(Click image to play video)
2020 has been a whirlwind year for
Marianna Naturals Corp. (MRNN, Forum). Founded in April of 2020 by both Co-Founder & Chairwoman Heather Marianna and Co-Founder, President & CEO Joel DeBellefeuille as the company is taking a very unique approach to the burgeoning CBD beauty and personal care market – creating a brand and a business model that outthinks and outcompetes the competition. How? By building a belief system that the world deserves 100% ethically-sourced, cruelty-free, paraben-free, and sulfate-free natural skincare and cosmetics without the use of chemical preservatives.
Marianna Naturals and Beauty Kitchen also manufactures fresh handmade CBD & non-CBD beauty care, personal care, and cosmetics products which was born from the hugely popular Beauty Kitchen YouTube series.
Heather Marianna is a bubbly social media personality who translated her passion for looking and feeling her absolute best into the development of her all-natural beauty and skincare product line.
The management team at Marianna Naturals says they’re keen on listing its shares on the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) and are anticipating swift approval very soon.
In this informative, upbeat, and highly entertaining video podcast, Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined by Heather and Joel to get all the up-to-date news and information on what’s happening with Marianna Naturals.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: To start, Heather, can you update our investor audience a bit about yourself and how you came to create your unique natural product line?
HM: So, I started making skincare when I was in high school because I had really bad skin and I found that a lot of the quote/unquote “natural products” that were being sold in stores were not natural, and the chemicals were making my skin break out even more. Fast forward to 2012, late 2012. I decided to quit my corporate job as a consultant, and I was asking all my friends, “what do I do? How should I, I want to work for myself? What do you guys think I should do? What am I good at?” And hands down, everybody said that I needed to make the beauty products because I had cured so many of my friends and just, texting them what to use, what to buy at Whole Foods, all that stuff. So, I started a YouTube channel, got millions of views, started to get a lot of notoriety from YouTube. I started getting asked to be on news segments and appear on TV shows, and then I started creating [products] for sale and I was able to grow the brand organically with very little marketing, which is great.
SH: Well, Joel, shifting to you, some pretty big news out very recently – the announcement of approval as a Walmart Marketplace Seller. Sounds like big news. Can you walk us through the deal?
JDB: Yeah, absolutely. So, back in mid-November 2020, towards the end, we wanted to, of course, start bringing the brand into Canada in a very big way. Discussing with Heather and the other management team, we felt that Walmart would be a good place to start the exposure. We submitted the products and normally, it takes a couple of months. In a matter of little over an hour and a half, I personally received the email confirming that we were approved to list our products. Currently, right now, we’re on walmart.ca, There are 43 different products available for purchase directly from their site. So, it's a, it's quite exciting.
HM: I want to add to that there're like 900 million daily view visits on walmart.com and we have a phone call with them soon, Joel, to maybe add our skin diagnostics [tool] to the page. We'll get to talk a little bit more about that later.
SH: Can you tell us a bit about the demand for your self-care products and how it has continuously grown…especially during the pandemic?
JDB: Yeah, during the lockdowns, there was a self-care surge. People had to do this because things were closed, but the aftereffect of this was the self-care movement that remained. People were taking longer baths – bath sales, soaks were up, and people were face-masking more. I'm sure we saw it today. You saw tons of celebrities posting their daily face mask on Instagram during the lockdown. Most importantly was the rise in awareness of chemicals in beauty products, personal hygiene products, and even cleaning items; that was heightened, which was really good for us. Another reason that I think skincare sales are up and the demand was up during the pandemic, was a lot of people were ditching glam and makeup because they weren't going anywhere. So, makeup sales are definitely, were definitely down and they are still down and skincare sales are still on the rise.
SH: As mentioned in the intro, the company has certainly been busy of late launching the Health Canada-approved dissolvable biotin vitamin mouth strips. This is in partnership with ODF Nutra Inc, along with the personalized online shopping experience for customers as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Can you tell us a bit about these deals, and any others? What are some of the things we should be looking out for moving forward?
JB: A couple of months back, we partnered up with ODF Nutra. They're a – basically, a mouth strip manufacturer here, a dissolvable mouth strip manufacturer here in Montreal, and Heather and I felt that we needed to bring something unique to the company that was easy to market, especially for celebrities and influencers. So, we came up with the idea of developing a biotin mouth strip that dissolves on contact and you get a good shot of biotin, which is good for the hair, skin, and nails. So, we figured that that would be a kind of a unique approach to surge online sales, and marketing for the company. So that's one of the initiatives that we're looking at, we're looking to launch that in Q1.
And then moving on to, in a very exciting initiative - which Heather briefly mentioned a couple of minutes ago - is our skin diagnostics tool which scans the user's face in real-time. It's available currently on all of our sites - on our corporate site or our shop, the beautykitchen.net site as well as our Marianna branded site. In real-time, you get the scan and then get a result back in three seconds. The software program spits back [results] on what the program found, whether it's red spots, blemishes wrinkles [using] a score from zero to 100, [and then provides] referrals to our products. That's super exciting, and that was launched on January 1st, 2021. As Heather mentioned to me on a call, we're in the hundreds of downloads already, of people scanning their faces. So very cool.
