231: How My Student Teri Miyahira Makes 6 Figures Selling Vegan Makeup Online

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Teri Miyahira barely mentions her own products on YouTube or Instagram. That is deliberate. Her entire selling happens on email, and the social content exists purely to build loyalty first, which is how she reached roughly $300,000 in cumulative sales with no paid advertising at all.

Teri is a student in my Create A Profitable Online Store course and runs Teri Miyahira Beauty, a natural, vegan, and cruelty-free cosmetics line. She also sells a subscription box, so a meaningful share of that revenue recurs.

Below is her content-first funnel, how she pre-sold her first production run to launch for effectively zero capital, and what it actually takes to formulate cosmetics.

Key takeaways

• Roughly $300,000 in cumulative sales, with $175,000 in 2017 at 60% margins, entirely without paid ads.
• She does not sell on YouTube or Instagram. Those channels build loyalty and capture emails, and email does the selling.
• Her content-to-offer ratio is 3:1 or 5:1 on email, and as high as 10:1 on social.
• She pre-sold roughly 400 units to fund her first manufacturing run, so startup capital was effectively zero.
• Her first hire was a 3PL, before customer service, because fulfillment was the only thing she could fully hand off.
• Subscription boxes run 30% to 40% margins against 60% on individual products, with four to five month average retention.
• Cosmetics are unregulated in the sense that no FDA submission is required, provided labels are compliant.
• She gives chemists an ingredient list rather than a formulation, because most are not used to formulating green.

How Teri built an audience before she had a product

Teri started a green beauty YouTube channel in 2013 while working a day job in operations and business development at a tech startup, recording videos at night, on weekends, and at four in the morning.

She did not start it to build a business. Makeup was a hobby, and blogging about it partly justified how much of it she bought.

The niche choice is what made it work. Fifteen years ago clean beauty did not exist in the mainstream the way it now does at Sephora, Target, and CVS, and she had been hunting down clean products herself for years without finding bloggers covering them.

Because so few people covered green beauty on YouTube, she simply started appearing in search results. Her growth was a function of niching down rather than deliberate keyword research.

She started the cosmetics line in early 2016, three years after starting the channel.

Why she decided to launch her own products

The signal was inbound. Brands approached her constantly about promoting products to her audience, ranging from ones she had never heard of up to Honest Beauty.

Her reasoning: those brands needed an ROI on influencer spend, so the fact that they kept coming meant the promotions worked. She was already promoting lipsticks, eyeshadows, and blushes for other companies, so she could promote her own and capture the margin.

She still does sponsorships alongside her own line.

The content-first funnel

Teri’s framing inverts the usual ecommerce sequence. Most stores push product first and try to build loyalty later in the funnel. Coming from influencing, she builds loyalty first and sells second.

The mechanism runs in three stages.

On YouTube and Instagram she barely mentions her brand or her products. The content covers green beauty broadly, other brands’ products, and technique: how to apply makeup, how to create a smoky eye, how to wear a red lip during the day.

Calls to action point at the email list rather than the store.

Once someone is on the list, she promotes other people’s brands alongside her own, plus new YouTube videos and Instagram posts. Her stated model is Gary Vaynerchuk’s jab, jab, jab, right hook.

Why she treats social posts as middle of funnel

This is the part Teri says she explains to every brand she consults with.

Most people treat social posts as traffic drivers pointing at the website. She treats each post and video as a middle-of-funnel asset and drives traffic to the content itself.

The reason is algorithmic. From roughly Q3 2017 she saw a marked drop in organic reach across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which changed where traffic needed to be directed.

Why she is now on Instagram Stories

Stories became her main focus because their reach appeared less affected by the algorithm changes than regular feed posts.

Her second reason is specifically for introverts. Stories are not live, so you can batch and pre-record everything rather than committing to Instagram Live, Facebook Live, or live webinars.

She shoots Stories on her iPhone during the same studio session as her YouTube video rather than cutting up the DSLR footage, which she attributes to laziness and which produces a more natural behind-the-scenes feel. She mixes in ordinary material like what she ate or a coffee she ordered.

She schedules through a dedicated Instagram planning tool rather than posting live.

Repurposing one shoot into everything

Her advice to brands is to start with video, then cut it into blog content, social clips, and stills. Thumbnail photo sessions should produce extra photos for social and the blog at the same time.

She has settled at roughly one YouTube video a week, down from two or three, largely because she got better at repurposing.

Selling a subscription box off an email list

By the time someone reaches Teri’s list they are already warm, familiar with her, and aware she promotes competitors as readily as her own products. That trust is what makes the subscription sell.

The conventional advice for recurring revenue is a tripwire or an individual purchase first, then the subscription pitch. Her position is that this depends entirely on how warm they are, and that leading with educational content lets you go to the subscription much sooner than expected.

The offer is a genuine discount. An eyeshadow is $25 individually, while a box of three to four products is $49 to $59, roughly half price.

That trades margin for lifetime value: 30% to 40% on boxes against 60% on individual products, with average retention of four to five months and some subscribers at two years.

Her retention approach is not tactical. She keeps products aligned with what subscribers already care about, rotates seasonal colors and formulations, and launches new products through the box so subscribers get first access.

How to actually create cosmetics

Teri had no formulation background and a bachelor’s degree in communication. She found manufacturers entirely by Googling.

The critical skill is knowing ingredients, which came from years of beauty blogging.

Her reasoning is that cosmetic chemists formulate the way they are used to, and very few are used to formulating green. Approach one without knowing what you want and you will get a formulation misaligned with your brand, which she believes is why the green beauty space is becoming diluted.

Her process is giving the chemist an ingredient deck rather than a formulation. She specifies roughly 15 ingredients she wants in a lipstick and asks whether it is possible.

