Holly Tupper: Founder of Cultus Artem

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be you just want to make sure you will get knocked down but just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. It’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show and I am so excited to have my next guest here who is the founder of the incredible brand Cultus, Artem and if you do not know what this brand is, you are definitely going to figure it out very, very quickly because this founder Holly Tupper is just absolutely so so inspiring. And as I said, she is the founder of Cultus art I’m known for not just jewelry, which is what she started out with. But also luxury fragrance. Many people know her I was actually chatting with a friend telling her that I was interviewing her and she’s like, Oh my god, her fragrances are gorgeous. There’s some lovely, and her moisturizer I was just talking to her about which I was fortunate enough to try just part of her skincare is just absolutely to die for. So you have to have to have to check this brand out for sure. But the brand is all about the art of the dormant while using traditional time intensive techniques as a means to transform rare precious materials into distinctive sensorial compositions. So we’ll hear a lot more about that for sure. But without further ado, I just want to say hi to Holly and have courage do the talking instead of me. So welcome. He Yeah, absolutely. So very, very excited to meet you and to have you on the show for sure. So I’d love to hear before we get going and hear a lot more about you. Where did the name Cultus Artem come from?

Holly Tupper 2:25
Oh, thank you for asking. I have always loved etymology. And you know where words come from and how words are used, I think particularly these days with all the, you know, the noise that we’ve had here, recently, meaning of words is to me, it’s important. And when I moved from Singapore to the United States a few years ago, I rebranded my company before. In the before time, I had always worked under my own name Holly Tupper. And I think that was sort of a holdover from having studied art and having been a painter and jewelry designer, and Jamaica, you know, you sign your, your, your work with your name. And so I just always thought, well, that’s what my company should be called. And I get to the states and go to a trade show. And some person who is trying to be distributor guys who really dumb idea, really, who do not want to use your name for your company, because if you ever sell, and in the you know, fragrances are really hot right now, you’re toast, because you’ve basically sold the rights to your personal name. So once you think about that name thing. So as I as I, you know, what is it that we do? Why do we do it? And how do we do it? And that, you know, became the sort of the exercise and the being occasionally a little obtuse and deep, I actually, in the etymological sense went all the way back to proto indo European words. And I was kind of coming up with some names. And I thought by you know, I think there are probably a lot of people that don’t even realize that there is such a thing as proto indo European words and maybe why do we move this up the food chain to Latin planet has a lot of people understand Latin. Yeah, and the the name called the Star Tim is from Latin and Cultus is not only the root word for culture and cultivation, but in Roman times the act of Cultus was performed by highly skilled practitioners have been involved first, the application of makeup which one my imagine 2000 years ago was gross, hard to work with incredibly smelly, all mineral based, and after they would be made up and this was for men and women. They would be perfumed to mask the smell of the horrible thing that they just put on their faces at which was probably full of lead and all kinds of, you know, horrible thing. And the chemistry of the day had actually learned how finally to extract to buy into liquid form fragrance, but here for it had been, you know resin in form of resin and did Bertus incense and as offering some temples and so forth. And then finally after being perfumed, the the person would be a Bejeweled with their, with their jewelry. And that okay, well, I’ve been making jewelry for 35 years I am now and I’ve been at that point I’d been perfuming for 15 years. And I had the idea of a small skincare, you know, capsule collection. So I thought, Okay, well, culture is the act of Cultus is cool. But how are we doing? This is very artful. And so our Tim is the root word for making art. It’s the conscious arrangement of elements to effect the senses and emotions. And so I’m sorry, Jim, which is kind of the long, long winded answer. No, I love it. It has meaning on to as I said, You know what we do? How we do it? And why do we do it? So?

Kara Goldin 5:55
So you touched on this, but you are an artist? And you started out with jewelry? Did you think you were an entrepreneur? Did you think you were a jewelry designer? I mean, how did she think about you know, your your start?

