Female Founders: Monal Patel & Pinki Gosal of Vasanti Cosmetics On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Risk Tolerance — in the beauty industry newness is essential. There is a lot of time and money that goes into creating a new product and success is not always guaranteed. We have had many products that have not gone according to plan but this has not stopped us from moving forward with many of our top sellers.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Monal Patel & Pinki Gosal.
Monal Patel, Founder & CEO at Vasanti Cosmetics.
Monal has a knack for numbers and the technical know how to successfully manage all retail operations and company finances. Her journey began at Ryerson University where she attained her Business Management Degree with a major in Accounting/Finance. She then found herself growing businesses from the ground up in hi-level management positions for over 10 years before dedicating herself full time at Vasanti Cosmetics in 2005.
When she doesn’t have her CEO hat on, you will find her on a nature hike, listening to a podcast or planning her next adventure. Her motto in life: “you get out of life, what you are willing to put into it”.
Pinki Gosal is the Founder & President at Vasanti Cosmetics. She is creative at heart and has travelled the world, from Italy to Korea to draw inspiration and knowledge of beauty from various cultures. She studied Psychology at York University in Toronto and was able to apply her understanding of people while thinking with an open mind to push boundaries of innovation.
Her journey into the world of cosmetics began in Chicago and landed in Toronto where she spent over 15 years at a leading cosmetics laboratory and manufacturer. She worked closely with chemists and engineers as the Director of Product Development where she used her hi-level expertise to develop innovative formulas, packaging and manufacturing techniques in curating new ideas and growth hacking.
When she doesn’t have her product development hat on you will find her enjoying a glass of wine on a patio taking in life, hiking into the wilderness or dancing up a storm with her huge family! Her motto in life is: “live for today, embrace change and everything will fall into place”
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
When we started in the late 90’s, we simply couldn’t find beauty products that worked on our skin tones. There was a lack of choice and makeup feeling too heavy. Our mission to give beauty a happier meaning began in 1998 and we have not looked back since.
After years of research, development and meticulous attention to detail, combined with the honest feedback you can only expect from your sisters, Vasanti (which means “of spring” in Sanskrit) was born.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
Picture This
You make a big move to Chicago and land your first job there at a high-end beauty studio, owned by an affluent ex-model. It’s your second day on the job and you’re stoked to meet the beloved owner of this company. Your ambitious self is getting ready to greet her, but then the unexpected happens — she arrives and without any hesitation she points at your face and blurts out “Who’s this?! Get some concealer on her!” and continues to walk away. In a panic, makeup artists hurry over to use the darkest shade of concealer on your dark under eyes.
After all their efforts, you’re standing there — shocked — with layers of white ashy concealer on your brown skin and no clue what just happened. This is the first time anyone has pointed out your dark circles, and now you can’t stop obsessing over them. You’re desperate for a solution, but every concealer you try just doesn’t work!
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Funny story, we are trying to stay ahead of trends but realized after a few bombed products that we were too small and didn’t have the marketing power we have today to launch trendy shades/product. For example, we launched a white liquid liner which was trendy in Korea and before K-beauty was a thing but didn’t quite catch on here.
The lesson was to try so you know for sure, fail fast, learn and move on.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There are so many people who have helped us along the way, but the one person who we will forever be grateful to is Sabu of Studio Sabu Photography. He was part of our family back then and he was high end product photographer and did work for major magazines like Wedding Bells. He shot all of product shots for us for free for many years and never asked for anything in return — all he wanted was for us to be successful — this is in the late 90’s and early 2000’s before smartphones had good cameras. We remember people thinking that we were much bigger than we actually were because we had amazing product shots on our website and all of our printed materials as well.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
We live in a gender biased society where women in general are expected to run the household, be caregivers and on top of that they do not have the luxury of time on their side. In anyone’s career there is an opportune time to start your own business. Typically, a woman (or man) straight out of school may not have the skillset, confidence or experience to start their own business. By the time a woman is ready to start her own business she will most likely face a fork in the road where she is going to have to decide between starting a family or starting a business. Commonly, we see that women will choose starting a family over the business.
