How one beauty founder’s tenacity led to a million-dollar breakthrough

Camille Bell remembers everything about the moment her cosmetics company won a $1 million innovator grant. When she tells the story, it’s like it’s November 3, 2022 again. She’s back in the same chair she’s applauded 38 other business owners from all night, slowly realizing why everyone is looking at her.

“The tears are just streaming down my face,” she says, her voice filling with emotion. “And they say, ‘I want everybody in here to stand up. Stand up! Get out of your seat! Camille Bell, founder of Pound Cake, won the million dollars!”

“What DocSend does is it eliminates all [of] that,” Bell continues. “It’s just this one link and you can send it to a bunch of people. You’ll always be able to see what time, what location, who exactly was looking at your deck and [at] what slides. It helps us be more efficient with our time.”

It took Pound Cake seven years to get on the market; Bell doesn’t want to waste any more time getting to their next goal. Maybe waste isn’t the right word: After all, she learned a lot along the way.

Making Pound Cake

Like many founders, Bell started Pound Cake to meet a need of her own. Bell wasn’t allowed to wear makeup growing up, so she had to wait until her first day at Temple University in Philadelphia to experience it.

“When my dad dropped me off, an hour after he left, I went across the street to Rite Aid and bought as much makeup as I could,” she says, laughing. “I got this purple lipstick, a foundation, [and] concealer. I got eyeliner, I got mascara [and a] bright pink blush. I also may have gotten some false eyelashes.”
 

Good old trial-and-error, YouTube tutorials, and an elective taught Bell the beauty tips she missed as a tween. She soon picked up something else: The way makeup looked in its tube or compact rarely looked the same on her.

“I’d be like, Wow, that looks so beautiful. Let me put it on my skin,” Bell explains. “But when I would put it on, it would either not show up at all, or, if it did show up, it was a completely different color than what was being advertised. It’s just such a shitty feeling."

Bell complained about it to her friends enough they eventually suggested she “do something about it.”

“I was like, ‘You know what? I will.’”

After graduating in 2015, Bell had a name and concept down. Pancake or cake makeup, the cosmetics industry’s great-great-grandma, was invented in the 1900s without consideration for women of all shades. Pound Cake, then, would be a call to arms: Destroy the industry’s belief that there are such things as universal shades. An online quiz would help customers find the right shade for them.

Bell joined Temple’s business incubator, and won $500 in a pitch competition. With her student discount, it was enough to get a Mac, but not much else. So when she found a $1 million team pitch competition, she knew she had to apply. Bell asked fellow alum Johnny Velazquez and two close friends to join her on stage in Boston. They made it to the semifinals, but didn’t win. After a few more competitions, Bell noticed a pattern:

Apply and get accepted.
Appear in the competition’s promotional material.
Advance to the final round.
And then… nothing.

“I’m being told, ‘Oh, you have a good idea, but you don’t have a product.’ ‘Yes, we saw you got a prototype, but [the winner’s] actually on the market,’” she says now. “The goalposts kept moving.”

By 2017, Velazquez had gone from being Bell’s pitch deck designer to Pound Cake’s co-founder. But after a solid year of losing pitch competitions, they were ready to quit. Advisors from Temple’s incubator advised them to do market research first. After speaking to 300 people, Bell knew two things: They shouldn’t quit and it was time for crowdfunding.

Let’s go to our own community who will get it, she thought.

Some tricks and an unexpected treat

Get it they did: By Halloween 2017, the last day of Pound Cake’s Indiegogo campaign, 167 backers had helped the duo reach a little over half of their $20,000 goal.

“We’re just talking each other up, like, ‘It’s still a success. We can still take this money,’” Bell remembers. “And all of a sudden, I refresh the campaign and it says we surpassed our goal.”

After Velazquez got Bell to explain what she was “Oh my god”-ing about, an email from someone at a major tech company explained the sudden $10k’s provenance.

“Hey, I’m the guy who donated,” it read. “We’re doing a promotion where we’re getting people to their goal. We’ve been following your campaign since you started and we just needed you to meet half your goal.”

