For Aishetu Fatima Dozie a red lip is more than a fashion statement — it’s war paint.
Before she successfully launched her brand, Bossy Cosmetics, she spent twenty years in finance as an investment banker. She negotiated million-dollar deals, traveled to meet clients around the world and worked for Wall Street juggernauts like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
Most of her day would be spent in male-dominated spaces where she rarely saw anyone who looked like her. As a self-proclaimed “lipstick junkie,” Aishetu would apply a fresh layer of lipstick as a confidence booster before every make-or-break meeting. It was her version of authenticity; it was her brand.
“Beauty has always been a very instrumental part of my journey. Your looks have a lot to do with your own confidence and how you show up in the world,” says Aishetu.
Her experience in finance and on Wall Street was a key source of inspiration for Bossy Cosmetics. She wanted to make it easier for other women to feel the confidence that she felt when she rocked her favorite lipstick. She wanted to create a way for women to feel “bossy.”
“You shouldn’t have to be an investment banker, or wealthy, or someone of privilege to identify as ambitious,” she says. “To be a boss, you just need to strive to be better each day.”
This desire to help women feel more powerful, along with feelings of burnout in her finance career, caused her to take a one-year sabbatical to reassess what she wanted from life.
Reclaiming “bossy” and redefining success
Aishetu is now the founder and CEO of Bossy Cosmetics, a 3-year-old brand with the mission of empowering women to look, feel, and do good. On her ecommerce site, she offers more than 40 products, including lipsticks, glosses and eye shadow palettes. The products have names like Focused, Fierce, and Unapologetic—all traits the founder wants to inspire in her customers.
She chose to name her brand Bossy because it’s a term that’s often directed at women in a pejorative way—a label bestowed on women with an opinion or strong point of view.
“I wanted to reclaim a word that’s used to silence assertive women,” says Aishetu. “Our goal is to excite, ignite, and empower working women, and we do that through cosmetics.”
Although she sells her brand on Amazon.com, Bossybeauty.com has always been the headquarters of Aishetu’s brand. It’s the home base she wants shoppers to land on and discover more about her founder journey. She found elements of her ecommerce site limiting, though; for instance, shipping would cost $5.00 and then take up to four days. For beauty purchases, which can be impulse buys, having such a long wait wasn’t the shopper experience Aishetu wanted.
Because Buy with Prime offers Prime shopping benefits, like fast, free delivery, on sites beyond Amazon.com, she decided to go all in with Buy with Prime. She added it as a checkout option on her ecommerce site, and placed a large Buy with Prime banner on her home page. She also began teaching her loyal social media followers about the shopping benefits of Buy with Prime.
“It’s more about my love for my customer, and how I give her as many options as possible so she feels like Bossy Cosmetics really cares about her,” explains Aishetu.
In keeping with the theme of giving her customers more options—and also to help expand the business—she sells across multiple sales channels. In addition to her website, Aishetu sells in 300 JCPenney stores across the US to capture the demographic that likes to “try before they buy.” And on Amazon.com she created a Store for her brand and a dedicated Buy with Prime page.
“When you sell products, you’re building an omnichannel presence. You want to meet the customer where he or she lives and do what’s most convenient for them,” says Aishetu. “So, whether on Amazon, off Amazon, in store, for us, it’s all about convenience.”
Leaning into shopper expectations
Shopper expectations are ever-evolving, and since the pandemic, the standards for speedy delivery have gotten higher. According to the 2022 State of Shipping Report, 62% of shoppers expect their item to arrive in under three business days, and 56% of abandoned carts were due to delivery times deemed to too long by shoppers.
The past several years have completely changed the landscape of ecommerce. Consumers want their orders fast, and ecommerce brands that can’t keep up with thesedemands lose sales to brands that can. For beauty shoppers, Aishetu knows that they tend to buy impulsively.
“When women come to our site, they’re ready to purchase and they want it now—it’s highly emotional,” she says. “You won’t buy a lipstick 30 days out. You want your product as quickly as possible. Buy with Prime means they get it quicker than we could ever deliver.”
When a shopper checks out using Buy with Prime, they know that their Hustle liquid lipstick or Style Meets Substance eyeshadow palette will be shipped in as fast as one day. That Prime delivery promise alleviates the hesitation that shoppers might have when deciding to make a purchase.
“We’re a small brand, so we can’t afford to deliver in 1-2 days. We won’t do it effectively anyway,” says Aishetu. “So being able to welcome customers to our site, keep them there, and give them the exciting 1-2 delivery was something we couldn’t pass up.”
Maintaining the customer relationships that make loyalty possible
Aishetu’s cosmetics brand is driven by meaningful customer relationships, and she focuses on building a community around her brand.
The Bossy website features a six-minute YouTube video where she shares her journey of battling imposter syndrome and redefining the meaning of success. Aishetu frequently uses Instagram Live to chat with Bossy’s nearly 20,000 followers as she does her morning beauty routine. Being close to customers and having a direct line to them is crucial to Aishetu.
A challenge Aishetu faced while selling on Amazon was not being able to use order information that could her build better customer relationships.
Offering Buy with Prime on her site not only allows her to delight Bossy’s customers with fast, free delivery, and saves her the headache of having to worry about fulfillment logistics, but it also gives her the ability to receive shopper order information, including email addresses, which she can use to build customer relationships and provide merchant support.
“What Buy with Prime allows us to do is attract that customer, retain them by keeping the customer data, and allow them to get the Prime delivery promise,” says Aishetu. “We have all sorts of activations as a brand that we do on our own to retain customers, such as sending digital and physical cards. By having the customer data, Buy with Prime helps us retain a whole new set of customers.”
Direct relationships, fast shipping, and high visibility has helped Aishetu’s company further stand out in a crowded beauty market. Whether it’s online or offline, on Amazon or an ecommerce site, the Bossy brand will be there for its shoppers.
For Aishetu, Buy with Prime is a way for her to elevate her brand, and help more women embrace the boss that they are.
“Women have a voice and our voices matter. Either we get a seat at the table, or we’ll build our own.”
Check out Bossy Cosmetics’ Buy with Prime collection page for the latest beauty looks! And read other Black History Month merchant spotlights featuring Sunday Morning Coffee Company and Lamar Denon.