Transcript
Welcome to the Built On Purpose Podcast where we talk with purpose-driven professionals about the challenges and triumphs of trying to make the world a better place through business. I’m your host, John Natoli, co-founder and president of Pollen Brands, a digital branding agency empowering purpose-driven professionals with design and digital ideation and activation here at the Center for Social Innovation in New York and worldwide.
John:
Today, we’re speaking with Sarah Villafranco, founder of the natural skincare brand Osmia, creator of gorgeous artisanal soaps, former emergency room doctor, and Pollen Brands client. We’ll talk about how Sarah found her true purpose (again), going from emergency room doctor to founder of Osmia, facing the trials of her former life before founding Osmia and transforming into the confident entrepreneurial woman that she is today, giving a sense of personal service to digital e-commerce customers, building a team of people who care almost as much as you do, and helping people see the value in a more expensive product using purpose.
Hey, Sarah. Thanks so much for joining us. I’ve explained what Osmia is, so everybody knows, but I would love for you, in your own words, to explain what Osmia is and what Osmia means to you.
Sarah:
It’s sort of a hard word to pronounce and not one that very many people are familiar with, but it’s essentially a nerdy medical reference. I took it from my previous years in the world of medicine. The word “anosmia” means the inability to smell, and so I took off the “an” and just used Osmia to mean a sense of smell and also to mean… It’s a reminder to sense your life, to really absorb the rich textures and use your senses in ways that seem mundane but can make your moments much fuller.
John:
I know, because I know your products and I use them all the time, how that has translated into your products and what they do. You’ve just taken a bar of soap, for example, which is something that somebody totally takes for granted and, literally, the texture of it, the ripple effect that you’ve created on it, the different colors, having the ingredients visible on it and everything, I can tell, is all part of that sensory exploration. Where did that inspiration come from? I know you were taking a soapmaking class. How did it strike you to do that?
Sarah:
I was at this strange… It was a crossroads with more than two roads, just a traffic circle of life. I had a lot going on because I had a new baby and a sick mom, who died shortly afterwards, and then was feeling unfulfilled in the practice of emergency medicine, which I had been doing 10 years. There was something about it that didn’t… While it was a super cool job and made for the best dinner party stories, I would leave just feeling depleted. I didn’t feel that I had infused anybody with a real meaningful piece of medicine where I was truly healing. I stitched people up and stuff and that was helpful, but there was something missing, some sort of healing element that was missing for me. Like I said, it’s a complicated background, but there’s a lot going on in Western medicine now that doesn’t seem consistent with the vows I took as a Western physician in medical school. I would watch a lot of my colleagues be more inclined to prescribe medication than to prescribe a commitment to a 20-minute walk every day.
All of that turbulence within me made me feel like I wanted to just try some new things and I saw a local soapmaking class and I said, “God, that sounds cool,” and I went. It was definitely a light switch that flipped in my brain that day where I thought, “This is what I want to do.” It was excruciating because it’s a lot of school to become a board-certified ER doctor and now I want to make soap? I couldn’t make that make sense for a long time. But the process of making soap was the best blend, to me, of super-hard science where, on a molecule to molecule basis, you have to match up or you don’t get soap, and then this endless array of colors and textures and scents that you could bring into every bar. You can’t do that in medicine. You can’t just say, “I’m going to give you 17mg of Lasix today because that just feels good to me.”
John:
Right, or do some fancy stitch because it looks pretty.
Sarah:
Exactly, yeah. So I think I was missing my creative calling and when I took that class, I found it.
John:
That’s cool, that’s excellent. I’ve spoken to a lot of purpose-driven entrepreneurs and, being one myself, I know that, often times, when you have that pivotal moment or you have that realization then you decide to commit to it, it sets off this chain reaction of other decisions and other changes that you make in your life. Did you experience that same thing?
Sarah:
I think it was a pivotal decision and a pivotal moment but it took a long time for it to take shape. I knew it was important that day during the soapmaking class. I thought, “Something shifted just now,” but it took quite a bit of work to figure out what I really wanted to do with that shift. It was really hard for me to think about the idea of letting go of medicine. Now I realize I haven’t, but at the time, I had to explore all of that pretty deeply.
