Cheree Ashley: Founder & CEO of Osier

Episode 748

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Indie Lee, Founder of Indie Lee Skincare — the clean beauty brand built on resilience, transparency, and a mission to empower healthier living. Indie’s journey began in 2008, when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumor that doctors believed was environmentally derived. After surviving surgery, she turned her awakening into action, creating her own skincare formulas at home and eventually launching Indie Lee Skincare in 2010.
In our conversation, Indie shares how she transformed her personal health crisis into a movement that helped shape the clean beauty industry, what it took to bring her kitchen-made formulas to market, and how the brand has evolved over the past 15 years. We talk about the challenges of pioneering clean beauty before it was mainstream, how she defines “clean” today, and the lessons she’s learned as a mission-driven founder balancing wellness, science, and growth. Indie also opens up about her most pivotal founder moments, the hardest challenges she’s faced, and her vision for the future of beauty and intentional living.
Whether you’re a beauty enthusiast, a wellness advocate, or a founder looking for inspiration, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss. Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up, that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control, control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. I’m so excited to have my next guest. We are joined by Cheree Ashley, who is the founder and CEO of Osier, which is a Korean formulated skincare brand rooted in balance, resilience and new beginnings, and before launching Oh, Sarah sharee spent over a decade creating recovery programs that helped 1000s along the way, she noticed something often overlooked, the toll stress and addiction can take on someone’s skin and sense of self. So that realization led her to launch her incredibly, fairly new company, Osier, which is absolutely lovely and yummy in many ways, but the brand launched with two products the brighter days, Vitamin C serum and the recovery ceramide cream, which each focused on restoring and hydrating and protecting. So, so, so incredible. I love the philosophy behind it, and I’m excited to dive into shares journey on how she has not only launched Osier, but also how she’s building it. And so without further ado, welcome sharee. Nice to meet you.

Cheree Ashley 2:07
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me today. It’s a pleasure to meet you, and I’m excited to share my story and a little bit more about oh Sarah for your listeners, and it’s a pleasure.

Kara Goldin 2:17
Super excited. So for someone hearing about it for the first time. What is Osier And what makes it different from from everything else on the market,

Cheree Ashley 2:29
which is a great question, because there’s so many amazing products out there with amazing backstories and founder stories, and you know it, it’s a pretty saturated market, so I definitely am entering a space that has a lot, you know, I’m not a chemist, I’m not a celebrity. I’m somebody who just has a pure passion for taking care of myself and what I put on my skin and my body, coming from a space of recovery where, you know, I’m in recovery myself. So many years of not taking care of myself is really kind of what led me to this. And I feel like our our story is different. That’s what differentiates us, is we are a skin care brand that is going to be giving back to people that are struggling with substance abuse and mental health. And I don’t know of any other brands that that do that, and I just feel like it’s a bigger purpose. So it’s amazing products with a mission to be able to enter a space that’s going to help a lot of people.

Kara Goldin 3:36
So you didn’t have experience and actually launching a beauty brand, I would imagine you were a few along the way and had really focused on this, especially as you were continuing to recover. But what was the moment when you said, I need to go and do

Cheree Ashley 3:57
this definitely? So I started my facilities when I was really young. I was only 24 and I feel in the nicest way possible to say that I had to grow up really quickly. I’m working with a lot of doctors and therapists and other, you know, psychiatrists that own facilities. And so recovery is such a passion of mine, and I love it, but I wasn’t able to really share my journey of what I personally love. Skincare is everything to me, you know, working out and and those are things that were kind of on the back burner and not really brought to light because I was so focused on in the addiction field, and it really was something like, you know, this is who I am. This is what I enjoy. And over the years of having my facilities, I saw I wasn’t the only one. I saw how many of my clients came through the door with the same exact insecurities as I. Did when I walked through the door of treatment. And you know, really, what we put in our body plays a huge role in the effect on our skin. And from, you know, just puffiness from excess alcohol and substances or picking or rosacea, and once you find recovery, the first thing you look at is yourself in the mirror and say, like, Oh my gosh. Like, I really need to make some changes here, because you physically see what it’s done to you, and it ages you so quickly. And so I was seeing that with my clients, and we would provide little travel size shampoo and conditioner soaps for those I had to urgently come into treatment, and we just kind of put our label on it. Ordered them from Amazon. Always had it set out. And that kind of is where the rabbit hole, you know, started of, how cool would it be to kind of start something ourselves for our clients once they come in? And then I really started thinking, Okay, what is it that I like? Where do I like to shop? How could I do this on a broader scale, not just for people in recovery, but I have a group of friends that are very busy stay at home moms, so something that is luxury, but affordable. So I kind of took all those things into factor when creating Osier. And you know, first I wanted to come up with something that was meaningful to me. And oh, Sarah stands for the willow tree, and willow tree means new beginnings. And so that’s kind of where it started, picking picking the name, picking the style, the look of it. I wanted it to be able to be unisex. I wanted it to be something that I could see on the shelves of Nordstrom. And so that’s kind of where it started is from very ground up, just kind of doodling on paper of what what Osier can be. And that’s kind of where it started.

