Two working women turned into "intrapreneurs", producing local exclusive sea cucumber scientific skin care products

Many wage earners dream of being a boss one day and starting a career for themselves. In fact, many foreign companies have encouraged employees to start their own businesses in the past. This trend has also begun to emerge in Hong Kong's innovation and technology industry in recent years, allowing employees to pursue personal career development while retaining talents, and even creating synergy with the company's main industry.

Arey and Lavinia, two girls born in the 1990s, joined Labway, a local start-up that specializes in developing sea cucumber health products, two years ago. They are responsible for sea cucumber scientific research and marketing respectively. When the two girls usually work in the office and blow water, their favorite thing is Talking about their skin care experience, "There was a time when one of us had a bad face and the other had sensitive skin. We would often recommend skin care products to each other," they said with a smile.

Sea cucumber is famous for its nourishing and health-preserving properties, and is regarded as a "sacred product for beauty." While working part-time at Labway and focusing on scientific research on sea cucumbers, they noticed that in addition to being used as a health supplement, sea cucumbers also have strong repairing and antioxidant effects, making them suitable for use as ingredients in skin care products. "However, the collagen of sea cucumbers is a large molecule that is insoluble in water and cannot be directly absorbed by the skin. It is necessary to add complex enzymes and water to break the chemical bonds of the large molecules into small molecules first!"

👯‍♀️ Learn to be brave enough to make decisions

This step happened to require the use of the enzymatic hydrolysis technology developed by Labway, so they boldly proposed ideas to their boss, and eventually came up with a cooperation plan for internal entrepreneurship. In addition to allowing them to use the company's scientific research resources, the boss also became their boss. Shareholders, support them to continue the sea cucumber skin care product project.

This is how the two girls founded the new Hong Kong brand Mer-Veille. The unique ingredient "sea cucumber collagen peptide" extracted through scientific research technology, combined with polar brown seaweed extract and mother-of-pearl essence, is a rare product in the world that combines marine scientific research concepts. Skin care brand.

"We have the decision-making power of the new company, and we will use the time after completing our full-time jobs to run the business. We have never thought that we can build our own brand while doing a lot of work. Sometimes there are ideas that we can try to discuss with the boss and win the first priority. !」

However, it takes some time to adapt to the dual roles of employee and boss. "I learned a lot in the process, especially the responsibility of being a boss. In the past, I could put forward ideas, but the final decision-maker was the boss. We must learn to make decisions and have the courage to make decisions. It doesn’t matter if we are wrong, at least we have tried and learned a lot.”

Text: Gao Mei reporter @gomui.173
Photo: IG@merveille.hk