YouSaid · the spoken record

Vicky Tsai

lines on the record: 118
first: 2025-06-02
most recent: 2025-06-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The makeup artists, I saw the names in the credits on the side of the picture, and then I looked them up online and I found their agencies. Send them to their agencies.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I went to the library and I couldn't afford the magazines, but I flipped through them and I wrote down the names of the editors and their mailing addresses and the makeup artist that I admired. And I started sending out care packages with handwritten letters to them just with the blotting papers. And all I did was tell the truth of their story. And I said, I hope you enjoy them. And that was where the press coverage started coming from.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they had pointed out that Sheseido had been in the US for over two decades and had not been able to really make it beyond Chinatown. SK2 Procter& Gamble was behind them. They weren't having any meaningful success yet. Shuyu Amora, which was owned by L'Oreal, had been pulled out of the market and shut down. And there was no other Asian brands. And people told me very, very plainly that skincare is not really a thing in the US people care about. They care about makeup. And then Asian beauty in totality is not aspirational here. So don't do it.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You name it. I couldn't even give people money to take me as a client. And then retailers were not interested at all. And everybody also told me at the time too that there is no demand or interest in Asian beauty in the US because it's not aspirational.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was completely mistaken about how I would bring it to life. I thought if they're beautifully designed and I tell this beautiful and true story about where they're from, I'll be able to find partners to work with. So retailers who would want to carry it, PR agencies who want to work with us. And we were turned down everywhere.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I went to the grocery store. I was checking out and my credit card got declined. and the people behind me in the cashier looked at me with a great deal of pity because I was super pregnant and I couldn't afford my groceries. And I left them there and I walked out without them.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Working out of my apartment. But I mean, to be completely honest, financially, things were dire. When we maxed out one credit card, we would roll it all over to another credit card to buy ourselves some time. And I have a distinct memory of being nine months pregnant. I couldn't afford maternity clothes. So I just sort of pulled the drawstring out of my sweatpants. But then I'm like Humpty Dumpty without the suspenders. So I have to hold on to the pants when I walk or else they're on the ground.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed, indeed, yeah. Well, I started before I even started the idea, there was maybe half a million in debt. So we've immediately went to credit cards, which I don't recommend, but it is what we did. I worked four jobs. I begged my landlord for a discount in rent in exchange for renting out the apartments and being the super for the building. I sold anything that I had that was of any worth, including my car and my furniture. My husband is very good at poker. And so when he moved to San Francisco every Tuesday night, he would go play poker. And it would be just enough. I would wake up Wednesday morning, there would be a little stack of cash, and we'd use that to buy food. And then I just was just a team of one.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's money and it's growth and it's money and it's growth. And I wasn't interested in creating something for money or for growth. I was interested in creating something worth loving. And that I would want to spend the waking hours of my life doing. So I just wanted to self finance it and just see what it could become. But the only thing I wanted was to make sure it stayed really true.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew enough about fundraising that I didn't want to do it. I wanted to create something really, really pure and really, really true. Lot of people from business school end up in the private equity world and in the VC world and the ROI is very straightforward there. It's about money.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beauty of simplicity in nature. And so we said, you know what? That's far more beautiful than just being an exhaler and a breath of fresh air. So let's imbue it with meaning.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I I had been helping out my friend Stanley, who had been the global head of Creative for Starbucks and had left to start his own creative agency. And I had asked him for his advice on creating a brand because I didn't know how to do that. And when I was telling him what I wanted it to feel like, I just said, I want it to feel like an exhale. Like a breath of fresh air. And so he actually came up with the name Tatcha. And then shortly thereafter, he introduced me to this incredible woman, Nami Onadera, who's still with us, who's our director of culture. And she said, when I saw the name Tatcha, I assumed that it was short for Tatehana, which is one of the classical Japanese arts of flowering arrangement.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I thought maybe I can create a way to keep sharing these things that I'm finding because there was these ingredients that heal my skin. There's this paper with this beautiful history that's fantastic and simple. And so I actually created Tatcha as just as a way of sharing these things I was finding when I go there.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still can't explain it, but I saw this vision in my head of sharing these beautiful little treasures that I found in Japan with other women like me who were looking forth something that was real and beautiful and safe.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took them about a month to actually make them and send them to me, or maybe a couple months. And so they showed up in big crates a few months later.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something here maybe I'll keep like a thousand for myself and then I'll figure out I'll give everybody I'll sell another nine thousand and then I'll have a steady supply for myself”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I called the place in New York where I bought my engagement ring because I had proposed my husband and bought my ring. And so I just called them and said, I need to sell it back to you. Would you buy it? So they took it on consignment. It took a few months for them to find a buyer.