With that (and $10,000 from another Temple pitch competition win), they had enough for research and development. Bell wanted their first product, Cake Batter, to be lipstick. And its first color would challenge a “beauty don’t” women with deeper skintones have heard since the days of cake makeup: You can’t wear red lipstick. A lab in Utah promised to create a proprietary formula for $7,500 upfront. The first samples left much to be desired.

“I’ll never forget,” Bell says now. “It was a pink, really thin, liquid lipstick that was crumbling.”

Not wanting to be out $7,500, Bell and Velazquez worked with them for a year before switching labs. Getting the color right was harder than they anticipated, but they had to be particular.

“We have one shade of red [that] we break down into slightly different variations so when they’re applied to specific skin and lip tones, they all look like that same color,” Bell explains. “We would test it on my friend Kethura who’s darker than me and has a darker lip tone. If the red was still showing up orange on her, I was like, ‘No.’”

Cake Batter’s launch and production were delayed further: The lab’s only chemist was OOO from December 2019 to February 2020. COVID came in March 2020 and shut the lab down until July. At the same time, there were reasons to stay hopeful. Beauty culture was changing: The 2017 “Fenty Beauty effect” and ensuing foundation shade arms race, saw the industry expand.

When mega brand Glossier awarded Pound Cake a spot in its inaugural grant program, the timing couldn’t have been better. Bell had just shipped boxes of Cake Batter tubes to the lab in Canada—they could fill them by September 2020, just in time for Glossier’s announcement and Pound Cake’s official launch, an event two years in the making. (Really five, but who’s counting?) This was it!

Then the samples arrived… and it wasn’t good. The lipstick had separated, leaving red clumpy pigment floating atop an oily base, and aesthetics aside, the product didn’t work; the color crumbled off in dry flakes. When Bell called the lab’s owner, it got worse.

“He was like, ‘Oh, I was going to call you. We’re not going to be working with Pound Cake anymore.’ What? ‘Yeah, we got a bigger client and this process is just too much for us. You’re responsible for shipping your vials back.’”

Click.

Seeing red, then seeing green

It was too much for Bell and Velazquez. The news, plus years of stress, were a one-two punch that devastated them both and sent Velazquez to the hospital with a heart attack.

Is this the universe’s way of saying, “This is not for you?” they wondered.

Glossier’s support—and an accompanying $10,000 grant—stopped them from posting an apology statement to their Indiegogo backers. They found a New Jersey-based lab focused on indie creators, and spent all of 2021 reformulating Pound Cake from scratch. (Turns out the Canadian lab had pocketed their updated formulas and sent fake ones instead.)

“They nailed the pigment load, the vibrancy,” Bell says. “And this time, it smelled like actual cake batter. We were getting excited again!”

Then the universe really started moving in their favor. They won a coveted Allure “Best of Beauty” Award before they’d even launched. (And reminder: Post-launch, they sold out in two days.) TIME named Cake Batter Lipstick as one of the best inventions of 2022. By 2023, Pound Cake had a steady stream of sales buoyed by ecstatic word-of-mouth and social-media comments.

“In a rare moment in the beauty industry a product is EXACTLY what it says it will be and so much more,” an early five-star reviewer wrote. “So excited you are here. I can’t wait to see what is in store for this brand.”

That part of their story, you already know. Since winning a million and ugly crying in front of Pharrell and thousands, Pound Cake has only gone up. Cake Batter is now sold in 800 Ulta stores and through clean beauty retailer Credo Beauty. (They sent assets for Pound Cake’s physical displays to their new partners using Dropbox.) Cake Batter comes in a new color (brown) and Pound Cake launched their second product, a neutralizing lip oil called Melted Butter, in 2024.

And with this new round of fundraising powered by DocSend, Bell and Velazquez hope to continue expanding their team and their line.

”It has been cool to see who is opening our pitch deck, how many times they’re opening [it], from what location,” Bell says. “I get to see even what page they’re lingering on, and for how long. It’s also a way to [notice], ‘Hey, we didn’t give this person our pitch deck, but they viewed it.”

It’s more than Bell could have ever imagined during those years of “hiccups,” as she prefers to call them now.

“If I had given up, if I never applied, there would still be countless people of color feeling overlooked in beauty aisles,” Bell says. “Pound Cake didn’t just fill a gap: We created a space where everyone can feel valued and celebrated.”