A Clean Slate
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Where the idea came from
I had a long career as a fashion editor and was taking some time off. My goal was to start a business in wellness, but should it be food? Fitness? Then—and this is going to sound very woo-woo—I had a lightning bolt moment. It was 3 o’clock in the morning. My family was sleeping, and I was shopping online for beauty products. All of a sudden, the entire idea came to me: I want to create a small shop that feels inviting—a place where I would want to go to just hang out—and has the best curation of safe, clean, luxurious beauty products.
I woke up the next morning and told my husband. I felt this bizarre sureness. I knew that I would be successful and that this was what I was meant to do. And from that point until the moment I opened my doors, I never had a single doubt—which is very, very strange because I always question everything and have a hard time making decisions. But I doubted this not once. When I say not once, I really mean not once.
First steps
I pulled images to represent my vision, researched ingredients, and purchased a hell of a lot of products to test. I started fielding questions about clean beauty from friends. Then I’d host pop-up events. I’d create gift bags with my brand name and logo and fill them with great products. I was building a community and creating awareness around ONDA and the mission. Really, I knew nothing about starting this business. I learned as I went, and I turned to people who could help—someone who knew how to create a pitch deck, someone who could explain brand building, someone who told me I needed a pro forma.
The answer, I found, was don’t jump from A to C. I took the steps I could each day, even if it was spending five minutes on the business or doing two things. Do this and you’ll be incredibly surprised how far you've come after a year or even a month.
The initial goal
One friend asking me about clean beauty was Naomi Watts. She’d come to visit and forgotten her beauty products, so I gave her some; her skin responded immediately and she fell in love with clean beauty. She introduced me to a business partner who said, “Do you want to open a store or start a business?” I thought, Well, hell, let’s shoot for the business. Within months, we launched an e-commerce site, filling orders and writing personal notes to customers. Meanwhile, we looked for a retail space and opened our first store in Tribeca in New York City. Naomi came on as a partner, too.
On opening day, so many people from the community we’d built from our pop-ups came to visit and shop. As they did, they were using all the words that I’d envisioned: Oh, I love this space. I want to live here. It smells so good. It sounds great. Everything looks beautiful. This is such a wonderful curation. It felt surprising—and then not surprising at all.
My hardest moment
We grew fast. We brought on investors and then business advisers from London. We quickly opened a second store in Sag Harbor and then, not even a full year later, a third in Australia. We were dealing with a lot of personalities with very different ideas. How do you retain the essence of what you created in the first place when you can't be in four places at once? Then the pandemic happened. My business partner stepped away, and we closed locations. My team and I had gone through the wringer. Eventually, we decided to sell to a big beauty company. It felt like, Here, take my baby and do what you want with it. They changed it a lot. And then they pulled the plug. I went into hiding for about two weeks. I was incredibly depressed, and grappling with what to do because it wasn’t really mine, but it was gone.
Coming full circle
Someone told me that I could buy back the brand in bankruptcy court. It’s a bidding process, and it seemed like no one but me was interested, but I had to wait 10 days. Then, three minutes before the deadline, a higher bid came in from the Middle East. We went to court oversight, and somehow I won. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.
Since then, I’ve reopened the store in New York City, this time with no partners, no investors, no board of directors. It’s just me and a very supportive, amazing staff. I think it was George Clooney, of all people, who said that success doesn’t really teach you anything; it's the mistakes you make along the way. That definitely applies here.
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