Twelve years ago, Gabrielle Requena noticed something small and unwelcome in the mirror: faint lines etched across her chest, the tell-tale signature of a lifelong side sleeper. She had spent years perfecting a skin care routine for her face. Her face had received years of attention; however, her decolletage had been left to fend for itself.
“Dreaded side sleeping lines!” she says now, with the kind of laugh that comes easily to someone who has made peace with the joke at her own expense. “I’d always taken great care of my skin on my face, and then one day, there they were.”
What followed was not a quick fix but the birth of an entire category. In 2014, working from her kitchen table, Requena began testing prototypes of a reusable, medical-grade silicone patch – a low-intervention answer to a problem the beauty industry hadn’t yet named. She called the brand Wrinkles Schminkles. This year, more than a decade later, she exited the business following its acquisition by global consumer products company Avenir Collective, having scaled it – without a cent of outside funding – to over $20 million in annual revenue and a footprint in 22 countries.
It is, by any measure, a remarkable founder story. But what makes Requena’s telling of it worth sitting with isn’t the revenue milestones or the retail wins, impressive as they are. It’s the candour with which she describes the interior experience of building something from nothing, and then – deliberately, patiently – letting it go.
The Proof Was in the Trial
Requena is quick to point out that the idea alone wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was convincing a sceptical beauty-buying public that a silicone patch could do what she said it could do.
“Wrinkles Schminkles was one of those products people would see online and think it was too good to be true,” she says. In the brand’s early direct-to-consumer years, Gabrielle built her entire strategy around removing the friction between curiosity and proof. “Once consumers trialled our product and experienced the results for themselves – immediately smoother skin often after one night’s use – they trusted the brand and returned to purchase again.”
That instinct – trust the product to sell itself, if you can just get it into someone’s hands – would become the throughline of everything that came after.
Building, Patiently
Ask Requena how she scaled a bootstrapped business to eight figures in revenue without ever raising outside capital, and she doesn’t reach for a growth-hacking playbook. She reaches for a mantra.
“I embraced a mentality of ‘Building, Patiently,'” she explains. “When you are launching not just a new brand but pioneering an entire new category, you can’t predict the pace at which the market and consumers will embrace product usage and form an emotive connection to the brand.”
Too much capital, deployed too early, she believes, can actually work against a founder in that formative period – the stretch where a founder-CEO is still learning her business and her customer from the inside out. “As a Founder and CEO across all areas of the business, it’s in the build phase where you truly get to know your business and customer innately,” she says. “Leveraging your own profit to grow more patiently in the early years is what sustains you in the latter ones.”
That strategy faced its biggest test when a venture-backed competitor entered the US market two years after Wrinkles Schminkles, using significant funding to pursue the newly emerging power of influencer marketing. Requena watched from the sidelines as the rival poured money into influencers rather than customers.
“It ended up being a gift for us,” she says. “They used their funding to grow awareness of the category in the US, and I patiently built targeting the real core consumer.” The postscript writes itself: “We outgrew them and had a significant exit. They did not.”
The Real Challenges Weren’t the Ones You’d Expect
For all the noise that surrounds female founders- the funding gap headlines, the credibility battles – Requena is refreshingly specific about where her own hardest moments actually lived. Not in self-doubt, but in operations.
“I never questioned whether I could make it work,” she says plainly. “But there were loads of challenges while scaling over 12 years.” If pressed to name the two biggest, she points to people – “having the right people at the right time, in the right roles” — and growth itself, the inevitable plateau that demands a founder tear up a strategy that once worked and build a new one.
It’s an unglamorous, deeply practical answer, and it tracks with everything else about how Requena talks about her business: less mythology, more mechanics.
Staying Ahead in a Category She Created … and Others Copied
Pioneering a category is one challenge. Defending it for over a decade against a wave of imitators is another entirely. Requena’s answer was to keep the brand in near-constant conversation with its customer – expanding into microneedle patches, building a recycling program for sustainability-minded shoppers, and, tellingly, retiring the language of “anti-ageing” altogether.
“We stopped talking about ‘anti ageing’ and started acknowledging that ‘ageing was complicated,'” she says. The campaign resonated deeply with women and helped the brand generate more than 80 million organic views across social media. “It made our customer feel understood and appreciated.”
It’s a small linguistic shift with an outsized emotional payoff – the kind of insight that tends to separate category creators from the brands merely renting space in a trend.
What It Actually Feels Like to Exit
Founder exits are so often narrated in the press as clean, triumphant full stops. Requena’s account of her own is more honest, and more interesting for it.
“I felt all the emotions, willingly,” she says. “Initially ‘relief’ at achieving a successful sale, as the sale process is not for the faint hearted. Then ‘frustration’ through the challenging integration process into the buyer’s business.” She pauses on the memory of a quiet Christmas, the first real stillness she’d allowed herself in years. “I even ‘grieved’ the business I wanted to let go of.”
And then, finally: “The emotion I am left with is ‘elation.’ To have pioneered a category, built a brand, and achieved a successful sale and exit is the greatest adventure of my career.”
The One Thing She’d Do Differently
If there’s a single regret Requena will name outright, it’s this: she built almost entirely alone.
“Coaching and community programs really only took off around 2022/2023, and they’ve been a game changer for founders,” she says. “I didn’t make time for that, so mine was a very solo journey.” She cites a line from Scott Galloway that has stuck with her – that building a company without a co-founder is like being upgraded to the presidential suite with no one to share it with. “Funny and true,” she says. “If I had my time again as a solo founder, I’d fill that void by creating meaningful connections with other founders.”
Life, Six Weeks Out
These days, Requena – now advising CEOs and founders on ecommerce transformation, growth and exit readiness – describes her single biggest piece of counsel in one word: focus. “Founders often get distracted by that noise,” she says of the constant stream of opportunity and crisis that defines founder-led business, “and the impact is a lack of focus. Building up the muscle to acutely focus on the top three to five things and block out the rest of the noise consistently is where the output starts to compound.”
As for her own time now, six weeks into life after Wrinkles Schminkles, the pace looks deliberately different. “Success looks like balanced days,” she says. “Slower mornings, a little bit of work, a little of exercise, a little bit of learning new things and a little bit of writing for my new Substack, The Exit Files.” Her skin care routine, by contrast, hasn’t changed much at all – “active skin care, in-clinic treatments, and focusing on internal wellness” – though her relationship to ageing has evolved considerably alongside the brand she built around it.
“I unintentionally leant into it as therapy for my own acceptance of ageing,” she reflects. “We are damned if we do want to do something about our ageing, we are damned if we don’t. Judged if we do, judged if we don’t. We know it’s a privilege to age versus the alternative, but we still look in the mirror and criticise our changes. It’s complicated.”
It’s a line that could double as the mission statement for the brand itself – clear-eyed, a little wry, entirely unwilling to pretend the complicated thing is simple.
Asked what keeps her motivated through the inevitable hard patches of building something new, Requena doesn’t point to grit or discipline. She points to curiosity. “I like to live my life in the pursuit of personal growth,” she says. “So when I found myself feeling challenged or unmotivated, it usually meant I was feeling stagnant. What motivated me was a new problem, a new skill, a new part of the business I hadn’t figured out yet. The day-to-day alone couldn’t motivate me through the hard patches, but often newness could.”
After 12 years spent transforming a personal skin care frustration into a global beauty category, Gabrielle Requena is following the instinct that built her success: finding the next problem worth solving.