Founder's Story - Skincare, Success, and Empowering Women: Chithra Kannan Built Skin Centrick from Scratch

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Chithra Kannan, CEO of Skin Centrick shares her journey from being a software engineer and real estate investor to founding Skin Centrick, a skincare line that focuses on natural ingredients and innovative formulations. She talks about how analytics and a passion for clean beauty led her to create a brand that stands out in the competitive skincare industry. Chithra also discusses the challenges of entrepreneurship, how she differentiates her products, and her dedication to empowering other women to start their businesses.Topics Discussed:Transitioning from software and real estate to skincareDifferentiating a skincare brand in a crowded marketThe importance of natural ingredients and innovative product designEmpowering women in business and entrepreneurshipChithra’s story is an inspiring example of how passion, innovation, and determination can lead to success in any industry.Our Sponsors:* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.com* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/FOUNDERSAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have Chitra Cannon, who is the founder and CEO of Skincentric. Chitra, I'm really excited because I've always had this affinity with skincare and I don't want to age. I want to look my best forever, hopefully. But I'm excited to dig into your story. So what made you say, I want to be an entrepreneur, and I want to do it in this industry? Thank you, Daniel. Thank you for this opportunity. I have to be really honest with you. This is not, I'm not going to say that, oh, right from my childhood, I always had a passion to be an entrepreneur or passion to run a skincare industry? Definitely not.

I know my husband since I was a teen. Literally speaking, from my 13, I don't know my husband and myself and him, his name is Shyam. So, myself and him, like we literally grew up from 13 and he was always being there behind me and like we do own a group of companies, like different, I would say childcare industries is our main thing. In Dallas, Texas, we do own four of those.

Plus we are into software. We both had, we were both from a software engineer background. And plus we are into real estate and all. So one fine day, I wanted to get, I think I have always said that, right, I'm scared of PhD. So always into doing different masters. So one fine day I got an admission from Harvard to do analytics and I decided to go ahead and do it. And being an investor, I was like looking okay why don't we kind of be my own investor why don't I start. That's when the idea of skincare like came into it like probably

why don't we have our own beauty line of my own. So I was just talking casually in my family and they said like just go for it. Honestly I don't know how to do makeup. Um, I'm going to be very honest. So I wanted my skin to always look at its best in natural way. So that motivated and, um, doing analytics, I worked in a healthcare industry and I designed it to quit that for good and jumped in and I felt like, okay, this is my inner passion. And I wanted to just run with it. Literally a year and a half back because when I did meet the chemist

and I started discussing my own formula of what we could do. And here I am today, sitting in front of you and giving an interview, I should say. No, that's amazing. I love having the support of your husband, working together, having different businesses, diversifying into different industries is something that in entrepreneurship we know could be key to long-term survival, right?

Because if you put all your eggs in one basket, it could sometimes be dangerous. So I'm very curious because I know the beauty industry is highly competitive, but it could be also incredibly profitable. So how do you separate yourselves in that crowded market? As you said, if you see like if you take from A to Z, every alphabet has lines of beauty care, which we don't even know. And as you said, yes, there are many. So one thing when I decided to come into this beauty industry, that's one of the questions that I asked myself.

And I'm not a big popular name brand to say, OK, this is the concern. Let's go and try this particular product. And nobody knows about me, and nobody know about this brand name, then how we could able to even survive or get into an industry to get a name. So then I started thinking that way is like one being from an analytics industry that helped.

And the second, like I wanted to deviate or have my own version, like how we could able to have a skin centric of its own stuff, right? Like how we could be able to survive. And then we started doing it from a futuristic perspective. Like if we take, for example, if I wanted to say, if take body lotion or take a hand soap, there are different of it, right? Like there are different variety of it. If I'm going to come up with my own hand soap or a body lotion, that's not going to be any different. So then I said, how we could be able to stand alone,

what we could do with it. A lot of serums are upcoming, and everybody wants to look young, as you rightly said. Everybody wants to look at its best. So coming up with what this future has in store for us, going natural, going clean clean and coming up with instead of a makeup remover in like in a chemical way how we could able to go with the natural rate like then started with the turmeric oil, started with the rose

oil and tried to do with the futuristic version and that's how we started getting and something that they haven't heard about it but they do know about serum coming in different versions of it but they do know about serum coming in different versions of serum. If we talk about serum the popular ones are okay they do know about vitamin c they do know about the retinol those are the common ones but how we could able to stand alone coming with the skin cell related serum coming up with a plant still serum and that's how we differentiated thinking futuristic as how I felt like we could probably get in and I think that strategy worked and within a year if I could able to be there with

