Storm Menzies knows better than most about the challenges of finding funding to back women-led startups.
The founder of accessible beauty tools startup ByStorm Beauty set out to help more than 700 million women globally living with a disability to look and feel good, launching last month.
Menzies has mild cerebral palsy, and after breaking her dominant hand, found she couldn’t do the simplest things, like open a mascara or paint her nails.
And so ByStorm Beauty was founded to solve her problem, knowing the frustration she felt was shared with millions of women.
“I remember sitting on the bathroom floor defeated after trying to do my makeup for the first time and giving up. I felt embarrassed, like a failure, and honestly guilty that I never thought deeply enough about makeup & accessibility to realise that someday, it might impact me too,” she recalls.
Margie – one of the beauty aids from ByStorm
“I felt a lot of shame realising that people with more complex disabilities than mine can’t use makeup at all because of how it’s designed, yet here I am crying on my bathroom floor.”
“I realised that sitting in frustration wouldn’t change anything. It hit me that if I couldn’t open or hold these products, how many others couldn’t either?”
The solutions for many show how inventive women can be – using everyone from tennis balls to rubber bands and hot-glue guns as makeup tools.
But in looking to solve the problem, Menzies also found a deeper, darker truth.
“In that initial discovery phase, I was shocked by how nonchalant the young girls I was speaking to said, ‘Oh, well no one thinks we’re beautiful so why would they include us?’,” Menzies said.
“The more people with disabilities I connected with, the more I realised it’s not about being able to use a product, it’s about what not being able to use a product means. What are we saying to young girls with disabilities if they have never seen themselves represented in the beauty industry?
“Well, I can tell you what they think it says… It says ‘you don’t belong’, and something I’ve heard countless times since starting ByStorm – ‘you’re not beautiful’.
“That’s what really lit the fire in me to change how people with a disability are included and represented in beauty.
You beauty
Now Menzies has someone who sees the beauty in her idea and what it means, comedian Celeste Barber, founder of makeup brand Booie Beauty.
The duo are collaborating to offer ByStorm’s products with Barber’s makeup.
A fortnight ago, Menzies launched her debut tools, Betty and Margie, which were co-designed with people with disability to work with the makeup products people already love.
“The truth is, disabled people miss out on experiences that build confidence and connection, not because of their bodies, but because the world was never designed with us in mind,” she said.
“I’ve always been deeply passionate about equal access, having worked in the NDIS space for over a decade. Plus, I’m someone that can’t sit still once I’ve got an idea – I was recently diagnosed with ADHD which came as no surprise to anyone close to me.
“So when I realised how normalised exclusion was in the beauty industry, I did what anyone with a hyper-fixation would do… I bought a 3D printer, taught myself how to 3D model, spent all of my savings, developed prototypes, tested those prototypes, had my designs torn to shreds, and then started the process all over again until I landed on Betty & Margie.”
Booie Beauty founder Celeste Barber and ByStorm founder Storm Menzies
Barber got her idea from the start, Menzies said, although having the attention of an Instagram-famous star was wild, she confesses.
“Working with Celeste has been surreal. She got it instantly. She didn’t see ByStorm as some charity project; she saw it for what it is – a game-changing design that the beauty industry has ignored for far too long,” she said.
“I’ve been told more times than I can count that ‘there’s no market’ for accessible beauty, that the market is just too niche because ‘disabled people just don’t need makeup’. Celeste backing us before we even had finished products felt like someone saying, “I see you. I see what you’re building, and it matters.”
“She never asked once about the market size or profitability. She, like me, couldn’t live with the feeling that people would be excluded from the joy of makeup and wanted to do something about it.”
It was also a massive FU to venture investors who didn’t believe and an industry that makes people with disabilities feel invisible.
“Celeste’s support feels like a giant, glittery, lipstick-shaped middle finger to an industry that has excluded us for too long,” Menzies said.
“Personally, it makes me feel like we really can change the face of beauty – and that accessibility will finally become the standard, not the exception.”
- Disclosure: The author was the first external investor in ByStorm. After a practise pitch session with founders at the University of Newcastle’s I2N accelerator, we gave Storm Menzies $20 as her first investment.
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