Good morning,
When Vicky Tsai was a teenager, her family moved to Houston--and she quickly realized that she’d never fit into the beauty standards surrounding her.
The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Tsai struggled with her identity and desire to fit in throughout her childhood. Then, in her 20s, a job sent her traveling around the world--including a 2008 trip to Japan, where she fell in love with local beauty rituals meant to enhance mental well-being. The experience inspired her to launch Tatcha, a San Francisco-based beauty company built around those Japanese rituals, a year later.
Tsai quickly hit roadblocks--her potential retail partners told her that Tatcha was “too niche” and “too exotic” for Western women--but drove through them, building her startup into one of America’s fastest-growing companies by 2015. Yet even then, Tsai faced obstacles. She stepped down as CEO, after being told by “two middle-aged male consultants” that she wasn’t qualified to run the company she’d led successfully for a decade. Unilever purchased Tatcha for an estimated $500 million in 2019.
Earlier this year, Tsai returned as CEO. Read our story to learn how she’s leading Tatcha through Covid--and how she discovered some crucial realizations about leadership, progress, and bias while she was away. |
