Inspiring Founder's Minimalist Beauty Brand with KonMari

In 7 Hours With, we explore the routines of leading professionals in their space to learn the when, why, where and how they work. In each diary, we will look at what they’re doing at seven different check-ins throughout their day.

Anastasia Bezrukova is the founder of new beauty brand Minori, as well as an IPSY alum and certified KonMari consultant. She created Minori with the inspiration of minimalism and mindful consumption, formulating the perfect everyday clean beauty essentials anyone can use for their day-to-day looks.

7:30 AM

Starting in January of this year, I implemented my first ever morning routine. I’d never had one before and would jump right into working from the moment I woke up. I knew that to get through the monumental task of launching a brand, I would need to take better care of my mental health and start the day off mindfully.

At 7:30 AM, I go into my office which is always filled with sunlight, and take 20 minutes to read a book while drinking my coffee. Then, I turn on either a YouTube meditation video or my Waking Up app, and meditate for 10-15 minutes. I’ve been meditating daily for 10 months now and am very grateful to have allowed myself to try this practice.

8:30 AM

After that, I do a 20-minute workout. Then I shower and do my makeup! I’m the founder of Minori, a clean and vegan minimalist makeup brand that launched this summer. Prior to launching Minori, I worked in the beauty industry at IPSY on the merchandising team, and before that I was a beauty and personal care buyer for Canadian retailers. I am still getting used to my new role as a founder of a brand that is now launched, and I have a small team who helps me with influencer marketing, content creation, and retail outreach. Being available to guide and motivate my team is definitely my number one role as a founder.

Outside of managing my team, my days are essentially filled with trying to learn and implement best growth practices. One week, I’ll be digging into best email marketing practices and work on setting up a new email flow. Another week, I’ll work on figuring out how to optimize our website for better conversion and work with my web development team to implement the needed changes. Fundraising has been another big element recently as we are working on our Friends & Family fundraising round. In parallel to all of this, I need to also work on product development, as creating amazing products is at the core of our business.

10 AM

Today, my work day began around 10 after I finished my morning routine of reading, meditating and working out. First thing, I’ll jump into Slack to see if anyone on my team is waiting on anything from me. I get a notification that my PR team urgently needs me to send them the info for our holiday bundles. I take the next 20 minutes to prepare a few slides with all the needed information and photos so that they can share the information with editors.

Minori was born out of my need for a simpler approach to beauty and a more mindful approach to shopping in general. I worked in the beauty industry for 6 years before launching Minori, and saw that the biggest pain point a lot of women had with the beauty industry was that it had become way too noisy and complicated. There is an overload of options, trends, and makeup tutorials to watch. It makes a lot of us feel quite lost and not know where to start.

Minori’s answer to this overwhelming space is to create a makeup line that is hyper-curated, with products that are very simple to use, made to be useful for your everyday beauty routine (we’re vanilla… in the best possible way!), and multipurpose whenever possible. I did my certification a few years ago with Marie Kondo and her team, which definitely fed into my creation of this brand. I fell in love with the method in my mid-20s when I was struggling with impulsive shopping and accumulating way too much stuff that ultimately did not make me happier.

Applying the KonMari method to my life was so transformational that I wanted to help others declutter their homes as well. I did quite a few client sessions before COVID hit, and now that everyone is getting vaccinated and feeling more comfortable with having visitors in their homes, I will start working with clients again. I want to focus on helping beauty industry professionals, makeup artists, and content creators, as they particularly struggle with organizing and finding a balance between keeping things they need for their work and being able to let go of excess clutter.

11 AM

At 11, I have a follow up call with a potential Angel Investor, so I take a few moments to write down my big talking points, pull up my investor deck in case I need to share any numbers, and get into the mental zone to ace that call. Then I’ll take a look through my emails and spend the next hour working through a few notes from the team. A new Canadian retail order landed in my inbox, so I passed it along to my Canadian warehouse (my mother in law!) and created the invoice right away to send to the store.

Then I get an update from my PR team that our interview with Lonny Magazine just got published, where I spoke about how I set up my Minori home office. I read through it and share with my mom and mother-in-law who love getting this type of update from us!

2 PM

I just finished recording a podcast! I had a lot of fun recording for the Blondie Beauty podcast on Zoom with Mackenzie Judge. I spend an extra 30 minutes after recording to get to know her and her journey a bit.

Then I realize that I haven’t eaten anything all day, so head to the kitchen to make a big salad for myself and my husband. Eating at a consistent hour is my biggest struggle. Lunch can be anywhere between 2 PM and 4 PM, depending on the day’s activities.

5:30 PM

This is around the time I start my CEO night shift! Tonight I’ll be reaching out to a few subscription box companies that my intern has identified as good fits for us. We are interested in sampling with boxes that focus on clean, vegan and cruelty-free brands. I spend the next two hours reworking our retailer deck to include information that will be relevant for subscription boxes.

This night shift is important, and the biggest productivity hack I’m trying to implement is to not answer emails sporadically throughout the day, because that can easily destroy my day. I’ll work on emails once in the morning, and once in the evening before going to bed.

I’m so excited for what’s next for the brand — we’re looking at a multi-brand collaboration with other minimalist brand founders that will allow us to partner up and seed a group of influencers with our products in a much more streamlined way. I’m just starting to work on this, and currently scoping out the interest from other founders and laying out a roadmap of how we can execute this collaboration.

12:00 AM

I finally go to bed and listen to 10 minutes of meditation theory on my Waking Up app to try to calm my mind before falling asleep. I’m still working on improving my productivity. I’m pretty hard on myself in regards to this. I want to push myself twice as hard as what seems to be realistically achievable in a day or a week. A big part of my meditation practice is trying to accept the fact that my to-do list will always be long, and that I need to get through the day without feeling overwhelmed and anxious about it.

That’s a wrap!