Skincare, Success, and Empowering Women: Chithra Kannan Built Skin Centrick from Scratch

0:05Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today, we have Chitra Cannon, who is the founder and CEO of SkinCentric. Chitra, I'm really excited because I have 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. I'm not gonna say that oh right from my childhood i always had a passion to be an entrepreneur or passion to run a skincare uh industry definitely not i know my husband since i was a teen like literally speaking from my 13 i don't know my husband and uh myself and him his name is uh sham so myself and him like we literally grew up from from 13 and uh he was always been there behind me and like we We do own a group of companies like different, I would say, child care industries is our main thing.

1:09We are in Dallas, Texas. We do own four of those. Plus, we are into software. We both had a we were both from a software engineer background. Right. And plus, we are into real estate and all. So one fine day I wanted to get. I think I have always said that I'm scared of a Ph.D. 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, and 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 came into it. Like probably why don't we have our own beauty line of my own?

1:56So 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. I'm going to be very honest. So I wanted my skin to always look at its best in a natural way. So that motivated and doing analytics, I worked in a healthcare industry and I decided 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 was 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 Freshview and giving an interview, I should say.

2:40No, that's amazing. I love the, you know, 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.

3:24And 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, right? Like, and I'm not a big popular name brand to say, okay, 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 when I started thinking that way, it's like one, being from an analytics industry, that helped. And the second, like I wanted to like deviate on half my own version, like how we could able to have a skin centric of its own stuff, right?

4:05Like how we could able to survive. And then we started doing it from a future perspective. them like if we take for example if i wanted to say uh 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 gonna come up with my own hand soap or a body lotion that's not gonna be any different so then i said like how we could able to stand alone like what we could do with like a lot of serums are upcoming and everybody wants to uh look yeah as you rightly said like everybody wants to look at its best so coming up was like what this future has in store for us like going natural going 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 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 version 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 one but how we could able to standalone coming with the skin cell related serum coming up with the plant still serum and that's how we differentiated thinking futuristic uh as how i felt like we could probably get in and uh i think that strategy worked and within a year if i could able to be there with one million likes on a tiktok and this many thousand followers it's definitely because of that uniqueness and bringing in the efficacy right first i did um feel it's like one is like making them come near the product right and i went bold with black if you see in any uh skincare industry black is not common other than the top brands and perfume bands they do have black but in the skincare industry i think i did go bold with black and that attracted.

6:05And then the second thing, 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 months and months to see a result.

6:42Certain 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.

7:24Talk to me about this lipstick that's not a lipstick. What was the story in this? There 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 air care. And many have asked me why you didn't go with one, but why so many different skews? And my answer is for any problem and they put it, I wanted SkinCentric to be a part of the solution. So when I was doing it, as I initially said, I'm not too much into makeup. And I don't want to use lipstick over and over again. So I did come up with something where there were many that are common that it's like kind of a lip gloss and color changing stuff.

8:08But it was all the one thing I did see it's lacking in there is like it is transfer, transferable. So when we seek 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 um and it's transfer proof so i did come up with one and i one of my uh friend's doctor she was just playing with it she was just trying with it and i said like um this is something uh my other friend said that you need to introduce this lip care and i said like okay but when i was talking to my this friend's doctor she was like uh so what you're gonna mean this i said like 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 like okay 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 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 with this morning but it's just taste and your lips will naturally 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 you solved the problem you had other people try it I like that you chose the name of what somebody said.

9:49I 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.

10:34As an individual or as any 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 need to get better at it. Right. So I felt like in 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 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 able to take the results uh because we already preset our mind with certain expectations when that doesn't happen we feel that's a failure so success is something uh what is success to me is not success 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 in.

11:41So when it comes to women stuff, and that's something that I always been behind there. And even in November, there is something that's happening in Spain, 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. When you realize you need to hire, it's usually already too late. I've been there wasting weeks waiting for decent candidates. If I had used Indeed, I could have hired way faster. So when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need.

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13:40And you may not all be like born with it. One thing is like 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 gonna happen like how many minutes i could able to survive like hold my breath if you keep on thinking about it you're never gonna be as good just get into it maybe just get your feet wet then start knowing it and then slowly take a step and it is a process and that's one thing who all wanted to be uh into the entrepreneurship or who all wanted to start something on their own just thinking or just collecting is not gonna help maybe start taking baby steps and you may not be successful on day one but i'll just hang 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.

14:46You need it to be in the race to be successful. Not just thinking, you cannot have everything picture perfect in paper to dive into it or to start it. And this is something I'm trying to help my other peer women who all have the motivation to do something. I'm always there and I always say I'm a ping away 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.

15:28So it's great that you're helping to uplift women, inspire, motivate, educate, all these things. Can't wait for your keynote speech in Europe. I'm sure that's going to be amazing. Something you said that really stuck with me is 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.

16:03But 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 you're funding and all those things. How can they do so? Well, I think they could reach me. Like 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 um i receive and i definitely try to respond i definitely try to help may not within an hour or so but definitely uh within a week i'm definitely i'll reach out so they could reach me in contact of skincentric.com or they could connect me in linkedin uh 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 and like they would be cooking but they would be doing something else they'd been listening to music that's how their brain works so it's 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 and i'm sure every single one can be successful and let's build a community of more and more uh 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.

17:34My 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? 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.