👋, I’m Kimberly. I’ve been creating obsession-worthy brands for the past fifteen years. And now, I’m giving away my secrets every week in this newsletter.
Welcome to the Secrets of… Series — in which I’ve carefully designed a series of thought-provoking questions to tease the most interesting and insightful information out of the best brand builders in the world.
It’s not every branding project that inspires me to break out Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and go deep into what Self-Actualization means for our customers. But Motif is a beauty brand that inspires us to realize our full potential. And Motif’s founder Devanshi Garg Sareen is a woman who elevates every expectation.
When Devanshi founded Motif, she was a beauty outsider determined to raise the standard of skincare for everyone. And along the way, she raised the standard for ingredients, she raised the standard for luxury, she raised the standard for results, and she raised the standard for how to think about self-care.
At its core, the product Motif sells is Scientific-Sensorial Skincare, unlocking the untapped potential in every product to do more, to go deeper, and to feel better. The brand is also an invitation for us all to take Pleasure in Progress.
Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from the brand narrative we created:
At Motif, we live for the moment when you recognize your rhythm, you feel in harmony with yourself and your skin, and you start an upward spiral. Once on the ascent, you can expand your limits and challenge yourself to reach ever greater heights.
Our facets are multi. Our learnings are exponential. Our ones are never done. United in our desire to be the most we can be—we find the patterns that best serve us. And nothing stands in the way of our powerfully perpetual growth.
Today, I’m thrilled to bring you my full conversation with my client Devanshi, a powerful brand builder who is herself in a perpetual state of growth.
Devanshi Garg Sareen is a skincare enthusiast, a 3x founder, and a mother. Hailing from New York City by way of Iran, India, the UK, New Zealand, and Germany, almost always an outsider, she learned early on to look at people through the lens of shared human experiences. After 10+ years working in technology services, Sareen worked as an innovation consultant in 2020 for Big Beauty, leading her to reflect on pain points with her own skincare journey and a desire to demand more from the modern brands we use. This eventually led her to launch Motif—a forward-thinking beauty brand that merges real science with customer-centric design—grounded in the desire to connect people through daily progress and growth.
1. How would you explain what you do to someone who has no idea?
I’m an entrepreneur. I like to create things that didn’t exist before. I like to dream and bring to life beautiful solutions to universally felt problems. And I’m currently building a scientific skincare line that can drive impact through its values and products.
2. One of my favorite quotes about branding is this one from Wally Olins:
Fundamentally, branding is a manifestation of the human condition. It is about belonging; belonging to a tribe, to a religion, to a family. Branding demonstrates that sense of belonging. It has this function for both people who are part of the same group and also for the people who don’t belong.
What brands have made you feel like you personally belong in your lifetime? These could be brands you belong with right now—or in the past (say, when you were a teenager).
As a young adult, that brand would be Starbucks. I remember I read Howard Schultz’s book about how he was inspired by the coffee bars and culture in Italy, and he wanted to create a place of belonging in America that existed outside of the home and outside of the workplace. For me, for a moment in time, Starbucks really achieved that.
I live in New York. But through my early working days, when I went to meetings in the middle of nowhere cities in America, I could rely on buying and eating familiar food in a familiar environment. Starbucks was a predictable place of comfort where I gained a sense of belonging — which I cherished. I remember even finding and using a Starbucks on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. Although today, I love to support smaller, more independent coffee shops, I still treasure the role that Starbucks has played in creating a place of belonging in my life.
When you walk into a Starbucks, how does it make you feel?
There's a sense of familiarity. The decor, the music, and the practicality of it — like being able to order a spinach feta wrap or sous vide egg bites… healthy options when you're surrounded by things you don't understand. It’s the pleasure of being able to find a healthy, go-to, familiar destination — it’s comforting.
3. What event or interaction in your life has most shaped who you are today in your work?
The biggest one is probably motherhood. I've always been the kind of person who wanted to find purpose in my work. There's even more pressure to do that now given my time at work is time away from them. What I do becomes that much more important in terms of its impact, as well as its impact on me as a person — my mood and my well-being so that I'm a happier, more present mother and member of the family. Motherhood also connected me more deeply to other women and enabled me to better understand and have more empathy towards them.
Another one is continuous learning. My father is a surgeon. Growing up, I always remember seeing him study. I watched a grown adult study while he did his MD, then his fellowship, and then some other exams because he was trained in India but we’ve lived around the world. We are always learning and we are always studying. He taught me the importance of being a lifelong learner because I didn't associate learning with just a certain stage or phase of life. I think I realized that it's something that never ends.
I feel like that has this definite connection to defining yourself as an entrepreneur. You're always inventing something new, so you always have to be learning and you always have to be studying.
Exactly. And different stages of the business need a different version of you. I'm back to being at square one with this venture, and I’m constantly thinking back to being a parent. You're trying to be the best person you are because you're trying to think about what the child needs from you.
