Storm Menzies on Accessible Beauty and Challenging the ‘Too Niche’ Myth

Storm Menzies is the founder of ByStorm Beauty, a brand on a mission to make beauty more accessible, without sacrificing style or dignity. After injuring her dominant hand at the gym, Storm realised how much dexterity is assumed in everyday makeup tools, and how often disabled people are excluded from the beauty conversation altogether.

In this episode, Storm shares how she went from DIY clay prototypes to launching a national collaboration with Celeste Barber’s beauty brand, BOOIE. We talk about co-designing with disabled users, her frustrations with investors who say “disability is too niche,” and why she believes accessible design should never feel like charity.

Connect with Storm: 

Instagram: @bystorm.beauty

Website: https://bystormbeauty.com

Tiktok: @bystorm.beauty

Connect with Peta Hooke

Instagram: @petahooke

Website: www.icantstandpodcast.com

Email: icantstandpodcast@gmail.com

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Episode transcript:

00:00:03

Peta: Hello, and welcome to the I Can't Stand Podcast, the show that explores what it's like to live with a disability. My name's Peter Hook, I have cerebral palsy, and I'm your host. After a short break over Christmas, I hope you had a lovely one. If you celebrate Christmas, I'm so excited to be back with you. I've got some really special conversations coming your way this year, and I'm thrilled to be kicking things off again with today's guest, Storm Menzies. Storm is the founder of byStorm Beauty, a business she created after a gym injury that made her realize just how inaccessible makeup products can be. Living with mild cerebral palsy herself, Storm thought she understood disability until she found herself unable able to open a tube of mascara or hold a product steady. That personal frustration sparked something much bigger. In this conversation, we talk about how she went from sticking lumps of clay onto beauty products in her bathroom to co designing with other disabled users, teaching herself three D printing, and launching a national collaboration with comedian Celeste barber. Storm is smart, funny, and refreshingly honest about the challenges of being a disabled founder in a space that still sees disability as niche. If you've ever struggled with dexterity, felt excluded by beauty standards, or wondered what it takes to start a business from scratch, this episode is for you. So, without any other I do, let's get into it.

00:02:11

Storm: So I'm Storm. I'm the founder of by Storm Beauty, which is on a mission to make beauty and make up more accessible to literally everybody.

00:02:20

Peta: I love that, And there's a fellow beauty lover. I know I'm gonna love this conversation because marries two worlds that I'm very passionate about disability and beauty, and I really admire you starting a business in this area. I think so many of us think, oh, I want to start a business and help people, but you're actually doing it, So congratulations to you. Let's start off very very basic for those who haven't heard of Bystore Beauty before. What are you trying to solve within the market.

00:02:54

Storm: Yeah, well, I think I'll give my story because it was something that I wasn't even a way where of being a problem to solve in the first place. So I have mild terrible palsy, but I've lived with very very few barriers in my life. Generally very clumsy. The right side of my body is primarily affected. But I have worked in the disability space for the last ten years in a whole variety of roles. But it wasn't until I broke my dominant hand about two and a half years ago that I realized how inaccessible makeup was. And to be honest, I wasn't. I didn't even think about it, Like I didn't think about, oh, what's it going to be like now I've broke them up? Didn't even think about it. All I thought was like, okay, well I need to get ready, so I need to put makeup on. Went to open a tuba musca and was like, fuck, I can't do this, Like I can't hold this steady. So I called one of my girlfriends who has AP, and I was like, Hi, how are you doing your makeup?

00:03:55

Storm: Like what are we doing? Because I was googling and accessible makeup wasn't coming up. She was like stuh, like with great difficulty, like makeup isn't made for people like me because no one sees us as beautiful, so why would they bother. It was this moment for me that I had so much, honestly, so much guilt and shame because I didn't even realize the privilege that I had. In only realizing it at this very point, it made me like just determined to do something.