There is a little bit of an ego piece where it’s like a social demotion from MD to soap maker, and then I realized that’s all not very important in the long run. Then, after losing my mom, that shortened the timeline of my own life, potentially. I could live to be 90 or I could die at 64, like she did, so not knowing that, I thought I don’t want to come home from work not feeling like I’ve… If I’m going to be a career woman and take time away from my family to do that, I don’t want to come home feeling like I’m not sure what I did today. You know?
John:
Absolutely. Yeah, I can relate to that strongly as a parent.
Sarah:
Yeah, you are quite the family man.
John:
Absolutely, yeah. Once you actually did make the change, did you do that in a gradual way, where you were doing this on the side, or did you just quit and start Osmia?
Sarah:
Definitely not the latter. I had a friend who had a house with an empty storage room and we converted it. We referred to it as “the meth lab” for a couple of years. I pretty much got these glasses and wore them in the meth lab for two years while I formulated 50 plus products. I started with soap and I was making soap in every vessel. I would grab people’s empty milk cartons and be like, “Can I have this?” Then it graduated from soapmaking to full skincare. I’ve studied this stuff now, from aromatherapy to natural skincare, more than – I hate for any of my previous patients to hear this – but more than I studied anything in medical school just because it’s so fascinating and interesting to me.
John:
That’s the life of an entrepreneur.
Sarah:
Yeah. I did that for like two years. I’d work a few shifts a week in the ER and I’d work the rest of the hours in the lab developing products. And then, when I knew I was at a point of viability with the line, that I thought this is a collection that would do okay, that was the real leap of faith moment where I did all of the long runs and soul-searching and asking my dead mom to give me a sign. It never really came except that I finally just… I know about myself, thanks to great parents, that if I set my mind to something, I can do it, but I also knew that if I kept one foot in the world of medicine and one foot in this, neither would ever be right and I couldn’t leave Osmia at that point. I was so invested and so passionate about it that I had to leave medicine. Or leave the ER; that’s more accurate. I still think I’m practicing medicine.
John:
I think that’s a really interesting thing about the Osmia brand is that people rely on you for that expertise and that knowledge. It’s one of the aspects, I think, that you’ve really brought to the table as a digital entrepreneur where most of your sales are done online and you’re bringing this level of almost bedside manner practice to servicing your customers. Can you explain a little bit how that evolved, if that was just instinct for you to do that or if you were receiving so many questions that it just wasn’t really a choice or how did that come about?
Sarah:
I think I went into medicine because I wanted to touch people. I practiced for 10 years and then four years at school before that. I remember, as a third-year medical student, I was with a patient one day. I had been awake for about 40 hours and was pretty bleary-eyed. She was having a double mastectomy and I had been with her through the pre-op period. She went into surgery and my relief came and said, “Go ahead, go get some sleep,” and I couldn’t go because I thought that’s just crazy that I wouldn’t be there when she came out.
I had a little bottle of some sort of lavender oil or something with me – I’ve always had lotions and potions in my life – and I waited around until she got out of surgery and I put some of that on my hands and I was just standing behind her, at the head of her bed, just massaging her shoulders while she started to come out of anesthesia. A few times, as she was coming out, she would go like this, like reaching in the air and she was definitely confused. Finally, she figured out that I was back there and she pulled my hand until I came around the bed and she looked at me and she said, “I thought you were an angel.” I thought that’s medicine, that this woman just had this huge, life-altering surgery and has so much to cope with, up until this point and still to come, and somehow, the touch of my hands and the smell of that essential oil was what got through to her.
John:
It’s the moments in between that really matter. As an ER doctor, you deal with emergencies – these big moments that happen in people’s lives, these big, critical moments that we think of as the important things – but it’s what prepared you for that is how you’re going to deal with it. What happens in between and afterwards is, I think, what Osmia is about, is living that fully.
Sarah:
Yeah, and I realized how impactful something like that could be, I think, at that moment. I don’t know that I consciously stored it then, but when I started working with the oils again and got to know them all, I wove that thread back through and I thought, “Wow, this stuff really is powerful.” Powerful medicine, too, however you use it, from the actual aromatherapy that happens to the act of caring for yourself. I guess, in terms of that bedside manner, that’s what I want to remind people is that they are worth that investment of their own time and money and energy to come into their senses for a moment so that they are able to bring a greater awareness and appreciation to the mundane moments that make up 98% of our lives.
