How Are we Rethinking B2B in Beauty Through Marketplace and Experience with Anthony Saniger #243

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SAS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how we're rethinking the B2B industry in beauty and aesthetics through marketplace and experience. Today we have our guest Anthony Saniger joining us. Anthony is a board member Beauty Rep, uh, which is a consumer-focused brand. He's also a consumer-focused brand builder with over 19 years of experience across beauty, fashion, as well as the wellness industry. He brings a strong blend of strategic, strategic vision and creative execution, helping brands grow by building meaningful connections with their audience and positioning themselves effectively in competitive markets. Anthony actively invests in and advises brands across CPG, beauty, and hospitality. Using his entrepreneurial perspective to drive growth, innovation, and long-term brand value. So welcome, Anthony. Super excited to have you on the show today. Thanks. Yeah, excited to be here. So curious to hear your story, right? You've spent, you know, many, many years building, advising consumer brands in the wellness space, aesthetic space. What are the patterns you've seen in the space, in the market that led you today to focus on this specific product, which is Beauty Rep in the, in the aesthetic industry? Yeah, I mean, like you said, I started my career really focused on consumer. I was a brand strategist 19 years ago before tech was where it is today, obviously. And now with AI and kind of all the advancements that we have today, 19 years ago, people were building systems that took, you know, 4 years to build and lots of time. But back then, I started my career as a brand strategist and really understanding consumer in a deep way. And I say that in a broad piece is people think that at least my philosophy, that B2B exists here and B2C or direct-to-consumer exists over here. But ultimately, a B2B customer is a consumer of something. And so I like to take kind of my consumer angle to this. If you look at a product that you're building in B2B and it, let's say it has a shopping component to it or an e-com component to it, but you try to make it look different because you feel it's B2B. Ultimately, those people that are buying it, yes, they're a B2B customer, but they shop on Amazon, they shop on target.com. And so at the end of the day, their patterns are very similar to a D2C customer. So, uh, I like to put it into this angle. And so when I started working on Beauty Rep, I actually met, uh, one of the co-founders, uh, Carrie Concannon. I met her, uh, because she was working for two clinical skin brands and those skincare brands. She came from a deep B2B knowledge of the sales process. She started as a sales rep. Europe, territory manager. She was growing up in that area and she didn't really know D2C, but as she became more senior, she started overseeing the D2C channel because they said, okay, well, we have this B2B channel. We now want to launch D2C and go direct to consumer. We need to launch it. And we got connected because a friend of hers said, you should talk to Anthony. So I started building her D2C channel. And then she goes, wow, I wish you could do what you're doing on D2C in B2B where they're faxing orders to me. And they are text messaging me with all of their details. And I said, well, let's sit down and talk about it. And then next thing I know, one year later, BeautyRep is here. So for me, that's always been the unique perspective, is taking a consumer at the end of the day and applying to the B2B channel. Love it. So what did you see as kind of the biggest inefficiencies? You were in the B2C space. You saw how the businesses run, how they were operating. For example, like they were faxing in orders. Texting in order to— what are some of the inefficiencies you see, you saw in that market and how did some of those insights shape, you know, Beauty Rep as it is today? So Beauty Rep exists to connect practices which are med spas, derms, plastics, longevity clinics with brands. So brands like Zeo Skin Health or Obagi Medical. Some of these have consumer retail products, but they also have backbar professional products and including things like devices like lasers, Hydrofacial machines. And then they also have injectables. So Botox, filler, and this kind of stuff. And so what happens is these today, these brands have a sales rep and those sales reps have practices that they're managing in a territory. And it's pretty old school, kind of like old school pharma pharmaceutical sales. And they go door to door and sell in these products into these practices and they call them and reach out to them on Instagram. And then on behind them, they have an education team because these products are professional-grade products. There is an education level of like how to inject a patient or how to use a chemical peel on a patient. So they need education and training, these practices. Right. And then they also need marketing collateral. How are they marketing to their patients these products? So they have these two pillars that sit behind them, and usually these are siloed departments. So there's marketing, sales, and education. They don't quite talk to each other in