Disrupting Body Care with Chelle Body | The Heart-led Brand Podcast Episode 002

In this first interview episode for our new podcast, The Heart-led Brand, we’re chatting with Rashel Hariri and Gloria Chik of chelle body!

chelle body is a no-fuss, simple ingredient body care brand created to make everyone feel great in their own skin. chelle body launched in 2022 and is growing rapidly. The team has been featured in publications like GirlBoss, The Quality Edit, Vitadaily and more! They're on a mission to create unique body care products that make an impact on your body after the first application.

Episode Highlights:

On how they decided to start chelle and chose their first product:

Rashel: “Part of my nature is I always see things and I’m like, ‘This should be a business!’ […] With this one in particular, I knew that the product worked really well because it worked for me. It helped with my ingrown hairs It helps smooth my skin. But I think I had my cultural blinders on. I’m like, ‘Well, this is more of like a Persian thing and a Middle Eastern thing. It wasn’t until I had broken that wall and passed it on to a friend of mine from a different cultural background and she was like, “This is really great! And I haven’t seen anything like this before!” That’s when we were like, “Oh, okay! There is an opportunity because it goes beyond my culture and it’s just more about skincare and self care.”

Gloria: “It’s interesting because from my perspective, it was a product that I was looking for, but I think I just didn’t know what it looked like. I feel like I had so many of these types of treatments that I was looking for, but they just didn’t exist. So there was this “aha” moment of when I saw it.”

On doing user testing and starting small:

Rashel: “In the early days, it was just me, Gloria and my mom. From producing the product and creating it, we started with a really small sample. I think the first time we did it, we had 30. And we just wanted to see how long it would take to make that amount. Then we started giving it out to our friends and getting feedback. I think that’s one thing that we’ve been really good at chelle is crowdsourcing feedback. […] We are an indie brand. We don’t have an endless amount of time and resources and money to buy like 10,000 units of something right away. So we started small and we continuously iterate. And that would be my advice to anybody else who’s starting out is there’s nothing wrong with starting small.”

On what changes they hope to bring to the body and skin care industry:

Rashel: “Personally, I like the fact that we are taking concepts of body care and self care that we use in our own cultures that have been used for thousands of years that really haven’t gone beyond the walls of certain groups. I think that in the beauty industry and self care / body care industry, there needs to be more diversity.”

Gloria: “I think a lot of the emotion that I felt from the beginning was this idea of sharing. Because this the whole thing started when you (Rashel) shared something with me and your mom shared it with you. How do we go about doing things that are with intention but sharing and having knowledge and acceptance? […] You know, like the idea of being able to celebrate people of color in exactly how they are. A lot of skincare and makeup is about ‘How do we fix something? How do we change you?’ Whereas we like the idea of discovery and having a conversation and sharing is really a big part of how we operate in these ways. I think that ‘s what makes something so special, right?”

You can follow chelle on Instagram @chellebody and check out their deep exfoliation kit on their website!