00:04:29

Storm: I went on the journey of at first thinking I. Was going to create accessible makeup because I was like, well, that makes sense to me, Like I need accessible makeup, Let's create that. And then I started actually. Talking more to the community and I did a big research piece with an incredible company called Noable Me. I don't know if you've heard of them, but they do market reachs research specifically for people with disability. And what I realized from that is that people with disability don't want accessible makeup. They actually just want to use the same products as everyone else. They want to use the. Same things that their friends are using. You know. The one of the lines in this survey was that I don't want to use special products for special people. I already do that enough. I actually went to my. Like local like two dollars store, and I bought a lumber clay and I just started putting it on the ends of my products, and I was like, okay, cool, this is going to make it a lot easier because what I needed was just more surface area. Everything is just so buy motor control skills, and I'm like, I need just something that's thick. So I, yeah, I just got clay and started attaching it to things, and then that moved into teaching myself how to three D model and buying a thready printer, and like, I have no skills in doing this, So this was a lot of like YouTube how to focus groups of people with disability the whole way through lots of different age, age, demic graph eggs, and different types of support needs, and just started iterating and just going like, okay, cool, how are we going to do this? Learn how to injection silicon mold in my garage like very very rough, and yeah, all of my products because they're like pink and purple silicon just looked like sex toys, honestly, like a big dildos. So I didn't originally set out to create a company. I was literally just like I need to solve this problem. And then I did a disability tech accelerator called Remarkable, which was just brilliant, and they kind of helped me realize like like, look, this is a great idea, but do you even have product market fit? Do people actually want this? Like it sounds great, but how are you going to how are you going to do this?

00:06:51

Storm: Do people want it? So I went to a local disability expo and I had like the loudest, brightest store there. It was like Unicorn vomit all over Like it was so cool, Like I'm like, I'm going to make a splash. I'm going to make a splash because it's you know, not just about the products. It's about it's about disability and beauty coming together, not making a disabled product. We got four hundred. People during the wait list literally after a day, and I was like, Okay, I think we're going. To do this. But also, like the other really big important part for me is like the representation side, because the more I went looking, the more I realized that we don't have representation of people with disability and beauty and that is a huge problem. And the more the more people I meet, particularly in like the mainstream, haven't ever you know, maybe they don't have anyone in their life with disability, or I've never. Thought of it before. They get it straight away, but they've never had access to the message, and you know if you do. We don't see people with disability in beauty advertising. We don't see them as a market, and then we don't create products for them because we don't see them. So it's for me, it's a very intertwined problem, the lack of representation and the lack of product accessibility.

00:08:17

Storm: So it's kind of the mission that I'm. On now is my products may make up more accessible, but the real mission is actually being able to have conversations with brands and go, hey, you've got a really big accessibility problem here, and this isn't a charitable or nice thing to do. This is actually good for your business to make things more accessible. Because businesses talk money. And also, I think we need to. Get out of the retric that disability has to be a charity or a good deed and make people feel good.

00:08:51

Storm: It's not about that. It's about we need equal access to products and services and everything else. This is actually an issue of human rights, not about a charitable donation. So I'm trying to show to businesses that there is a growth business model here and that this is a target market, because when we do that, then businesses will start innovating.

00:09:16

Peta: I want to go back to like the day that you went to the two dollars shop and bought clay. Was it a thing where you're like, I'm going to make this product, I'm going to figure it out or was it more organic than that, because I think a lot of people misunderstand when you start a business, you have to pep yourself up and reconvince yourself it's a good idea over and over and over because if you don't believe it, nobody else will.

00:09:44

Storm: That is exactly it. No, it definitely did not start as like a business, right. I was, you know, thinking about myself originally. Right, It's like, okay, I need something with more surface area. But I like my right side and my fingers in particular are quite flaccid. I don't know if that's the right word, but they're quite like floppy. So I find it really hard to even like grip necessarily quite hard things. So I was just thinking, Okay, I'm gonna need something like soft and squishy, and I was like, okay, like clay, I can mold different shapes and kind of see what's going to work. So that was honestly all I was thinking about to start with. Then comes the imposter syndrome of like, yeah, but why you're going to do this?

