Building YUZU: How Lauren Shun Created a Natural Personal Care Brand from Scratch

Let me introduce you to Lauren Shun, the founder of YUZU, who turned her search for gentle skincare into a thriving business. What started as kitchen experiments to soothe her own eczema has blossomed into a beloved brand known for its natural ingredients and captivating fragrances. In this candid interview, Lauren shares her journey from late-night product making sessions to running a successful company with her husband, offering a fascinating glimpse into the world of handcrafted personal care entrepreneurship.

Awayday: Tell me the story behind YUZU. How did it all start?

I've always had a history of really sensitive skin. I've grown up with eczema my entire life. Eczema is basically a skin condition where you get rashes and inflammation on your skin. I found that a lot of the store-bought personal care products had really long ingredient lists and a lot of those ingredients would be really irritating, harsh, and drying for my skin. 

So I wanted to experiment with making my own products. I actually started making them in my tiny apartment kitchen back when I was living in San Francisco. I wanted to use natural ingredients -- simple ingredients that were easy to understand, like coconut oil, shea butter, olive oil, and sunflower oil. These are plant-based ingredients that are a lot more gentle and nourishing for my skin. So I started playing around with recipes and just kind of kept tweaking them to get them to the consistency that I wanted them to be. I started using them on my own skin and found that they were a lot more gentle. I wasn't breaking out, they were very moisturizing, and they didn't cause any of the harsh reactions that I would get from a lot of the mass-produced products. 


Over time, I started making a lot of products. I was gifting them to friends and family and then eventually I started selling them at my local yoga studio, pop-up markets, and craft fairs, and the business has just kind of grown from there. 

A: I’m glad I asked you that question because I didn’t know that you started by developing the recipes yourself. 
That's incredible. So did you have a chemistry background or did you just develop them through a lot of trial and error? 
How did you even know how to go about it?

It is a very similar process to baking. So you find recipes, right?
Especially with the Internet nowadays, there are a lot of different recipes out there. I’d start with some basic recipes and then I would test them out on myself and then on friends and family as well. Then I would tweak the percentages of the ingredients from there --  like if I wanted something silkier or more moisturizing or a lighter formulation. So, it was basically a lot of trial and error to get them to the formulations that they are today. 

A: One aspect of YUZU that really stands out to me vis à vis other brands is your fragrances. How have you nailed these so well?

We work with a bunch of different fragrance suppliers to get the right fragrance -- like if we're looking for something fruitier, or for something floral. We'll work with our fragrance suppliers to nail down exactly which fragrance family and which notes we're trying to get. 

Then we test the different fragrances in different formulations. What we've found is that if you use a certain fragrance in, for instance, a candle versus a lotion, it's not going to smell the same and isn’t going to carry the same because the underlying base formulation is different. So if we get a fragrant sample from our supplier and we're like, “Oh, this smells amazing,” we have to test it in all of our different product formulations first because it's going to smell different from a soak to a lotion to a candle. 

I also make sure that the fragrance strength is different across the products. For instance, with a pocket room and fabric spray or a candle, the reason why people are using those products is for the fragrance. You want it to travel and fill up the entire space. But then for a lotion or a hand cream, you don't want the fragrance to be really strong and in your face. 

A: How long have you been in this business? I would think it would take years to figure out all of this! 

I started in 2016. In 2016 and 2017 it was a side business for me. I was still working a regular day job, and then I worked on the business in the evenings and at night. The end of 2017 was when I went full-time with the business. 

A: So how was that leap to decide, “Hey, I think this is going to be my primary occupation”? 

It wasn't an easy decision, but it had gotten to the point where I was working 40 hours at my full-time day job and then I was also working 40 hours at night and evenings on the business. I was essentially forced to make a decision because it just wasn't sustainable from a lifestyle/ sleep perspective.
I just remember I would be up really late at night, then I would wake up early and go to my full-time day job, and then I would come home and work in my kitchen and make products. I would be hand-carrying my orders on BART to go to the post office before I went to my job in San Francisco. It just wasn't sustainable. If you really want to be able to grow the business, you've got to go all into it. You can't have one foot in the business and one foot in your full-time day job. 

And, yes, it was definitely a challenging transition, from a financial perspective. You give up your steady income to go all-in on something that you weren't sure was going to work out or not. But we are still here. We survived the pandemic and are still in business. So, it's worked out so far.

A: I think I think you chose wisely! 

It’s definitely been a lot more fulfilling, to be able to do a business where you're creating products that people are loving and using and regularly reordering. And my business partner is actually my husband, so he's been helping out a lot as well. He helped with the transition because he was still working full-time after I had quit. So he took over all of the financial needs, like bills and living expenses and all of that. In 2021, he came on board as well full-time.

A: One day I'll have to ask you a whole other series of questions about working with your spouse. That's probably its own interview! 
So this next question is a common one, but you never know what the answer will be. What is your typical day like? 


It varies a lot. I spend my first hour just going through emails and highlighting what's important. I always have a bunch of recurring tasks, like customer service, production planning, and checking in with our team to see if there are any issues or questions. 

I like to leave about half of my day for project-type work. For instance, recently I was putting together some marketing postcards for a bulk mailing that we're doing. Or I could be working on our wholesale catalog or our email blasts. I could be interacting with some of our sales reps. I could be catching up on purchasing, supply chain, or accounting. 

A: All the hats, right? 

Exactly. In my corporate jobs before, I’d get bored because often I’d be doing the same thing over and over again. I’d look at the same report or update the same spreadsheet. When you're running your own business, there is always something different to do. Your to-do list is never complete.

A: So what has been the most rewarding aspect of running your business? 

It’s seeing the satisfaction and joy that people get with using our products. I love reading customer reviews -- I probably personally read every single one of the customer reviews that we get on our website. It's always amazing when we get reviews that are like, “Oh my gosh, your lotion is better than any other lotion I've tried before,” or “Your skin and lip balm is my savior for my dry lips, and it's the only thing that's getting me through the winter season.” 

When we see customers reordering the same product every three or four months, it's super fulfilling because we know that the products we’ve created have basically become a staple in their day-to-day routine. It has improved their quality of life. I know from having suffered from sensitive skin and eczema my entire life that when you find products that work for your skin, it is honestly like a savior, and you don't want to switch to something else. You stick with it. 


A: I know you've just launched new packaging -- is there anything else you're looking forward to for YUZU in 2025? 

We're looking forward to expanding into more products and fragrances. The packaging redesign was a big deal -- we had been working on it for about a year and a half. It turned out to be a lot more behind-the-scenes back-end work than was expected. We did a lot of testing to make sure we got to exactly what we wanted. 

A: I’m so excited for what's to come!