The chemist comes back proposing a synthetic where something is not workable, she counters with a natural alternative they might be able to source, and it iterates. She does not specify ratios or gram weights.

Sometimes the answer is no, and then you find another chemist.

She works within her chemists’ existing ingredient suppliers rather than sourcing independently, because doing your own ingredient R&D pulls you into distributor relationships and makes the supply chain considerably more complex.

Regulation and minimums

Cosmetics do not require FDA submission, similar to the vitamin industry. Provided your labels are FDA compliant you can proceed, and you need no certification or chemistry qualification as a founder.

Minimum order quantities vary by manufacturer, from 1,000 to 5,000 to 10,000 units. Some will agree to a first shipment of 500 against a commitment to roughly 5,000 units across a year.

Her advice is making sure you have the cash flow to hit an MOQ before you start.

How she funded the first run

Teri pre-sold, using the model normally applied to online courses and info products: sell first, use the proceeds to create the product.

She emailed her audience, was explicit that it was a pre-sale with a stated ship date, collected the money up front, and sold roughly 400 units. Her first manufacturing order was that same 400 units.

Her caution is that this is tricky in practice, because manufacturers routinely need far more time than they tell you, so the ship date you promise carries real risk.

She launched four SKUs: an eyeshadow, blush, bronzer, highlighter, and powder. Formulation took roughly four months of conversations with manufacturers, helped by everything being US-based with no language barrier.

The Shopify store took about an hour, chosen specifically because it works out of the box with an extensive app store, since she is a writer rather than a developer.

Total startup capital was effectively zero, offset by the sweat equity of having built the audience first. She is clear that starting today without that audience would mean spending on content marketing and ads to build a list before launching.

Why her first hire was a 3PL

Teri has no business partner and no outside investors. Asked who she hired first, the answer is a third-party logistics provider, before customer service.

Her reasoning is what could and could not be delegated. Supply chain, manufacturing, and working with chemists had to come from her. Marketing, YouTube, and social had to stay with her to keep the brand voice consistent.

Fulfillment was the only major function she could fully hand off, and by month two or three she was exhausted assembling cardboard boxes at home and driving to the post office.

Moving that time into marketing, customer service, and product development would advance the business faster than doing everything herself.

What she looked for in a 3PL

She already knew roughly how 3PLs worked from talking shop with brand founders during her influencer years, including the awkward parts: some require 1,000 units per SKU in the warehouse before considering you, some require phoning the warehouse to announce inbound shipments.

Her criteria came down to transparent pricing and technology. She describes the traditional 3PL industry as antiquated, with service contracts that nickel and dime you and leave you unable to predict your warehousing and fulfillment costs.

She uses ShipBob, which found her via a cold email to her support inbox the same week “find 3PL” appeared on her to-do list. She has used them for about two years, and states plainly she has no affiliate relationship with them.

They handle warehousing, inventory, subscription box kitting, and individual order fulfillment, with split inventory across regional warehouses so orders ship from the nearest zone.

Why she left Amazon and has not returned

Teri sold a single skincare SKU on Amazon years earlier, before the platform’s gold rush, after learning about it from Ryan Daniel Moran.

It started gaining traction and she left anyway.

Her reasons: no ability to build an email list, no direct access to customers, limited control over the look and feel of the page, and no path to move Amazon customers to her own site.

She got off Amazon roughly when everyone else was piling on, and has no near-term plans to return.

What she would do differently now

Teri started dabbling in Facebook ads in the months before this interview, driven by the organic reach declines.

Her recommendation for anyone starting a physical products business now is having both a paid and an organic traffic strategy rather than relying on organic alone.

She also notes that her brand carries her own name, which was good for initial sales because the audience already knew her, and that a separate brand name would have fit the content-first strategy better by blending in with everything else she covers.

Her biggest early challenge was time, doing content, marketing, R&D, manufacturing, customer service, and fulfillment simultaneously as a solopreneur. She has a team now.

You can find Teri at TeriMiyahiraBeauty.com.

Frequently asked questions

Can you build an ecommerce business without paid ads?

Teri Miyahira reached roughly $300,000 in cumulative sales with no paid advertising, using YouTube and Instagram content to capture emails and selling exclusively by email. She notes that declining organic reach since 2017 means a new business today should plan for both paid and organic traffic.

Should you promote your products on social media?

Teri deliberately does not, keeping her YouTube and Instagram focused on education and other brands’ products to build loyalty first. All selling happens on email, at a ratio of roughly three to five pieces of content per offer.

How do you fund a first manufacturing run with no capital?

Pre-sell it. Teri emailed her audience with an explicit pre-sale and a stated ship date, collected payment up front for roughly 400 units, and used that to fund the first production order.

What margins do subscription boxes have?

Teri runs 30% to 40% on subscription boxes against 60% on individual products, since a box of three to four items sells at roughly half the combined individual price. Average retention of four to five months makes the tradeoff work.

Do you need to be a chemist to start a cosmetics line?

No, and you do need to know ingredients well. Teri gives chemists a list of roughly 15 ingredients she wants rather than a formulation, because most chemists are not accustomed to formulating green and will otherwise propose something misaligned with your brand.

Are cosmetics regulated like food or drugs?

No FDA submission is required, similar to the vitamin industry, provided your labels are FDA compliant. No certification or chemistry qualification is needed to found a cosmetics company.

What should your first hire be?

Teri’s was a 3PL, before customer service, because fulfillment was the only major function she could fully delegate. Supply chain, product development, and brand voice all had to stay with her.

Why leave Amazon as a beauty brand?

Teri left because Amazon gives you no email list, no direct customer access, limited control over page presentation, and no route to move buyers onto your own site. She exited roughly when other sellers were piling in.