At 15, Susie Ma and her mom found themselves in London six months behind in rent and their electricity and water was about to be turned off.
They had relocated to London to start new lives but faced a daunting decision on whether to return home to Sydney, Australia where, as Susie describes, it had been a “really unhappy and violent household” that she didn’t want to relive. She knew her mom and dad, who had divorced, would never work out. A turning point came in Susie’s life when overcame her doubts and fears after years of embarrassment, unable to participate in simple activities such as buying birthday gifts for her friends.
That’s when she remembered spending time with her grandmother in Cairns, in Queensland, Australia. “I used to make this amazing product with my grandmother,” Susie recalls. “And it was this beautiful body scrub made with local ingredients. There were fresh sea salts. there was macadamia oil, jojoba oil, and its smell of these beautiful essential oils of lemon, myrtle and eucalyptus and bergamot.”
This exfoliate made your skin feel soft and kept away the mosquitoes. For Susie, this was her lightbulb moment. She would join her mom at London’s Greenwich Market to sell her body scrub. She borrowed 200 pounds from her mom to buy all the ingredients and 50 jam jars. At school, she designed the logo, printed it out and used a glue stick to paste the labels on the jar.
That Saturday at the market started a life changing moment. After an exhausting day of selling, Susie remembers not counting her money throughout the day. “And as soon as we got home, I took out all the cash out of my pockets,” Susie says. “I was wearing a little denim skirt, and this yellow halter neck top with the tiny little pockets in the front that were bulging. I took up all the money. And my mom and I just sort of counted the money up and we got to 980 [pounds or about $1,000] and … we just we just cried with happiness. And just realizing that … And that was the beginning of everything.”
Susie began to hone her entrepreneurial skills, expanding Tropic Scrub. She spent her days after school making the body scrub and going to market every Saturday. To scale her business, she adopted a direct sales method, adding a sales force of friends and their families who made a 20% commission. With the success, Susie made enough to get the family out of debt and buy their own home. As a high school student, Susie appreciated her success with Tropic Body Scrub, but she wanted more. She headed off to college where she majored in business so she could land a job where she could “make loads of money.”
Right out college, Susie, then 21, landed a job as a foreign exchange trader at Citi Group. She achieved her dream of making lots of money, but by the end of her first week, she felt like something was missing. “Week after week after week, I very quickly realized that I didn’t just want to be working in a job where I was earning good money,” Susie says. “But I wanted to be working in a job that I was actually enjoying myself.”
After complaining about her unhappiness, one of her friends encouraged her to return to her body scrub business, but this time found some investors. Her friend convinced her to apply to the United Kingdom’s version of “The Apprentice,” hosted by Lord Alan Sugar, a hugely successful entrepreneur and investor. He would choose one business to invest 250,000 pounds [about $278,000]. Out of 73,000 applicants, Susie made the final 16 candidates. She didn’t get chosen for the investment, but while she was on the show, she restarted her Tropic Body Scrub business, counting on the show’s publicity to drive sales. Her strategy worked. She sold out of products instantly, which garnered the attention of Sugar who asked how he could help. Susie convinced him to invest 20,000 pounds to become a 50% partner in the company.
While the investment helped, Susie ran a very lean operation. She built on her direct sales model, creating her first 400 customers into ambassadors who could generate up to a 30% commission on sales. That network of ambassadors has now grown to more than 20,000 around the UK. The company, focused on using all organic products, is one of the UK’s largest fashion brands, offering more than 300 products and selling more than 3.2 products a year and has more than 400 employees. Susie has focused on positioning Tropic as a model for the beauty industry, using sustainable packaging, and donating 10% of its profits “to good causes to help towards that infinite purpose, which is to help create a healthier, greener and more empowered world.” The company recently celebrated planting 7,000 trees in South Downs in the UK and opening up a school in Nepal.
Susie realizes she’s come a long way from those days of selling her body scrub at the Greenwich Market. “I’m excited about showing the world just how much difference you can make,” Susie explains. “And also showing people that no matter who you are or where you’re from, and how old you are, you can make a difference. You could literally be a 15-year-old girl who’s completely broke with a body scrub and a jam jar. And you can end up building schools and making the world a greener and happier place.”