store. It really was a necessity for us to be as nimble as we wanted to be,” Dalton says.

Thinking Forward

Start thinking like a billion-dollar company, and Chief Sales Officer Eddie Silcock says, “We’ll start to operate like one.”

So Perfectly Posh has recruited a regional sales team working with leaders on coaching and accountability training and will launch a complete revamp of their training system in late 2018. They’ve also installed some simple field incentives, switched up the comp plan, and drastically changed their field engagement strategy.

“Our products, our packaging and our vibe stop people scrolling. In this busy world of Facebook and Instagram, we have the ability to get people’s attention.
”
— Eddie Silcock, Chief Sales Officer

Silcock believes 2019 to be a pivotal year in a three-year Posh strategy focused on U.S. customer acquisition. “Our products, our packaging and our vibe stop people scrolling. In this busy world of Facebook and Instagram, we have the ability to get people’s attention,” he says. That’s an advantage over other companies who are trying to reinvent themselves for the millennial market. “We are already set up to really speak to and resonate with the millennial market. We just need to continue to execute on the strategies to do so.”

Posh is also looking to capture share of the U.S. Latino market. “That world of family being together and taking care of each other really suits our brand,” Silcock says.

“We’ve still got a lot of opportunities to grow here (in the U.S.). Having said that, obviously the move to Salesforce makes it easier to go into other countries. We have an incredible executive team that has a lot of experience, so as we start to look at other opportunities we are leaving the door open and having conversations about what products would do well in other markets,” Dalton says.

But with a chuckle, Funk adds, “We’re currently in the U.S. and we see that changing someday.”

You deserve it Sisterhood Helps Women, Children

The You Deserve It foundation, the charitable arm of Perfectly Posh, launched nearly three years ago and turned its attention this year to “give back” ingredient sourcing programs that benefit women and children of remote Guatemala, Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa.

The responsible sourcing of palm oil is rare among skincare companies and adds expense, but Posh is serious about helping its Guatemalan sources and has a yearlong commitment to nutritionally support babies and infants. “Our field really rose to the occasion. They collected change at all of their events and presented a $40,000 check for our global initiative,” CEO and Founder Ann Dalton says.

You Deserve It is also building the Shea Sisterhood through a partnership with Global Shea Alliance. Forty Posh products contain shea, purchased as seasonally as possible through the Alliance, which in turn provides hands-on training to women in Ghana and 21 sub-Saharan African countries who are building shea businesses.

Posh sold out of 25,000 units of its first Shea Sisterhood fundraiser quickly and a reorder of 25,000 arrives shortly. This initiative will help sponsor a warehouse in Ghana, where 500 women can participate in collective buying power and increase their incomes by over 40 percent in the next shea season alone.