How Saie founder Laney Crowells network built her clean beauty brand

When Laney Crowell left her communications job at cosmetics behemoth Estée Lauder in 2016, she didn’t have a clear roadmap to creating Saie — her clean beauty brand that now sells $100 million annually.What she did have, however, was a deep Rolodex that she believed could help her build anything. “I have this thing where I tell myself that I just have to talk to 70 people,” Crowell told NYNext of her approach to networking.

“I make a list in Google Sheets and I just cross people off the list — I ask for their recommendation for who I should talk to next, and then I get another name and just keep going.“My mantra is, just get up one more day, then [connect with] the next person and you’ll get there.”That networking ethos ultimately helped Crowell identify the market opportunity and secure funding for Saie, which is beloved by celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Kristen Bell.After leaving Estée Lauder, Crowell launched a beauty blog where she reviewed products and discovered a significant gap in the high-end clean beauty market. This was well before #cleanbeauty started trending on TikTok or Sephora launched a “clean seal” in 2018 — an indication that something is formulated without ingredients like mercury compounds or formaldehyde.At the time, the clean makeup industry, which is expected to hit $52 billion by 2030, was then valued at closer to $5 billion.So Crowell, now 43, started speaking with dozens of people about her idea of launching a brand free of chemicals, like sulfates and parabens, that can disrupt hormones and damage skin.By 2019, Crowell had launched with mascara 101 and secured investments from notable figures like Gwyneth Paltrow and G9 Ventures founder Amy Griffin, who has also backed Bumble, Hello Sunshine and Goop.“A huge part of my success was that being in New York gave me proximity [to investors and other power players].

I could do five meetings in a day if I wanted to, and I did because I like to work...