John:
Absolutely. What’s the point if you’re not going to enjoy those kind of moments, right? Coming from such a unique story of going from an ER MD to soap maker and starting this and the events in your life to now building a team of people who are meant to embody the Osmia brand, how has that been in terms of teaching them what is this all about and how do we represent Osmia? I almost don’t want to say that in terms of training your staff, but how do you imbue them with that meaning and that mentality?
Sarah:
I think that there’s a process of natural selection that does happen where, for the most part, somebody walks in here and I’m going to have the sense of whether there is a complementary energy or not, whether they seem like the type of people who value what we’re preaching. I have had a couple of people that I’ve worked with in the past where they’re… I had one young woman who was a cigarette smoker and I had to say, “You can’t come here smelling like smoke and you can’t go outside during lunch for a cigarette because the cigarette smoke can’t come back in here. I’m so sorry to impact your personal life that way.” But more than that, I knew that probably, ultimately, this wasn’t going to resonate for her, that this way of life didn’t feel as true to her as it does for a lot of the people who end up staying.
I think people do sort of self-select and I don’t think you can put a square peg in a round hole. I’ve had times where I didn’t listen to my instinct about whether someone was authentic, as far as the way they were contributing to the brand, and that inauthenticity will bleed through eventually. I think that’s been a good lesson for me to listen to my instinct when I know either someone’s heart isn’t in it or that the life they lead when they walk out the door is just too different from what we’re doing here.
John:
Absolutely, and it’s almost reflective of the process that you had to go through in being true to yourself and going through some of that soul-searching to decide to leave the ER and come into this. Some people can’t do that. Some people will kid themselves for a long time and say, “I work for Osmia and I’m going to stay here,” and they won’t do it themselves. That’s one of the challenges of running a team and having to make hard decisions like that sometimes.
Sarah:
Yeah, it definitely is. That’s not a skill… It’s a really different structure than the ER was. I worked with a team in the ER too, but in some ways, there was an established chain there.
John:
A hierarchy.
Sarah:
Yeah, and I don’t want to say that because there’s a lot of stuff that nurses do that I, A, would never want to do – God bless them – and, B, I don’t have that skill set. But it just wasn’t like I really… I was a good leader there, but it wasn’t that they were looking to me. The ER has its own heartbeat, its own cues and you can fit into it or be disruptive to it and that’s a different scene than here. Here, this whole place, from the building we’re in to the desk I’m sitting at to the products that are flying off the shelves, it all came from the spark of me and so that’s a much bigger responsibility. I’m not stepping into something.
John:
It’s a lot of pressure.
Sarah:
I’ve created something and now I want to show up and live it and breathe it. I think one of the big things that’s been really hard for me, as a boss, is to separate the business from my passion. I want to keep them very much intertwined, but becoming a businesswoman, when it comes to staffing decisions and teambuilding – just this year, I have brought in some new people, including a new chief operating officer, who just has a lot of amazing corporate experience and understands how companies grow.
I think, at the beginning, I thought, “I’m just going to try this thing.” I wasn’t, “Man, we’re going to be in however many retailers and however many doors,” that wasn’t my way. I just was like, “I’m so excited. I love doing this.” But it’s grown and it continues to grow and so having someone in here, at my right hand, who brings a totally different skill set and to whom I will defer on a lot of stuff because I go, “Great. That’s a great idea. I would never have thought to do it this way. Yes.” So learning where to stay really strong in who you are and in your passion and your drive and sharing that enthusiasm and when to just totally pull back and give someone else the wheel.
John:
Yeah, and it’s all in the name of the purpose. It’s bigger than yourself and it’s bigger than ego and anything like that. It’s if this is in service of what we’re trying to do here, then let’s do it. It doesn’t matter if I’m doing it or if somebody else is doing it, it’s getting done, right?
Sarah:
Yeah.
John:
Can you tell me a little bit about some of the decisions that you’ve had to make in terms of beyond just the product – beyond the soaps, beyond the lotions and the products? You’re very passionate about the entire customer experience – what is it packaged in, how does it arrive. What kind of impact do you feel like that has had on the success of Osmia?