00:10:26

Storm: Like who do You think you are to be solving this? Like and you're so right? It is the constant doubt, the constant doubt. And it's not even like the doubt for me. It's when I talk to people about it, it's like, oh, yeah, but disabled people don't need makeup, Like why would like why would they need makeup? People genuinely have said that to me. I want to say, like hundreds of times now now it makes me more motivated because now I'm like, how dare you? I'm like, I will prove you wrong, and there is a market here and I'm going to change this. And of course I have, you know, the ongoing self doubt constantly. You know. My partner always reminds me, is like, but who else is trying? You were? You were the one doing it, So you just have to accept that you were the person doing it, and you have to come to terms of being okay that it is you. Eventually, when hopefully I get funding and capital and all this stuff. Because product based businesses are so much more expensive than I could have possibly imagined. My dream is to be all to civility, own, run and buy and for the community, and. To me not to be the face of all of this. That is absolutely the dream, But for now I'm stuck with me. So we're trying to make it work.

00:11:55

Peta: If people are listening and thinking, oh, I love beauty or I really struggle to put on you know, mascara always comes to mind. That can be really tricky. Talk to me about your products and how each of them vary from each other.

00:12:09

Storm: Yeah, okay, so I have two products. They're essentially the exact same product, but they're different shapes to different needs. So they are an attachment. So there are a silicon attachment that is designed to fit over most cylindrical products, which is kind of most products. So it's like a nail polish.

00:12:31

Storm: A mascara A concealer, a brow. Gel, lipstick, lips gloss, pretty much anything that has that like really small circular shape it fits into. And the way that I guess I designed them is so that they have as much universal compatibility as possible. So we're working at the moment on a little insert because things like an eyeliner, it won't fit on, but basically from like a nail polish to mask and upwards at will, So essentially they just slide over and they one is a bull shape, which tends to be better for people who can curl their fingers and they have like salt like wrists and joint pain. So we've had a lot of feedback from people with arthritis to say like, this is really helpful, and then people with tremors as well have been like, oh, this is actually really helpful. The idea for the bull shape one is actually to be able to have some kind of like insertible weight as well. That's you know, on the roadmap, as I keep saying.

00:13:35

Storm: And then the other one is. More of a flat paddle shape, so that's better for people who can't curl their fingers as well. And something that I've only learned recently is actually a lot of people with limb difference like the flat paddle shape one because they can put it under their arms as well. I had to look at this the other day for a presentation I was making. It took one hundred and thirteen revision to get the opening of the products, which is like a tapered star shape, and that tapered star shape. I guess allows you know, a little bit of flexibility to accommodate different kinds of diameters for products.

00:14:17

Peta: Obviously the first iteration, as you said, look like sex toys, and you said that there was many different versions. Did you work with people like Ots, Like, how did you get to get to the different shapes because obviously we both had our different dexterities and we have that lift experience that you could bring to a product, But how did you make sure that you were covering all bases other than just focus groups? Like focus groups are great, but in the end you need that expertise.

00:14:51

Storm: Absolutely so. No had Ot and Physio's consult as well. So you know, this was not something that I was dreamy of being growing into a business, right. This was literally my. Side passion, Like it was a very long way down the road that I thought, oh cool, I'm going to create this into a business. This was actually just something that I was like, I know, this can help a lot of people, and that's what I really wanted to do. When it was actually a friend who said to me, oh he became a mentor, But it was a man that I met and he was telling him about my products and that you know, I have all these like silicon products, and I. Really want to help people. And he was in the disability like business space and kind of like an adjacent space, and I was like, I just want to give them away, like I just want to make them. I want to give them away to people so then you know, people can be able to use makeup more like it's all I want to do. When he said to me, Storm, do you think that if we continue to frame disability as a charity, we're actually going to make any progress? And I was like, yeah, no, we're not. That actually makes a lot of sense to me. He's like, you need to start thinking thinking more about the business side of it, because it's the business side of it when you have a use case for it that you can pioneer for other businesses to go, hey, there is a market here. Let's innovate and let's commercialize and let's make products. And that is what gets the message further charity, doesn't you know? It obviously does in some capacities, but here, if we keep framing it that way, we're also going to keep you know, propositioning the dehumanization as well.

00:16:28

Peta: I think you're so right about putting value on the products that you make, Like, yes, I think it's amazing, and clearly you care about disabled people so much. But without that want to actually make money from this and have capital come into your business, the whole industry is going to sagnate because who else is going to do it. The big beauty industry have all this money and none of them have ever touched it. So I think it's so important, as you say, to attribute value to what you're doing, because it does have value. It has so much value to disabled people. I don't think anybody should try away from that.