Kara Goldin 6:49
So how did you navigate product development and find the right partners in Korea? This is what it’s based on. I mean, obviously Korean beauty is as super well known for quality. But how did you navigate that, especially from, you know, the West Coast, California,

Cheree Ashley 7:12
so ironically, it’s such a small little town that I come from, and I had a friend that I went to school with and she started a women’s brand, a feminine women’s product. And so she had moved to Dubai, and I kind of reached out to her and just said, Hey, you know, I’m really considering starting my own brand. Don’t really know where to start. I know that you were pretty successful with yours. Would you mind giving me some insight and kind of where to get started. And so she was so helpful in the beginning stages with everything for ocera, different manufacturers and testing different products. And, you know, from boxes to registering your barcodes to just all the things I initially when I started, I’m like, okay, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to hit the ground running, and I want to do everything by the book incorrectly. I don’t want to cut corners if I’m going to put something out there, especially because I don’t have, like, you know, these amazing celebrities, they already have connections, and they have, you know, it’s a lot easier I feel and I could be wrong, but it seems to be easier for them to create a brand, and it’s just like, oh, boom, it’s just out there in the market. So I knew I wasn’t going to have that luxury. So if I’m going to create something, I need it to be amazing, because I can’t just show for it. I can’t just show, you know, like a lipstick and the color, it’s like, you have to try it. So the best way that this is going to be successful is, once people try it, they fall in love with it, word of mouth. Now they tell a friend, and now they reorder. So that’s why I was really particular with which manufacturer was going to use, lab and chemist and all of those things, factoring in, as well as me having extremely sensitive skin. So you know, Korean skincare, which is kind of why I leaned that route for the first two products, is it really favors two sensitive skin.

Kara Goldin 9:15
So, so interesting. So let’s talk about those two SKUs. So the brighter days Vitamin C Serum. So what makes this formula stand apart from others that are out there?

Cheree Ashley 9:27
Yes, so vitamin C, the standard vitamin C, is pretty like dry and can be a little harsh on your skin, and usually it comes in 10% so initially I was trying that, and that’s very harsh for my skin, so I kind of toned it down, and wanted it to be be able to favor to sensitive skin, but also be effective. So it’s 3% it also has squalling in it, so it’s very hydrating as well. You honestly could use it as your moisturizer. I personally do in the morning. That’s. What I put underneath my makeup, or if I’m just usually adult wear makeup in the day, is just the vitamin C serum and sunscreen. So it just is very light and milky and very soft. So that’s been the biggest feedback is, oh my goodness, this is so hydrating and so soft and it doesn’t irritate.

Kara Goldin 10:21
And so the and then the recovery, ceramide cream, like, what differentiates that product from others that are out there?

Cheree Ashley 10:30
There’s a lot of amazing moisturizers, the ceramides and having that specific ingredient for me, when, when was coming to Okay, what do we launch with? There’s so many different amazing products. How do we pick just two? I really wanted to tie in two different skews that either, if you’re a beginner to skincare and you’ve never but you know, if you just wash your face with right, your body wash in the shower and you just wanted to try something new, or if you already have a skin routine and you wanted to incorporate two which two products could be an easy go to that you’re going to see a difference. And so for the ceramide cream, it’s extremely, extremely hydrating. It’s very, very soft, and it rebuilds up that natural barrier that we all have. Once you start getting into your late 20s, early 30s, you know, our skin and our barrier is not as strong. So I wanted something that was really going to lock in that hydration and moisture and other serums or other products that somebody’s using, and where people could actually wake up and say, Oh, my goodness, I feel a difference after even the first use, and then after seven days to a month, they’re really seeing that difference of just soft, hydrated skin.

