Jaime Schmidt got her natural deodorant and toothpaste onto the mass-market shelves of Walmart and Costco before selling to Unilever in 2017. Now she advises Hero Cosmetics co-founder Ju Rhyu, who’s about to go big with her skin-care business.
Jaime Schmidt is the quintessential maker-made-good. In 2010, she started manufacturing deodorant in her Portland, Oregon, kitchen as a hobby. From farmers’ market tables, her products—which came to include soaps and toothpaste—stormed the shelves of CVS, Walmart, Costco, and Whole Foods. By 2017, when Schmidt sold her company to Unilever for an undisclosed amount, Schmidt’s Naturals was in more than 14,000 stores in over 30 countries, with year-over-year growth of 300 percent.
Schmidt, who remains active in her business and has launched an investment fund with her husband, wants to support the next generation of makers: people like Ju Rhyu, co-founder and CEO of Hero Cosmetics. (Hero is based in New York City. Rhyu, whose husband is French, lives in Paris.) Rhyu emigrated with her family to the United States from Korea when she was 3. Back in Korea in 2014, while working for Samsung, she observed that country’s obsession with innovative beauty products, some with ingredients like snail mucin and donkey milk. Specifically, Rhyu—who was struggling with acne—noticed people wearing discreet, skin-toned patches to drain pimples. Something similar existed in the States, but it was marketed as a bandage.
Rhyu hoped to instead sell the patches as beauty products. She lined up a Korean manufacturer and hired a designer for the packaging. But daunted by mounting costs, she initially chose different means to ride the Korean beauty trend: doing marketing for a K-beauty e-commerce business, then founding Inside the Raum, a consultancy specializing in K-beauty. It was during this time that she met her co-founders, brothers Dwight and Andy Lee, who persuaded her to give the patch a second shot.
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