most of these organizations. They operate in their silo. And what I notice is one brand would have a Dropbox with their education material. Another one has a learning management system., and then they have maybe 5 other pieces of tech that are all built for other things. And then you have the sales team, which has the CRM, and they're using something like a Salesforce made for tech companies to sell tech products, not made for aesthetic brands and beauty brands. Then you have, um, and, and none of the sales reps understand Salesforce or how to use it, and it's too complex for their needs, so they don't use it, they don't adopt. And then you have the marketing side, which has a Google Drive folder with a bunch of marketing assets, which are called all kinds of different things and all over the place. And so this is what really unlocked for me was if we can combine that into one seamless place where they can get it and they can access these documents easily, then we can actually create a user experience where they're doing that. And by the way, they're doing that across on average about 16 different brands for their practice. So they've got 16 different portals to log into for each brand. They've got 16 different LMSs to get learnings from, 16 different ordering platforms, 16 different ways to contact your rep. And so it becomes very complicated, right? So you see, they're kind of managing, you know, their vendors, so to say, right? So they have 16 different vendors and they each have their own system, their own process and their way of doing things. So what you're doing is you're bringing this all together in one place. Having a simple infrastructure so that they can log in and they can manage it all in one place. So why do you think now is a good time to actually build it? Like, why wasn't this a thing before and why was it important? Yeah, I mean, there is quite a bit of tenure bias in this industry. One of the things I've learned from Kerry, who was, you know, boots on the ground doing this, is that there's kind of a 'this is the way things have always been done' mentality in this industry. And there's kind of the old guard that kind of runs a lot of the brands in these territories. And, and people are scared. This is, you know, sales reps make money off of commission. Uh, anything that disrupts that process or that flow. Okay. Wow. Are you going to take my commission from me? How is that working? But there's an inflection point right now. You have the adoption of AI by big companies. Companies are trying to figure out how to put more AI in, reduce some of the admin burden. You have a squeeze, margin pressures, global macroeconomic climate pressures as well. So for example, average sales rep is managing a territory of about a million, million bucks worth of sales. And the commission structure between that and comp and everything, you're talking 30 to 40% of that territory is just going to their cost and they're being squeezed with time. You know, they're only able to service their top tier practices. Because those are the ones bringing in the most money for them. But the bottom-tier practices get no service, so they can't grow to be big practices. So there's kind of this inflection point where macroeconomic pressure, uh, brands making reductions, AI disrupting technology workflows, um, disjointed products and systems, lots of investments for companies that, you know, on the brand side, these are beauty brands. They want to invest their dollars in research and innovation and building new products that are skincare products or new injectables, not tech products. So, and they're not tech people. They don't understand how to make life easier using tech. And so now that's why I think now is the time to kind of disrupt this a bit. Nice. How do you kind of see, you have these two sides of this marketplace, right? You have the reps, then you have these brands. How are you able to manage both their needs and incentives and making sure it's aligned? Yeah, it works for both. What I think we've really discovered is that brands want the relationship with the practices. They don't want to lose that to tech, but refocusing what a relationship means. So for me, in that sales process, a relationship and what we really believe in at Beauty Rep is that that relationship is about building and growing that account in a natural way. Focusing on how do we educate you better so you can teach your clients the right way to use the products? How do we make sure you know about innovation that's coming up? You know, there's new peptides being released and new products coming out. And how do we make sure that you as a practice have the most education, the most training on how to use that product, the most success with your clients? Right. So as a practice, you need to see a client, them to have a good result with whatever treatment they have and come back again to you. Right. That's how you're going to make your money. So if the, if the sales rep can spend more of their time training them on how to do an event inside their practice and getting an event going and bringing their clients into their, their patients in there, doing treatments on them, using the product, having a good experience, that is going to result in more revenue growth long term. Right