Melisse Shaban has spent 30 years building brands at Aveda, the Body Shop, and Fekkai. She founded Virtue Labs and scaled it into an award-winning hair care brand. She wasn’t looking for another venture. Then she saw what Aramore had built: a biotechnology that delivers an NAD+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) precursor through the skin barrier to fuel cellular renewal at the deepest level. Real clinical data. Peer-reviewed research. A 12% increase in barrier thickness. She came on as a board member, then couldn’t stay on the sidelines.
Aramore has crossed $5 million in revenue—but Melisse isn’t relying on the traditional beauty playbook to grow it. No influencer deals. No aspirational campaigns. Instead, she’s sending free products to strangers on Reddit and asking them to report back with the good, bad, and ugly. Here, she shares why she’s betting on radical honesty over industry hype—and why getting the story right matters more than going viral.
On coming back for one more brand:
The ability to find a genuine piece of biotechnology—not claims, facts, and there is a difference—and be part of commercializing that and making it accessible to consumers, that was attractive to me. We had done the same thing at Virtue. I’d had a great run and enjoyed it so much: the storytelling, making the impossible possible. I thought this was another opportunity to do that as a last shot in my career, probably.
I started out as a board member, not as the CEO. Jumping back in wasn’t the plan. But I couldn’t resist the temptation. And because I didn’t build this from the ground up, I can be more objective. When you build something out of your soul, you often don’t see the flaws in it. I don’t behold Aramore in the same way. I see it for what it is and what it can be, versus something that’s so close to me I can’t evaluate it clearly.
On running a 28-day trial on Reddit:
Reddit is becoming trusted again, because I know it’s you on the other side. You’re not being paid. You’re not looking at your followers or your likes. You are being genuine. We picked really active skin care users and put them on a 28-day regimen to see what they saw. In 100% of the instances, they saw a dramatic change in the underlying look and feel of their skin.
It goes back to the 28-day skin cycle: The lowest layer of cells rises to the top within that four- to five-week period, depending on age. That’s when you start to see transformative change. We’re going to continue to use Reddit this way: putting active skin care users on the product for free and letting them give us the good, bad, and ugly. We don’t choose by demographic. It’s completely democratic. Usually it’s people between 40 and 60.
You’ve got to have faith in your product to do that. And I’m OK with negative feedback. Even when I’m shopping for clothing and reading reviews, I always go to the one or two that are bad, because I want to know what they saw. That’s more helpful to me than everybody buying five-star reviews. We’re not afraid. We know the benefits to healthy skin. It may not achieve what you want as a customer spending $100, but I know it’s going to increase the thickness of that barrier and the overarching health of your skin.
On admitting the storytelling isn’t solved:
We have seen big brands get to be very big with no science and deep emotional connection or aspirational connection. We have real science. Now the unlock is figuring out how we help people understand that.
I don’t know that we are yet, frankly, to be honest with you.
We have to avoid the historical cheap shots. “You don’t need Botox, you need NAD precursors.” That isn’t the case. The reality is finding a way to help people understand that if you take care of your skin and your body, starting early in life, it’s very small things you have to do. It isn’t 27 layers. It isn’t 17 products. You don’t have to spend $1,000 a month.
I even hate the word “aging” because it connotes something negative. If you are not aging, you’re dead. We’re leaning into aging, not anti-aging. We’re all for aging well, aging beautifully. Stop looking at every little insult and nick that somebody else has defined as beautiful. Let’s just be healthy. If you think about things like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers—you were never supposed to succeed. You were just supposed to stay part of this community. The beauty industry did the same thing for decades: Make a woman feel badly about herself and sell her hope in a jar. We’re not doing that.
On cutting products to protect what makes the brand different:
We had products in the line that didn’t have NAD in them. I think that’s for some other company. We are the only company in the world right now that can actually deliver what we’re delivering. The mistakes come when you think you have to be all things to all people, almost in a regimen type of way.
I think about it the same way I think about vitamins. Some people feel like they need 20 different ones. Me? I’m going to take vitamin D and magnesium. That’s what I need to replace. So how do we supplement what the body needs, when it needs it, versus getting caught up in the beauty space, which is new, new, new, new? Every trend that comes your way, you’re jumping on it.
Our challenge is policing the industry and not letting people get away with saying it’s real science when it’s not. That’s not fair. That’s a lie. Show me the receipts. Let me see your data. If you can put a white paper up but it’s not peer reviewed, it doesn’t matter—you wrote it.
On when 30 years of experience works against you:
Sometimes you can have too much experience. Experience can be fear, because you’ve seen things before that haven’t worked, and you tend to stay away from those things. But everything comes in cycles.
The quickness with which the communication platforms are changing has been shocking. The enormous amount of content that’s required goes against my ethos. Growing up the way I did in branding, it was almost like the brand had a promise and there were just do’s and don’ts—things that were non-negotiable. This brand can’t play there. This brand can’t speak like that. There were guardrails. The thing that’s shocking to me now is there don’t seem to be as many guardrails for brands, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
I don’t like clickbait. But I think it’s a necessary evil. The attention span is so limited, it almost takes those types of strategies to make space for the real storytelling. It reminds me of things that used to happen 30 and 40 years ago in advertising, where it was salacious and shameful. You’d make a woman feel badly about herself and sell her hope in a jar, and if you just used this product, you could maybe look like Cindy Crawford. Some of the new clickbait has that same energy, where you’ve got about three or four seconds and that’s it. It feels gross to me. But here we are.
Hear more from Melisse on Shopify Masters, including her advice on taking investment money (and why it stops feeling good), what she learned building brands alongside Horst Rechelbacher and Anita Roddick, and why she still believes truth wins—even if the last year has shaken that conviction.