00:17:11

Storm: It is uncomfortable, though, because it's it's honestly, this value thing constantly where I'm like, I want to help so much, like and I want people to have access, and I'm so passionate about it, but it's a constant reframing to me to be like, the vision of this is bigger, though.

00:17:28

Storm: The vision is. That, like I want other businesses to go, hey, this can be profitable, so we're going to invest. Like when Fenti came to market, they made one hundred and fifty one hundred and fifty million dollars in the first thirty days of business. But there were so many people behind her who tried and couldn't get investment, couldn't move the mission forward because you know, wild concept that people of color would want foundation that match their school, but because of the dehumanization of people of color, they were seen as not a group of people to market to. It wouldn't be profitable, it's too.

00:18:10

Storm: Niche, and so we had to have that pioneering person like Rihanna to come along and show that no, she's not giving it away. She's this isn't charity because we need to have equal value for people with disability or in her case, people of color, and we need to we need to commercialize this so it is a market because that's how we get innovation. She's now set the standard because it sells and it sounds so icky, but it's been a really big learning journey for me to come around to it and be like, actually, this is the way that we need to do it, because we can't rely on governments to say, like, you know, to make the changes that we need because you know, they've tried to legislate accessibility when it comes to web websites, right, but there's no real inforce it. You know, we can make laws, but without anyone like enforcing it, that doesn't happen. But if we show that. There is a market there and there are customers there and this is going to be good for business, that's actually when we get so much innovation in those areas, and then we're able to find essentially commercialized solutions that a lot of people disability are already doing and have more innovation. So that was a bit of a ramble, but that's kind of my It's been a very long learning journey, kind of like unraveling all of those things as well.

00:19:36

Peta: And I think it's so true because I also think it gives validity to your product of people who don't know what it is because it is a new product to the market, right, It's not like it's a foundation where we go, oh, we all know what that is. There's an education piece and also something for people to understand how it's actually used. Like that must be a huge challenge in your business, you know, communicating how it works and making sure people understand. Have you found that to be quite.

00:20:07

Storm: Challenging, Yeah, you are like three thousand percent ride it is really really challenging. What I've realized is a lot of our community is not used to people innovating, so they're not looking for solutions to problems that they have because we're the most incredible problem solvers there are. We're j rey rigging our own stuff. Like the amount of people I've spoken to are like, oh, yeah, I put gaffer tape on the end of my products, or I you know, have all of these really amazing hacks for your products. You're not necessarily looking for a solution and not necessarily looking to see if someone is designing a solution because you're just kind of so used to nothing happening in the space. The other kind of part to that as well is now connecting with so many occupational therapists. That's been a really great trust part of the piece. I've got a little government grant at the moment to look into the therapeutic application of makeup in a clinical setting. The theory on this is that makeup is so much more than even just like find motor control skills. It is the planning, the sequencing, and it's then obviously the dexterity and find motor control skills, but holding a tiny little miscar that's a big jump for someone. So my tools can essentially be used as that stepping stone to build that. The first kind of initial conversations that I've had with ots, and these are like heads of ots at big universities, is that we're not asking about makeup application. In an FCA, we ask about shaving for men, but we don't ask about makeup application. It's not standard practice. It may be asked if someone is wearing makeup or they bring it up, but for the majority of people, it's not being asked. And I mean, who's dressing up to see their OT I get from in terms of like, you know, the priorities of like we need to you know, have other activities of daily living. I get it. But it's a really important activity of daily living, not just for you know, the well being effects and all of that, but it's also how society sees you. And you know, we know from the research that we do have not related to people with disability, but when you look more presented, look presentable and put together, particularly as women, which usually I mean in the research all is included wearing makeup, more likely to get paid, more more likely to be respected at work, more likely to advance your careers. We have so much bias when it comes to attractiveness and all of those things, and it's like we're we don't then think about that when it comes to people with diablity who live in the same world as well and have to adbye by all the same social norms, and we're not capturing it at that point, and we're not working on it as a skill. It just compounds all of the barriers. So that's the theory I'm working on anyway.

