In 2011, David DiLorenzo launched V Beauty Pure with Nail Dust Collector, a tabletop product he ideated with his hairstylist father that (not surprisingly) collects nail dust and masks the smell of nail polish. After Hurricane Sandy dealt the professional nail products brand a blow, he picked it back up again in 2016 and has since expanded it far beyond collecting dust to becoming a leader in acrylics and gel polishes as well as an educational platform for nail artists to help increase their revenues.
DiLorenzo says, “With retail, you’re just putting your product on a shelf and marketing the best you can and hope that sells, but, in the professional business, it’s really about people, and it’s about creating a community.”
V Beauty Pure’s community has contributed to the brand growing over 2,300% in the past four years and amassing a nine-figure revenue sum. A sure—and permanent—sign of its passion for V Beauty Pure? Hundreds of fans have tattooed the brand’s signature V logo and bottles on their bodies, a move that DiLorenzo did himself in 2020, but didn’t imagine others would follow suit.
He says, “Every time I see somebody post [a picture of their tattoo], it takes my breath away and reminds me of what I’m doing and how much we’re helping people in our business.”
Ahead, we chat with DiLorenzo about how V Beauty Pure got its start, his strategies for building the brand and where he hopes to bring it next.
What was your first introduction into the beauty world?
I’m the third generation in the beauty business. My grandfather was a barber, my father was a hairstylist and owned salons. He also was a distributor. My first job was in the salon sweeping the floors and handing out bagels and coffee. It’s innate to me. My dad was in South Beach dealing with Versace and all the modeling agencies there in the ’90s. It was the height of when South Beach was taking off back in the day when Madonna, Sylvester Stalone were starting to go there.
In high schooI, I started helping my mom manage the salon. There were 100 hairstylists and 35 nail techs. I always wanted to be in the business with my family, but my father ended up saying to me, “David, go to college.” I ended up in Jersey, not going to college and in the restaurant business.
Come 2011/2012, I said to my father, “I just want to go into business with you.” I gave him my money. He wanted me to have skin in the game. We decided to focus on the nail business, and our first product was called a source capture system. It collects the nail dust and odor at the source. So, when the girls are filing, it pulls the dust down into the machine instead of getting the dust all over.
In the early 2000s what was happening was, with the acrylic odor, it was starting to separate hair salons and nail salons. It used to be full service. Per square foot, the hairstylist is making more money. The hairstylist decided, you know what, let’s get rid of the nail techs, and we saw a need to keep the nail business inside of the salons. We brought the machine in thinking that that would help them.
We got messed up with Hurricane Sandy, and insurance burned us. That threw everything off. Fast forward to 2016 is when I really started to take the business seriously.
What came next?
Everyone was asking for dipping powder, but there was no one that was focused on acrylic. If they go right, I go left. They were all focused on traditional brick-and-mortar distribution, and I saw a huge potential for online. Nobody was focused there. Everybody told me that I was crazy and wasting my time to go online, and I said, “I see something.”
I started with the acrylic, and we focused on education. In our business, on the pro side, there is education, but they’re mostly product pitch classes. What I did was flipped it. I wanted them to actually teach how to do nails, and the product was secondary. People need to learn how to lay acrylic, the foundation of the business, the skills.
I ended up building an education team with nail techs. Some of them already had a following, and some of them we started helping. We were like an agency that would help them with their content and position them as teachers online and give them an avenue outside of the nail salon where they can make extra money. Now, they have a second source of income. That branched off into having ambassadors as well and building out a whole team around that.
How much did it cost to bring the dust collector to life?
A little over seven figures to develop that and to take it to market is a whole different ball game. In reality, to launch a product pre-internet was millions of dollars to go into distribution. It was very hard to build hype for your product. By having online, it cut the cost of your barrier to entry into a business.
I wish I knew about Instagram when I started, but at least I was the first to market in our business on social media. We actually started selling them through Facebook, and I got international. What happened was we started connecting with other brands, so all the major brands in our industry were actually allowing their educators to start to sell the product in their classes. It got me international distribution first, and somehow I ended up back in America.
