Behind every successful business leader is the proverbial “right hand man.” Amy Welsman was one, working side by side with Joanna Griffiths, the founder and CEO of intimates brand Knix. Welsman handled marketing, wholesale, operations and more, helping grow the business from a startup to a multi-million-dollar intimates powerhouse. Knix was pivotal in creating the leakproof underwear category, which is on pace to become a billion-dollar industry. Last year, Knix was acquired by Swedish company Essity for more than $320 million.

The idea for Paume came in 2019, when Welsman had a newborn in the house. She worried about germs, but in her opinion, the hand sanitizers were harsh on the skin, badly scented, sticky and packaged in cheap-looking, disposable plastic containers. Paume’s plan is to do all of that better, and Welsman is taking her past experience to grow her Toronto-based brand. The brand is already available through The Detox Market, Credo and Anthropologie.com. Two other big retailers will be added soon.

We checked in with Welsman to find out more about Paume and her plans to grow the business.

HAPPI: We are sure that you learned many valuable lessons at Knix that directly apply to how you approached launching Paume. Can you share one or two that really stand out? What did they teach you?

Welsman: Being on the ground floor at Knix was an invaluable experience to have prior to launching my own brand. I was able to face the inevitable challenges, problem solve, experiment and learn from mistakes, without the stress of being the actual founder. I also learned so many valuable lessons by shadowing the founder. I have brought so many lessons and skills with me, but here are two that stand out:

My experience at Knix taught me that you can’t be everything to everyone out of the gate. First focus on a more niche audience that immediately resonates with your product, then expand to a wider audience is a smart way to start. With today’s advertising costs, it’s nearly impossible to reach a broad audience with your brand without major funding to back your efforts. It’s much more cost effective and strategic to focus on a niche, win them over and expand from there.

At Knix, we first went after athletes – people who were looking for active intimates that fit well under their active clothing, and who were looking for functional garments that addressed leaking, sweating and chaffing. We even went so far as to market to horseback riders. We knew long term we wanted all women to wear our product, but it was extremely difficult and costly to go after everyone immediately.

At Paume, our core niche customer is the mom looking for safe, convenient, premium and aesthetic hand sanitizer for her nursery and diaper bag. While of course I want all people using our hand care products, we have focused our efforts on this customer as we can resonate with her immediate needs while navigating early parenthood. Growth isn’t always linear. All brands go through different “eras,” often full of evolutions, missteps and reinventions. If you have loyal customers and partners in the beginning, they will evolve right along with you.

I also learned by shadowing Joanna Griffiths, the founder of Knix, that how you react to mistakes and challenges is key to your success as an entrepreneur. You WILL make mistakes and things WILL go wrong—guaranteed. The test of a good founder is how you react and learn—ideally quickly, efficiently and with a calm head. I know it sounds cliché, but when you’re a business owner and something bad happens, it’s easy to panic and think it’s the end of the world. It takes a lot of resiliency and mental discipline, to take a breath and calmly problem solve. Once solved, don’t dwell on it, rather, learn from it and move on.

HAPPI: Do you have a “you” at Paume?

Welsman: I have been fortunate enough to have an incredible team of three women who have been at Paume since I did my first capital raise in 2021. One in particular mirrors my role at Knix, in that she is a jack-of-all-trades who has taken on a variety of aspects of the business and is never afraid to get her hands dirty. She shows the determination and resiliency to handle the high-pressure environment of an early-stage business.

I have two other team members who are my right hands in other ways and contribute so much on a daily basis. One is a creative lead who does all our photography, social media content, paid assets, packaging, emails and more. She is so talented and brings our products to life in such beautiful and creative ways.

The third member of the team is a higher-level ops director and business strategist, and former Knix employee, who laid a solid foundation for our supply chain and processes, which helped facilitate our growth this year. The fact is, the early days of a startup are far from glamorous – it can be a grueling and high-pressure environment, so finding the right people who thrive in these circumstances is vital. As the founder, while you want to be involved in every detail, it gets to the point where it becomes impossible to do it all, and you need to rely on your team. Thankfully, we are a well-oiled machine.

HAPPI: Do you work with a contract manufacturer that handles production? Can you share that experience with us? For example, did you have a very specific set of “musts” for the product line in terms of ingredients, aesthetic, efficacy? And packaging; was it easy to find the right partner to create your products?

Welsman: We work with a contract manufacturer in Canada who specializes in clean, natural and plant-based formulations. It took some time to land this partner, as not many fillers can fill spout pouches, so it was a challenge in the beginning! That said, when we work with them on a new product, we always ensure they are formulating to meet Credo Clean standards, so we have a list of hundreds of no-no’s that the lab follows. Not all of our products are plant based, but we try our best to use them where possible. Our aim is to use the cleanest, most efficacious ingredients found in face skincare. Traditionally, hand care products have been made by fragrance companies, where scent is prioritized over efficacy and performance, so we specialize in formulations that are functional as well as sensorial.

Rather than opt for a turnkey packaging solution with our filler, we have always sourced our own packaging for each product with different suppliers.…. Having so many suppliers certainly makes our supply chain a bit more complex, but we have so many different requirements for design, sustainably and aesthetic that we found it necessary to manage it in-house and work with different specialists who could meet our standards.

