We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Shabria Sterling. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Shabria below.

Shabria, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

In my opinion the department of education needs to change the learning curriculum by that I mean adding more classes that actually teaches you about the real world and eliminating the classes we don’t need, more then half the things we learn in school we do not use In our daily life. How many times a day do you have to use PEMDAS method? (Parentheses, exponents, multiply, divide, add and subtract.) and that is just one example. We need to be taught financial literacy which is mostly learned in your household if you’re fortunate to have someone in you’re household who is actually financially stable and knows about credit because they go hand and hand. Because you can’t get a apartment/house or a car without credit or income no matter how many college degrees you have and that’s what they do not teach you In school. Before when I was younger I found myself in a living situation I couldn’t get out of that wasn’t ideal for me, I was working and still couldn’t move out because I didn’t have the credit nor the income to match the requirements to lease an apartment. When you are working that’s one thing but working and knowing how to spend your money and where to put it into like a credit card to build credit is another, now being an entrepreneur and having business credit is something most entrepreneurs aspire to have because college is not for everyone.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I got into the beauty industry first by being in love with makeup at a young age because I was not allowed to wear it it made me even more curious, as I got older I learned how to do it but I never really perfected it the way I would of liked to and the more I wore it the more my face kept breaking out. As the breakouts continued I felt that now I needed makeup to cover up the acne until I got the confidence to just go through the motion of just letting my skin breathe and work on repairing it thats when I got really into skincare and YouTubing DIY videos of natural skincare products then I started formulating and creating little by little I started learning more and more about branding/investing in my business which became SLIM SKIN & SLIM ESSENTIALS. When I first started I sold lip care products such as lip glosses and balms it was a very messy process so I eventually stopped creating those for a while and I start creating face scrubs and face oils because I noticed stores didn’t sell much of those more so body exfoliants and oils but nothing really to target the face that’s where I wanted to stand out I wanted to create something where there wasn’t so much competition (at first). If you think about it you can only really get good natural face products online and they’re a bit more expensive then your average skincare in stores like Cvs, Walgreens, Rite Aid etc. because they are sold by small businesses and they are made with natural ingredients, most drug store products have more then 10 ingredients where my brand focuses on the simplicity of the product where most of my products are made with less than 5 ingredients in every products so you reap the benefits of each ingredient. I am also a one woman business as well I buy, create, package and ship everything for my business there is no middle man that is my biggest accomplishment I made for my business and It cuts cost down tremendously when I want to rebrand. This brand had helped me provide for myself in hard times and my goal when my business reaches a level of success is to give back to the community and start a non profit to help the less fortunate.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Consistency is key to growing and promoting your business the more people see it the more they want it, and that is how you grow clientele especially with social media that is the thing most small businesses have a hard time with especially if they have a full time job and their business is their side hustle. It takes discipline as well to put the time into your business when you have a lot of other things going on for me I recently became a mother so things got more difficult for me to put focus into my business like I want to but I’m learning to not make excuses if it’s something I really want.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

I make all my products by hand In batches, they are formulated, made, labeled and shipped by me and me only. Although it does cut cost down for the business it is a lot on one person. When I first started I did look into manufacturing my products but I couldn’t afford it starting out so I had no choice but to do the research to manufacturing own my own to what I would need and what’ll cost. What I have learned is from doing this is to know what you want to do with your business and how you want it to look to your customers if not you will waste a lot of money when you are indecisive.

Contact Info:

• Website: slimessentials.bigcartel.com