now, a practice or a sales rep is focused on the practice saying, hey, I haven't received my shipment yet. Where's my tracking number? Can you text it to me? And that is a burden on the sales rep, which limits the time of really truly adding value to the practice. So letting them refocus their effort there and not on the administrative burden of, hey, I can't find my order, my package got lost in the mail, I received this package and it's damaged, I need to place a reorder for something I've placed an order for 50 times, you know, what promotions do you have currently going on? These things are can be done by anything, you know? Yeah. So how would you describe kind of like the ideal or modern, the B2B product experience? What does it actually look like that leads to actually more revenue growth without adding more complexity into their workflow and the process that they're already managing? Yeah, I mean, I think now if you're thinking about a product, it's obviously a very exciting time for anyone building products because you can, you know, vibe code on the weekend and maybe spin up something. But you have to get into the psychology of what is the user and how are they acting today? And you have to seamlessly integrate into that process. So as I was saying, they need to be able to text and place a reorder. So right now we are launching the ability for them to text to us what they want and not have to log into our platform and go to a product page and place that order in a more normal way. We have to build in conversational shopping because they are chatting with ChatGPT. On the side, right? Mm-hmm. So before you could create a product and that was the way that everyone has to do it, and now you have to kind of be everywhere. I believe you have to be a conversational shopping ability. You have to have the ability for them to text. You have to have the ability for someone to log into the platform the old school way, go to the PDP and add it to cart. And you have to do all of that quickly.. And so for me, I think that's like the key piece is don't disrupt. You're not trying to reinvent how they work. You're just trying to make it faster and smoother. So you're trying to, you know, they're already kind of using— this is the behavior they're already experiencing in their day to day and how they run their business. So you're just trying to make it a little more, I guess, more easy for them to run their day to day. And then, you know, kind of looking ahead in the future, How are you seeing like where most companies still underestimating on how to build like a scalable B2B platform and marketplace like this if they're thinking to apply this to, you know, different markets or different industries? Yeah, I think, you know, again, the key here, I think at least why I think we're winning in the aesthetic space is we focused on an industry that, you know, used to, you would not focus on a niche industry. You would say, okay, this is for all beauty companies. Well, the problem is that the product— let's use Salesforce, for example, right? Salesforce, B2B company, massive, huge company, big, big, big infrastructure, team, money behind it, amazing product. But when you get to that scale, the problem becomes I can't be specialized for any industry, right? And because of the speed at which now you can launch products focusing on a specialized industry and doing something perfectly that replicates their way of working, that I think is how you win in the future. And I think today you have these big mammoth platforms and then you have kind of scrappy platforms that aren't really good. But in the future there will be a lot of platforms like a CRM for like Salesforce is not great for the aesthetics world. It doesn't work. They don't think like the, the way the data needs to be organized for the aesthetic space. Works really good if you're, you know, a different industry because it was built for that. And they've been focused on that consumer. Now they have niche parts, but they're a big company. They can't really modify. So I think the future of B2B is many, many, many different products. It's not like one Notion where, you know, Notion is the one for everyone. It's very specialized. This is one for marketing agencies. This is one for marketing agencies that focus on branding. This is one for, um, and I think those will win. And maybe there's a bigger top co that holds these entities, fine. But I think what wins are very specialized products because that's how you understand the behavior of that audience deeply. So, you know, essentially we're getting a lot more customized to very specific niche industries and in the market, you know, so, you know, in this case, you already had some kind of insights because of your partner. Who understood where the inefficiencies were. So if somebody is looking, you know, right now, you know, the AI industry is obviously growing. Curious to know how you look at it. Somebody is looking to build something similar. They want to focus in on one specific niche industry. How do they get in and understand what their process is and maybe find and uncover some of these inefficiencies? This is the flip side to the coin that I just said, which is you're going to see a lot of products out there because of the ability to