1 million likes on a tick-tock and this many thousand followers It's definitely because of that uniqueness and bringing in the efficacy. First, I did feel it's like one is like making them come near the product. And I went bold with black. If you see in any skincare industry, black is not common other than the top brands and perfume brands. They do have black. But in the skincare industry, I think I did go bold with black and that attracted. And then the second thing, a strategy I applied is like coming up with a trendy bottle, right?

If you see many of the reviews, they stopped reviewing about the product and they started reviewing about how to use the different bottles, like what is it behind it? What is the direction to use coming up with the trendy bottles? So these two made them come near it. So, okay, they just buy one, but how they could become a loyal customer is like giving that product efficacy, right? When they start using it,

they started feeling the difference from day two, day three. They don't want it to wait for once and once to see a result. Certain serums, they apply, they go to sleep. When they wake up, they say, my dark spot is no longer there. What did you give me? So those kinds of prompting questions became so popular within the short time, I should say. And that's the trend I started following. Yeah. I can tell behind you that you have this affinity for art and sculptures. I can tell that you're very meticulous when it comes to the branding, the ingredients. I can relate to you where you create a product

down to the science of the ingredients and what's in it. And there's no better feeling than crafting this and then seeing it come to life and people use it and they love it. Talk to me about this lipstick that's not a lipstick. What was the story in this? That is definitely a funny story behind it. It's like I was initially mainly focusing on skincare and then I felt like, okay, probably next the aircare. And many have asked me why you didn't go with one but why so many different SKUs and my answer is for any problem and they put it I wanted skin centric to be a

part of a solution. So when I was doing it as I initially said I'm not too much into makeup and I don't wanted to use lipstick over and over again so I did come up with something where they were many that are common that it's like kind of a lip gloss and color changing stuff. But it was all the one thing I did see it's lacking and there is like it does transfer transferable. So when we sip a cup of coffee, it just transfers it and it just fades away within an hour of wear. So behind the mind, like I was always thinking of coming up with something that when you apply it, it's long lasting and then it's good for your lips and it's moisturizing at the same time. It's definitely not anything cosmetics or anything added to

it. And it's transfer proof. So I did come up with one and I, one of my friends' daughter, she was just playing with it. She was just trying with it. And I said, this is something my other friend said that you need to introduce the slip care. And I said, okay, when I was talking to my friend's daughter, she was like, so what are you gonna name this? I said, I don't know. And then she did try it, she opened it. And when she saw it, she said, it's not a lipstick.

And I liked that name and I said, okay, maybe that's the name. So I said, it's not a lipstick. And I liked that name. And I said, like, OK, maybe that's the name. So I said, like, it's not a lipstick, but it could give everything as a lipstick, keeping it in a very natural way. And that's the story behind it. It's just a lip tint. But it stays long. For instance, if you see, my lips,

it feels like as if I did come right out of like after the makeup, but honestly not. This is something I did quit this morning, but it's just taste and your lips will match really be like red and pinkish in color. Well, I like that you are solving a problem. You saw an opportunity in the marketplace and then you solved the problem. You had other people try it. I like that you chose the name of what somebody said. I think that's fun. It creates the story.

Something else that's very inspiring about you is you mentioned that you didn't have this mass following. I think a lot of people stop when it comes to entrepreneurship because they're like, well, I don't have a following on social media. I don't have these resources, but it looks like you took the time to figure things out and create that, but you didn't come into it with being a content creator, for example. Talk to me how you are also empowering other women to get into entrepreneurship. Thank you for asking that question. I always feel if even if it is one person or two person who can benefit by seeing this, then I'm up for it.