00:23:17

Peta: And it just goes to the fact that people don't think that disabled people are part. Of the beauty conversation. And I think there is a little bit of thought that beauty is sort of vacuous and disabled people have more important things to think about. But like, from my perspective, and you've really well, we're not. In my head, I had forgotten the very first episode of this podcast five years ago, four years ago, was talking about me how I'm treated differently. If I walk out my door with makeup on my face or the days I don't, because it's such a difference it is.

00:23:57

Storm: And it's also like, you know, you go to work without makeup on. People like you, okay, are you sick, and you're like, no, I'm fine. This is how I look.

00:24:05

Peta: For those of you who do follow you on social media. You had a massive announcement a few weeks ago that you're partnering with Celeste Farmer, who is a massive comedian here in Australia who has her own beauty corporation called. Booie Beauty. Talk to me about that. How did that happen and what are you going to do going forward with booe Beauty. I'm so excited for you.

00:24:32

Storm: Yeah. Look, it is massive and she is exactly what you see online. She is chaotic, super adhd and she's amazing, Like, she's exactly the same. She's great. I made a pitch deck and I sent her a pitch deck and was basically like, I love your products, but you're excluding like twenty percent of the population. You know, you talk about, you know, inclusion and accessibility when it comes to prize and wanting to be for every every person, but you were excluding a huge part of the population. And I didn't hear back for months and then I literally get a call out of. The blue nowhere. You know, I never answer numbers. I don't know either, And I answered this call to literally her saying, holy fucking ship bulls and I was like, Mom, is that you No? I was like, who is this? And she goes, I was trying to make my products accessible and I thought accessibly prized, and I never thought about people with disability. We need to do we need to do this now. I've never thought about this before. And oh, my gosh, I feel like such an idiot. My god, I can't believe I've done this. We need to do something. It's not that necessarily people don't care, it's just they've never thought about it before. And she's very much proof of that. She deeply cares, but just hadn't thought about it. So we yeah, did a collaboration, so working with her for the last six or so months on basically my products, but in her colors. And the incredible thing about this is that I had no proof that this is something people wanted because my products weren't in market. So she took a bet on me and a bet on this idea before I even had a products in market, which is incredible.

00:26:28

Peta: When you have been Speaking to investors to try and get that stimulation and capital, is there anything that's given you a minute to sort of reflect and go, Actually, this is where I see the business heading in to five years time. Where do you see EXCEP. You don't have to tell me all your secrets, of course, but just in general, where do you see inclusive beauty going forward?

00:26:56

Storm: Oh my god, I I daydream about this constantly, and there's so many different ways it could go. So I want to basically make I want to make so many different products, right, I want to make so many different products and make you know, accessibility the standard and have really beautiful products. And sometimes I fluctuate to like going between do I redesign all assistive tech because all of it is so ugly we deserve so much better than this, or do I just stay in the beauty space. But I guess the core of everything for me is that, like, I really think that all personal care and beauty products should be esthetic and they should be beautiful for everyone. And at the moment that doesn't exist when it comes to people with disability. It's like, okay, cool, here's this aid that is super ugly and it sucks. The challenges we live in this like a like attention upon me where attention is really really really expensive and I'm very much learning this is it some funded bootstrap founder who also so they can live. It's very expensive, so capital will help me scale a lot quicker and get like my product's into the hands on more people, But then also have the feedback that we need to know where the next direction is because I don't want this to be all about me. I want to learn from the community is to like where is the best place to go next? Because the thing that I've realized in this is we have a huge problem with data, a huge problem. So when I'm pitching to investors, you know, I can talk about all the macro the macro figures like the censor start a one point three billion people who have a collective spending power of thirteen trillion dollars. But they're like, yeah, and how many use beauty products? And that's the hard thing because no one's doing the research because research is expensive. All like platform reviews, Like if we look at a Mecca or a Sephora or you know, anywhere where you're buying products from, and you read the recommendations and the reviews, right, you have no idea the demographic makeup of that person. You don't know what type of skin tone, skin texture, all of those things have.

