Oui the People’s Karen Young is furthering the conversation around body care

Oui the People chief executive officer and founder Karen Young just completed her largest fundraising round to date, but she’s just getting started.

When the Esteé Lauder alum conceived of the premium direct-to-consumer shaving and body care brand in 2015, Young, who also has a fashion background and had previously founded her own home and lifestyle goods company, was coming from a personal place, having experienced razor burn and ingrown hairs from shaving for years – something many people who shave have just accepted as part of the hair removal process, discomfiting though it may feel.

Having worked at large companies, Young had seen firsthand their struggles to connect with a consumer directly, which informed her research. “I certainly felt excluded from the conversations that were happening at the time. Shaving wasn’t a price point conversation for me — it was a ‘How do I actually help my skin’…I just felt really overlooked,” she said.

And so initially, the idea really started as a beta project. I went out there before we even made a thing and I just started talking about the problem. I started talking about the experience I was having in my skin and I wanted to see if others were as well.”

The next challenge was finding the funding and a manufacturer that would allow Young, who was running Oui from her kitchen table and fulfilling orders in the evenings and on weekends, to amplify scale. “It was not easy,” she said. “When it comes to fundraising, there’s a lot that has to do with the market conditions, there’s a lot that has to do with your competitors. You take all of those things, which are the ceiling, and then underneath that you add the fact that I am a Black woman and it just makes it very, very hard to break through that ceiling.”