669: They Built a Luxury Beauty Brand in Year One — With a Team of Two | Brunel

About this episode

Jasmine Tookes and Sabrina Carstensen discuss how they built the luxury body care brand Brunel with a small team and no external funding.

A Victoria's Secret Angel and a Goldman Sachs investor built one of the most talked-about luxury body care launches in recent memory without raising a cent or paying a single influencer. Jasmine Tookes spent two decades on the world's biggest runways turning down incubator deal after incubator deal, waiting to build something real. When she finally met Sabrina Carstensen—who spent years evaluating consumer brands at Goldman—they launched Brunel bootstrapped, profitable, and with a two-person team that pushed their chemists harder than any brand they'd ever worked with. In this interview, the co-founders of Brunel break down how they built a luxury body care brand from scratch on a lean budget, why organic community came before paid ads, and what it actually takes to get suppliers and manufacturers to take a self-funded brand seriously. What you'll learn in this interview: • Why Jasmine turned down 15 years of incubator deals before building her own brand • How they kept capital in reserve for collection two before collection one ever sold • Why word of mouth and organic TikTok drove their entire early growth—no paid influencers • Why the three-oil bundle outsold every individual…

People in this episode

Host: Nathan Chan

Guests: Jasmine Tookes, Sabrina Carstensen

Topics covered

• luxury beauty brand
• bootstrapping
• organic growth
• body care
• entrepreneurship

Keywords

• luxury body care
• bootstrapped brand
• organic marketing
• entrepreneurial journey
• consumer brands

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Brunel, Goldman Sachs, Victoria's Secret

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