spin them up quickly., but it's going to be really hard to make them work really well in the industry if you don't have experts doing it. So I understood the technical side, but I didn't understand B2B sales in skincare. So Carrie obviously brings that knowledge and we have, you know, 20+ years of knowledge there. Um, there's another co-founder, Olivia Schmid, who, uh, is former Amazon. She went to London Business School. She's also an attorney. She went to Columbia for law school. So lots of kind of good cred there that helps. She's the COO and she also worked at Galderma and Allergan, two of the largest leaders in the injectables category for us, which is another category that Carrie didn't have as much experience in. And we needed that knowledge of the injectable space because it operates slightly differently than skincare because it's medically regulated and there's a lot of like legal stuff that kind of goes into that, that we have to build into the platform. So another reason why injectables companies can't just be on any B2B SaaS platform. Selling Botox, you know, so we needed that expertise in-house. So I think anyone looking to build it, bring in, surround yourself with a team who understands that industry really deep. And then you bring, you know, if you bring the technical knowledge or you're coming at it from the other side, you're the person who knows that industry really good, find a good technical. I don't think you can do it solo. I think you have to do it with a team of people who understand the industry and then also understand the tech capabilities. So you have to have all of that, and that's rare to find in one person. Absolutely. Yeah. And also can understand, you know, human behavior, understand the industry, and then, you know, really pay attention to those inefficiencies. Anthony, what are you most excited about for the rest of kind of the rest of the year in 2026, specifically in aesthetic or maybe the longevity industry specifically? Or what are some areas you see that there's this big potential and you're really excited to see where it goes? Yeah, I mean, the volume of med spas that are launching, at least in our category, that are launching in the US. It's funny because Olivia, our CEO, she has a slide in the deck that says there are more med spas in the US than McDonald's, which is kind of like a wow moment. And you kind of realize the scale at which that is. So I'm excited there. I think also there's going to be a lot more innovation in the category. People care. People are living longer, so they show visible signs of aging faster. People care about what they're looking like for periods of time. And there's also a lot of advancement in technology that people are doing. People talking about mitochondria health and the impact of skin there and the impact of longevity peptides. There's conversations going that I think makes the space super innovative in the category of product, but not in tech. And so I think that marriage is what excites me, is like, if you can have innovative products with innovative tech, then it's like, wow, it's super powerful. Yeah, I can see that. Absolutely. Love it. This has been, this has been great. Um, ready to shift, uh, we're gonna shift gears and go into the rapid fire questions if you're good with that. Ready for that? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anthony, what's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into a flow state? Well, in 2012, I ran the New York City Marathon and I was a big runner for many years. I hurt myself and then I fell out of it for a while, but recently I've been back running shorter distances, not marathons because I'm in my 40s now and not in my 20s. But running for me, there's a kind of mental zone that I can get into where I can be super creative. Absolutely. Anthony, what's one piece of advice that you wish you had known, and if you could go back, you would tell your, say, 25-year-old self? Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you in other areas. When I was young in my career, I was good at a lot of things, not great at anything. As I've gotten older, I've realized what I'm really great at, and I've started focusing my time on what I'm great at and anything that I'm good at, putting that to someone else who is great because they're going to be able to get me to the next phase a lot faster. And I think before, I thought I was so curious that I thought I needed to be an expert everywhere, and you just can't do it. You burn yourself out, get too tired. So focus on what you're really, really good at, and then surround yourself with people who are better than you at other areas. Love it. Absolutely. What are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow Beauty Rep? Meaning, you know, what keeps you up at night these days? I think it's right now, how are we showing up in all the ways that practices are currently interacting with brands? So that for me is the current challenge that we're working on solving and we're launching products. Like literally we had one product launch yesterday. I have another one that I'm just launching today. Within the platform. And I think if we can crack those nuts, because again, people don't want to change behavior fast, slowly they will change behavior. But