And I think the same thing with business: what does the business need you to be? Who does the business need you to be today? And that's going to be different from who it needs you to be tomorrow.
4. What is the business-related book you would gift to someone who isn’t in your field? And what is the non-business-related book that’s had the most impact on you as an entrepreneur?
My First Business-Related Book:
Start with Why
Start with Why is about tapping into our deeper drivers and what brings and keeps people together, whether you're an entrepreneur or you're an executive trying to inspire and bring together a team to achieve something bigger. Individually, I think it's a really useful framework, which is also helpful before you entertain any new project or commitment or business. It will create something that's more likely built to last.
My Second Business-Related Book:
The E-Myth
The E-Myth is about why most businesses fail. It talks about the different roles that the business needs us to be in different stages of the business. How every business needs an entrepreneur, a visionary, a manager, and a technician. It was a helpful framework for work but also for life and its various stages.
My Non-Business-Related Book:
The Alchemist
I read The Alchemist when I was eleven or twelve years old and it remains one of my favorite books of all time. It speaks to the part of my brain that loves the magic of dreams and the quest for finding our calling and the power of the unexplainable.
As a reader, it taught me how to find and live with meaning. And as a person building a brand today, it taught me the importance of imbuing meaning in anything I do and create. When you put that kind of energy into something, people will feel it when they use it.
5. You're getting put into the Brand Builders Hall of Fame. What do you want to be remembered for? And what do you wish would be forgotten?
I want to be remembered for creating something meaningful that made someone feel special or seen in a moment of friction—and to have turned that moment of friction around to make them feel good. Â
What I want to be forgotten for is whenever I unknowingly didn't make them feel that way. As a founder, I now have a growing list of customers, and they have certain expectations from the brand. I want them to feel that I've impacted the way they think or the way that they feel in a tangible way. And I want them to forgive any time that maybe they reached out to me and I didn't reply to them one-on-one or in any way that didn't make them feel seen in the way that they were expecting to be seen or heard.
Being in tech teaches you to look for your customers, listen to them, and pay close attention to every single click. You become hyper-customer-centric, hyper-customer-focused. And I realized that a lot of the big beauty brands and the big food and beverage brands that I was working with weren't that. There was almost a sense that customers were a number, just something more high-level and transactional. It's something that has been an interesting learning experience, from tech to beauty, in the way I've approached building the brand.
6. What’s the most controversial thing a brand you work with has ever done—and how did it turn out for them?
At Motif, we're slightly provocative around this concept of self-care and how it's being used in the beauty, wellness, and other kinds of consumer-forward industries today.
We believe that self-care is a much more powerful and holistic concept that is meant to inspire a desire for continuous personal growth and development. And instead, it's been reduced to a very narrow, capitalistic definition of self-indulgence, which inspires stagnation.
Consumers today are smart and realize when feel-good messaging exists to be authentic or to further an agenda. The result is that consumers are more jaded than ever before, especially in beauty, and they are harder to win over by new brands like us.
7. In a world where consumers are more divided than ever, what do you think brands need to do now to engage them?
I think that's another controversial stance that we take at Motif. At a time when the world is more divided than ever, we need brands that unify and focus on what unites us versus what divides us. And that's what we feel at Motif.
I started this brand as a person of color feeling I wasn't being seen by this industry, and that I wasn't able to find skincare products that solved my needs. I thought that it was just because I was a person of color, because that's the easiest place to go first. And then as I dug deeper and deeper, I realized that it was also my needs as a working mother that weren't being met, that it was also my needs as a person with sensitive skin that weren't being met, that it was also my needs as a person who wanted and demanded more results that weren't being met.
It's easier to go to skin color first because of the current political climate. It's harder to look deeper and beyond that, because the truth is that I will have more in common with another working mom regardless of her ethnic or racial background than with someone who is of my ethnic and racial background but single and 18 years old, and we forget that sometimes.
The question is not what brands need to do to engage divided consumers. I think the question is what burden we should place on brands to try to unite them. The brands that we love forever speak to a shared human experience. They solve more universal problems, and they focus on what brings us together as humans instead of what drives us apart.
And what do you think some of those markers are for Motif right now that bring people together that you've been focusing on?
When I was formulating in the beginning, I started with my skin, and my skin has more melanin than let’s say your skin. But I tapped into a larger market. It's almost like this example of when you create a ramp on a footpath for someone who is in a wheelchair, you make life easier for a mom with a stroller or someone with a grocery cart or a child on a bicycle. I believe that when we think of unique cases and special scenarios, we actually raise the bar as a whole. We've done that with our formulations.
We design with sensitive skin in mind. Our customers who have sensitive skin love our product, but it's also preserving the skin of people who have more resilient skin. Similarly, we have formulated for people with oily and dry skin because we don't want to label people. For example, when you're going through hormone fluctuations or travel, your skin is not just one type. What is that shared human experience? Can we think of what will create an objectively superior product? That's number one in the way we've approached our formulation.
