Community Highlights: Meet Cary Lin of Common Heir

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cary Lin.

Hi Cary, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was born in Shanghai and immigrated to Berkeley, CA with my folks when I was four years old. Growing up, I always was encouraged by my parents to aim for a stable path in life (doctor), and I never imagined that I would one day start a company, much less a beauty brand.

I studied Economics as an undergraduate at Harvard and moved to New York after college to start my first job in management consulting. The job basically had me living out of a suitcase and dealing with constantly irritated and breakout-prone skin from the stress and lifestyle. While I had always had a love of beauty inherited from my skincare-loving mother, I found myself wandering the Sephora in Times Square late after work to de-stress and became so passionate about skincare to the point where one day, I realized I wanted to try and pivot my career into beauty.

The problem with breaking into the industry is that everywhere requires “prior beauty experience,” which I didn’t have. So I started over — as an intern. I dropped everything and moved back home to the Bay Area to work for a prominent Asian American beauty founder, and that opened my eyes to the possibility that maybe I could do start a company too. On her advice, I went back to school for my MBA at MIT and put in the work at some of the top consumer and beauty companies in the world before finally taking the leap to start Common Heir in 2020.

Being an entrepreneur was NOT on my radar originally, but I fell in love with the idea that I could create something that’s part of someone’s daily life and routine, an experience physical to the touch that could help someone feel confident and beautiful. That’s the magical part for me!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The nugget for the “luxury meets inclusivity meets sustainability” concept that eventually became Common Heir started in late 2019. My co-founder Angela Ubias and I eventually began working together in earnest in 2020, right before the pandemic. We had been introduced by a mutual friend and both approached the warm intro with low expectations. I had been “on sabbatical” (read: burned out from work) trying to get something off the ground, and she was coming off of a long stretch in beauty manufacturing and wondering whether she should start something after making incredible products for other people. We first met over FaceTime and surprise, surprise: it was a “love match,” a total meeting of the minds moment. We were immediately speaking the same language when it came to our values on what the industry SHOULD be.

We both had similar perspectives on beauty and what we’d do to improve the industry but had very different backgrounds (mine in brand and marketing, hers in product development and account management). We knew that our shared vision for building a beauty brand that is inclusively designed for all skin types and tones, sustainably made without plastic packaging, AND clinical-grade performance was going to be the hardest thing we could possibly set ourselves up for. If it was easy, someone else would’ve done it already!

Starting a company is a pretty tough journey during normal times. And starting a company with a perfect stranger (we had never worked together before!) in the middle of the pandemic was definitely not Plan A! After flying to meet each other in person twice before the pandemic, we ended up having to build the company remotely – her in Austin and me in Los Angeles. We raised a small friends and family round to get our prototype formulations off the ground, only to find that the pandemic disrupted international supply chains EVERYWHERE. As a nonexistent new brand at the time, we also struggled to find partners who had the capabilities to make what we had in mind to our standards. It was rough out there for a while.

Even once we had prototypes and done a really successful beta, no one thought that there was room for a luxury AND sustainable AND inclusive brand to get funded. We were told that nobody cared about the problem or that the market was too crowded. We were told that our fundraising efforts would’ve been easier if there was a man on our team because it would lend credibility to the “seriousness” of our innovation. There was a lot of doubt, despite our collective years of experience in the industry, that folks would buy into a clean, plastic-free brand that didn’t feel granola. Even when we had built up momentum and traction with our launch with key retailers and press, we set out to fundraise and endured so many no’s before we found our perfect partner.

As you know, we’re big fans of Common Heir. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
In the two years since our official launch, we’ve set out to disrupt the beauty industry and set a new bar for luxury skincare that delivers high-performance results, inclusively designed by default, and sans plastic packaging. As first-time founders, we both found ourselves taking a massive leap of faith in the middle of the pandemic to bring a much-needed innovative approach to a global beauty industry that generates over 120 billion units of packaging a year and historically has not catered product development toward a diverse range of skin types and tones.

We launched Common Heir with a vision of luxury beauty as it should be—intentional, sustainable, and inclusive. Not just one or the other. Now I think we’re evolving, having cultivated a brand rooted in the legacy that celebrates inclusivity through clinically testing our skincare on all skin types and tones. We take inspiration from our heritage and reimagine rituals that we’d be proud to pass down to our loved ones. Our shared vision is for the brand to serve as a gateway for folks to start leading a more sustainable, conscious lifestyle without sacrificing product performance or their core values.

We now have an award-winning lineup of Vitamin C, Retinol, and Ceramide serums that have received acclaim from beauty editors, makeup artists, and community members for its clinically proven performance and aesthetic, plant-based packaging. We’ve been featured in Allure, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Refinery29, Byrdie, People, Good Morning America, and other top publications, speaking to our intention and ability to design for all. We want to prove that sustainability doesn’t have to be granola, and that inclusivity in clinical studies should NEVER be an afterthought, and that things that are good for you can be coveted and pretty, too.

What were you like growing up?
Growing up, I loved art. I was also a very restless kid who wanted to try absolutely everything, I fell in love specifically with art – that was when I could settle and focus on something.

When I was younger, I used to draw on the walls. I can’t remember a moment in my earliest childhood when I wasn’t scribbling little animals on my homework, coloring in the Snoopy comics in the San Francisco Chronicle, or drawing likenesses of myself with markers on restaurant menus. When we moved to Berkeley from Shanghai, I first began taking various community center art classes, but I quickly found myself growing bored of monotonous, guided drawings and became a devoted pupil of Chinese brush painting, and eventually fell in love also with oil painting.

Art teaches you so much about life: an accidental splotch on paper becomes an added branch on the tree with a few extra strokes, or a leaf, or a little sparrow. I will always remember my art teacher saying, “There are no such things as mistakes in art. You simply made a line you didn’t like.” I think starting a company sometimes feels similar – you learn by trying to deal with the unintentional “lines” and “splotches” as best you can and try to appreciate the bigger picture.

Pricing:

• 10% Vitamin C Serum – $88
• 0.2% Retinol Night Serum – $88
• 2% Ceramide Barrier Boost – $88
• Gua Sha Facial Sculptor – $68

Contact Info:

• Website: commonheir.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/commonheir
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/commonheir

Image Credits
Christopher Blackwell. Kelsey Fugere. Joseph Saraceno. Wilson Wong. Semira Chadorchi.