HM: Yeah. We've we have had a big influencer push with skin diagnostics and we think that this is going to be big for us. COVID-19 and the precautions aren’t going anywhere. People can't get samples anymore. People can’t get customized skin samples at the stores. They can't try anything anymore. So being able to just scan your skin, get a “customized for your skin” regiment, at home in your pajamas or wherever is, is awesome.
SH: For investors not entirely familiar with the natural CBD beauty and personal care market can you break it down for us?
JDB: Sure. Heather, do you want to, you want to take that?
HM: CBD in skincare, a lot of people at the beginning believed that it was very like a fad, but it's not. We mixed with skincare [something that] helps people with acne inflammation, pain, dryness, eczema. It is expected to reach $1.7 billion by 2025 and $3.48 billion, I believe by 2026. So, it's a huge market and people are seeing a lot of results from CBD skincare, especially like I said, for people with eczema and inflammation, and they're getting off of medication and using this.
SH: Your corporate deck states that Marianna Naturals is all about simple, uncomplicated ingredients. What do you specifically mean when you say, “simple and uncomplicated”?
HM: Simple and uncomplicated is really what the consumer wants these days. They're looking for more eco-friendly products with sustainable ingredients that leave less of a footprint on the environment. And that's exactly what we do. We get all of our ingredients from eco-friendly sources, they all come from the earth, they deliver results with no chemicals. If you have acne and are using our beet mask, that's actually going to clear acne up. You can get off of the Proactive
and the other stuff that's just putting more chemicals in your face. A lot of people when they use these kinds of chemical products, their skin gets used to them, and then when they stop using it, they break out again, so that they have to keep using the product. Whereas we can use things from nature to cure your acne, help with your dry skin, all of these things that are actually working.
SH: Can you tell us about any new and upcoming projects and products that Marianna Naturals has in development that may be of interest to investors, and what’s on the horizon in 2021?
JDB: Yeah, sure, Dave. We're in talks with a European company that's going to be developing an application for us. As you know, sales are mostly derived through mobile applications since COVID-19 struck. A lot of people have their phones physically in their hands all the time now. The application is geared toward our consumers in a way that’s more mobile-friendly than our e-commerce sites. That will be a great application for our users; which will potentially push shoppers to use this product, to learn about our products a lot quicker than going to our [desktop] website. It's going to be available in the app store.
We’ll be in the Google Play Store as well as the Apple Store. That’s one of the major projects that we're working on, and we think that'll drive a tremendous amount of revenue, and of course, add shareholder value once we start trading. That is going to be on the heels of the ODF Nutra Q1 launch. We're just working with our developers right now to get the application where we want it – that’s super exciting, and that will bring a lot of great results.
SH: I'll throw this one out to both of you. How do you see the CBD / hemp sector evolving and growing especially regarding the seven billion-dollar-a-year health & beauty market?
HM: I don't think the CBD skincare market's going anywhere. I've heard a lot of our customers that use our CBD pain relief gel say that it helps them so much more than taking Tylenol. Eczema, psoriasis, is a big problem, and CBD [and natural] skincare helps with that tremendously. You know, what does work for that? [Something else] I made it before, I need to make it again. All these guys were like, “that really works!” Rosemary essential oil? Put it in the air conditioner. It will help grow your hair back. I promise you, and then you can get it at any grocery store.
SH: And use a little extra in my spaghetti sauce later?
HM: On your head!
SH: Can you tell our audience a little bit about your corporate management team at Marianna Naturals along with the experience and innovative ideas they bring to the space?
HM: Absolutely. Our main right-hand girl, her name is Michelle [Metcalfe]. She's our operations manager here. She runs the entire warehouse. She is amazing. Along with all of our warehouse workers, all these people have been with me for years. There's a lot of loyalty, which I think is very important with brands because we don't have a lot of people coming in and out that we have to retrain all of these people. We get together, we talk about new stuff. What do we want to put out? I will come to them and say, “I have this idea for a product.” And they’ll say, “that's not good.” You know, not everything is great! But we do have a great graphic design team that works in-house. They do all of our labeling - they do a ton of our private labeling, we do a lot of ton of private label and wholesale as well. I have a great assistant, [Charles John]. Obviously, Joel has his team as well.
JDB: I want to add to what Heather just said there, Dave, regarding our private labeling; we just launched a private label brand called DSS Essentials with Deondra Sanders in mid-November. If no one's familiar with who Deondra Sanders is, she's the daughter of Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, who is - if you watch football at all, you know! He's one of the main superstars. That was an exciting product launch and it’s going well. We’ve got three different products from her launch that are featured in the specials and brand sections of our website. We also have DSS Essentials available on our beautykitchen.net site and all the other sites that worked for the company. We've also been in talks with a few other celebrities to do some more lines and some brand endorsements with Marianna Naturals. We’re working through all that right now.
SH: And finally, folks, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked during the interview please feel free to elaborate for our audience.
HM: I think we covered it all, but I just am really excited about skin diagnostics. We are putting packages together for a lot of our retailers right now. We're in over 3000 boutiques so that they can start implementing that interactive experience for their customers.
For more information, visit
https://marianna.ca/
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.
Disclaimer: Copyright material and original source of content, corporate logos, videos, images, links, and names may be distributed and shared on this site in fair use only; to third-party social media platforms, creating awareness and visibility of the selected brand. The content distributed on this site is for informational purposes only without the intent of copyright infringement.