We were able to overcome this as there were three of us and collectively, we had the skillset, experience and confidence necessary to get us going. We were lucky because there were three of us, we didn’t have the pressure of having to choose one over the other.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
Creating communities and sisterhood where women (and men) are accepting of other women’s choices and not passing judgement on them. Women showing up for other women and supporting them.
The government can help through grants, funding, education, tax breaks for women entrepreneurs.
Introducing entrepreneurship early on in young person’s education so, show what can be possible.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
Women are inherently responsible and have the ability to manage it all. Managing relationships, managing households, managing lives, managing finances.
We remember the first banker that gave us a line of credit told us that he loves dealing with women business owners as he has never had a woman default on a loan.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
We have so many people who come to us and say, “oh you are so lucky you are your own boss or you get you make your own schedule”. What they don’t realize is that your shift never ends.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
Someone with a high-risk tolerance and self-motivated is more likely to be a successful along with the ability to recover fast when you fail.
A regular job would be more suitable for someone who needs stability, structure and direction.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, what are the “Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder?” (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Resilience — we have been in business for 23 years, the business has had its ups and downs
- Thick Skin — we have gotten a lot of unsolicited advice through out the years in the form of why haven’t you done this or tried that and many times it has not been constructive but we have been able to take whatever value we could find from it and not let it phase us.
- Resourceful — the world needed Hand Sanitizer and in a matter of 5 weeks we were able to certify and launch a superior formula. We also deployed our #WeSeeYou program within a matter of days — product donations to frontline workers.
- Inventive — most entrepreneurs start because they see a problem that needs to be solved. The seed for Vasanti was planted over 23 years ago when one of the founders, Pinki, had a “Devil Wears Prada” moment (see story on top 2nd question). Pinki became obsessed with her dark under eye circles and that lead her to create one of our top selling products Liquid VO2 (an orange concealer) almost 20 years ago, long before orange concealers became a thing.
- Risk Tolerance — in the beauty industry newness is essential. There is a lot of time and money that goes into creating a new product and success is not always guaranteed. We have had many products that have not gone according to plan but this has not stopped us from moving forward with many of our top sellers.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
We are using our success to support women and sending a message to women that even while being minority women you can really accomplish anything you are passionate about and that when women empower and support each other anything is possible.
We have also used our success to spread the message of inclusivity. Everyone matters and we have done this from the start of our business over 20 years ago.
We have also used our success:
- By hiring females and supporting their continued learning.
- Helping build a woman’s confidence at an early age so they are able to build and do anything they want.
- Using our success to fund charities like Look Good Feel Better that supports women going through cancer and supporting countless number of everyday women that approach us to support their own charities. We are happy to support and help in any way we can.
- After all our brand was created on the power of sisterhood and supporting one another.
- You can trust each, you can work together, you can build each other up.
- We believe in sisterhood and creating that culture of support to create a better place.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Creating a space and environment of Unconditional Support. A safety net made by women for women. Support ideas, new thinking, approach, healthy practice, inner peace and help minimize insecurities and build confidence so women don’t get into bad situations or feel alone and not included.
We had this experience growing up with our community activities and a strong sense of community care within our 50 closest family friends. Girls of similar ages from other immigrant families our parents knew came together as our parents made sure we had activities and community events that made us feel belonging and ability to form relationships where we felt like we can always count on each other. This type of unconditional relationships formed at an early age helped build the confidence we needed to take the chance to start a business. 40 years later, we are still just as close-knit group of 16 plus girls that feel blessed to have one another.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
We would love to have a private lunch with Bobbi Brown. She has always been a true innovator in the beauty space. Her journey is so inspiring and have the utmost respect for her business savvy.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Female Founders: Monal Patel & Pinki Gosal of Vasanti Cosmetics On The Five Things You Need To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.