Holly Tupper 6:11
I? Interesting question. I’m not sure that I will, I certainly didn’t sit down and write a business plan when I was first making jewelry. And I don’t think I approached it from that perspective, I think I started making things. And then people thought they were nice, and I was so that’s nice that they think it’s nice. And it sort of one thing sort of led to another I suppose. But it was sort of, you know, as I progressed, it became some more codified as a as a, as a business. And in terms of entrepreneurship, is it’s a big E word. But I think that innately a lot of people feel like sometimes it’s okay, just to sort of go for something just to try it and see what happens. And that’s sort of the route of entrepreneurship, it’s that willingness to just kind of, you know, give something a shot, maybe. So I’m not sure that I felt like I was really an entrepreneur, but I just sort of innately maybe, you know, had the makings of one or something.

Kara Goldin 7:16
So this started and in Singapore, yeah, you actually started creating your beautiful objects. And then and then selling them, did you sell them in stores? Or how did you actually get your products out there?

Holly Tupper 7:33
Well, the Yes, I sold in stores, but I also I guess it started started at the fair kind of level, you know, there were at the time in Singapore, it was very difficult for accompanying wives. And at that point, I was an accompanying wife, I had actually had a career in, in Wall Street in the brokerage business as a institutional bond salesman and fixed income at Paine Webber, which no longer exists. But I had done that for about eight years worked on a huge trading floor in New York City, you know, one of three women in a sea of 3000. Guys, that was pretty funny. And then, you know, got to Singapore, decided to kind of take a leave of absence from the brokerage business and cast around and did the things that nice expatriate housewives at the time did which was, you know, join ladies organizations and take classes. And I happened to take a class in jewelry bead stringing. And that kind of became addictive. And finally, one couldn’t eat at our dining table because it was covered in beads. And then I ended up teaching the class. And then after a year or so I, I felt frustrated that I was having to buy manufactured fittings and I wanted to find a course that I could take to learn how to become a goldsmith or silversmith. And there weren’t really classes like that on offer in Singapore at the time, except for this one gentleman named Ed Owen. And he had a training school for young Chinese kids to gain just enough knowledge to go be apprenticed to traditional Chinese Goldsmith’s shops. So it was me the you know, The New Yorker. Coming in, yeah, New Yorker coming in over with 1515 year old kids from the heartland of Singapore who are learning how to you know, do these bits in it so one thing led to another so as I started to become more adept at goldsmithing that’s when I started to make much more interesting jewelry that was more worthy of being sold in stores and so I did sell in stores in Singapore and then many years later had my own boutique but to begin with,

Kara Goldin 9:37
so it’s it’s one thing to enjoy jewelry and and love making it it’s another thing to create a pretty nice business one where people are they know your name. They know the brand name. How did you create awareness? I mean, why do you think people picked it up?

Holly Tupper 9:57
In the early days? I think that it was because I would engage the consumer in the process of making the jewelry in many instances. And I think by allowing them to participate in the creation of something that they aspired to, that that helped a lot. And, you know, I did have some very interesting clients at the time, some Malaysian royalty, for example, and they would come to my studio, and we’d sort of sit on the, on the floor, and, and play with, you know, stones and beads. And, you know, and kind of compose things, you know, with me, giving a lot of direction, obviously, because I was the one that had the skill set, and I was just trying to help them to actualize their aspired piece, but and I guess it was sort of word of mouth, and by being in stores, and I did actually get a little bit of press when I was getting first getting started in Singapore, and some of the local fashion magazines, which also helped.

Kara Goldin 10:58
Interesting. So they were sort of kind of your micro influencers, maybe in some way. Right? Were they ready to do that? Right now? I love it. I love it. Where do you get inspiration from for, you know, any of your products.

