Meet the brains behind SOSHE. Sahar, Junyi and Aidan, the SOSHE trinity, met by chance as participants in a startup competition as undergraduates at USC. What began as a sunny California dream, an innovative thought jumping out of Sahar’s makeup drawer, quickly became a revolution of refillable cosmetics.
Three G-Zers from completely different worlds, Sahar, Junyi and Aidan bonded over their desire to innovate. Sahar was a curious sophomore studying Computational Neuroscience, and Junyi, a savvy business student with a background in managerial training at a beauty conglomerate. Initially, they met on another beauty-related project for which their team won the entire case competition. However, they still wrestled with the question: why does good mascara have to be wasteful? Short answer: it doesn’t.
Rethinking the entire makeup industry does not happen overnight and the duo needed to find someone to turn their vision into reality, someone who could channel creativity outside of the box and into the perfect sustainable mascara container.
In the meantime, with the true networking spirit of a business student, Junyi scheduled a coffee chat with one of his peers from the competition, whose brilliance and talent were evident from the get-go.
About an hour into the meeting, the two were already beginning the first stages of scrappy-startup product research.
Junyi recalls “I remember meeting Aidan in the USC Village and we had a coffee chat for like an hour. We walked straight to Target, I bought a couple Maybelline mascaras and asked him to re-make a couple of them. ‘Make this refillable.’
He did it and I knew that we were onto something.”
From building rockets in high school to rendering and 3D-printing mascara bottles, Aidan admits that his passion is making and fixing things. When Junyi and Sahar approached him with a detailed request, he remembers thinking, “This sounds awesome because I don’t know anyone that makes it like that.”
So why would three college grads ditch the security of corporate jobs and start from scratch in an industry with competitors whose products line the shelves of every household?
Sahar explains, “It’s a really exciting time to be in beauty. A lot is changing. We’re seeing more leaders emerge from BIPOC and AAPI communities, as well as a number of female founders paving the way in beauty and wellness. It’s about time founders of companies represent the world we walk in. I believe the beauty industry is setting the bar for how we need to approach sustainability solutions and inclusivity in the workplace.”
Aidan states that 2022 is the perfect time to be in beauty because “brands and manufacturers have to take a leap, doing things they’ve never done before. It's exciting to see people try to do things we’ve started years ago.” He, of course, refers to SOSHE’s G.L.A.M. Mascara that is certified plastic negative, clean, cruelty-free, petroleum-free, and paraben-free.”
According to Junyi, who previously worked for a major cosmetic conglomerate, SOSHE is “all about taking a stronger stance on the future of sustainability. Our goal is making sustainable products that are gorgeous.”
“One main takeaway from this is that all three of us have complimenting skill sets. Aidan is great at the design aspects, the more technical ones. Sahar, we really leveraged her creativity and brand aesthetic. Also, she used her sorority house and her friends as testing grounds for the development of the product, anywhere from packaging to formula, to naming to all those things. I’m the numbers side, the marketing point of view and so when you combine all three of us, that’s when we really felt like we had something that worked really well, a triad of different things. ”
Today, it’s impossible to imagine a world where they are not working together.
This is where our origin story ends and yours begins. Sitting pretty on your vanity counter is magic in a bottle. Where will your G.L.A.M. Mascara take you?
Our job is to give our girl the platform …
so she is inventive,
so she listens,
so she collaborates,
so she gives back,
so she is smart,
so she is savvy,
so she is kind to the planet and to others.