Durana Elmi, co-founder of Cymbiotika, on how the wellness brand won shelf space at Target and Ulta without a paid influencer campaign or outside capital.
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Please email studios@latimes.com. Most wellness brands are built in the order the internet rewards: virality first, infrastructure later. Cymbiotika did it backward, spending five years compounding triple-digit growth almost entirely without the paid-influencer machinery that fuels the rest of its category.
“Visibility is easy. But building a product that people trust is what takes time,” said Durana Elmi, Cymbiotika’s co-founder and chief creative and experiential officer.
“We’ve always wanted Cymbiotika to be a brand that lasts, and that meant focusing on a foundation first. ”How a Korean skincare brand hit $500 million without a celebrity, and why Kendall Jenner’s instincts made her the perfect partner for what comes next. That foundation is deliberately unglamorous. While competitors leaned on paid influencer campaigns to manufacture a moment, Cymbiotika spent its early years on formulation, its proprietary liposomal delivery technology, and an operation it kept almost entirely in house.
“We run most of our operations in house because we wanted to be close to every part of the customer journey,” Elmi said. “Those aren’t necessarily the things people see on social media, but they’re the things that create loyalty. A viral moment can introduce someone to your brand, but it’s the product and the experience that will keep them coming back. ” That discipline got tested every year the growth curve bent upward again.
“Every stage of growth comes with a different challenge because every year the business looked completely different than it did the year before,” Elmi said. There were moments, she admits, where a faster shortcut was on the table.
“There were definitely moments where we could have made decisions that would have helped us grow faster in the short term, but they weren’t the right decisions for the brand. We never wanted to rush a launch, compromise on ingredients, or make decisions simply to hit a number. ”Instead, Cymbiotika leaned on its own customers as a kind of standing focus group.
“Listening to our customers has shaped so much of how we’ve grown, and staying focused on why people chose us in the first place has helped guide every decision we’ve made. ”: overclaiming, underdosing, influencer deals with no real usage behind them. Her read on the resulting consumer skepticism is unusually welcoming for a founder.
“I actually think that skepticism has made the industry better. Consumers are asking smarter questions, reading labels, and doing their own research, and I think brands should welcome that,” she said.
“We’ve never wanted people to simply take our word for it. We want them to understand why we formulate the way we do and make informed decisions for themselves. ”Can natural skincare deliver results? Tata Harper explains the biotechnology behind clean beauty and why your routine needs an upgrade.
The next test came at retail. Cymbiotika has expanded into Target, Ulta and Whole Foods, the kind of mass distribution that has quietly diluted plenty of direct-to-consumer brands before it, pushing them to reformulate for margin or repackage for a different shopper. Elmi says Cymbiotika treated the expansion as a distribution problem, not a brand problem.
“For us, retail was never about changing the brand. It was about making Cymbiotika more accessible. We know not everyone discovers wellness brands online, so being in retailers like Target, Ulta, and Whole Foods allows us to meet people where they already shop. ” The one thing that couldn’t move was the product itself.
“We weren’t willing to compromise on what got us here. We didn’t change our formulations, lower our standards, or create a different version of Cymbiotika for retail. We wanted someone picking up a bottle at Target to have the exact same experience as someone who’s been shopping with us online for years. ” That consistency gets harder once you add a technical story to the mix.
Liposomal delivery is not an easy sell to someone standing in a Target aisle, so Elmi strips it down to one idea before going any further.
“Most people don’t want a chemistry lesson. They just want to understand why one product works differently than another. We always start with something simple. Your body has to actually absorb nutrients in order to benefit from them.
That’s why delivery matters. ”Keeping that one idea consistent, across DTC, mass retail and a growing wholesale business, is now Elmi’s job in a sentence.
“My job is making sure that no matter where someone experiences Cymbiotika, they feel the same connection to the brand. Different channels require different strategies, but the heart of the brand should always stay the same. That’s what builds trust over time. ”, and Elmi says that wasn’t a limitation, it was leverage.
“Building the business without outside capital gave us something that’s hard to put a price on, which was patience. We never felt pressure to chase someone else’s timeline or make decisions for the next funding round. We could focus on building the company we actually wanted. ” When the company did eventually take on institutional capital, it ran that decision through the same filter it applies to everything else.
“When we decided it was the right time to bring on institutional capital, we looked for partners who saw the same long-term opportunity we did. We weren’t looking for people to redefine the business. We were looking for people who could help us accelerate what was already working while respecting the values that got us here. ” That same instinct, choosing carefully rather than moving fast, is how Elmi describes her closest working relationship.
She built Cymbiotika alongside Shahab, her co-founder, the fourth company the two have built together, and the split between them is exact rather than improvised.
“As CEO, Shahab is focused on the long-term vision of the company, how we scale, and making sure we continue building a business that can last. My focus is the brand, the customer experience, and how people emotionally connect with Cymbiotika across every touchpoint. We absolutely challenge each other, but we also know where each of us brings the most value. ” It’s a discipline Elmi expects to matter more, not less, as the category matures.
“Wellness is becoming much more personal. People aren’t just looking for products anymore. They’re looking for education, connection, and brands that fit naturally into their everyday lives. ” Coming from a founder who spent years building without a marketing budget to fall back on, that reads less like a pivot than the same argument stated forward instead of backward.
“My vision is for Cymbiotika to continue leading through innovation while also creating experiences, content, and community that help people feel supported well beyond the products themselves. ” It’s the case Cymbiotika has been making since long before anyone outside the company was paying attention: that the slow, unglamorous decisions compound into something an influencer deal never could. Nobody got rushed onto the shelf. Nobody got rushed onto the cap table.
And nobody, least of all its own founders, was in a hurry to sell the story before the product could back it up. Flavio Gomez is a Content Marketing Strategist at LA Times Studios, driving strategy across multiple verticals and leading high-impact event marketing initiatives. Make Legal Filings Easy With a LegalZoom Promo Code July 2026
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