"Louise is the girl with the perfect skin.
She says turn on the light, otherwise it can't be seen."
—Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
A question we get (a lot) is, how did we – two regular, non-celebrity women with limited resources who live and work on opposite sides of the U.S. and who have always worked for others – decide that launching a skincare company was the move to make?
I think there are really 3 questions there:
- What does it take to look at your life, in the middle of living it, and come to the conclusion that you simply must take a plunge like this?
- Why do we think we (with no connections, no investors, no deep pockets and no track record) can just waltz through the doors of clean beauty and find support and love when the industry itself can seem hostile to boot-strapping newcomers?
- How do we sustain our belief in what we are doing, in the values we share and in the people who we want to reach and connect with?
Exploring those 3 hidden questions are why we are introducing this blog. In between short posts about the fruit we all love (hint: avocados!), the way our face oil makes skin glow, and other topics, we’ll be sharing our successes and setbacks and lessons we learned along the way.
We believe women founders have an extra responsibility to help others. Not just through our products and philanthropy, but by letting people know that they are not alone in their challenges, and by – hopefully – making the road we all walk a little smoother. We hope you’ll feel like walking beside us, for a little bit of the way at least.
But back to the question at hand … how did we decide that launching Avoila was the move to make?
With skin comes skin challenges. For most of us, that’s just part of being human in the modern world. If you're a Gen Xer, (I'll just Ok Boomer myself now) you may remember the Lloyd Cole song, Perfect Skin. I cringed when that song played because it would never be me. Turns out, it's not most people! And when Kristy and I compared notes, it certainly seemed like we might have experienced more than our fair share of skin challenges!
We'd each looked high and low for solutions: Retin A, steroids, tetracyclines, and on and on and on (don't worry – we're not here to tell anyone to ditch their skin medications or creams that they love. You do you, and let’s keep those discussions between you and your dermatologist, or esthetician, or skin coach, or mother, or bff, or random barista, or whoever you choose). Some of these products seemed to work, at least temporarily. But sacrificing our own health in the name of "beauty" just wasn't working for us. It felt like a trading one issue for another and feeling like the treatment might be worse than the issue, in the long term.
We wanted something better. Something clean and nourishing that would bring real, sustainable improvement. And something that felt nice. And smelled wonderful. And made us feel good. So, in the end, we made it ourselves. And once we did, we saw that this approach to beauty could bring relief and satisfaction to anyone living each day wrapped in human, perhaps imperfect skin.
That’s when our search became a mission, and our face oil became Avoila.
