In support of Startup Grind’s Female Leader Month, we are featuring female innovators and founders throughout the month of May. We are proud to share these stories about women who are disrupting industries and changing the world.
When her infant daughter was diagnosed with severe eczema, Fairytale Moments CEO Lola Lowe was desperate to help ease her pain and discomfort. After four years and hundreds of formulas, she created an incredible skin care product that helps people with eczema live their best lives, with confidence. Now, the Air Force veteran and member of the 2018 Bunker Labs PHL cohort class is delivering her product to a worldwide audience of those impacted by eczema.
LIFT Labs: Give us the Fairytale Moments elevator pitch.
Lola Lowe: You know how you get that itch in your elbow? Imagine losing your whole arm just trying to dig it out. That’s eczema. I make a skin care product that helps you scratch the elbow and stop the itch without losing your whole arm.
LL: What led you to found Fairytale Moments?
Lola: Without my daughter, I would have never in my mind thought I had something in me to give to other people to help them. I’m a mother of twins, so I had to care for her at night and then also her brother. Nothing the doctor prescribed worked. I just had to go to my grandmother and then use my own culinary resources to figure out if there was something that could help her feel better. It took me four years to get the perfect formula. It wasn’t easy, we tried hundreds of things, but I started to really study which plants were thin enough to get through the skin and then really study the disease. I finally found something that would work I noticed that she sleeps a lot more during the night, I noticed that she’s not scratching, she’s able to go swimming, and do activities that normally she wouldn’t because of her eczema. I started to use that final recipe from that moment forward.
LL: Who are some other leaders that inspire you?
Lola: Vince Murphy and Akiliah O’Brien, two really good friends that I met in network marketing, and actually my whole team, really inspire me because they saw in me that level of confidence I was trying to give to my daughter. They coached me and talked to me and walked me through owning that confidence. I probably would have never reached out to one of my mentors, Diane Sandefur at University of Pennsylvania, to be on Shark Tank. My younger self would have been waiting, “I’ll wait until somebody notices” – but who notices nobody? The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
LL: What’s one lesson that you’ve learned through founding Fairytale Moments that’s been most impactful on your life or your career?
Lola: It sounds like a cliché, but ‘just keep swimming.’ Every single day get up, and just keep swimming, just keep trying, just keep pushing, just keep believing.
LL: What is your top goal for Fairytale Moments over the next twelve months?
Lola: To be able to support my family just off this alone. I’ve been doing it a year without any other income, so this is my first year without supplementing my income with other work. I want to be able to support my family as if I had supplemented my income with the regular corporate, tax-payer job.
LL: What advice can you offer to future female leaders?
Lola: Put on confidence and wear it every day. And, just keep swimming because obstacles are going to come. Celebrate the small wins. It doesn’t matter how small it might seem to you or to someone else, because the problems are going to come. If there’s no problem to fix, celebrate that, and enjoy that moment, because another one is going to come.
LL: Do you have any go-to business or personal podcasts that you listen to?
Lola: Yes, I listen to Gary Vaynerchuk. And personally, I have a friend who does a podcast, Sonya LaRae on Tuesday mornings at eleven, that I listen to. She started out in the music industry fifteen years ago. She talks about tackling huge problems with confidence, making them work in her favor, even though it took her away from something that she loved doing.
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