As a woman or as an individual or as any woman, human, I would say confidence is something not everybody is born with. I feel it's like a kind of a skill set that you needed to get better at it. So I felt like I had a solid background. I had like behind me, I have a family who's backing me up. Not everyone are blessed with it for different reasons. I felt like if I could be able to empower others, then I feel that I made the purpose of me being here. One thing is like, one thing it could be a friendship, it could be on any different settings, it could be a business or anything. Have zero expectation. When you start expecting that's when you couldn't be able to take

the results because we already preset our mind with certain expectations. When that doesn't happen, we feel that's a failure. So success is something, what is success to me is not success to another person. For some, like getting out of the house to going to an office itself is a card of success because they may not have the correct transport or going there. So when it comes to women stuff,

and that's something that I always been behind the air. And even in November, there is something that's happening in Spain, called Euro America. And I'm one of the keynote speaker to go and talk about like how our brains work, like what we could do different. And I'm also doing some kind of fun to help other women come up in their own business or they do it. Whether you're starting or scaling your company's security program, demonstrating top-notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever. Vanta automates compliance for ISO 27001, SOC, GDPR and more saving you time and money while helping you build customer trust. Plus you can streamline security reviews by

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And you may not all be born with it. One thing is stop thinking deep into what we needed to do. Just wanted to pair up with a very small story. When we, if you wanted to swim, say you wanted to swim, just looking at the water, saying like how deep it is, like whether the water is cold, whether the water is hot, what's going to happen, like how many minutes I could able to survive, like hold my breath. If you keep on thinking about it, you're never going to be as good. Just get into it. Maybe just get your feet wet, then start knowing

it and then slowly take the step. And it is a process. And that's one thing who all wanted to be into the entrepreneurship or who all wanted to start something on their own, just thinking or just collecting is not going to help. Maybe start taking baby steps and you may not be successful on day one but just hand them there. Maybe on week two or after two months or for some cases even after two years. When you look back you would have definitely done something different but just keep running the race. You need to be in the race to be successful. Not just thinking. You cannot have everything picture perfect in paper to dive into it without the start date. And this is something I'm trying to help my other peer women who all have the motivation to do something. a peer woman who all have the motivation to do something. I'm always there and I always say I'm a finger wave

for any kind of support. I hope I answered what you were looking for. I appreciate that because I know the percentage of in the US, how many business owners that do over a million dollars of revenue that are owned by women, I think it's only like 2%. It's very, very a small number. I think it's even gone down the last few years.

So it's great that you're helping to uplift women, inspire, motivate, educate all these things. Can't wait for your, uh, your keynote speech in Europe. I'm sure that's going to be amazing. Something you said that really stuck with me is it, if entrepreneurship was like swimming and you could see the water in the deep end, I don't think anyone would do it. I think it's good that entrepreneurship you don't see, you know, sometimes the possibilities of what's to come because we know it is a roller coaster.

There's tons of ups and downs and tons of reasons why you shouldn't do something or why you can't do something. But there's a lot of, I think there's more reasons on why you should do something. So if people want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information. Maybe they want to hear your talk or they want to figure out like what your funding and all those things. How can they do so? Well, I think they could reach me.

Like I, I'm not a big social media person. I honestly say you did talk about all the social media stuff but they could definitely reach me in LinkedIn and I think contact at SkinCentric. I'm always very curious anything I receive and I definitely try to respond. I definitely try to help may not within an hour or so but definitely within a a week, I'm definitely, I'll reach out so they could reach me in contact at skincentric.com or they could connect me in LinkedIn. Then I'm definitely there to help. One thing I would say is like, we are always multitasking. That's how their brain, they cannot do one thing at one time. They would be cooking,

but they would be doing something else. They'd be listening to music. That's how their brain works. So it's inbuilt. It's within that. So it's just that we needed to do a little fine tuning. And if there is somebody who could tune it, I'm sure every single one can be successful and let's build a community of more and more doing it. So it's not just you being happy.

If you could keep your community happy and if your community posture, then everybody's gonna be happy and then we could bring in a change. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. My wife is a way more successful entrepreneur. She's way better at entrepreneurship than I am. And I always am open to saying that,

but thank you so much for joining us today and all the impact that you are giving. Thank you so much. And she's definitely lucky to have you and you're lucky to have him, right? Like if in a house, if a husband is there to support a wife, I think a wife doesn't need anything more to it. So I'm blessed and I'm glad your wife is also equally blessed.

Thank you.