Holly Tupper 11:14
I think mostly I think from nature, you know, particularly with perfume, it’s the olfactory experience for me is pretty intense. And I really do take inspiration from get smells that I smell along the way of life. And, you know, and sometimes if it’s particularly compelling fragrance, I’ll really sort of sit with that. I mean, that’s how I, for example, designed one of my perfumes, which is called chum Pakka. champaca is actually a flowering tree that grows wild in the forests or jungles of Southeast Asia. And I had never heard of it. And when living in Singapore, I used to take our dogs jogging in an old abandoned cemetery. And every once in a while I would, you know, smell this incredible fragrance. And I’d stop and I’d try and pierce through the foliage to see where it was coming from. And I could never find a blossom. And time went by and I happen to be in Bali, working on a sampling production for some fashion. And after I’d finished I went to the local produce market and in front of the produce market were a women sitting in front of large baskets filled with, you know, flowers and palm fronds so that people would make their own, like, offerings for their home spirit temples. And it was a basket of the rose petals and a basket of the Lang Lang and Jasmine and so forth. And then there was that smell that smell from Singapore from the you know, the abandoned cemetery. And I said to the, you know, you know, up any book, or any champaca, whoa, terima, kasih, banyak, Kenya, airways, I get back to Singapore, go to local nursery and ask the nursery. Do you have any champaca in the crisis? Oh, yeah, I’ve got tons this is there over there. And it’s like, oh, geez, I had to call over here to Bali to find this. So I bought a tree and I brought it home. And when it would bloom, I would just sort of sit in front of it and absorb the experience of the fragrance. And from that I started to compose a perfume. And this perfume isn’t made of just one ingredient a perfume is made of hundreds of ingredients. And it’s a balance of those ingredients to you know, achieve the the final kind of artistic expression of my personal experience with that, you know, inspiration or whatever. So, but I would say that a lot of of my inspiration, particularly for skincare and perfume has come from nature itself,

Kara Goldin 13:36
nature and travels to places Yeah. It’s so, so interesting. And which is what’s the name of that one in particular that fragrance, it’s called Cempaka. It is called Shem Pakka. Wow, that’s that’s such a great story. customer education isn’t just nice to have for growing businesses, it’s essential. There are only so many hours in the day for you and your team to personally onboard and address the needs of your growing number of customers. That’s why you need Thinkific plus Thinkific Plus provides businesses like yours with a powerful, easy to use educational platform to keep your vendors partners and customers informed, engaged and coming back with Thinkific. Plus, you can create memorable interactive content with live sessions, communities, assignments, engagement surveys and more. You can sell individual courses directly to customers or bundle them for large organizations generate monthly recurring revenue through membership programs and course subscriptions. Plus, you can transform leads into brand advocates by offering high value education at every stage of the customer journey helping your business to grow to sign up have now for one incredible offer, our listeners get one free month of Thinkific. Plus when you visit the special URL thinkific.com/kara Get your free month today at THINKIF I see.com/ka are a thinkific.com/kara Your fragrances are also all natural and clean fragrances. So, you know average consumer who is not in this industry or I should also say, business person who’s not in this industry. What does that mean in the fragrance? And I guess beauty industry overall,

Holly Tupper 15:46
you know, here in the States? It’s, it’s a good question, because we don’t really have the same level of regulation that, for example, that exists in the European Union. So in England, you know, you can’t just sort of call something organic, it has to be certified as organic. And here we can, you know, I can say that my life is organic, and like, Yeah, great. But so the way that I like to describe it, I think is just to say that my fragrances are made from natural botanical ingredients. So instead of synthetic substitutions for those odors that are created in a chemistry lab using a petroleum molecules based molecule in order to recreate the smell of mine, actually our Bulgarian rose or jasmine sunbug, from Tamil Nadu and in India, and those have botanical ingredients, whether they’re flowers, or stems, or leaves or roots, or the SAP or resonance that come out of trees, they are distilled and taken from a physical shape into a liquid form. And those are the ingredients that I’m using for fragrance. And they are they’re much more complex because they’re whole odors, as opposed to what happens when a lab tries to make an odor synthetically, when and they’re beautiful. And there are many, many beautiful smells that you know get made at these fragrance houses, they really are chemistry and you know not much fragrance but is that it’s synonymous with taking vodka and turning it into a Pinot Noir the head. And whereas I’m just starting with the Pinot Noir grapes. So that’s sort of the best way to describe it, I think in a way that sort of makes sense. Because there is a lot of confusion particularly in fragrance and in cosmetics and impurity. Because the marketing language has become so obtuse and, and on all sides. So people that are trying to claim, you know, being green or sustainable, or organic or natural, or, you know, real versus fake or whatever, they they use a lot of kind of obtuse language to describe things. And they’re not very clear. And I try and be as clear as possible so that people understand I want people to understand why things smell the way they do and why they work the way they do because of what they’re made with and what they really are made with instead of alluding to them being made with something,