How have the offerings evolved?
We started with the acrylic first, then we launched gel polish. I told you I bet on online, so when COVID hit and brick-and-mortar stores shut down, we grew fast. It was the perfect storm. I ended up offering 24-hour U.S. shipping, and I had to call up my friends and get their brothers that were home from college to help us ship. I did everything I possibly could to stay open.
In businesses, when you grow really fast, you have to pump the brakes a little bit to make sure your foundation is solid. A lot of people grew really fast during COVID, but then they lost their clients. The key is making sure that you retain your clients, and we did a very good job at that. I’m very proud of what we accomplished.
How did you go about retaining customers?
The product speaks for itself, it’s good. On top of that, once somebody uses a product in the professional business, if they like it, they keep coming back for it. So, if you deliver the best product you possibly can, the market will speak for you. We’re in a consumer-driven economy.
It takes us sometimes a year, sometimes two years in product development to make new products. We’re overly obsessed with making sure that our product is getting released properly, and we don’t push out things before they’re ready. We don’t dilute the products for the sake of increasing profits.
The brand is more like a lifestyle brand than it is just a nail brand. We’re a people business. People think that, when you have a brand, that it’s all about the product, but it’s really about the people. We assembled an amazing ambassador team, an amazing education platform. We’re the only company in our industry that has educators and an education program on our website where it directs them to where their classes are being held.
The industry was salons, and now it moved into independent booth renting. So, everybody’s independent. I wanted to create a team environment, so we built this amazing ambassador program where it’s not just like you’re an ambassador, you get a code and you just pass it out. We bring them in on Zoom meetings, we have meet-and-greets, we bring them to education seminars where we teach them. We make it a family type of environment.
How much do the educational classes contribute to sales?
To be honest, it is less than 5% of our sales. It’s really about creating the community. The academy is not profit-driven, the academy, but I’m creating a tremendous amount of value for the consumer.
In our classes, and especially when I teach classes, I teach you about how to make money. That’s something that people forget in the beauty business. They’re always teaching you art or how to do nails. We include the business side of it, which is extremely important because college doesn’t even teach you how to make money.
I always tell [the nail technicians], “Why don’t you link up with other experts, rent a little space, and then you guys could feed off of each other’s business?” I’m not telling them to go get big salons. I’m telling them, “Look, make this a little exclusive experience where you have one hairstylist that works with you, one makeup artist, one lash tech, and you bring back what it was in the ’90s and early 2000s, but on a scale that is manageable.”
What’s the distribution today?
All of the distributors are professional nail distributors. I’m not in every store in America. We selectively choose them in regions that we want distributors. My first business model was I wanted to open up my own little boutique stores. So, it’s like having a Chanel store inside of Nordstrom. It’s a little different than just having your product in a Costco just on a shelf somewhere.
What are the bestsellers?
Our acrylic and gel polishes are our No. 1 selling products. The dust collector was the entry to the business that we expanded on.
How big is the V Beauty Pure team?
We have a very strong team. We brought in a CMO who’s instrumental. and my VP of sales and also my father are instrumental. My team motto is, “You can’t do this alone.” This is a team sport, and if you don’t bring people in that are better than you in different areas, you can’t grow. So, I brought the best people in I possibly could.
We have about 450 ambassadors that are exclusive to us. We picked people that wanted to be part of our brand and eventually wanted to be an educator or do something else in our business. I didn’t want them to be diluted and post this brand today and then another brand tomorrow. They’re exclusive to us in the nail business. They’re allowed to obviously promote other products not competing with us, but it’s more about being organic to the brand.
What other future goals do you have for your brand?
We are looking at going into possibly opening up our own schools around the country. I’ve been entertaining opening up boutique stores where we distribute the product ourselves, and I’m looking at making them advanced training academy-slash-boutique retail stores that are exclusive to us that create a different type of experience like a Tesla store in a mall.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