This also impacted how we've approached the way we talk. We're trying not to focus on the attributes that the beauty industry has considered good or bad, youthful or old. Instead, we talk about healthy skin, because healthy skin is going to be all those positive attributes we desire. But can we finally talk about skin health instead of just beauty? Can skincare become part of a bigger wellness discussion? And can we truly switch beauty around to be inside out?
8. What marketing principle do you think great marketers overlook all the time?
I'm not a trained marketer. But I believe that customer retention matters, and it matters more to me than customer acquisition. The recent bull run in the economic climate, growth at any costs, has placed an overridingly high emphasis on new customer acquisition. But when brands are truly put to the test, growth can only happen if we are acquiring new customers whilst retaining customers.
Real growth only happens when existing customers love your brand and products so much that they’re spreading the word, and they are helping you acquire new customers. And that's only going to happen when you're generating real and tangible value for them.
What are you doing to try and drive that and do things differently to build community?
One answer is not in the marketing but in the product itself. I think if the product works, and people feel good and it makes them feel good, that is one reason they'll come back for more. That's one part of the growth burden that product development carries.
And second is to know your customer and become a part of her world. We’ve realized that we are resonating with millennial moms in Dallas, Charleston, and Chicago. Because we have limited budgets, we’re focusing on finding influencers who look like this, we’re doing events in those communities, and we’re keeping our marketing super focused and super relevant to her.
9. What advice would you give your 26-year-old self—both career-related and not career-related?
It would just be one: take more time off. And maybe two: not to take myself so seriously. I think that's advice I would give myself today, too.
10. What’s the most valuable positive feedback you’ve ever been given? And what’s the most valuable negative feedback you’ve ever been given?
This is a difficult one, but to me, it's the most meaningful when someone says, "Oh, I never thought of it that way." Because I feel like I helped trigger a small transformation in thought.Â
The negative feedback one is an interesting story. Going back to my younger self, I had been working in tech with a lot of dudes. It'd been a few years. I was in a leadership position and, for people who don't know me, I'm 5'2". I was visiting my mom in India and I can always count on my mom to serve me good negative feedback. She asked me, “Devanshi, you've started talking really loudly. Why?" She triggered my self-reflection. I realized that it was more than that.
In my efforts to become a girlboss, I had become aggressive. I'd started talking loudly and it was kind of a push to be seen and taken more seriously. That's when I had this insight that, hang on, this isn’t me. And that I can still be powerful by leaning into my feminine energy.
That's where I had this idea that I could be gentle and potent, which also became a value for Motif. We associate people who are soft-spoken as ineffective. We assume people who are aggressive are effective. It's a very masculine point of view. It was a big turning point for me because I leaned into the power of my feminine energy and I leaned into the things that made me a good leader and a good manager. And they were very different from what made other people around me effective. I am innately more nurturing. I'm a different kind of leader. I find that there are still times when I become abrupt, and I have to catch myself.
11. What motivates you to get up and go every day?
There are a lot of beautiful things in the world, and I find that knowledge to be motivating. I also think that there's a lot wrong with the world, and that's also very motivating. That makes me conclude that motivation is a personality characteristic rather than a temporary state of being.
12. Who do you most admire—and what question would you most like to ask them?
It’s a bit cliche, but I am going to say Oprah. What I love about her is that she had this knack for turning mundane life into opportunities for insight, conversation, and connection.
But at the same time when I read about her, I've always wondered how someone so incredibly powerful has also been so incredibly vulnerable in the face of unrealistic beauty standards. I would like to ask her what her expectations would be from the beauty industry.
13. Last question—what's a secret?
Something we fear to be made known, but it's never as bad as we anticipated it to be. You can call me the Devanshi Voltaire.
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I help founders create the kind of brands that get customers so obsessed, they’ll do your advertising for you. Based on my experience founding my own consumer brand, I developed The Branding Sprint—a uniquely collaborative, streamlined, and agile approach to brand creation. Click here to learn more about The Branding Sprint, shoot me an email at kimberly@brandsthatgetyou.com, or schedule a call.
More About Me
I’ve created indie darling brands (Biossance, Patchology, exa), developed Fortune 500 brands (Netflix, Gap, Wyndham), rebranded global brands (Crabtree & Evelyn, Paula's Choice), founded my own DTC brand (Archer), and run in-house teams for brands (Sephora).
My work has won over 80 awards—including Clios, Addys & 30 Under 30. And I was recently named one of the Forbes Next 1000.
I earned my BA and MA at Stanford, where wrote my thesis on the negative mental effects of gender stereotypes in advertising. And today, I devote 100% of my time to working with founders who are 100% committed to using their brands’ impact for good—developing healthy mental models for a better world.