Sarah:
A big one. I always said that I would tell people to imagine walking down a little cobblestone side street in Paris and you see a door and you peek in the window and you see that they make cool things in there. You go in and the door tinkles and somebody walks out and greets you and hands you things to smell or touch or try on or whatever it is. That’s what makes you interested in a thing and it’s what makes you sense it, so I’ve tried to infuse everything we’ve done here with that.
From the beginning, every order that has ever been sent out from our store has a note with human handwriting on it. There was a time, at the beginning, when I used to write, “Dear John, I hope everything is great with you and the kids,” and I wrote, essentially, a giant postcard to every customer because I was so excited that they placed an order. Now, we have a volume that that’s not sustainable, but my staff, they all have a little watercolor paper cards with our logo and, on every card, they write their name and they write something like, “Enjoy,” or, “Happy holidays,” or whatever it is and they sign their name and they put their own email address so that the person who gets that order knows that, if there’s an issue, here’s exactly who I can contact.
John:
Amazing.
Sarah:
It’s such a big deal because that’s all you really want. That’s all any patient I ever saw in the ER wanted was just to be heard and seen and have someone listen and that’s what I want to show people here; we’re here.
John:
I know exactly what you mean. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve run into, the hardest decisions that you’ve had to make about running Osmia?
Sarah:
I think when you think of challenges, for me, the biggest challenge is the business stuff. I don’t have an MBA. That stuff is not… I’m great at math, but the forecasting and the vision of business growth is not in my cells. That’s really hard for me, so a lot of times, people would be like, “What do you want? What’s your vision for the company?” and I’m like, “I don’t really know. I just want to keep doing this and I want to keep growing the company.” We’re offering health benefits for our employees starting in January. That’s so exciting; we did it. It’s little pieces like that where I just want to build something wonderful that’s good for people and good for the world. It sounds totally la-la, like you’re a businesswoman. Can you say something more intelligent than that?
John:
Well, you’re doing it.
Sarah:
Yeah, we’re doing it and I’m okay to let someone else help me figure out the exact shape of it.
John:
Yeah, I think that’s a really powerful realization that people come to. Not always a realization; I think some people already feel that way and they’re comfortable with that. But a lot of people are not comfortable with saying, “I need help,” and allowing other people to help them. Was that something that came easily for you, to let go of the reins on some things and just have people help?
Sarah:
To a degree. The product manufacturing was the hardest thing for me to give up because I love it so much and my standards are so high. Fortunately, we have someone who is better at it than I ever was and her standards are just as high as mine, so it works out really well. I taught her how to do it all and she does it better than I did.
I think I’ve always been the pathologically honest type and if I don’t know something, I just say, “I don’t know that. I don’t know the answer to that question.” I would do it when patients would ask me questions. I always love to remind myself of an unfortunate colleague of mine in medical school who came in one day and he was scrambling and he didn’t check the patient’s vital signs. He showed up to rounds and he was breathless and the attending physician looked at him and said, “Did you check the patient’s vital signs?” and he said, “Yes, sir,” and he rattles off the blood pressure and pulse and temperature. The attending just looks at him for a minute and says, “The patient has been deceased for the last two hours.”
John:
Wow.
Sarah:
I thought, “Wow. That’s a really powerful example of why it doesn’t work to fake it.” It just doesn’t. There is a fake-it-till-you-make-it aspect of this, there’s no doubt about that. There are definitely days where I am like, “What am I doing? I left a whole career in medicine to do this and I don’t know how to do it,” so I pretend with those days.
John:
I think I just had one of those moments. My wife and I, Heather, we were in exactly the same boat yesterday, saying exactly the same thing. She runs a business as well and I think we were both in it. Even as a parent, you feel that way sometimes.
Sarah:
Oh God, yes. I feel that way every day.
John:
You’re like, “What the hell am I doing? I’m messing everything up.” What’s your favorite customer story? You have all these stories and those great dinner party stories from the emergency room, but what about with Osmia?
Sarah:
Yeah, totally. There are so many of them at this point. I became an accidental expert in this skin condition called perioral dermatitis, which you know all about from being all over my website. It’s basically an angry, flaky, bumpy skin condition in the nose and mouth region that affects mostly women but men and children and older people too. I have a couple of septuagenarians who are working through it right now.
