MArya Paz Arya and Natasha Gil met in 2005 when they were both in Sencosud, Years later, Gil was hired by Parque Arauco. Now with children each, they reunited in 2016 as parents from the same school. In a conversation, Gill told him that the work rhythm and four children were too difficult and that he wanted to become independent.
In 2018, both left their jobs in retail. They were looking for more freedom and time for their families, something that the intensity of larger companies did not allow them. “But I started wondering what the hell I was doing,” Araya recalls.
Soon after, Gil tells her that he is importing chairs from China. This is how a company was born: taking advantage of his experience in retail and contacts abroad, the business consisted of assembling a container in China, and everything was already sold upon arrival in Chile., The model was doing well and it was profitable, however, the pandemic hit and they thought they couldn’t grow any further.
Thus, they began to get acquainted with the perfume market at the beginning of the epidemic. Araya defined herself as a “fragrance junkie” and believed there was little competition from American firm Jo Malone. Furthermore, the prices were high and not very accessible to the national market. “And people were getting more worried about homes because of the lockdown,” he says.
In 2021 he contacted a Chilean laboratory, imported the fragrances and made the dosas. They invested $80 million with a focus on making environmental sprays. After more than eight months and hundreds of samples, they arrived at a product that could be sold. He left the lamp business aside and set out to sell in the North American market.
Araya has lived in the United States since late 2020 and from there he started the process of selling on Amazon in early 2021. DAfter almost a year of rejection of patents and applications, they were accepted on the market by the American giant. ,They rejected us mainly because these products are made in the USA with different standards”, says Araya. After 30 applications, they managed to get certified.
At that point they took a big jump, they started growing 50% month-on-month and they’re already selling $100 million a month through Amazon alone, “We arrived at a sales estimate of $150 million per year and we are already estimating over a billion”, highlighted the founder.
Thanks to the success of this strategy, and avoiding the stock outages for which the Jeff Bezos-founded company is being punished, They are opening online store in USA And a lab in Colombia that will allow them to rapidly deliver to that market.
