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I have two beauty brands. The first, Elizabeth Mott, sells Korean cosmetics. Being Korean-American, I grew up seeing amazing Korean skincare and beauty products. I decided to reimagine them for the American consumer, starting with mascara and eye makeup. Elizabeth Mott was started in 2010 and named in honor of our first studio, on Elizabeth and Mott Streets in New York’s SoHo district.

Six years later, after my husband Vira and I moved from New York to Hawaii, where he grew up, we launched a second company, Hanalei. It is a Hawaiian skincare company that uses island-derived ingredients for efficacious skincare formulas.

People say a crisis kick starts entrepreneurship, and it definitely did for us. I was in the fashion industry and my husband worked on Wall Street. Then the 2008 recession hit. We weren’t unhappy where we were, but both of us were entrepreneurial and wanted to do something on our own. We bootstrapped Elizabeth Mott. In the beginning, Vira and I did everything. This was before Instagram, K-Beauty, before social media took off. Plus, there are tons of challenges creating a business in the fiftieth state and on an island. We have grown slowly, and while we are not yet in major distribution channels like Target, we do quite well on Amazon. There are ways to succeed without having to be in every single Sephora or Ulta store.

There’s a lot of paperwork involved in selling internationally. It takes a lot of time, and there are international laws and a lot of third party agencies and processes involved. For example, if you’re a cosmetics company that wants to sell products to Japan, you have to go through their regulatory process. Hanalei has a catalogue of thirty products, but I’ve only been able to register three of them in Japan because it takes so long to process, approve, and then they want us to change certain ingredients.

Thankfully, Hanalei has been able to sell wholesale through duty free stores, airline partnerships, and international shopping centers. The duty-free stores in Hawaii did so well we opened duty-free stores in Guam and Okinawa. Of course, everything changed after the pandemic; economies went sideways in the worst possible way. But we were born digitally native, so our core business has always been online.

At first, we had no intention of taking Elizabeth Mott international. But when you start a business, the way you think it’s going to turn out, and how it actually turns out, are completely different. In the beginning, I wanted to sell just enough to have a comfortable lifestyle. But now, through online channels like Amazon, we sell to the European Union, the Middle East, and other regions. Today, most of my 27-member team resides in Korea, Pakistan, and the Philippines. We produce all Elizabeth Mott products in Korea.

On the other hand, we did apply what we learned from six years of running Elizabeth Mott to Hanalei. The direct-to-consumer cosmetic industry is like fast fashion in that people are always looking for new and different products. We wanted Hanalei to expose people worldwide to Hawaiian ingredients like kukui oil, papaya enzymes, and a specific aloe vera from the islands.

My advice is to first build a track record in your home market. We never actively sought out international agencies or distributors. They came to us because we had a track record. But it’s not easy selling abroad, at least the way we’ve set up our business, which is very bootstrapped and scrappy. That’s why trade councils are very helpful. They offer a lot of resources. Trade shows are important, too, and probably the easiest way to gain a lot of international exposure in one space. It’s also about referrals and networking. I now have a team that helps me with that, but in the beginning, I flew everywhere to meet with people. I still do that, but back then, we did everything ourselves to save money and prolong the opportunity to network.

People assume that I am an expert in this industry, but I’m not a chemist and I didn’t work in the cosmetics industry. It is definitely possible to create a business that you are not an expert in, especially with direct-to-consumer, the internet, and other nontraditional platforms. Still, it takes the same grit, determination, and hard work. You have to be creative, adaptable, and scrappy.