https://nasacademy.com/blog/article/akash-mehtas-story
Akash Mehta is a British entrepreneur and influencer who made it onto the 2019 Forbes ‘30 under 30’ list in media and marketing. As a digital expert, he has harnessed the power of social media to quickly build Fable & Mane, a clean and conscious haircare and wellness brand, for which he acts as CEO and co-founder alongside his sister.
As an influencer and a digital marketing specialist for beauty and fashion brands, Akash has successfully reached multiple audiences through his career in digital marketing. At 22, he started off as the youngest manager at beauty giant Estee Lauder Companies. In less than three years, he became the youngest digital manager to ever be hired at Dior – and if that’s not enough, hee is also a global guardian for UNICEF.
From serving as the Global Digital Manager at Dior Beauty to creating his own brand, it comes as no surprise that Akash’s accomplishments have helped him grow his side hustle into a booming, full-time business.
Akash’s father has been an entrepreneur in the beauty industry for 40 years. He used to take Akash to board meetings from a very young age. While his father worked, Akash would sit in a corner, just listening, not realizing he was subconsciously being trained in entrepreneurship – and beauty.
As a kid, Akash was extremely studious. He was good at math and physics, so taking up engineering made sense to him – but once he got to University, that all changed. He went from being a grade-A student to failing his second year. And this was a pretty big reality check for Akash. He soon realised that he needed to pursue something that he enjoyed and was passionate about – not just something he was good at. So, while he was waiting to retake his second-year exams, he managed to bag an internship doing digital marketing at Burberry. He loved the mix of the digital world and the beauty industry, and officially decided to ditch his plans of becoming an engineer.
Akash studied in some of the most pressurised schools in the UK, and unsurprisingly achieved incredible grades throughout. Despite being grateful for this, he has always wondered about the limitations of the educational system in today’s world – he believes that ‘education of the mind’ is not taught through skills. Reflecting back on his time as a pupil, Akash admits that he struggled to find his path early on – but he acknowledges that each of those lessons he learnt from those supposed missteps, has made him into the man he is today.
Akash went on to discover his true passion, and despite his young age, he already seems to have achieved more than most of his contemporaries. He believes that everyone should pursue their dreams – regardless of your age, and regardless of your experience.
Since Akash has left Dior, he and his sister, Nikita, have launched their holistic hair care wellness brand, Fable & Mane, based on ancient Ayurvedic rituals passed down from previous generations. Since launching during the pandemic, the brand has already proven to be a huge success and isn’t going to be slowing down anytime soon..
Despite his professional accomplishments, Akash was never in a rush to be an entrepreneur. He always believed in enjoying the journey, and seeing where it led.While he worked at Dior for three years, his sister started working alongside their dad on some side projects. Most of them failed, but there was one idea that stuck, and it was to create a beard oil. Then, that turned into creating a hair oil – and the wheels started turning.
Almost 90% of the world’s wigs are made in India, but there’s no big Indian brand in the haircare market, unlike Morocco with its argan oil. And then, Akash got the idea to start Fable & Mane.
When it came to pursuing any project, Akash always believed there were both business and personal reasons behind it. The personal reason in this case, was to create something that contained his childhood memories of his grandmother, and the hair oil she made for them as kids.
But Akash wasn’t the kind of entrepreneur to quit everything and start working from his garage. He spent a year and a half building Fable & Mane while he was still at Dior. He managed to get Sephora interested after sending them some samples and a LinkedIn message, telling them he was coming to San Francisco – which caught the attention of one of their junior buyers. Later, when he was working on building the brand with Sephora and preparing to stock Fable & Mane, Akash was ready to take the leap, and become the full-time CEO.
There wasn’t a business plan. At the outset, Akash knew he would have to learn a lot on the journey. After having failed in engineering and discovering his passion for digital marketing, he had built an attitude that embraced failures – he became committed to learning from them instead of letting them deter him. He also had a pragmatic approach, and focused on smart networking, and surrounding himself with mentors and people he trusted.
Being an entrepreneur can be lonely and tough – but Akash had his dad as a mentor and his sister by his side. While Akash was good at team building, finance, and digital marketing (which helped him take the brand to a global level quickly), his sister was the creative one with a long-term vision for the product. They work well together, and not having a business plan also meant they were quite agile. They responded quickly to anything that happened in the rapidly-changing digital and retail landscapes – and it helped them navigate through the pandemic.
Digital marketing is what Akash had been trained in for almost six years prior, thanks to his opportunity to work with big brands like Estée Lauder. He was an ‘intrapreneur’ for those companies, helping them to make digital ROI less of a grey area. He was putting numbers behind everything, and figuring out ways to convert their digital presence into sales. Going into Fable & Mane, everything he and his sister did in digital was tested for years before in the playground of big corporations with big budgets.
But that’s not all, Akash also has his own digital brand agency which works with the likes of L’Oréal. From affiliate marketing and checkout codes, to working out which social media platforms and what content to create, Akash already knew what worked – so he could skip a lot of the testing process you would normally go through.
Akash’s business today is mainly dependent on social media and digital sales – with influencers being the driving force behind its growth. He’s had to learn a lot about growing an international team of different types of people from all over the world. Navigating this has been a learning process for him, and he’s learned that what you might need today, is not necessarily what you will need tomorrow. So he looks at every day with a fresh perspective. But even after being a digital expert, an entrepreneur, and building a successful company. Akash is always learning – and he’s not afraid to ask for help or advice.
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Become a beauty entrepreneur
By Admin Nas Academy
By Admin Nas Academy
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