Because I had it while I was developing the products for the line, and the products are what helped me settle it down, I’ve developed an expertise in it. I would say I have a handful of people, maybe 10 or 20 people, who have sent me pictures of their skin and it’s so painful to look at. It looks like they just scratched at their faces. It’s just so painful, and saying, “I don’t leave my apartment. I don’t go to social events. I’m trying to figure out a way to work from home because I can’t stand to be seen in public. I stopped dating.” It’s on your face, it’s right there. It just shatters your confidence. Of course, you want to encourage people to remember that their beauty is so much deeper than that, but it’s really hard when it’s right on your face.
Those are the people where, first me, in the early days, and I’ve written a bunch of stuff and, now, my team is really, really well-versed in how to help people through this skin condition. We get these emails back from them two, three, four months later and their skin looks so much better and they’re standing in the sunshine and they’re on a date. I got a text from one of our customers who got engaged. In some ways, she was like, “It’s all because of Osmia,” and I’m like, “No, it’s not,” but I’m so happy that we were… I feel honored to be a part of that for that person.
John:
Absolutely. That’s powerful. I think that’s one of the themes that comes up a lot when I speak to people who have just decided to make the leap and do something purpose-driven is I think there’s always this leap that you have to make where you say, “What is soap?” You know what I mean? And for me, design or web design, “What’s design? I’m not going to change the world, I’m not going to feed all the hungry or cure AIDS or something.” But eventually, you get to a point when you say, “This is what I do. This is what I can do to make it better and to change somebody’s life.” Did you experience that same thing or is it something that came gradually as you started seeing the effect that it was having?
Sarah:
No, I know that I’m capable of reaching people and that’s what I want to do, is to touch them somehow. But over the last four years of the company coming to life, what has become really more clear to me is the number of ways in which this soap company can touch people. That’s why I opened up my Instagram feed to my personal life. I show people that I’m out trail running every day. I told you I’ve got to be done with this interview at 4:00 because I’m going for a trail run today. Like interview be damned, this is going to happen. I want people to see that I’m doing all this stuff that I’m trying to encourage them to do; I’m not out just preaching it.
I try to capture… I love photography. That’s another one of my missed callings. I see the world like this for the most part and I try to capture some of those moments from my own life just to give a gentle nudge to people like feel your kids hand in yours. Feel the sticky, syrupy, grimy, warm kid hand.
John:
Always sticky.
Sarah:
And just drink it because it’s going to be gone so fast. We work so hard to get to the next thing, especially when you’ve got little kids – and I know you know all about this. When you are like dinner, bath, book, bed, it’s just like you’ve just got to grind through it.
John:
And then it’s 9 o’clock and you want to go wake them up and say, “What did I do? I just blew it.”
Sarah:
Totally. I can’t get enough of reading to my girls and they’re 9 and 13 now. I drop into that hour of reading every night like it’s a Jacuzzi; I can’t wait to get there. That’s medicine, too, just as much as anything else is. It’s just reminding people to savor their lives because, as far as any of us know, this is the only one we get.
John:
Yeah, and maybe the only day.
Sarah:
Yeah, absolutely.
John:
Yeah, for sure. I think that that’s a powerful message and that idea of almost just curating your life, do you know what I mean? Just deciding what you’re going to focus your energy on. It’s really similar to the practice of photography, of course, just deciding what am I going to shoot, what is the moment going to be and that kind of thing and going through life in that way where you’re being conscious about what am I going to focus my attention on, it’s the essence of mindfulness. And then to bring that to your products and to bring that to your customer service and even to your social media, I think, is not only good life advice, but it’s good marketing advice to say this is my perspective, this is what I’m choosing to show you. Nobody’s life is perfect, but here’s something aspirational. We get enough imperfection just living our lives; we don’t need it in our Instagram feed. I take that with a grain of salt when people say, “Social media, it’s just all flowers and it’s not really how life is.” It’s like life is how life is. I don’t need more of that.
Sarah:
Yeah, I do share a lot of really unrefined moments too. I think I just want people to really find the beauty in that. It’s like when you go to Italy and pull over on the side of the road and find the old man pulling the olives off the tree and he beckons you over and hands you a bottle of this olive oil that’s got flecks and stuff floating in it and it hasn’t been filtered, it hasn’t been treated and it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever put in your mouth. That’s the filter I want them to see their lives through is this is so imperfect and we’re all totally in it together.
