 I just said to my friend one day, that's so dead cool, and she was like, wait. It was kind of our way to give a middle finger to the fragrance world as a whole. We wanted to create something that hadn't been done before. I'm Karina Chaz. I am founder and CEO of Dead Cool. I created Dead Cool as my approach to be in the non-toxic beauty space. I wanted to create beautiful wearable scents that are good for you and good for the environment. My family is very into the organic life, and I was born into a family that created beautiful cosmetics. I was always kind of helping them in their lab. The manufacturer and facility was my playground. I guess you could say that I was a tomboy. With that, I was always intrigued with more masculine scents. I became intrigued with the idea of creating a new identity and category for this industry that has really been at a standstill for quite some time. The Dead Cool process really started just with notebooks and doodles. I have little sketches of the barcode and the bottle design and how I kind of wanted to see something come to life. From there, I started making a Vibes page on Instagram. People want to see how things are made. They want to know where their products are coming from. The moment I stepped in front of the camera and used my personal Instagram as a driving force, I saw a huge shift with the exposure and the sales. For me, the success really comes in where people choose to wear scents that I've composed as their daily wear. Fragrance is a huge part of someone's identity and it becomes their personal style. It becomes their personal aesthetic. I get a lot of people always asking me, like, how did you start your business? How did you know that this was the right move? And I always say, like, it's really just creating a vision and how do you want to see something and how are you going to make that vision come true? And of course, with everything, there will be some type of rejection. But you just can't let it get you down. Just do what you do best and build everything that you can and they'll come back and it happened. So it's pretty incredible.