FEMALE FOUNDER LIVE TALK
Unlocking Retail and International Expansion A Workshop with Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic, Co-Founders of BYBI Beauty and rayro
(Session in English)
Getting your product onto shelves sounds like the goal. But for most founders, retail and international expansion is where things get complicated fast: the wrong retailer, the wrong market, the wrong moment, and what looked like a breakthrough becomes a cash flow problem.
Elsie and Dominika have been through it more than once.
Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic built BYBI, the world's first carbon-negative skincare brand, scaling it to global distribution across more than 3,000 retail doors and raising £10m in funding before successfully exiting in 2024. Along the way, they landed in 1,800 Target doors in the US and on the shelves of Boots, Sephora and beyond. They've since sold BYBI to the founding team behind Revolution Beauty and are now building rayro, a kids care brand, while running DE London Consulting, where they work with early-stage consumer brands on brand, growth, fundraising and retail strategy. They're also published authors with Penguin and Virgin Startup mentors.
In short: they've done the thing you're trying to figure out, and they're here to tell you exactly how.
What you'll take away from this session
How to know when your brand is actually ready for retail, and what retailers are looking for before they say yes
The realities of international expansion, which markets to consider first and how to approach them without overstretching
How to structure retail conversations and negotiate terms that work for your business
What Elsie and Dominika learned scaling BYBI into 3,000+ retail doors across multiple markets, and what they would do differently
How to balance DTC and retail growth without one cannibalising the other
The funding considerations that come with retail expansion and how to plan for them
We don't share the recording afterwards, so if you want to be in the room, you need to show up live. It’s the best way to ask questions and immerse yourself in the learning.
12pm UK time
1pm FR/DE time
Please note that the time on the website is based on DE time. Register for a Zoom call to add timezone-relevant time to your diary.
- Register for free -
Exclusive Online Session for Female Founders
Who is this Online Session for?
This session is for founders who are building a consumer product brand and starting to think seriously about getting into retail, or those already in conversations with retailers and realising there's a lot more to navigate than they expected.
You might have a product that's selling well direct-to-consumer and be wondering when and how to move into retail. Or you might be eyeing international markets and not know where to start, which market to prioritise, or how to make the economics work. Maybe you've had a retailer show interest and aren't sure how to handle the conversation.
Retail and international expansion can transform a brand. They can also stretch it in ways founders don't see coming. Elsie and Dominika have navigated both sides of that, across multiple markets and multiple funding rounds. This session is about getting the real picture from two founders who have scaled, sold and are now doing it all over again.
Businettes Community
Businettes is a pan-European community where female founders feel inspired, equipped and supported to succeed. Through action-driven webinars, events and a community that genuinely roots for one another, we bring together women who are serious about building something and want to do it alongside people who get it. Free to join.