By Andrea Nagel

Data is the holy grail of building a business with impact.

With that in mind, Kendra Bracken-Ferguson, founder and CEO of the largest platform dedicated to minority-owned founders of beauty and wellness companies, BrainTrust Studio, knew she needed a data partner that would provide her community with the tools they needed to build their beauty and wellness brands. But this kind of data costs a fortune and is out of reach to most startups.

Kendra began networking and was led to machine intelligence platform Spate, which was founded in 2018 by ex-Googlers Yarden Horwitz and Olivier Zimmer to make data accessible and useful to beauty brands. Via the Spate dashboard, Kendra’s community of Black beauty and wellness founders will have access to more than 20 billion data signals to empower them to make more confident decisions across their product and marketing innovation strategies.

“Our members are the trends setters and Spate is the trend spotter. The convergence of bringing the two together for our founders, who are creating products for everyone, and coupling that with data, is amazing,” said Kendra, adding that in just one year, BrainTrust has accumulated 81 founders, which represent the top 10 brands and $86 million in revenue across 650 products.

The partnership gives a year of data and access to BrainTrust Studio members via an app, as well as one-on-one support from Spate for category specific trends.

“If a founder is specifically looking for new lip trends or fragrance trends or eyeshadows trends, they’ll be able to drill down specifically within a category. We’ll also be able to work with Spate on what that looks like from an execution perspective, what the market needs, how they can innovate their own brands within their category, or expand into different categories,” Kendra said.

For access, users have to be a member of the BrainTrust Studio. There are three tiers of membership: Start, Grow, and Accelerate. There is a nominal membership fee for brands that fall within the Growth and Accelerate tier.

“The important thing, especially since our platform is focused on Black founders of beauty and wellness companies, is that our founders are creating products for everyone. Being able to tap into this data [levels the playing field,]” Kendra said.