This All-Female HBS Team Just Launched a Line of Luxury Skincare Products

Take a peek in your bathroom and count how many products you use for grooming. Now, how many of those products have ingredients that you can list off the top of your head? I honestly couldn’t think of one if you paid me.

We know so little about what we use to keep ourselves looking spiffy. Jessica Assaf, an MBA candidate at Harvard Business School, picked up on that at an earlier age. The longtime activist for safe, healthy beauty products has teamed up with some of her superstar classmates at HBS - Enke Bashllari and Katie Power - to bring consumers the most effective, luxurious skin treatments out there with a new brand called RAW Is Everything. And it’s all from nature.

When Assaf was 15, she - like most girls that age - started to play with makeup and become more interested in beauty. But it took little time for her to notice that many of the most marketed cosmetic products available were full of chemicals that did more harm than help.

“I realized through my own research that most ingredients in beauty products weren’t safe,” Assaf told me. “The FDA doesn’t require pre-market testing or approvals before products hit the shelves. So many ingredients have been linked to cancer, reproductive harm and neurotoxicity. That really scared me.”

“It’s an intimate thing to be rubbing something on skin and not knowing what’s in it,” she continued. “It became part of my identity to educate consumers about what they were using and, at the same time, promote safe alternatives.”

Since then, Assaf has been heavily involved in the cosmetics industry and activism, advocating consumer awareness about what exactly is in their favorite beauty products. She started a blog with Alexis Krauss called Beauty Lies Truth to spread the word about cosmetic safety concerns and potential alternatives, and it’s been going strong for nearly two years.

Those efforts were all well and good, but when Assaf came to Harvard Business School, she met equally as powerful female peers and that’s when the real movement started. As she put it, “When I started business school, I realized that I don’t have to spend all of my energy talking about the problem when I can help fix it.”

So Assaf teamed up with Bashllari - who has her PhD from Columbia University Medical Center and who invests in health and wellness companies - and Power - who’s a branding and marketing wizard. These women set off to do thorough research into which natural components were the most effective, safest means of treating common skin concerns that affect women. It took more than a year to examine and test different components, but they’ve pinpointed several potent oils that have been some of world’s best kept beauty secrets for centuries.

Currently, all of the products can be purchased on the startup’s site. But, soon enough, the line will be launching exclusively in luxury retailer Bluemercury’s stores throughout Boston and New York City. By that time, RAW - which has been bootstrapping since its inception - is hoping to position itself for raising a round of funding and the then-graduates will be dedicating themselves full-time to the venture.This female power team launched its RAW line a matter of days ago, and it’s already packing orders. It consists of four, single-ingredient products that range in price from $45 to $55, including its Age-Defying Concentrate (rosehip oil), Facial Moisturizer (passionfruit seed oil), Antioxidant Treatment (raspberry seed oil) and Clear-Skin Treatment (tanamu oil). The products are all sustainably sourced, unrefined and cold-pressed to ensure these oils retain their integrity, safety and efficacy.

The RAW ladies are also planning on getting out in the Boston community, staging pop-ups to start a dialog with women about their skincare, what they should be using and why they should be wary of the products pumped out by major retailers. Assaf explained that:

They scare you into thinking you have a problem that you don’t have. So much of the beauty industry focuses on short-term results, but no one thinks about long-term effects. Beauty is superficial so it’s easy to let people think that science can do it better. But there are even more effective, natural ingredients that have been used for hundreds of years. You don’t need invented ingredients. There’s a general trend of going back to the way things used to be, and I think that’s here to stay.

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Despite What Sheryl Sandberg Says, MBAs Still Matter

Facebook’s COO and, ironically enough, Harvard Business School alumna - has also voiced that MBAs are superfluous in tech. In a post on Quora last December, Sandberg had apparently written, “While I got great value from my experience, MBAs are not necessary at Facebook and I don’t believe they are important for working in the tech industry."

As these high-profile entrepreneurs have sworn off hiring MBAs, business school grads might be having the last laugh. Perhaps while PayPal’s Thiel views MBAs as sheep-like and having “herd-like thinking and behavior,” B-School grads may actually be more majestic than that: Unicorns.

According to analysis from NextView Ventures, 1 in 4 Unicorns has at least one founder who has an MBA. To be more specific, there are 63 MBA founders among the 157 Unicorns out there, which shows that some Unicorns have multiple founders with business school background.

Among all of the MBA programs molding Unicorn founders, Sandberg’s (as in the same Sandberg that said you don’t need a business degree to succeed in tech) alma mater, HBS, has been the most significant contributor, which could be due to the university’s large class sizes. There are 14 Unicorns that have HBS alumni as founders. That figure is followed by Stanford GSB’s contribution to the Unicorn realm - 8 companies with alumni - as well as Wharton and INSEAD (in France) with 5 startups started by grads.

So while the startup space can be more accessible to people without business degrees, it wouldn’t be fair to say that MBAs are completely useless. With the vast majority of ventures failing, having an MBA presence at 1 in 4 Unicorns - startups that are crushing it - might not be a coincidence. Anyone may be able to start a company nowadays, but it could take the business school touch to make a company successful.