Kara Goldin 18:09
it totally makes sense. So what is the most difficult fragrance that you’ve created?

Holly Tupper 18:16
Well, there’s several, I think, probably, because the fragrances I have eight fragrances in my collection right now. And as a perfumer, when I first started, I was performing as artists using natural ingredients. And I wasn’t really paying too much attention to it regulations. And so we don’t really have regulations to the states. But in the European Union, we have the EU and then we have a body that’s known as air fryer, and they advise the European Union regulators about potential allergens for both beauty and fragrance. And I thought, you know, oh, these people to be stupid, you know, whatever. And I was being the artist. And I thought now actually, I am going to make perfu using natural ingredients. But that is going to be compliant with EU and IPRO regulations, because that’s actually more of a creative challenge. Because they have, of course, outright banned things that are hazardous. But beyond that they have a huge list of items that are suggested use in certain percentages, because they potentially could be allergenic for some people in certain concentrations or her. So people tend to, in my situation, really become very strict about how they interpret that and they interpret it to the strict sense. So if it’s potentially allergen, we don’t use it at all period. And if it’s, you know, you’re only allowed to use it in 4% of your solution. You might use it only to 2% or 1% or not at all. So the difficulty with making fragrances then has been to reformulate when the EU has changed some of their regulations because they’re constantly looking at what they consider to be potentially allergenic. So aside from many animal products, for example, in fragrance we used to use for major animal byproducts and progress from whale castoreum from Beaver civet, from civet cats and musk from muskdeer bowl course we don’t do that anymore. Amberger is a little bit because the ambergris comes up might have been washed up to shore from something that happened 200 years earlier. So it’s not that you’re not harvesting an animal to retrieved the, the perfumery ingredient.

Kara Goldin 20:31
So interesting. And you also came out with a skincare line, is that your newest?

Holly Tupper 20:38
It is, um, I did this is sort of a COVID thing. You know, when the really early days of lockdown, I looked under my sink epic I now because I have to stay home, I’m going to deal with all this icky stuff. Yeah. So I just like them, I think as I do, you know, I’m not a huge buyer of cosmetic materials and stuff like that. But what is all this nonsense that I had. And I had always wanted to create a capsule skin collection, where the, the best quality ingredients that are the most efficacious are combined in products that are you know, pleasant to use and where you’re not having to buy the vitamin C serum and then the under eye wrinkle cream, and then the neck firming thingy and single ingredient or single efficacy kind of products. Because it’s not necessary to do that I think we over consume, and which means we waste a lot of stuff and nerve pollution. And I thought, you know, really what I’m interested in is creating really gorgeous product that is multiple ingredient multifunctional, but you know, just reduce the amount of stuff or hair and we have a cultist arts and we have our own chemist and my chemist and I started to compose using some of the same kind of approach to natural materials is we do with the skincare. So it is the newest one, we had basically created this one product, but comes in three different textures. So we have for people who prefer an oil and oil, a moisturizer, texture and a cream texture. But we’ve chosen to put all three of the products in the same container to of course, reduce waste. So the Korean for example, is maybe the same texture as type of cream that one would find typically pot, but we have elected to put it in the same last vessel as the other two products so that we are not creating multiple packaging, you know, protocols as well. But we’re still practicing.

Kara Goldin 22:47
So very different than the other two categories that you’ve taken on under your brand. But I mean, incredible, and you use a lot of nuts in it, is that what you were?