Kara Goldin 11:46
So every entrepreneur that I’ve ever talked to, every founder, I should say, really feels like being a founder and starting a company is so much harder than you ever thought. And what would you say has been kind of the most difficult or surprising part of launching a Sarah that, you know, just from, you know, just from whether it was actually getting the product created or launching or I mean, what has been the most difficult?

Cheree Ashley 12:25
I feel like there’s so many areas that have been really difficult to distinguish the hardest part for me, it’s also just going and just starting. It because there’s so much to learn along the way. I’m still learning every single day, every day, it’s like, oh my goodness. I cannot believe you know, we have two new products coming out, and it’s like, now seeing how long the first two it’s like, Okay, start now, because it could take up to a year. But I would say the biggest wow factor for me is how much you gift. Like nobody prepared me at all for that. I think you you assume, and you are behind the scenes for a good two years before anybody even knows about it. You’re not even talking about it to anybody other than your immediate friends and family. And so you see how much work goes behind the scenes, and how much you invest your time, your money, you know, the nighttime calls in Korea and photo shoots happening in Dubai, and all these things going that, the excitement of launching, like, Okay, we’re gonna do this. And it’s, it’s so beautiful. You fall in love with your brand that you created, and it goes live, and it’s like two sales, and it’s almost like, Oh my gosh. Like, what I thought we were almost gonna sell out? Like, it’s, it’s such an unrealistic expectation. But I think you just fall so in love with it that you assume everybody else is the second they see all this hard work into it. And that’s not the reality, also just the investment of that first launch and how much you’re gifting to different publicists and influencers and friends and salons and hotels and just trying to say like, Hey, try this. Let me know what you think, because if you love it, you want to share it. You want to put that on your shelves. You want to, you know, you want to be part of this mission. But to do that, it consists of of gifting. And so I feel like that’s been the biggest, wow. I didn’t realize that. Nobody prepared me for that. I don’t know if nobody talks about it, or if you know that’s just, I mean, it definitely seems to be part of the process. If you’re doing all the steps the right way. I mean, I could probably just wait for local sales, but it’s, I feel it’s going to take a lot longer to get where we vision this. And so this is just the route that I’ve I’ve taken to be able to spread the word a lot quicker.

Kara Goldin 14:57
So there’s different beauty brand. Who have launched with just one or two SKUs and kind of stuck with that. There’s also other beauty brands that have launched with multiple SKUs. So you’ve launched with two SKUs. Do you think that was the right decision? Do you wish you had more SKUs? Like, what would you tell somebody who might be going into launching their company today, knowing what you know,

Cheree Ashley 15:26
I would say, go into it with where you’re comfortable, let your company meet you where you’re at. You don’t want to get in over your head. Investment wise, because it’s not cheap or easy to start a brand and and everybody’s situation is different, whether they start with a partner or an investment firm or, you know, they’re creating it out of their living room or their garage. I really feel everybody has to meet themselves and have that patience from experience of being an entrepreneur and starting my company over 10 years ago, I didn’t have startup funds. It was just me, myself, and I and my family, and so I lived at my facilities. I couldn’t afford staff, and so slowly I built my company, and I had one employee, which she’s still with me today, you know, and then two employees, and now we’ve grown to multiple locations and 50 plus employees. And so luckily, having that knowledge from experience and trial and error with my first company, I kind of went into it with ease of knowing, give yourself grace. It’s just me, myself and I, I don’t have partners. Start with two. See how it goes, get people to understand and trust you and your brand and the products, and when the time is right to launch more, they already know like, oh well, the first two were amazing. I’m sure the next are going to be great as well, and just kind of building that community.

Kara Goldin 16:55
So your work in recovery has definitely shaped the way that you thought about when you were launching a SARE and how has your go to market strategy been influenced? Are you looking at showing up in recovery centers, for example? Are you when you think about sort of the experience that the consumers have? I think you’re more than recovery, and recovery can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but how do you get that message out there and kind of, I guess, show what you value in this brand.

