Michelle Hu Sold 30 Makeup Cases in Month 1: Over Six Years She Built a Seven-Figure Business

A 22-year-old Michelle Hu launched Etoile Collective, a brand known for cute beauty accessories, mirrors, and cases, from her bedroom in Melbourne, Australia back in 2016. By 2020, she had bootstrapped a business doing more than multi-seven figures in annual revenue. Here's how. ⬇️

Michelle wanted a makeup organizer like the ones she saw on Pinterest. They didn't exist in Australia, so she had it made when a family member visited China. She loved the way it decluttered her space and made her feel, and got great feedback from friends, so ordered 30 units to sell online. It took her a full month to sell through that first order.

After two years working in investment banking by day and on Etoile at night, she hit $20,000 in organic monthly sales, mostly acquired through Instagram content and word of mouth. That milestone opened up Michelle’s mind to believe Etoile could be a big business opportunity.

Digital ads became a key strategy in 2019. Michelle worked with a freelancer, first spending $100 a day. Next came SEO, managed by a freelancer she found on LinkedIn, then a full website relaunch, which cost Etoile $60,000. Up until this point, Michelle shot all her product photos on her iPhone and DIY-ed every part of the site.

“I cannot emphasize enough how important SEO is, especially when we launched in the US and having to manage those two sites and having very similar content.”

Then, Etoile Collective layered in PR, and in 2022 launched into the United States, using TikTok to fuel the launch.

Etoile was planning its US launch when a video went viral on TikTok, sending 15,000 users in 24 hours to its still-password protected US site. The top comment on the video was, "When is this launching in the US?"

The website wasn’t perfect yet, but Michelle went live anyway to capture as many sales as possible—and managed to pull off a successful US launch with zero marketing spend. Over the next week, 45,000 visitors hit the site.

“Instagram is challenging at the moment. We're definitely finding it hard to grow like the way we used to. So we have shifted a lot more attention and time into TikTok.”

Michelle says keeping up with trends and focusing on quantity over quality on TikTok works, and that high production videos don’t hit on the app. 

“It's always the stuff that takes two minutes or the very trendy sounds that do extremely well on TikTok—and it's about getting in early on those sounds. So unfortunately, that means that you do have to be on your phone a lot and you do have to be scrolling.”

Want to learn more about Michelle Hu's path to building Etoile Collective? Listen to the Female Founder World podcast interview with Michelle.