LOIS Beauty Craft founders discuss their experience in the RCIE Accelerator Program
Laura Osorno and Ivan Souza had an idea and prototype for their startup LOIS Beauty Craft but they lacked the mentorship and financial capital needed to help move the idea forward. Last April they applied to, and were accepted in to, the RCIE Summer Accelerator Program. The program partnered them with a mentor, provided non-equity seed funding, and helped them raise additional matching seed funding. Below they share more about their startup and journey though the RCIE Accelerator Program.
Question: What is LOIS Beauty Craft?
LOIS Beauty Craft is a beauty startup focused on providing natural, safe, time-saving, and pre-formulated “Craft-It-Yourself” (CIY) skin and hair care. We are joining the green and clean beauty movement by developing products for the community interested in having fun with beauty care, while consuming environmental-friendly products.
Question: What inspired you to create LOIS Beauty Craft?
We noticed that many people, especially millennials, have been making their own skin and hair care products at home and posting tutorials on YouTube. We understand people are doing this because they are afraid the chemicals in mass made cosmetics are not safe and they would like to have more control over what they apply to their skin. Even though we think it is really cool that people are being so creative and welcoming to the do-it-yourself beauty trend, we are also concerned with the potential risks of making your cosmetics and mixing things at home without having any formulation training. Making cosmetics at home is fun, but can also be harmful to your skin health. Therefore, we started LOIS to share our experience in beauty care and offer a safe and convenient solution to homemade natural beauty routines. By promoting our modular Craft-It-Yourself beauty products, we are building an educated community empowered to make better decision about their beauty routines, while expressing their true selves crafting with eco-friendly, vegan, natural, and organic products.
Question: What makes LOIS Beauty Craft unique?
Like many other clean beauty startups we are selling a product, but our business model is grounded on sharing our knowledge in beauty care and formulation design with our customers. The reason why people are posting millions of homemade beauty tutorial videos is because they are eager to learn and share what they have learned. As scientists and educators, we are reaching out to this community to offer guidance on the best and safest practices in do-it-yourself beauty.
Question: Why did you choose to participate in the 2018 RCIE Summer Accelerator Program and how has it helped you thus far?
We were at Rowan when we met and created the concept of LOIS Beauty Craft. Our first approach was to look into the opportunities we could find at Rowan to help us grow our idea. We were very happy to learn that Rowan had a program such as the RCIE Summer Accelerator, because we believed we had a great idea for a product, but we needed some business 101 coaching (as we both come from science majors) and also some seed fund to start designing our prototypes. Our mentor through the program shared with us very useful experiences on how to start a business and on how to keep track of our main goals, as one can easily get distracted with the excitement of starting a new company. It saved us from making many of the initial mistakes first-timer entrepreneurs usually make. The seed fund also helped us make our dream come closer to reality. When we started we had a passion and an idea, when we finished the program we were even more passionate, we had prototypes with great feedback, a website, a registered LLC, and the energy of our team was fully renewed!
Question: Do you have any advice for student companies applying to the RCIE Summer Accelerator Program? What is something you would tell students who want to be in the program?
Make sure you use the coaching and the fund to set up a method to get feedback from potential customers. We learn a lot from talking to our future clients and they can provide valuable insight on how to improve your idea, product, or service.
About Laura and Ivan…
Laura holds a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. from the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering at Rowan University. Ivan received his B.S. in Pharmacy from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, and just completed two years of postdoctoral research for the Department of Chemical Engineering at Rowan University.
For more information on Rowan’s Entrepreneurship programs please visit our website or email us at RCIE@rowan.edu.
