 Ever since I was little, I've always struggled with my skin. I've had eczema since I was a baby. And in high school and college, I had really bad acne. Dealing with those skin conditions and learning more about skincare products and skincare health is kind of what really threw me into the skincare world. I am Stephanie Zhang. I am a content creator and holistic aesthetician. And I started Collection of Vials as a way to kind of share my discoveries and my learnings with others. A typical day in my life varies. I really love my morning routine. So the first thing that I do every morning is I meditate. And then I'll kind of go through my skincare routine. I like to keep it pretty simple. I will start with slashing my face with warm water. Then I'll go into toner, sometimes in essence. I love to apply our plant remedy balancing facial oil and then follow it with our deep puffing facial roller. Follow that with a moisturizer and then SPF. I love to journal. I love to drink rinsed in the mentee or lemon water. And then I'll get started with the rest of my workday. Collection of Vials is my blog, my website. It's more of the content creation side of things. And Mount Lai is my beauty brand. So that's where we have our offering of facial tools like jade rollers and gua sha tools as well as skincare products. A couple of years ago, I was looking to purchase a jade roller of my own. I ended up ordering one online. It arrived and it broke, I think, after I used it twice. Then I ordered another one and also broke. So kind of that frustration of not having a high quality jade roller is what really spurred the decision to create one of my own. So I ordered a couple hundred units. I thought it was going to last me like a couple of months. We ended up selling through all of the units in our pre-order. And it's just been a whirlwind ever since. Customers were always asking us, what products should I be using with these tools? And that's really what inspired us to start our skincare formulations. We'll work with a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner to make sure that our herb pairings are really strong. We'll go through a couple of batches of iterations with formulas. We have to work with packaging, box design. There are just so many different elements that go into product development. We like to say that we take a modern approach to ancient rituals. And it was actually inspired by my grandmother. She has been jade rolling and practicing gua sha for over 50 years. Really the idea that skincare is really holistic and starts from within. So not only the products that you put on your face, but what you eat, your lifestyle, your gut health, your mindset, all of that really encompasses overall skin health. Having a website and a digital presence is so important because that's really how customers find you and how they purchase products. It really allows you to tell the brand story, how you want to tell it. So all of my businesses have really been digitally focused, digital-first, e-commerce-based. What's really funny and what really goes full circle is GoDaddy was the company that I used to purchase my first domain. So it's really been with me from the beginning. It is definitely challenging to maintain work-life balance. I kind of view it as a journey that ebbs and flows rather than a destination. It was just me doing the business for over two years. And it wasn't until, I would say, the past like seven or eight months or so that I really brought on my first full-time team member. And I really should have done it sooner. It's just too much for one person to try to do. One of the biggest challenges as a young female entrepreneur is just basically people not taking you seriously or underestimating you. They think that maybe I'm just the face behind the brand or I don't do a lot of the behind the scenes, but I really oversee every aspect of the business, whether it be marketing or ops or supply chain or finance, really all of it. The main goal is really the idea that skin care is a form of self-care and I'm all about sharing ways to holistically improve skin health from the inside out. It's truly been such an honor to be able to share these rituals with others.