HAPPI: Do you own the formulas?

Welsman: We own about 50% of our formulas, and we plan to purchase all of them when we have the budget. At the moment, for those we don’t own, they are custom formulations developed in partnership with our lab, and we license them exclusively.

HAPPI: Tell us about your packaging design—how does it speak to who Paume is as a brand?

Welsman: When I launched Paume, I wanted to create a brand that was atypical of what was a utilitarian and sterile sanitizer category. While most products only spoke to killing germs, I wanted to make sanitizing an enjoyable moment of self-care and speak to the benefits of clean hands and human connection through the power of touch. Paume has an innately luxurious and welcoming personality, and that is brought to life in our packaging. Soft rounded lines, organic earth tones and an overall elegance has helped us stand out in a category that’s dominated by more generic branding or bright and colorful aesthetics.

HAPPI: You have a considerable number of brick-and-mortar retailers already as a new brand—is this a channel you want to continue to grow?

Welsman: A big part of my role at Knix in the early days was growing and managing our wholesale channel. I learned that wholesale is integral to establishing and legitimizing your brand, and with today’s soaring acquisition costs, it’s more important than ever. That said, getting the PO can be the easy part. Consistent turn, and strong sell-through and building long term partnerships with your retailers requires a ton of effort, time and investment. Rather than try to sell to everyone, you’re better to focus on a few key partners and really invest in them.

The Detox Market is a perfect example. We have nurtured this partnership for almost two years through constant education, gratis for the staff, in store selling support, merchandising, etc., and it’s paid off. Our sales in 2023 have so far exceeded last year by over 400%. We always used to say at Knix that wholesale is an opportunity to bring our brand to life in the physical world, and the partnership can make all the difference.

HAPPI: Your brand is targeting a specific area of skincare—hand care. But do you see expansion to other skincare needs outside of hands? Or other customers?

Welsman: The body care category has seen massive growth in recent years. It’s certainly a hot category that’s becoming more crowded by the day. By staying focused on our niche, we have been able to stand apart, capture buyers’ interest, and steadily acquire new customers through our website. Never say never, but we don’t have plans in the immediate future to expand to other body parts. There is still so much growth to be done with our current product line.

We are working on two more products within hand care that we hope to get to market in 2024/25. One will be safe to use on babies, but that’s all I’ll say for now! Paume means “palm of the hand” in French, so we are married to that body part at this point in the brand’s trajectory. I could see a possible expansion into foot care down the road, as there are lots of synergies there, but for now, we remain focused on building a skincare routine for the hands.

HAPPI: What are the biggest challenges your brand faces right now?

Welsman: The biggest challenge we face is getting our acquisition costs to a sustainable number and keeping our cash flow in check. The iOS changes in 2021 completely changed digital advertising, and the cost to acquire a customer increased significantly. It forced established brands to recalculate their unit economics and shift their spend. For smaller brands like us, it meant we couldn’t rely on Facebook for early traction and fast growth. We were forced to shift our expectations of our growth timeline, take a more omnichannel approach— which was thankfully always our strategy—rely on wholesale for brand awareness and look to more organic ways to grow our brand. A lot of founders I spoke to last year were pulling spend on digital advertising entirely and deploying it elsewhere. We continued to focus our resources and time on our paid digital efforts, trying to lower our acquisition costs through audience testing and more compelling creative. That effort started to really pay off earlier this year when our performance saw a significant increase and we were able to start scaling. It took time and it was a capital-intensive endeavor, but it paid off.

Access to capital has become more limited in recent years for early-stage startups. Rather than rely on outside capital to fuel our growth, we decided in late 2022 to switch things up: bet on ourselves by taking things in-house and out of the hands of expensive consultants and agencies and focus on sustainable growth that didn’t require outside capital. I was willing to accept the possibility that growth might slow, but I needed to have more control of our finances. It was a very different mindset from my time at Knix, the heyday of D2C, when brands had a “grow at all costs mentality,” and when capital was much more accessible. Since shifting to more bootstrapped mindset, we have not only become a healthier business, but we have also seen faster growth compared to any previous year. That said, without a reserve of cash, we must be very careful with our spending and it requires constant management.

HAPPI: What has you, as the founder, most excited about your brand as we move into the second half of 2023?

Welsman: The second half of 2023 will be a pivotal time for Paume, and there is a lot to look forward to! It will begin with the launch of our Overnight Hand Hydration Mask, a rich glycerinbased, scent-free formula that promises to heal and repair severe dry cracked hands and even ease symptoms of eczema. It will be packaged in an airless tub which will also be refillable. I love that we can now offer a new refillable product—our popular Paume Pump is refillable.

This November, our All-in-One Cuticle and Nail Cream will be featured in a very well-known beauty box…It will get our product into the hands of over a hundred thousand customers. It will be a significant moment for Paume.

In addition, we are launching with Dillard’s and Blue Mercury in the fall, our first mass retail partners in the US. These partnerships have been almost a year in the making, and to see our products on their shelves will be very validating. November and December are also huge months for us – it is the only time of year our product goes on sale, so it presents a prime opportunity to attract repurchases from our loyal customers, and also acquire new ones. We have aggressive sales targets this year, so it should be a busy and exciting time.