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I looked around the room, and the only thing of value that I had left at that point was my engagement ring in my hand. So I said, I'll just sell my engagement.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first I said I'll buy it, then I went back to my hotel room and called my husband that night. So it's maybe 6 a.m. his time. And I say good morning. I hope you're doing great. I just bought 10,000 blotting papers”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They said they weren't interested, so then I said, How many would I have to buy to get you interested? And they said 10,000. And I was like, I'll buy it.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, yeah, yeah. And so I just came home with this box of things like that. And I used half of the wrong But about eight weeks later, my skin had pretty much healed. And that was after three years of dermatitis and steroids and antibiotics. And at the same time, I was so enchanted with the story of the blotting papers, the gold leaf artisans, the geisha, and the history. And to me, it embodied so much of what I was looking for as a woman. It was authentic. It was beautiful. It was steeped in true history. And so I guess if I take one step back is when I was still in Kyoto, after I met the geisha, I went back to the Goldie Fartisans and I did ask if I could bring the blotting papers to the US.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Largely food ingredients. When I took them home, Yuko had to write down on post-it notes saying, you know, this is rice powder, add water, create a foam, massage onto the skin, or leave on as a mask.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But she just told me some basic stuff. We use oil to take off our makeup. We use a lot of rice powder and camelli oil and sake. And then Yuko took me to go find some of those things afterwards. And that's when I started seeing geisha flitting in and out of the store while we were there without any makeup on. And their skin looks like a child's skin. And so if they reached for a bottle of oil, I would reach for that bottle of oil. And then if they reached for a powder, I would reach for a powder.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not because I wanted that look, but I was looking for anything at that point that I felt safe putting on my skin because I still had my skin issue too. And now I'm pregnant. So I'm super careful about what I'm putting on my skin.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And honestly, she didn't have a great answer. She just said, I don't know. We always knew that if we went and we used it before we put on our makeup, it would help create the nice canvas for makeup. And if we used it after, it would keep our makeup fresh. But she didn't have a lot to tell me about how that leap happened from one industry to in the next. But at the same time, I was so enchanted by her look, especially the makeup. They told me that Geisha had been around three to four hundred years. And I knew a lot of the things that scared me about ingredients in personal care were largely from the petrochemical industry. And so I knew whatever they're using largely predated the petrochemical industry. And so I started asking her questions about her makeup.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They introduced me to a geisha that they knew and they helped arrange for me to meet her in a tea house either later that day or the next day. And I had a translator with me named Yuko, who's wonderful. The beautiful. Unreal geisha walked in and I was just completely beside myself. It was the summertime. I was pregnant. I was trying to sit on my knees, which I'm not very good at. And I was sweating and I kept sliding off of my legs because of the sweat. And yet she was just the picture of perfection wrapped in kimono. No sweat, never had to budge, never broke character.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was my question because it's such a weird leap. And so they actually said you would have to ask a geisha or a kabuki actor because they're the ones who've been coming around. Getting them at the end of the day. And I was like, can I meet one? And they said, yeah. And so they introduced me to one, which is crazy because”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So gold is soft, and what they would do is they take gold, paper, gold paper, gold paper, gold paper, and then these massive hammers made out of like stones. And it protects the gold during the hammering process because gold leaf is only a few micrometers in thickness. So it really has to get hammered down to almost nothing. And so, this paper would get hammered with the gold and it would protect the gold. And then when they were done with hammering, hammering paper would get thrown away.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I got to Kyoto, I went to the artisans who are a couple hours outside of Kyoto. And when I went to the workshop there, all they make there is gold and there's gold everywhere. There's like gold on their eyelashes. There's gold in their clothes. It's like a mess of gold. And this is gold.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just started traveling. And I think, like a lot of people, I was traveling to find myself. And when she said Kyoto, there was something about it that drew me, even though I had never really spent significant time in Japan before. I knew nothing about Japanese culture because I'm not Japanese. But I just felt drawn So I went there”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I just felt like I didn't believe in anything anymore. And I questioned my value system and I questioned what I had been chasing my whole life because my parents as first generation Asian immigrants, you know, it's a very clear equation for success. You go to an Ivy League school, become a doctor or a lawyer. And then make your parents super proud and make their sacrifices worth it. And I had sort of veered off every one of these paths.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did not have a commercial idea yet at that point. I felt. We had had a pretty rough first 10 years of our adult life and pretty rough as a relative. I wouldn't say that it was no rough.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She said they're hammering papers, they're beating papers. And I was like, what are you talking about, Tomoko? And I didn't really understand what she was saying, but I thought the whole thing was so fascinating. I felt drawn to travel. I think I was trying to find myself, so I just picked up and I went to Japan.