Ep 025: Waterless Skincare with Seadrop

Today on The Heart-led Brand Podcast, we’re chatting with Serena Advani of Seadrop Skincare!

Serena was working in the beauty industry when she discovered something surprising about the skincare products she was using – most of them were made up of 70-95% water. It seemed strange to be paying for a product that was mostly made from something she could get from the tap at home. And she remembered making her own homemade face masks as a kid with her mom, using recipes that had been passed down by her grandmother that created these powders that you could mix with water to make your own skincare concoctions.

That was the lightbulb moment that led her to start Seadrop – a zero-waste, clean skincare company that makes waterless cleansing tablets that are good for your skin and the environment.

In the episode, we talk about:

How Serena started her skincare company
The #1 piece of advice she wishes she’d listened to as a founder
Some of the big challenges that she faced in the early days – from facing rejection to a last minute manufacturing crisis

Episode Highlights:

Why Serena decided to start a waterless skincare company:

I would say I've noticed that there are two buckets of entrepreneurs. There's one bucket of people who have that drive to start something from scratch and they might not know exactly what the idea is yet, but they know they want to build something. They test, they learn, they iterate on ideas until they find one that they're passionate enough about to go build.

The second camp, which is what I think I fall in, is what I kind of brand as accidental entrepreneurs – where you're not necessarily seeking out the goal of starting a company, but you end up coming across an idea or a space that you're so passionate about that you realize if you don't pursue that today, you will regret it for the rest of your life.

And that's how I felt about waterless skincare. I put two and two together on this being the solution to not only the beauty industry's sustainability problem. But then also just how to create really efficacious skincare that's better than anything else I tried on the market. To give you a bit of context, when I was working in beauty, I found out that our skincare is mostly water, which is surprising. It's kind of crazy that a cleanser is 90 to 95 percent water, which is why you store it in single use packaging, usually plastic.

It's why you add artificial preservatives in. It's also just difficult to travel with. It leaks and it's confiscated by TSA. And I am Indian and I've grown up mixing powders with water at home for skin care for my whole life. That's what my mom has done. My grandma has done. And women in my family have been passing down these recipes of sandalwood and turmeric and chickpea flour with water for generations. So for me, it was more that moment of everything clicking. In early 2021, I was at my grandma's house and we were doing these face masks. And I remember thinking, why are these freshly activated powder with water face masks and skincare products not the standard in the US? It just didn't make sense. It's easier to package, easier to travel with. To me, it just made so much sense. And that was when I knew that I had found that calling. To me, it was worth starting something a little riskier and building something completely from scratch because that idea would keep me going.

#1 piece of advice Serena wish she listened to as a founder:

So I actually wish I took the advice that I kept hearing from other founders and I ended up not taking it, which I regret, but the advice is talk to as many people as you can, as early as possible. I fell into that founder trap right at the beginning when I had the concept of not wanting to tell too many people about the idea, especially in our case where the product is patent pending.

It's really first of its kind and there is that element of fear of telling too many people your idea. And I, now I really understand that every other founder who I talked to, who just kept saying, it doesn't matter. You should share your idea, get more feedback, talk to people, even if they might be competitors, because the chance of them executing on that idea is fairly low.

And the benefit that you get from their expertise is fairly high. So that would be the advice that I wish I took sooner. I eventually did reach that point where I was asking everyone who could help for advice. But again, at first, I wish I would have been able to talk to more people in the really early stages.

Challenges Seadrop Skincare faced in the early days:

There were so many challenges in formulating this product, even finding a formulator who was willing to take a chance on this kind of a waterless tablet product was tough. It took more than 500 cold calls to find someone who is willing to take a chance on Seadrop.

I luckily found this phenomenal cosmetic chemist who was also Indian and it turns out similarly understood how powdered skincare could work well since she also grew up with it. She took our formulation challenge on and was able to create this really beautiful cleanser that I, you know, had to love more than any other cleanser I've used before I launch it and we're so happy with how it turned out.

But yeah, behind the scenes, 500 no's. And I think that's what people don't often see because you only see the finished product there. There was so much rejection that went into building this the right way.

Then in terms of other challenges, yeah, we've run into so many other challenges behind the scenes. For example, one story I love to share is about two weeks before our product launch when we had a party already set up for friends and family. We had invited over 120 people there and everything was set for our launch. Our website was ready. Two weeks before, I got a call on a Friday afternoon from my contract manufacturer saying that there's an issue with the final stage of tablet pressing before they can get the product to us.

And they tell me that the powder form, which again, they need to press into tablets was sticking to all the machinery, kind of like powdered sugar – it wasn't flowing through into the tablet press. I remember panicking because this is again, two weeks before launch, everything is all set. The only bottleneck is the actual product, which is a very important piece to have there on your launch party.

I remember I went straight into problem solving mode. After initial panic, I started cold calling people who work in powdered milk processing, people who work at pharmaceutical companies that might understand tableting. I was on the phone with people who make baby formula at this point. I ended up cold emailing a professor at Purdue who it turns out is a specialist in powdered milk flow ability. And he gave me the advice on how to fix our powder granulation. We ended up re-granulating and the product ended up arriving in time for the launch party, just a day before we were supposed to have this party and everything ended up working out.

No one ever knew that all of that was happening behind the scenes. We were able to solve it, but those are the kinds of everyday challenges that happen with a startup.