GLO30’s Dr. Arleen Lamba turned her personal skin care struggles into a solution for a market gap.
Our skin is the largest organ on our body. And it also happens to be quite a shape-shifter. New skin cells are formed in our epidermis and work their way up to the surface close to every 30 days. Where the old skin flakes off, and the cycle renews.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean the skin is a clean slate when a new month rolls around. Depending upon our age, hormones and stress levels, dead cells can have a little party on our face that gets out of hand, causing wrinkles and sagging under our eyes. For others, the breakout police get called after a rowdy group of bacteria gets trapped on the skin’s surface, causing all sorts of havoc.
Sometimes, skin issues can sneak up on you, and Dr. Arleen Lamba knows the feeling all too well. When she began suffering through a litany of breakouts at the end of college and throughout medical school, she says she found herself on a wild goose chase, trying everything she could to track down answers.
“This was the era where skin care was second and makeup was first,” she recalls, adding that, “I went and did the Nordstrom and Macy’s [route]. And then the estheticians and dermatologists. I did the whole thing because I was lost, and I wasn’t finding a solution.”
Refusing to be a physician who couldn’t figure out what was happening to her own skin, she became committed to finding a solution herself.
“That’s when I really understood the skin cycle every 30 days, what certain ingredients can do to your skin, what kinds of treatments you need, how you need to treat your skin every 30 days,” she says. “And slowly and surely, I started seeing an improvement because I started picking up solutions through my studying and research and me being… the guinea pig. My skin got tremendously better. And then I realized that there was this hole in the market.”
The gap, she discovered, was a layered one. First, there’s biology: Some people’s skin may be flawless but prone to monthly breakouts. Other people’s skin may be impacted by environment, stress, diet, lack of sleep or allergens. Then, there’s accessibility: Lamba remembers that, with her busy schedule as a physician, she could only do treatments on weekends or after work, but many offices weren’t open during those times. Plus, she wasn’t able to make appointments online or via text. Finally, there was the cost: As a resident, she didn’t have the finances for expensive treatments or overpriced products she didn’t need.
“I wanted to create a really simple program where we could do skin care every 30 days and come in and commit to our skin and commit to ourselves,” she says. “And that’s where GLO30 really came out of.”
When she opened her f irst studio in 2012, she was pregnant with her first child and working full-time as an anesthesiologist. She would take an early morning anesthesiology shift, then go straight to her skin care studio for evening appointments. When her son was 2, a friend prompted her to rethink what she most wanted to devote her time and energy to.
“[They said,] ‘You’re going to have to jump off that cliff without a parachute,’” she recalls.
For her, the parachute was her job in anesthesia, which gave her the funds to open her skin care studio. But she knew that no matter how scary it might be to give that up in favor of the unknown, she wanted to see where she landed when she invested her whole self into the process.
Fast forward to 2024 and you’ve got a surprise entrepreneurial success story that came from solving a personal challenge. Lamba has five GLO30 stores in the D.C./Maryland/Virginia (DMV) area; 65 in-development franchise-owned stores in markets like Dallas, Orlando, Austin and St. Louis; and a goal to open 1,000 GLO30 locations in the next 10 years.
AI FOR YOUR FACE
Because of her research and dedication to healing the skin, Lamba has developed a variety of tools that have created true results for her customers. One of the most unexpected ones comes from a talking box on the wall: GLO30’s AI skin tool assistant, GLOria.
Before their appointment, a client walks up to GLOria and scans a QR code or inputs their email address, and a polite voice greets them while noting the current temperature and pollution level. After scanning their face, GLOria offers advice for treatment options that are based on real-time assessments of the state of their skin—including everything from the amount of pigments to hydration levels, line formation and pore size.
The person performing the facial gets the information, which informs the treatment for that month, and customers can access their information any time to track changes and progress.
Lamba says it’s crucial that GLO30 be technology-forward because “if you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.”
This belief stems from the fact that one of the biggest issues she saw during her own skin treatment journey was that recommendations were most often based on who was providing the assessment.
“There’s a lot of, unfortunately, biases to that,” she says. “We are a multicultural nation with so many undertones in our skin, so if they didn’t understand your undertones, they couldn’t really give you the advice you needed…. Some would say I have oily skin; [others] would say I have dry skin.… Everybody’s opinion was so drastically different, and so it made me really doubt the process.”
HEALTH IS WEALTH
Lamba feels strongly that we don’t have to become doctors to understand that health is wealth. Her customers understand that concept well. Developing a commitment to offering “skin care for the rest of us” has served Lamba well as an unexpected entrepreneur, but she credits much of her business acumen to her medical training.
Given the ethos that guides her business, her clients are in a strong position to get what they need as well.
“The beauty industry, for a long time, has said, ‘Something is wrong with you, but our product will fix it,’” she says. “And that is something that I am completely against. Everything is right with you. We’ll help you see it.”