Like many beauty entrepreneurs, Rachel Roff, founder and CEO of Urban Skin Rx, came up with the idea for her brand after a workplace epiphany. As a trained aesthetician, she discovered that the tried-and-true treatments found in dermatology and aesthetics environments were not suited for darker skin tones.
“When it came time for me to do practicals [hands-on experience to graduate and receive a license], you have to service friends and family. I would bring in my group of friends and family, many of whom had melanin-rich skin. I would get from teachers, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that. Darker skin burns so easily. We have to keep it very basic,” Roff said on the latest episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.
Unsatisfied with the limited skin-care solutions that were offered for people of color, Roff opened the Urban Skin Solutions Medical Spa in 2006 in Charlotte, North Carolina. After seeing demand in that environment, Roff spun out the Urban Skin Rx brand in 2010 to serve more people. Today, it is sold in Target, Walmart and Ulta Beauty.
Part of its more recent success was largely due to a viral TikTok moment in 2020. An unpaid influencer posted a before-and-after of the brand’s hero cleansing bar that forever changed the brand’s trajectory. Last year, Urban Skin Rx hit $30 million in sales.
“One day at the office, my head of e-commerce [was like], our sales are triple what they should be at noon,” she said. “This girl ended up emailing us and was like, ‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I posted this on my TikTok, and it’s now at like a million views.’ We were not on TikTok at this point as a company,” she said. “It really has been a wild ride since, even to this day, the positive and negative effects of that moment will have forever changed our brand. It has given me a lot of life lessons as a leader, as a CEO, on what I would do if it happened again.”