Cheree Ashley 17:37
Being authentic to me has definitely just it hasn’t failed me yet. You know, I just, I was entering a new space where I sat there and had that conversation with myself, like, how much do I say, How much do I share? Do I really go in deep with my story? Do I talk about this being a recovery backed brand? And I said, No, that yes, I need to, because that’s authentic to me. And maybe not everybody will connect with that, but maybe a lot of people will connect with it. And so I’ve entered this space with that mentality. And when people ask, just like you asked, How did this get started? Where? How did you start? Osara, and why? Why the name, why the colors and just being authentic? And what’s true to me is that I’m in recovery, and I have a passion for skin care, and this is a new venture and a passion project that I want to see go further and touch different people. And how many people have resonated with that, and have connected with that and have said, Oh my gosh. I you know, I lost my dad to alcoholism a few years ago, or I’m in recovery myself five years the amount of people that have been able to share that with me at different events and PR events, and it has been emotional, because they would not walk into those rooms and talk about their recovery, if anything, they’re in a room where they’re don’t want to talk about it, because they don’t want to be judged. And instantly, when they come to Oh Sarah’s booth, and they meet me, and I’m instantly honest about that, it opens another level of comfort for people to say, like, oh my gosh, me too. And it also inspires people that may be struggling or have loved ones that are struggling, to say, like, oh my gosh, look what she has created from her journey of addiction to recovery, and here she is now. Like, I hope that it can inspire other people, that they can create it too. They can also create something they’re passionate about. If you’re not a chemist or you’re not an expert, you you can still partner with the right people to have your vision come to life, and there’s no shame around there shouldn’t be any shame around that you should be able to if you’re passionate about something, it’s going to be successful. Those are the companies and the brands that succeed the most. In my opinion. And that really, you know, the founders, they have a vision and what that story is, and they do the work to get it where it needs

Kara Goldin 20:09
to be. Yeah, definitely, if you could go back and give yourself one truth about starting your company to your younger self, not that you started that long ago, but what would it be like? What would you tell yourself like? I always think about those times when you know, you just start thinking, Gosh, this is so hard. How am I going to figure it out? And then you do. And when you look back on those times, you know you were able to push through, but if you could go back and give yourself one truth when you were starting this brand knowing what you know today, what would it be?

Cheree Ashley 20:50
Don’t doubt yourself. Just stay in it and be patient. And it’s not going to happen overnight, I constantly have to give myself that reminder almost daily. Sometimes I’m like, you know, it’s so easy to go on social media and see these other brands that you are so inspired by, and seeing them in all these different events and CMA Awards, and they’re, you know, in Ulta and Sephora and everywhere that you vision your brand, and you’re not there yet. You’re not even close. You wouldn’t even know how to enter those rooms. It’s so easy to see all of that. And yes, be inspired, but also be discouraged. And so having to remind yourself that you are they started somewhere. If you talked with them, they’re gonna have the struggles they’re gonna have, you know, I I wasn’t able to do this or that, you know? And it may be different than yours. Their struggles may be different than your struggles. And just really staying patient, and that’s, that’s still my reminder till this day, but, yeah, it’s definitely not easy. So don’t get discouraged. Stay positive and and keep your journey going.

Kara Goldin 22:07
So when you think about success for Osier, this is last question, and you had to, you know, really measure it however, like, what is success for a Sayer, like, what do you hope that you’re able to like, what kind of impact can you have?

Cheree Ashley 22:29
My goal for Osier is to be so largely spread that that percent of proceeds is truly able to help hundreds and 1000s of individuals across the country get the help that they need who do not have the resources. Treatment is not cheap. Not everybody has insurance, not everybody has the opportunity. I’ve spent many years walking the streets of brokenness, and I want to be able to utilize Osier in something that I’m so passionate about, and see it on the shelves of Sephora and Ulta and Nordstrom, and know that when it’s there, there’s also people getting better, like that is my dream and goal for Osier one day.

Kara Goldin 23:28
Well, I know you’re going to achieve that. So Cheree, thank you so much. Sharee, Ashley, founder and CEO of Osier Incredible, incredible skincare brand, good luck with everything. Everyone needs to go to the Osier website. Definitely purchase the products. Give ocira Try. They have, as Cherie mentioned, they have two SKUs. So so good, very hydrating, and so lovely. I love it. I’m surprised that this is your first brand that you’ve launched, because you’ve done such a nice job. So thank you for creating this and with such a great mission behind it, and very authentic helping lots of people and for everyone listening. Thanks for listening. Definitely share this episode and give a review and all of that. And thanks again for for listening today. So Sherry, thank you so much for joining. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a. Copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.

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