John:
Yeah. On that note of inspiration, what would you say is next for Osmia?
Sarah:
I think this ties back to the difficult decisions for the company question too. We’re thinking it through. Right now, what we have decided to do is do most of our sales through direct-to-consumer on our beautiful website. I love the way the website reflects our brand now, thanks to you guys, but it really does. I sit on my own website just watching that lavender video, “This is cool.” So most of the sales are direct-to-consumer and I think that that’s a really important piece of the sales for me and for our customers because we do control the customer experience, to a degree, there.
That said, we are in a town of 6000 people. I need a bigger platform. We have some of our products with Anthropologie, that’s been a wonderful partnership for us this year, we have a series of really awesome, small but growing partners throughout the US – brands like The Detox Market and these beautiful brands. There’s one called Follain on the East Coast that has similar customer experience to what we strive for. So in that way, I’ve chosen very curated partners because I want our brands to mesh really well.
But there will be some questions down the line where somebody comes and wants to partner and I have to make the call about whether it’s the right fit. Do you want to grow the brand? I want to grow the business, I want to be able to do more for my employees, I want to be able to have it become profitable for the long haul. But like I said, I’m not totally sure what that looks like yet. Is it partnership with a natural grocery store type thing? Do we see ourselves there or do we want to shoot for Barney’s or Bergdorfs? Those are questions we’re asking ourselves now and I think the answer will unveil itself with time.
John:
Yeah, it’s one decision at a time and then, all of a sudden, it transforms.
Sarah:
When you’re small like this, too, if something comes around and you have an opportunity and, really, the question is could we do that? Could we physically? There are days where we’re standing in the back looking at the soap rack and it has 8000 bars of soap on it and we’re like, “I guess we have to build another one of these,” or, “This mixer is not big enough. Do they make them bigger?” and we’re googling. That’s how you’re growing a small business, it’s just we’ll figure it out and if we physically can meet the demand and it’s good for our business and our staff, yeah, we’ll do it.
John:
How do you feel about growth? Sometimes there’s this level of intimidation around business growth where sometimes people worry am I going to lose the essence of what this company is all about. Is that a thought in your mind?
Sarah:
Sure. If, down the line, someone came to us and was interested in acquisition, that would be a really big decision for me because there are so few people who have the same ideals that I do in this business. That’s why I’m not raking in the money hand over fist right now but I’m organically growing a healthy company. I think of it like – because I’ve done it twice – like nursing a baby. Trying to get them to drink from the fire hose isn’t going to work. You have to take the time and you have to nourish them carefully and with the right things and then there’s growth and it’s beautiful, healthy, sustainable growth.
John:
It’s an interaction, it’s two-sided.
Sarah:
Yeah, exactly. Like I said, I don’t have business experience and I don’t really have… I have a friend who started a kids skincare company and she went in it with business building aspirations and she’s done quite well. It’s just a totally different take on it than what I’m doing. So what’s next for the brand? I don’t know.
John:
Yeah, what’s next? Maybe coming to a store near you, right?
Sarah:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Hopefully, although I happen to like the website a lot, so I don’t know that that’s…
Sarah:
Yeah, me too. But it’s true that it could be an interesting… I love the synergy – that piece that you sent me from The New York Times this morning – the synergy between people with an online presence and people researching you and hearing about you, let’s say, through the Instagram feed or whatever, and then they’re in some store in LA and they’re like, “Wait, I’ve seen this brand.” And then they pick it up and then they experience it in person because there are certain things that really do, especially what we do, you smell it and you’re going to want to buy it.
John:
Yeah, it’s over. That’s why the free samples and things like that really play such a big role.
Sarah:
Exactly.
John:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that there are some pretty incredible advances and opportunities in terms of how to make those connections and how to really connect the digital and the physical together in a personalized way, so if I have anything to do with it, then that’s part of the future of Osmia I think.
I think that that covers quite a lot and we’ve hit our time, so I want to say thank you for doing this. Please, to anybody who’s watching this, this will be one of the first podcasts so there probably won’t be a whole lot of people watching it, but anybody who is, go to osmiaorganics.com and buy some amazing products and tell your friends. I hope you enjoy it and thanks for watching.
Sarah:
Thanks, John.