00:29:06

Storm: So we have a problem with. Beauty data across the board, but we also have a problem with data specifically when it comes to the disability community, because even in the market research, so like a lot of these big beauty brands I've learned, do a lot of market research, but they don't ask about accessibility needs. We completely flabben it. You know. We also don't ask about, like a lot about the queer population as well. So it's really hard to create specific products when we don't have the data that we actually need for me to say, hey, I know that this problem is here, and I know that this consumer group or this target market wants accessible products. I can hypothesize about it, and you know anecdotally, I know that because you know people disability of humans, so they have the same like need, some preferences as anyone else. But I don't have the data. And that's one of the most challenging things because investors want data. They want to they want to see tangibly that a problem exists, that there's a market to sell to, and. They're going to get a return on their investment.

00:30:17

Peta: It's also probably a self fulfilling prophecy, though, because even if you look at that data and maybe it's lower than you expected. Disabled people might not be able to access makeup because of their dexterity or their access needs, and therefore your product is so useful. So I can see where you're sort of at a stalem, going, well, you sort of just have to trust my DT and what the community is telling.

00:30:44

Storm: Us the way that I'm really trying to frame it to investors, or like for instance, to Laurel, the way that I actually framed it to them. I don't have you heard of the Haptera. The land Com Hapta is this device that is a pretty high ten AI integrated product for people. I think they specifically designed it for people with upperling disabilities, but also trenors as well. And it's a beautiful looking device. It's gorgeous, but it still has not come to market three years after the press release, which obviously creates a lot of distrust in the community because you're like, who are you building this for the press of us and they're only releasing three hundred of them, and on top of that, it's going to be four hundred pounds. I actually got the chance to speak to the CEO of l'Oreal, who owns Lancome, about this specifically, and he said, oh, we've done a little bit in this space. You know, we have the hap of it. Oh my gosh, it was so expensive. It was hugely expensive, and you know, we've had to put it under and the lung Com brand and make it premium because it was just so expensive to develop. And I don't even know what's kind of come to market. And I said, that is the problem. We constantly look at disability as this huge problem that needs to be solved, and my kind of philosophy on it is I want to create low cost attachments to start with. It allows us to be able to get the data that we need to say, okay, how many people are actually interested in using makeup? And then it gets us the community that we need to actually say, hey, what products do you need? What challenges do you have? And then we actually get to ask the questions instead of you know, only relying on really small focus groups to gather like little bits of data that we have. Makes it really hard because the way we you know, commercialize products to you know, a mainstream audience is like Loreel has a group of seven thousand people that they do like surveys with to be able to get that market research. We don't have anything like that when it comes to disability, so it makes sense as to why we're not making products for that community because we actually just don't know what they need and no one is asking the question.

00:33:08

Peta: It's been such a pleasure talking to you today's Storm. You're clearly so passionate about the disability community, and it always makes me so happy to know that there are so many people out there like you trying to make things easier, better, accessible, equitable, all those good. Things that we love. Thank you so much for creating Storm Beauty. I really wish you all the success because you deserve it. It's really hard to start a business, so congratulations on everything you've achieved so far and will into the future. For those who listen to the podcast regularly, they know that My last question is about question you wish you never got asked, but I'm going to switch that up for you today. What is one question that you wish all these beauty investors or beauty companies would ask you about disabled people?

00:34:02

Storm: Oh, that is such a good question.

00:34:05

Storm: Oh my gosh, what's the one question I want them to ask me about what not having accessible makeup products means? That's what I want them to ask me, because the accessible makeup products is just one part of the story, but it's what it means when we don't have accessible beauty products. That's the thing that I want them to ask me, because that's the human experience in it is that when you don't have products that work for you, you often blame yourself to start with. That's the experience of all the conversations that I've had with people in my community, is people blame themselves instead of the products. And then they go, but I'm not beautiful. If you're not making products for me, it's because I'm not beautiful, and then we don't have the representation and all of those things. So I want them to ask me about what it means not to have them.

00:35:01

Peta: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the I Can't Stand Podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, the best way you can support the show is by sharing it with a friend or posting about it on social media, and if you have a moment, leaving a rating and review helps more people find these stories. Don't forget You can always send me an email I Can't Stand Podcast at gmail dot com. Or you can follow me over on Instagram at Peterhook. I'll see you next week. I would like to respectfully acknowledge the wondery and bunner wrong people of the Call and Nation of which I record the podcast today, and I pay my respects to both elders past and present, along with and especially to those in the First Nation's communities who are disabled themselves offs