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RADCLIFFE FELLOW ZZ PACKER CLOSES IN ON FOLLOW-UP TO CELEBRATED DEBUT

 Rose Lincoln

As the saying goes, “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” For more than a decade, much has been expected from ZZ Packer, the gifted writer whose breakout story collection left critics and fans wanting more.

“I don’t think I can remember where I last encountered a debut collection that so justified its existence, that buzzed with so much credibility and attitude,” read one review of “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” (2003), eight stories that vividly capture the complicated rhythms of contemporary American life.

The wait for a follow-up may soon be over. As the Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Packer is working on a sweeping novel titled “The Thousands” that follows the lives of several families from the end of the Civil War through the American Indian campaigns in the Southwest. The author is unfazed by the extended lead-up to her sophomore effort, except when pressed by her publishers. “The longer they wait,” she said, “the better they expect it to be.”

But good writing takes time, noted Packer, 42, during an interview in her Radcliffe office, and life can get complicated. Since starting work on “The Thousands” she has married, divorced, had two children, and struggled through custody battles and six moves, including two cross-country treks. (Also in the mix: a spot on The New Yorker’s list of the country’s top young writers.) The novel’s narrative has changed, too, with Packer throwing “hundreds of pages away” to arrive at the right place.

“Your conception of something can change so completely, but you can still be writing the same thing,” she said.

Packer’s original narrative focused on buffalo soldiers, regiments of African-American men who served west of the Mississippi River following the Civil War. The idea sprang from talks with her grandmother, the daughter of a Southern sharecropper who moved the family north in search of a different life. “The wandering mind part of me just began thinking about those that didn’t go north the way that everybody else did,” she said. “I wondered, ‘What about the ones who went west?’”

But as she delved deeper, she gravitated toward a broader exploration of Reconstruction and “what happened in America during this time period, and what happened with African-Americans that led us to how we are now.” From the outset it was clear that “The Thousands” required a “bigger treatment” than the short story could provide.

“The feeling of a novel is of having lived this life, or a life,” Packer said. “I like that the novel can do that as a form.”

To capture that sense of time and place Packer logged long hours at the National Archives in Washington, researching how sugar-cane production drove labor in the South (her protagonist works in a Louisiana cane field) and developing a period-specific perspective on challenges for the hearing-impaired (another main character is deaf). Books such as “Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie” and “The Military and United States Indian Policy, 1865-1903” rest on her desk at Radcliffe.

But the work has been as much a personal as a historical journey for Packer, who always hopes to learn something about herself when building complexity into her characters. “In a sense, it’s my way of understanding my own weaknesses and foibles and how not to repeat them.”

She is frank about getting stuck. To work through a recent creative dry spell, Packer drafted a flow chart that included descriptions of her different types of writer’s block and practical ways forward. “This is actually me doing something to get out of it,” she laughed, pointing to the intricate diagram on her computer screen.

Another resource is her vast collection of books.

“I’ll wonder sometimes just how writers do certain things. It’s like a little note in your mind to go back to look at what they’re doing, what they did well that produced that feeling in you.”

Joyce, Melville, and Shakespeare all have their “stylistic tics,” Packer said, and their pages offer up new things that each “brought to the form.” She reaches for Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” when “just trying to see what the language can do.” She will thumb through works by Malcolm Gladwell looking for “a sentence that’s universal.” Colson Whitehead’s writing “looks new” she said, “but has a sort of noir component.”

Growing up in Atlanta, Packer fell in love with words during her daily trips to the local library with her mother. Coming-of-age stories by Judy Blume, the sleuthing of “Harriet the Spy,” and young-adult novels by S.E. Hinton were among her favorites. In high school she read “whatever there was.” Her passion for writing and reading developed in tandem — when she wasn’t reading, she was scribbling down snippets of stories, plays, and poems.

“I’d always loved writing because I’d loved reading. I think people who are readers are inevitably interested in how it’s all put together, what literature is and how it works.”

She learned an important lesson about how it works during a reading before high school classmates. The story was “melodramatic and overblown,” remembered Packer, but it also resonated with her teenage audience and introduced her to the power of making people “feel something” with her words. “I think that that’s the kind of thing that isn’t emphasized enough when younger writers begin to write.”

As an undergraduate at Yale, Packer opted for literature over engineering and spent much of her time at a local bookstore, scanning the shelves and reading as much as she could. “That was where I first read Updike. I liked the visual quality of being able to see all these fiction titles and their covers … luckily they didn’t kick me out.” She did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and later became a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. But even after years as a successful writer and teacher, Packer hesitates to endorse the profession.

“In a way it requires an obsessiveness that’s not going to be taught. And that obsessiveness of trying to figure out how to be a better writer is not a very good thing to recommend to people.”

Still, on a recent afternoon Packer engaged with students from across the University who had signed up for a luncheon and a chance to ask the author about the work that has become her life. Great writers, those who craft vivid, believable characters and prose, are great observers of human behavior, said Packer. She encouraged her listeners to experiment with different forms, to hone their styles by reading and writing as much as possible, and to be prepared for success to take time.

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