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was unemployed. I still have dermatitis. I'm still using aqua4 in my face and I ran out of my blotting papers. I tried to find those blotting papers around in the US and they're not available. There's different kinds here, but not that kind. And so I called up my friend from Starbucks, Japan, and I asked her where to find these blotting papers. And she said they're actually from around Kyoto and they come from Goldief artisans.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I worked about four jobs at that point. That was one of them. I think the only thing that was interesting about that was oftentimes the business school types when they moved to San Francisco will live in the marina. So when I was out there renting out apartments, it was not uncommon for me to see my business school classmates. And they would be like, Is this your apartment? I was like, no. Why are you renting it out? I'm like for the money.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Um, well, I told my landlord that I was not working, and she let me help be the almost like the super for my building. Oh. And rent out apartments for her and her other buildings for $400 a pop.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I definitely was thinking about all the debt that we had because we had two business school debts plus a mortgage in Seattle plus a lease for an apartment in San Francisco. And my husband had undergrad debt on top of that. And I just remember thinking, I've really made a mess for myself.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I thought to myself, Howard Schultz called me my cell phone and offered me any job that I wanted at Starbucks, and now I am unemployed standing in the street crying with my chair. In a different city than my husband”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like an ergonomic chair. And then so when I left, I had to take the chair with me, and I cut it fit it in my car on the way out.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I think it dates back to 9 11 and the experiences there, but I was becoming increasingly impatient with spending the hours of my waking life doing things that I didn't believe in, or if I believed in, but it just didn't feel like the right fit or the right people. So I typed up a letter, a resignation letter, and I drove into the office and I handed it to them and I told them that I very much respected what they were doing, but it wasn't the right fit for me. And I tried to leave rather elegantly, but one, I was crying because I was so lost. And then two, I had brought this big clunky chair with me. And I was trying to take the chair out. He brought it into the office.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was their first business hire. And so my job was effectively to come up with a launch plan for them as well as a marketing strategy. And so I was with them for only, I think, maybe four months.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we were married. We still had a house in Seattle, and so I picked up and I left so quickly that I moved here, I moved to the Bay Area alone.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shampoo for curly hair and be able to check all these things off and how have it pop out a recommendation. They're really ahead of their time. I give so much credit for that.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was called, well, it eventually became called Good Guide. It's very hard to say. Good guide. Good guide. And it brought me to Berkeley. It was a few scientists out of Berkeley. And they wanted to create sustainability ratings for consumers by scraping the internet so that a consumer could plug in their values. You know, I care about gay rights. I care about animal testing. I care about carcinogens. But I also want to.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And then I was recruited out to the Bay Area to head up marketing for a sustainability startup. And then Howard Schultz found out, and he called me on my mobile phone and asked me to come in and meet with him. So I went back to his office and it was the week that my furniture was already on a truck to San Francisco. Wow. And he kept on being like, why? Why would you go and tell me what you want to do and tell me what job you're interested in? But I had a weird loyalty to the. The VP who gave me a meeting expectations review, so all I said to Howard was, Oh, you know, I just don't fit in here. So if I could do it all over again, Howard, I left because I got a crappy review that I did not deserve.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I missed zero days of work. And it ended up being a very successful launch. Howard was super happy with it and had me present to his board of directors. And I had a VP in my group who I had very little mentorship or guidance from. And at the end of the year, he gave me my performance review. And it was Meet's expectations. And I just thought, this is not a place where I'll be successful, even though I have so much admiration for Howard and the company and the brand. So I left.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was offended, honestly. I would go 40 days straight without taking a day off. I would fly over the weekend so that I would miss any time and be back in the office by 8 a.m. Monday morning. The timeline for the project was extremely compressed. There was a team of one with no manager. And in the middle of all of that, I broke my arm and I had a cast that went all the way up to almost my shoulder that I had to wear for months.”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's a great question. It's a piece of paper that is made out of, there's various kind of materials, the ones in the US are made out of cotton, the ones in Japan are made out of a certain type of leaf. And you press it to your skin when it's oily and it lifts off the oil, but it won't disrupt your makeup or take any moisture from the skin”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it leaves you looking kind of greasy. So when I would go to China via Japan, I would pick up these blotting papers that I found in Japan that I couldn't find in the US. What are blotting papers?”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had it from the summer of business school, so between those years, I had it my entire second year of business school, and then I had it two years after that when I graduated and I worked for Starbucks. So after business school, we moved to Seattle. My job was to launch Starbucks' consumer products business in China. And I was flying all the time through Japan. There were not direct flights between Seattle and Beijing at that time. And the only thing I could put on my face that didn't irritate it was aquafor. Which you know, you put on babies' butts when they have diaper ashes before”
2025-06-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tatcha: Vicky Tsai (July 2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT