Tatcha

“We were not profitable for the first eight years so we had to personally finance the losses and then when we ran out of money, we would have to go to friends and family and ask for help.”

“No, like 30,000, more than 30,000.”

“Our retail partner, Sephora, who did believe in us in day one. I just couldn't afford to be with them until year five because it requires more investment.”

“Vogue did a spread Oprah, it was on the Today Show pretty quickly. We got a ton of press.”

“One of our first customers, and I don't normally mention our customers, but one of our first customers was Donatello Versace.”

“But about eight weeks later, my skin had pretty much healed. And that was after three years of dermatitis and steroids and antibiotics.”

“We were probably 800,000 in debt at that point, and maxed out all of our credit cards”

“After we launched the blotting paper we had two acquisition offers within a few weeks of starting the company.”

“Finally this one merchant was kind enough to take a meeting with me, and then they gave me a chance to go up there, and we sold out.”

“I took one day off in the hospital when I gave birth, and then I went back to work.”

“If we were independent, I think there's a very good chance we'd be shutting down the company right now.”

“PR agents, even, I couldn't even give people money to take me as a client. And then retailers were not interested at all. So, and everybody also told me at the time, too, that there is no demand or interest in Asian beauty in the U.S. Because it's not aspirati…”

“I looked around the room, and the only thing of value that I had left at that point was my engagement ring on my hand. So I said, I'll just sell my engagement ring.”

“I would have taken the deal.”

“And that meant that, you know, for the first couple of weeks that this was happening, we were down like 80% a day in sales.”

“We had gotten acquisition offers or interest almost annually from our first year, and every, every time we said no outside of the one time where it just fell apart.”

“You asked me about the fundraising, and I mentioned that over the course of a few rounds, it was, it came to maybe a million dollars eventually two, but it was not an organized affair in any way.”

“Into their house for seven years... And worked out of their garage with no salary.”

“We didn't do broad sampling the way that most beauty brands do. And we also did not do heavy celebrity sampling the way that most beauty brands do. Instead, we thought about how to turn our best clients into advocates and ambassadors for us because we found th…”

“I thought the first million was harder than the first hundred million.”

“It was the first diverse leadership team in beauty at any scale and so they lead the company now.”