Nikki Jack Built Coco Elan by Selling First and Learning the Business Along the Way
When Nikki Jack started making natural deodorant, she wasn’t trying to build a beauty brand. She was trying to solve a problem for herself.
After being diagnosed with hidradenitis suppurativa, a skin condition that caused painful flare-ups, her doctor recommended that she stop using traditional antiperspirants. Nikki started trying natural alternatives, but none of them worked the way she needed them to. Eventually, she went into her kitchen and started experimenting with her own formula.
Her husband tried it, told her it worked and suggested she sell it. That became the beginning of Coco Elan.
What makes Nikki’s story compelling isn’t that she had a perfect plan. She very clearly did not. What she did have was a willingness to put the product in front of real people and let the business teach her what she needed to learn next.
She Started by Proving Someone Would Pay
Nikki did some of the things new business owners are told to do. She formed the LLC. She thought about branding and packaging. She worried about having everything look right.
Then a friend gave her much simpler advice: go sell.
So Nikki found farmers markets, set up a table and started putting the deodorant in front of customers. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but I knew I was selling,” she told me.
Those early markets became more valuable than a perfectly designed launch could have been. Nikki learned what customers were already buying, what they compared her product to, what drew people to her table and whether they would come back after trying it.
They did.
That repeat behavior mattered because people telling you they like an idea is not the same thing as proving you have a business. Nikki had customers exchanging money for the product, using it and returning because it worked. She was gathering real evidence before she fully understood that was what she was doing.
Selling the Product Was Only the Beginning
Once Nikki knew people wanted Coco Elan, a different set of questions emerged. She had to understand pricing, margins, inventory, manufacturing and the financial side of a business she had largely been learning as she went.
At one point, she realized she was selling consistently but still couldn’t understand why the money in her bank account seemed to go up and down without ever giving her a clear picture of whether the business was actually profitable. Later, when we sat down and looked closely at her numbers, she discovered something important: the business was profitable. She was simply spending too quickly and carrying inventory she didn’t need to replace yet.
That realization changed the question from How do I do more? to How do I better use what is already working?
I think a lot of business owners miss that distinction. Growth doesn’t always require another product, another campaign or another investment. Sometimes the business is already giving you the answer, but you have to understand the numbers well enough to see it.
Growth Required Nikki to Protect What She Built
One of Nikki’s hardest lessons came when she outsourced production to a manufacturer. The move made sense. Making products at home was becoming too time-consuming, and if Coco Elan was ever going to grow into larger retail opportunities, Nikki knew she would eventually need production support.
Then a manufacturer changed one of the ingredient vendors without Nikki’s approval. The formula came back different, and the consistency of the deodorant changed.
Nikki ultimately stopped selling for a period rather than send customers a product she knew wasn’t right. The experience taught her that outsourcing production does not mean outsourcing responsibility. A manufacturer may make the product, but the customer still sees Coco Elan’s name on the package.
That lesson now shapes how Nikki thinks about opportunity too. When I asked what she would do if a major retailer wanted Coco Elan in 100 stores tomorrow, she didn’t immediately say yes. She said she might ask to start with five.
There’s a lot of wisdom in knowing that a big opportunity and a good opportunity are not always the same thing. Nikki is still ambitious about where Coco Elan can go, but she is learning to measure opportunity against the actual capacity of the business instead of assuming that growth always means saying yes.
Becoming the Business Owner the Company Needs
Nikki’s story is still unfolding. She is learning how to hire, how to step out of pieces of the day-to-day work and how to see herself less as the person making every product and more as the CEO responsible for the entire company.
What stands out to me is that she didn’t wait until she understood every part of business before beginning. She made something that solved a real problem, put it in front of people, listened carefully and kept building from what she learned.
That doesn’t mean the details didn’t matter. Eventually they mattered a lot. But Nikki had something real to build those systems around because she had already answered one of the most important questions first: Will someone actually buy this?
In our full conversation on The She Can Work Podcast, Nikki shares much more about building Coco Elan, navigating manufacturing, understanding her margins, hiring support and growing into the CEO role her business now requires.