Holly Tupper 22:58
Yeah, you’re on the tentacle ingredie ingredients that have great deal of efficacious activity for improving blend skin’s ability to retain moisture. So they their bio mimicry kind of ingredients. And they are from, you know, nuts and seeds as well as you know, as other fruits, but we also are using, you know, seek help and should talk to mushroom extracts as well because they are also very proven to be very efficacious in terms of reducing fine lines and you know, plumping the skin and helping to retain moisture.

Kara Goldin 23:34
That’s It’s amazing. It’s such a nice product, so it a lot. And

Holly Tupper 23:39
everything sort of nut ingredient is actually prickly pear cactus, so it’s not really a nut nut. It’s actually the Cactus Pear.

Kara Goldin 23:48
So interesting. Like not what you would think would be a very moisturizing

Holly Tupper 23:55
it. It’s gorgeous. It ends with it, the skin, the Handfield to it as well. It’s super fabulous. So it’s an it’s an oil that is very moisturizing without being super greasy feeling Yeah, you know,

Kara Goldin 24:11
or Tiki or anything. Yeah, no, it’s it’s very, very nice. So, so you started your company 30 years ago, and, but I feel like you’ve continued to create and expand and learn, you know, you’re launching a skincare line, right? Like you’re you’re continuing to innovate, which is incredible. And frankly, it’s what most entrepreneurs should be doing right. They get bored when they’re not doing it. And, and, but when do you know that a business is successful? You know, or not successful? I mean, that’s, I think that’s sort of the entrepreneurs dilemma.

Holly Tupper 24:54
Yeah, you know, we bang our heads against the wall over and over and so we think we you know, we’d find a Part of the market that where there is a need or you know that where there’s a gap. And we think we have a brilliant idea for what, how to fill that gap. And I think sometimes we think some of our ideas are really fabulous, isn’t it? I don’t know. It is a very difficult question to answer, and I am not pugnacious, but I am definitely I’ve learned over the years to really push and to try harder when people say no, and I know that it’s not really a hard No, because there are possibilities, I’ll, I’ll try and find another route. And I think part of that has come from one working in the brokerage business, all those guys and having to kind of, you know, shoulder pad my way through the whole experience, to living outside the United States and working always for years and years and years and cultures, which were not my own. And having to be sensitive to how to describe what it was that I was trying to do in a language that first of all wasn’t shared, my human being anything other than a stick drawing, the hen re how to kind of encourage people to come on board with helping me to make the thing that I was interested in trying to make, even if it wasn’t something that they typically made. So it might have been a skill set that they had, they might have been something that I wanted to do with beading, for example. And it might have been that they knew how to do beading. But the format in which I wanted to do the beating was totally anathema. So how did you work through those problems, but when it comes to product in the market, and as a business owner, it’s it’s hard to you know, you make a baby and you know, want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, because just maybe other people will realize that your baby is really gorgeous. Yeah,

Kara Goldin 26:46
absolutely. Right.

Holly Tupper 26:47
You have to say, I’ve invested so much in this and it’s not going anywhere. And then it becomes dollars and cents decision, you say? Would I be better off spinning this money developing something else? You know, and have I, you know, what, where do I have to pull the plug? Because yes, we do make mistakes, I make designs, sometimes that artist, they don’t pass the smell test even for me.

Kara Goldin 27:11
And then you just put them to the side and and or bring them back at another point I were out on? Yeah, no, I mean, you can definitely see that I’d love your marketing. By the way. It’s so beautiful. I mean, when you go to your website, it’s just it really speaks to, I think, what the brand is and who you are, and as well. So how, how important do you think marketing is in terms of getting people to really fall in love with your brand?

