681: Dr. Angela Spent $350K Building The Skincare Brand Her Daughters Needed — Now It Does $40K/Month

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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Welcome to Little Empires, brought to you by the team at Foundr. At Foundr, our mission is to support the next generation of e-comm founders. So while you may know us for interviewing some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, this series is a little different. Little Empires shines a spotlight on the builders inside our own Foundr community, the entrepreneurs who are in the trenches, taking action, learning and building their businesses in real time. These aren't overnight success stories, these are real journeys, real lessons and real founders creating their own little empires one step at a time. This podcast is proudly produced by the Foundr team to give our students a platform to share their experiences, wins, challenges and honest realities of building a business from the ground up. Now, let's dive into today's episode.

**Leah Finch** (1:54)
Welcome to The Foundr Little Empires Podcast. I'm your host, Leah Finch. Today's guest is Dr. Angela Casey based out of Ohio.
Angela is a double board certified dermatologist and the founder of Bright Girl, a skincare brand to helping the next generation build healthy skin habits for life. Angela's been drawing on years of clinical experience. She created Bright Girl to make preventative skincare simple, accessible and empowering. So we're really keen to learn more about Angela's story, building Bright Girl through the Foundr community. Angela, welcome to Little Empires. It's great to have you here.

**Angela Casey** (2:36)
Thank you so much, Leah. It's really great to reconnect with you.

**Leah Finch** (2:39)
All right. So we want to start from the very beginning, Angela. I know there are lots of members from our community listening. They will be really keen to hear your story, juggling your full-time profession. Also, you're a mom, juggling that family life and then how you have built Bright Girl. So take us back to the very beginning. Did you have any experience in e-commerce before you started?

**Angela Casey** (3:01)
Not a bit. And I love to share that because if I can do it, anybody can do it. In undergrad, I majored in molecular biology and mathematics. If that tells you the kind of student I was, I went straight to medical school, then straight into residency training and fellowship and into practice. So really at no point did I have any business classes other than very basic accounting that was required to graduate from college. And really in my family life also didn't have any sort of entrepreneurial mentorship. My father's a physician, my mom stayed home with us. So I didn't have a model or an idea or really an experience of seeing how this all worked. I do have an amazing husband who has some background in business development and marketing, but neither of us is really prepared for the beast of e-commerce and what that involved. And we've done a lot of flying this plane as we are building it along the way.
At some point, you've just got to have liftoff and figure things out as you go. Yeah.

**Leah Finch** (4:10)
And that is like true words from anyone in the entrepreneurial space, like build the plane as you fly. So you've got your clinical background, right? So you are a double board certified dermatologist and dermatological surgeon. So how did the product idea come to life? What was the inspiration for launching a skincare brand?

**Angela Casey** (4:29)
Well, Celia, I practiced dermatology and Moe's Micrographic Surgery, which is skin cancer surgery for almost 15 years before this idea came to me. And when it hit me, it was so clear in my mind. What I was hearing from patients every day in my practice was, Dr. Casey, I just didn't know how to take care of my skin in my younger years. I grew up in an era where we didn't have sunscreen, we didn't have sun protection, nobody knew how to take care of their skin. And then pair that with raising three teen and tween daughters, that my husband and I are raising our girls. And I am feeling like a failure as a dermatologist because I'm struggling to get them excited about wearing sunscreen and using proper skincare. And instead of using the brands that I would recommend, that our dermatologist recommended, all of my colleagues love, my girls were turning to products that were really formulated for adult skin. They were much harsher products, really not appropriate or beneficial for young skin. So I'm seeing this mismatch in the world of like what my patients wish they had done, what my girls wish that they had, and really seeking a solution of where those worlds meet. I searched and searched for a brand that was exciting and engaging enough for my girls to want to use it every day, that would teach them those good habits. It was also safe for their skin and I never found it. So that's really what inspired Bright Girl. To me and to any dermatologist out there, it is so clear how important it is to start good skincare habits from a young age. It's just like brushing and flossing your teeth. You don't wait until you're 30 to do it. You start it from your childhood years when you have your first tooth. Our skin is no different. We have to start really caring for it from the day that our children are born. But the key for our teens and tweens is really equipping them with the proper ingredients, the know-how and the products that they're going to want to use every day. So they are building those good habits and that's setting the foundation for lifelong skin health.