PHOTO: Charmaine Chow, visionary Founder and CEO of GetHarley, championing accessible and personalised skin health through innovation, expertise, and passion.
GetHarley: Redefining Personalised Skin Health Solutions
Charmaine Chow shares her entrepreneurial journey, her mission to revolutionise skincare with GetHarley, leveraging AI and human expertise, while championing sustainability, accessibility, diversity, and top-tier personalised care for global consumers.
Charmaine Chow is nothing short of an extraordinary visionary, redefining the skincare landscape with her brainchild, GetHarley. Armed with a solid foundation in Economics from the prestigious London School of Economics, Charmaine’s career trajectory took her from the high-paced world of finance to the nuanced realm of beauty technology. Her professional journey, spanning illustrious firms like Morgan Stanley, KKR, and Goldman Sachs, equipped her with sharp analytical acumen and an innate ability to identify opportunities where others see challenges.
Yet, what sets Charmaine apart is her deeply personal connection to her work. Inspired by her own struggles with skincare and a desire for clarity in an industry riddled with noise, she built GetHarley—a groundbreaking platform bringing science, human expertise, and technology into a seamless, hyper-personalised skincare experience. Guiding consumers to optimal skin health by leveraging a curated network of top-tier practitioners, Charmaine has not only elevated the standard for patient care but also empowered experts to deliver tailored solutions with unparalleled ease.
In this exclusive interview, Charmaine shares her inspiring story, delves into the innovative core of GetHarley, and provides profound insights into entrepreneurship in the competitive health and beauty technology sector. Her forward-thinking approach to sustainability, diversity, and leveraging technology for personalisation exemplifies the responsible yet dynamic leadership needed in today’s world. Join us as we explore the vision, grit, and brilliance of the trailblazer behind one of the most exciting developments in modern skincare.
Charmaine Chow’s trailblazing leadership has transformed skincare, embedding technology with empathy and empowering practitioners to deliver life-changing personalised solutions.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and technology in skincare, how do you see GetHarley innovating further to improve the customer experience?
At GetHarley we pride ourselves in the ability to make things seamless for the practitioner and the patient at once, so we are leveraging AI to help with automating a lot of tasks and processes in the company to achieve that. That said, we think the ultimate luxury is having a human on the other side of the conversation, so we still want to keep a human-in-the-loop experience at all times.
“I craved a trusted voice to guide me through the thousands of options for my skin.” – Charmaine Chow
GetHarley connects skincare experts with consumers — how do you ensure the quality and reliability of your network of clinicians?
To acquire its network of clinicians, GetHarley actively recruits qualified aesthetic doctors, plastic surgeons, and dermatologists by reaching out to professionals in the field, likely through direct outreach, industry connections, and marketing efforts, allowing users to choose a clinician based on their expertise and availability on the platform, effectively building a large pool of practitioners to match with clients based on their specific skin concerns; users can also choose to be matched with a clinician based on their needs and preferences through the GetHarley platform.
“The ultimate luxury is having a human on the other side of the conversation.” – Charmaine Chow
What challenges did you encounter while raising funds, particularly the recent £40 million, and how did you persuade investors of GetHarley’s potential?
In the short run the market is a voting machine, in the long run it is a weighing machine. Fundraising is hard, you have to navigate not only your business trajectory but also adapt to market gyrations. In the early days, people didn’t understand the vision of bringing skincare experts into the skin health conversation, investors were mainly investing in a lot of direct-to-consumer brands that were scaling rapidly and marketing-led. So it took speaking to many investors for them to understand that our vision was not to bring more skincare products in to the market but to empower practitioners to help patients find just the right skin solution for them, at all moments of their life.
“Sustainability is something we will always be mindful of and will be strengthened as we grow.” – Charmaine Chow
How do you balance promoting medical-grade skincare with keeping the platform accessible to the average consumer?
I think accessibility has many dimensions – information and ease of understanding, as well as price and factoring in your time. I think our practitioners’ curation and education of just the right products, for each patient, makes navigating the minefield of information in the industry much easier and much more accessible. In terms of time, you can order products to your door within seconds, again making it more accessible and easier for the consumer. in terms of cost, actually if you invest in 3-5 good quality products and use them to the very last drop, we find that in the long run you spend less. Many consumers might purchase cheaper products over the counter, but find that the products don’t work, and so it’s a wasted purchase and a waste of money. In addition, you can book an online skin consultation for £40 with a skin professional via GetHarley, without having to leave your house. We believe this has made expert advice accessible for many people.
The skincare market is highly competitive — what sets GetHarley apart from other platforms and brands entering this space?
GetHarley is about helping you find the right products for your skin, not selling you products that you don’t need. GetHarley is brand agnostic, so not tied to a particular brand, making it democratic for the practitioner to pick just the right products for each patient. We have a community of practitioners that are best in class in what they do and we are humbled by the opportunity to serve them on our platform and help them service their patients on their journeys to happier healthier skin.
As GetHarley expands globally, what strategies are you considering to address the diverse skincare needs of people from varying regions and ethnicities?
We already serve so many regions and ethnicities… all genders, skin types. We have shipped globally to patients for years. Our expansion plans are about building practitioner communities out of the UK, but because we already serve the world, we are set up to facilitate people from all walks of life. Our offering of over 500 skincare brands, means there is a brand and product range for everyone.
What role does sustainability play in your product curation and business operations, and how do you intend to strengthen this focus in the future?
With skincare experts curating the right products for their patients, patients get great results and so use them to the very last drop. There is therefore less waste compared to buying, trying and discarding (which is much of the beauty industry). GetHarley curated product regimes are posted out in eco-friendly, fully recyclable boxes, with minimal packaging and no bubble wrap.
At GetHarley we practise hybrid working, so people minimise their recruit and maximise productively. We work digitally, we don’t print anything we don’t absolutely have to print and we also donate the products we don’t sell to charities.
Sustainability is something we will always be mindful of and will be strengthened as we grow.
How do you see technology shaping the future of skincare personalisation, and what is GetHarley’s approach to staying ahead of the curve?
I think technology will play a huge part in shaping the future of the industry and in particular personalisation of skincare. At GetHarley, we leverage our proprietary technology and data to help our practitioners get feedback on what their patients like, dislike and we share benchmarks against the rest of the skincare industry so practitioners can utilise this information during their consultations and the creation of their treatment plans.
What key lessons have you learnt as an entrepreneur in the health and beauty technology sector that you’d like to share with aspiring business owners?
Dig deep and understand if what is compelling them to start a business is strong enough to go through all the hard work, rejections and challenges. I would also ask them to think through the problem they want to solve and whether it is something they are really bothered by, because you really have to be so enchanted by the problems, to come up with great solutions. I’d also say at some point you also really need to let go and play the quarterback role and hire people.