Holly Tupper 27:41
It’s completely vital. You know, you might be the cleverest person in the world and created the most amazing thing. But unless you can describe it, and share it with people, how will they now or how you can build a website that’s gorgeous. And if nobody knows about who’s gonna go to it and shop on it, you know, when I first moved to the United States, I ran into like old friends from school days, or whatever. And they say, so what are you doing these days, Holly? And and I said, Well, I’m making perfume. And they said, Well, that’s lovely. Tell me about it. So it’s really nice. It’s all natural. Yeah, I really, like what I was doing, we had been such a personal expression of my own artistry that I hadn’t yet developed a language to share it with people. And so it was a total turnoff to the people who were listening, or who had asked me the question. And so marketing is 100% vital, you have to have something that’s worthy of marketing. So these days, there are a lot of companies that create a marketing story. And then they create the product or her. And in my case, I’ve always created the product. And then I have to create the story around the product, or I have to create the language around the product to describe the product to people in a way that they can relate to it, and they can share it and they can enjoy it. And but it is very, very important to tell the story of what it is that you’re trying to share in a language that people can understand. That doesn’t mean you dumb it down, it means that you make it as elevated as possible, but that you don’t exclude people from it. So like choosing a name for a company that’s proto indo European word, that was an example of min or stretch. But you know, using a name still a stretch that some people have a hard time pronouncing. Maybe it wasn’t the best fit, but, but it does speak exactly to the type of business that we have. So marking is important.

Kara Goldin 29:32
No, I think that name is I think it’s actually quite memorable. So I many years ago, I came up with the name hint, I didn’t use a naming agency and I think it for me, it was a it’s, you know, naming is so critical. And you have to be able to remember it and and it’s it’s one where I think once you’re told it, it sort of rolls off your tongue a little bit not all too You word names? Kind of do. But I think it’s, it’s awesome. So really, really nice. So best piece of advice that you’ve gotten as you’ve weathered your journey grown your company, however you want to view it along the way. I mean, what what is it that, that you think back on? And you think, yeah, that this is, that was a big piece of advice me, I feel like so often advice is something that maybe you don’t even really realize it until later on in the journey, when you need to really recognize that piece of advice that it was like, oh, gosh, that was so true.

Holly Tupper 30:43
Yeah, there are so many little pearls. A piece of advice, a recent piece of advice, I think, that I think it’s been very helpful is one of those sorts of issues that we had is that we sell our products in various environments, department stores, to, to small boutiques to ecommerce. And we have to occasionally hire our own salespeople to work in the department store environment, whether it’s a Bergdorf Goodman, or Neiman Marcus or whatever, and training those people in order to be able to sell our product because they’ve become the face of the business essentially. And piece of advice from my husband was to really, you know, forget to elevator pitch, create an acronym, something that’s like, four word, three words to four words long that your salesperson, if they are just completely, like, at a blank, what are the three words that come to their, their mind immediately gap, you know, terroir, affiliate provenance, you know, or whatever your acronym is that, that immediately reminds them of the the pitch, the story, the marketing that they need to come up with. And, you know, by simplifying it to an acronym, it really can be very useful. And then also, the exercise to create the acronym is a great exercise internally in the company, because we have to really think about how we talk about our products.

Kara Goldin 32:16
Yeah, is somebody along those lines, somebody once said to me that, you know, saying the same thing about your brand over and over and over again, it may seem like it’s getting old to you, but as you can, if it becomes something that your consumer starts to talk about it, then you know that you’ve done your job. Right? That the if because they will go tell their friends about why they like Cultus our room as well. Right that and they’ll talk about those specific words to describe it. So I totally agree. And I think it’s, it’s great advice, for sure. So Well, thank you so much for all of your time and this interview. And we’ll have all the information about cult stardom in the show notes. And obviously you can buy it on the website. Also, you mentioned Bergdorf, Goodman, Neiman Marcus and some other very beautiful stores as well. But definitely check out the website because you have really everything there and it’s just really, really beautiful. So thank you again, hallway have so much fun. Yeah, super fun. Have a great rest of the week.

Holly Tupper 33:36
Thank you, you too.

Kara Goldin 33:38
Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would, please give us a review. And feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen. Or pick up a copy of my book on daunted which I share my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And thanks everyone for listening. Have a great rest of the week, and 2023 and goodbye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time you’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight? Send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening