De Amari

TL;DR

De Amari (originally Mioskin Beauty, renamed when the name was taken) was a cosmetics retail and wholesale business I co-founded with Nhu Pham while working full-time at Holistics. We sold a Korean all-in-one skincare mist, built a wholesale distribution channel that became our main revenue engine, ran profitably for 6–8 months, and closed when our supplier degraded the product quality and turned hostile. It taught me things about running a real business that no PM job ever could.

The Opportunity

In 2020, a new Korean skincare product entered the Vietnamese market: Mioskin, a 5-in-1 mist that combined toner, serum, and acne treatment in one bottle. It was being actively promoted by major Vietnamese celebrities and positioned for busy women who wanted effective skincare without a multi-step routine.

We spotted three things aligning at once, and became retailers:

• the product was genuinely new to market (low competition, brand giving retailers strong promotions)
• it solved a real problem we personally understood (both of us were busy working women who hated long skincare routines)
• and, we’d tested it ourselves and seen real results.

Our target customer: women 25–35, busy professionals, enough disposable income to pay ~750K VND per bottle, not enough patience for a 7-step routine.

What We Built

• The retail channel was built on Facebook (70% of revenue) and Zalo (10–15%). We named the Facebook page “Mioskin Beauty” — exactly matching what people searched for — and seeded aggressively in beauty groups while building our own. We also built a website for SEO, gradually adding e-commerce functionality once traffic was consistent. Neither of us was an engineer, so I built and maintained the tech side myself, set up a chatbot to handle common questions automatically, and wrote most of the content.

• The wholesale channel was the smarter play. By buying large volumes directly from the brand, we got favorable pricing — low enough that we could resell to smaller retailers who couldn’t afford to buy from the brand directly. This channel became our primary revenue engine: predictable, scalable, and self-reinforcing (more wholesale volume → better brand pricing → more margin). Nhu owned vendor relationships, stock management, and financials. I owned positioning, product bundling, content, and tech.

• What actually differentiated us: we didn’t just sell. We gave honest skincare advice and turned away customers whose problems the product couldn’t solve. In a market full of aggressive pushing, that honesty built loyalty and word-of-mouth that no ad spend could replicate.

What Happened

The business ran profitably for 6–8 months, generating around 15M VND profit per person per month — real money for a side business run entirely in spare time alongside full-time jobs.

Then two things happened simultaneously:

• The supplier degraded the product. The production house changed the formula (calling it an “upgrade”), but the quality noticeably dropped. We tested it ourselves — the results weren’t the same. We’d built our entire reputation on this product actually working. We couldn’t sell something we didn’t believe in.
• The brand turned hostile. Instead of staying wholesale-focused, they pivoted to retail and started price-dumping directly to end customers — undercutting their own retailers. They also began reporting competitor Facebook pages, including ours. The distribution advantage we’d built was being dismantled from above.

We tried selling other cosmetics products, but those markets were commoditized with razor-thin margins. Without the key product, the business didn’t have a reason to exist. We closed.

What I Learned

• Skin in the game changes how you think. At Holistics, a failed feature is a learning. At De Amari, wrong stock timing is money sitting in boxes. The stakes make every decision sharper — pricing, bundle design, channel investment. Running your own business trains you to make decisions with real consequences, not just real data.

• You don’t control the input. I built good channels, an honest brand, and a loyal customer base — and the business still died because a supplier changed a formula. Nothing in our execution was wrong. The structural vulnerability was there from day one: we’d built everything on someone else’s product. I think about this now whenever I’m building on a single dependency — whether that’s a supplier, a distribution platform, or an API.

• The wholesale channel was real commercial instinct. Most small cosmetics businesses go pure D2C. We built a distribution layer — buying volume, selling to smaller retailers, using scale to negotiate better terms, reinvesting margin into more volume. That loop worked. It’s the same kind of systems thinking I apply to product growth, but with physical goods.

• Diversify earlier. 70% of revenue through Facebook was the same mistake as 90% of Code Diagram’s users coming from VSCode Marketplace. One hostile actor and you’re exposed. I’d seen this pattern in software and still made the same mistake in a physical business. The lesson is clearly universal.

• Honest positioning is a moat. Telling customers “this isn’t right for you” is rare in retail. It should have been operationalized more deliberately — more content, more education, a community — not just practiced informally in chat. The instinct was right. The follow-through could have been stronger.