With Sentou, Lili Vogelsang promises a remedy for razor burn in her underpants. Lea-Sophie Cramer thinks the founder is talented – and would like to see her work outside of the industry.
Lili Vogelsang’s Linkedin profile leaves a determined impression: Internships at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, at the Federal Foreign Office, at the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK). She is also a working student at Roland Berger. Her first job after studying politics took her to the strategy consultancy of Wolfgang Ischinger, head of the Munich Security Conference. She then moves to the Finsbury Glover Hering PR agency in Berlin – and quits her job after just nine months.
Now she is a founder, says Vogelsang over an oat milk cappuccino in a café in Berlin-Mitte. Probably something to do with saving the world, you think. climate protection. Impact. But Vogelsang smiles disarmingly: No, not directly. “We do self-care for down there,” she says: “We want to get the shame out of the pubic area.”
Solution to an intimate problem that many are familiar with
Sentou is the name of the startup that Vogelsang founded in September 2022. She sells a gender-neutral after-shave lotion for the intimate area via her own online shop. The 29-year-old asserts that you are solving a “burning” problem.
She came up with it through confidential conversations with friends. Almost all of her friends know problems that come with pubic hair and shaving, from pimples to rashes to ingrown hairs. In the meantime, she also has the results of a representative survey, which say that every second person has given up sex because not everything was chic down there in terms of hairstyles and shaving.
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You want to ask cautiously: And that’s all? Does that really make this world better? Vogelsang is prepared for this, as she herself has asked herself these questions: “The topic of impact and society is very important to me,” she says. Accordingly, she thought long and hard about the question: is a new cosmetic product really necessary? “Only when I had found enough answers about how I could make a contribution with my idea did I decide to implement it.”
A cosmetics company that doesn’t constantly point out people’s problems
Her goal is to prove that you can also be a “nice cosmetics company,” she says. One that doesn’t constantly tell people what problems they have: wrinkles, dark circles, too much here and too little there. “It’s about feeling good and not about being perfect,” says Vogelsang. And because common beauty standards are not supposed to apply to her company, she is also planning other aftershave products: soon there will be a body hair oil for those who don’t shave and a scrub for those who wax or epilate.
And then? Does she want to stay in the pubic area? “The big vision is to create a care category exclusively for the intimate area,” says Vogelsang. She’s just starting to scale Sentou’s performance marketing. So far, she had partially bootstrapped, i.e. financed her company from her own resources. In part, she was able to use funds from the Next Commerce accelerator program to build the company. A few months ago she was looking for a tech-savvy co-founder via the Founderio start-up network and found Felix Hartmann. And she’s in fundraising. She only met investors last week. There are already first commitments.
Networking trick brings them together with industry size
What helps Lili Vogelsang in all of this is her talent for networking. She likes people, says the founder, communication and exchange give her energy. And she reveals an essential tip for really good networking: “I approach people very actively – but only when I think I can bring something with me.” What she doesn’t do: “Let’s meet for a coffee ‘ offer invitations without input. “I know how valuable time is for people.”
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The following always applies to them: give first. And then see what comes back. Yesterday, for example, she called a supervisory board member of a large beauty retailer. He didn’t want to talk to her at first, but then she wrote him an email: she could bring him some consumer research. And she looked at what the company is doing on social media. And would have three suggestions for improvement. Then he suddenly wanted to get to know Vogelsang.
With Verena Pausder and Lea-Sophie Cramer to Estonia
It was similar with Verena Pausder and Lea Sophie Cramer. Vogelsang learned from their podcast “Fast an Curious” that the investors would like to travel to start-up country Estonia. Vogelsang was in Tallinn for six months for an internship at the Chamber of Foreign Trade.
So she emailed Cramer: “I could help there.” She knows the decision-makers in the Estonian start-up scene and knows how to bring business and politics together. “I know what your agenda might look like, I’ll organize it for you. Are you in or out?” The answer came three hours late: “We are in.” In November 2022, Lili Vogelsang will travel to Estonia with the Pausders and Lea-Sophie Cramer.
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Since then, she and Cramer have been in irregular contact. And Cramer once said to her: “Lili, you are such a talented founder – why the focus on a niche market? Why don’t you look for a business where you can have greater leverage?”
Intimate hygiene doesn’t save the planet. It’s not rocket science, it’s not disruptive, it’s not innovative and probably Sentou isn’t the next German unicorn either. Lili Vogelsang, however, sees this without worry. She is convinced that Sentou products make a difference for individuals in certain situations and that she can build a good, nice company on that.
In terms of market potential, it cannot be ruled out that her startup will become something really big, she says. “But we want – contrary to common practice – to build a long-term and sustainable company that can quickly become profitable and grow under its own steam,” says the founder. “I’m not e-commerce and WHU spirit enough to say, we’re now focusing on marketing and influencers and telling people that they need it.”