if I'm used to text messaging my order, I want to text message my order. I'm not going to change that overnight. So the figuring out all the nuances of the ways that people interact today and solving those, that's how we're going to be successful. So we have to stay on top of all the different ways that all of these med spas interact today with their sales reps. And it's very different across every brand. So that keeps me constantly discovering every, like, you know, car stock, for example, like sales reps have car stock, they can give free products to practices. It's not trackable. It's in the back of their car, literally started because they would have a trunk of free products, they would open up and give a bag to the clinic. How do I replicate that on a platform? I don't know. It's something we're solving now. I know, request free sample. There you go. Just a button. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but yeah, it's tricky for sure. Yeah. Anthony, who or what are some of the best 3 resources? These can be, you know, books, mentors, or people you follow in the space who you'd say have been most instrumental to your success over these last few years. I mean, it's probably going to sound super cheesy, but for me, I think like Brené Brown on the personal side, it's, it's like probably unexpected. I think on the tech side, you can get really hammered on a bunch of stuff out there. I mean, if you just get on X or Twitter and you start scrolling and you see stuff, you're just going to get bombarded with a lot of different podcasts, news, etc. And I find that a little hard to navigate. But on the personal side, you have to have a good personal foundation. I have a kid now, family, these type of things. It's hard to balance working the way you do as an entrepreneur and also being there for your family, that causes a lot of tension. So for me, that is now in this stage more of the focus. I would say that's really good. I still think Delivering Happiness, the, the Zappos book that existed, I think that was really insightful on how do we deliver happiness to a customer. Obviously, that was in the dot-com bubble. In the very beginning of dot-com. How do you sell shoes online? How do we think about that? I think that's also a kind of interesting book to read, just to think of it from that perspective. Again, some of it doesn't apply to today, but it was quite eye-opening for me. Absolutely. Yeah, well, great book. What does success mean to you today, Anthony? Whether it's personally, business, financial life, there's no right answer. Yeah, um, I think it's, uh, again, surrounding myself by people, especially on work side, uh, surrounding myself with people that I want to be around, um, and making that an enjoyable part of the day. I think especially for people who are earlier in their career, uh, there's many times that you spend more time with your colleagues than anyone else, and you don't in some cases always enjoy those people. And so what I've done over the past 10 years is pull in the people that I've enjoyed the most. And what I'm excited about is as they've gotten more and more senior, you know, whether that is, for example, my creative director on the agency side, he's worked with me off and on for the past 15 years in different capacities. And, and because of that, I know, I know what makes them happy. I know what makes them sad. I enjoy being around them. I know their life, you know, And so for me, the next 10 years is about building something with people that I really truly care about and enjoy being around. Because at the end of the day, you know, knowing, for example, Carrie has twins and that they're going off to college and she's going to be starting a new chapter of her life when they go off to college in the next 2 to 5 years, you know, and, and, um, and being a part of their lives by knowing that the impact that we're building together is going to impact their families. I think that's really, really powerful because that human piece is something that we can lose a bit. And so for me, it's been surround myself by no drama, no chaos, just people that love good hard work but fun as well and enjoy working. There's people who just enjoy it and there's people who they're doing a job and I want people who are excited. For me, that's success. Like 10 years from now, I walk in and I see some people that I'm working with and everyone's happy and hanging out and vibing together. That creates a cool atmosphere, you know? Absolutely. Yeah. Love it, Anthony. This has been fantastic. Where can, you know, founders or audience get in touch with you, learn more about you and your company, Beautybrand? Yeah. Yeah. So Beautywrap.com, you can learn all about Beautywrap. You can also message me on LinkedIn or follow me on LinkedIn. It's just Anthony Snyder. You'll be able to find quite easily. Those are probably the easiest ways. Okay, awesome. Well, add your, your website, BeautyRep.com, and your LinkedIn link in the show notes if you guys want to make sure to reach out and say hi to Anthony and feel free to ask any questions. Thanks. Thanks again for your time, Anthony. Yeah, thanks, man. Thank you. Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below. And help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.