MANILA, Philippines — Proudly Filipino makeup brand Absidy recently marked its first anniversary with a grand celebration in Makati City, attended by one of its celebrity endorsers, Heart Evangelista.
Aleisha Yap, the label’s 22-year-old Chief Executive Officer (CEO), shared to Philstar.com how she is growing the brand she conceptualized at 18 years old, and how she is continuously managing it all while finishing college.
“I have been a makeup enthusiast, so I really love makeup ever since I was 13 years old,” Aleisha dished on why she decided to come up with her own cosmetics brand.
“I was always playing with makeup. I was always buying makeup… I used to ask her (mom) to buy me makeup a lot… I love lipsticks.”
She explained why she named her brand “Absidy”: “I wanted something meaningful to me. I didn't want just like a word that is a combination of all our initials like my family and I’s initials, which is ABC… so we just changed the spelling and yeah, that's what we got.”
Since her parents already have a successful beauty venture, Luxe Organics, it helped a lot in making Yap’s dream come true to put up her own brand.
“My parents have really helped me, and the team has really helped me build the brand and make it go,” she said.
In spite of being not new in the business, Aleisha admitted that her journey is not free from challenges.
“Of course, I made a lot of mistakes,” she professed, “I think that one of the hardest challenges, like trying to find my way around, like how to work things out, how to make people hear up and make it, you know, like stand out.”
The COVID-19 pandemic was an added stumbling block, she said, as she had a hard time designing and making makeup relevant in a world that had been more focused on basic necessities like food and medicine.
Through it all, she learned that although starting anything is challenging, “If you really put in the work, it gets better.”
“Like now, seeing the brand… it's really rewarding,” she attested.
In just a year, her brand grew in terms of product lines and staff.
According to her, she is able to balance work with studies by building a supportive team.
“I think I'm really blessed that I can go to school and go to the office and of course the team, the team always makes it possible for me to get my work done. Like they make sure that everything is going well in the office,” she said. “It's challenging because there are many times where I have to work late after school just to get the work done.”
Celebrity endorsers like Heart and Kendra had been helpful in putting the brand in the forefront, but “having the motivation to think differently,” said Aleisha, is really the key to her brand’s continuous growth.
“I think there's a lot of things to achieve because we're just in our first year… there's so many more things we could do to grow. There's still a lot of people that haven't heard about our brand and it’s still a small brand compared to all the other local brands. So I'm hoping that we reach more stores,” she said.
“We didn't want to start off as a very small. We want there to be a base so that people would know it's a brand that they could trust.”
For those who also want to start their own business no matter how young or old they are, she urged them to “Just start!”
“Because no matter what, it's going to be hard, no matter what's going be challenging, but if you're able to put in the discipline and find the balance, I think that we can achieve a lot. There are a lot of young CEOs now, so that’s nice!”