After graduating UCLA (2017 baby!) in civil engineering, and being a licensed construction engineer for six years, I quit, to pursue my dream of building a next generation Sephora.

What did "next generation" Sephora mean? I didn't know for sure. I just knew there were things I wanted to do my way. And as simple as that, I quit my job with no product, customer, or sales. I got to working.

Fast forward many scrapped business plans — One fateful month, I uploaded a few branded perfume oils (not my brand, but a popular one) to my Shopify, and synced it to social media shopping platforms. The impotence was my belief that beauty product orders were a direct consequence of beauty product review videos. I never bought a product unless I watched a few or a hundred videos about it. In other words, I was bullish about social-e-commerce ("s-commerce). Boom. Sales started coming in from Tiktok Shop, and I was off to the races.

One year later, I had made around $120k in sales*. 95% of these sales were from Tiktok Shop. But the yarn was unspooling in every which direction. Tiktok Shop started placing copyright or fake product penalties on new launches. My shop's top selling brand which accounted for 70% of orders joined Tiktok Shop with their own fulfillment line. The generous return policy that Tiktok Shop inacted, on top of 6% marketplace fees, on top of the inherent cost of goods sold being a reseller, left my margins meek. Without including labor, my average net profit margin was around 26%. Including labor would leave me with nothing, or worse, in the red.

* I'll note here that for six of those months, I took a haitus to move to Massachusetts and attend MIT grad school. The timing was perfect — ChatGPT and Cursor was drastically improving while I was there. I used AI for almost class. I began to think about how AI could change everything. It could make things I didn't previously think possible with my minimal programming experience, possible for me to accomplish on my own. I graduated MIT in May 2025 with a Masters in Applied Science in Supply Chain Management.

That was June 2025. Net sales went up 258% compared to June 2024 (to $6850 in sales). In July 2025, net sales growth went down to 77% (to $9150). In August 2025, net sales went up only 21% (to $10,800). My growth with the current model was coming to a close.

I acted. I improved the wehitpan.com website— SEO-optimized product descriptions, two-packs, collection descriptions, importing hundreds of reviews from Tiktok Shop, and getting the general ducks in order to become a proper site. I started to take Google Search Analytics and Shopify Analytics data seriously. I optimized for AI-Shopping search optimization, because I wanted to prepare for the growth of ChatGPT Shopping, Perplexity Shopping, and Google AI shopping recommendations. I brought in seven hot perfume brands and more than twenty new products in one month.

On August 1st, I launched a soft-opening of physical WeHitPan Beauty store in Huntington Beach, California. Well, if you can call an expensively decorated and fully stocked set of three shelves in a seven-foot-by-nine-foot corner of a dry cleaners (yes, I said dry cleaners), a store, then it was a store. I started talking to about one customer a day. I had store hours. I visited a lot of perfume shops.

Around 36 days later, I am writing this now. I am so stressed that I feel my right shoulder permanently lifted. This is an odd quirk of mine. The stress seems to take over my right shoulder, lift it, go to the right side of my neck, and then cloud my brain. Despite being physically O.K. — with a working body, friends, an air-conditioned airbnb to stay, still some sales, and a not-bad savings account — I feel like an impeding large doom. I desperately need to save the business. WeHitPan Beauty, as it stands now, is dead. It does not have what it takes to be anything more than it is, which is a perfume shop in a corner of dry cleaners that does not pay rent, and whose products are going bad day-by-day in the bright Southern California sunlight.

So! What's next?

I'm not starting from scratch. But WeHitPan must move on to a new stage.

Here's what's on my mind:

A retailer's service to the customer breaks down into three things: Marketing, Distribution, and Fulfillment.

• Marketing = Getting you to want to buy. This involves sharing why a product and brand is a good fit for the right customer.

• Distribution = Allowing you to buy. This includes all that comes between your desire for an item and the desire being fulfilled. For example, you want to buy the Solinotes Vanille Eau de Parfum. Where do you go? Who do you ask? Right now, you may go to a physical store. Many people have worked to get you that product there when you want it. Or, you may check Google. You would search "Solinotes Vanille Eau de Parfum". Google would show you that Amazon, Solinotes, Anthropologie, CVS, WeHitPan Beauty (*yay*), Poshmark, Mercari, Urban Nirvana, Sativa, and more are all selling this exact same product. (Is Google, then, a retailer of retailers?). Which retailer do you choose to fulfill your desire? You'd probably choose one you saw on Page One of Google. All other retailers that don't show up on Page One would just as well not exist.* The search engine (whether it be Google feed, Instagram feed, or Tiktok feed) owns the retailer's digital real estate placement. Or you can have such a strong presence that customer's find the retailer, specifically that retailer.

• Fulfillment = Delivering what you bought. You put in the order — Now the retailer sends it to you safely. They have it stocked. They have it priced. They must process your returns. They must set a shipping cost. They must submit claims when packages don't get to you. And on.

I need to dig myself out of increasing costs and stagnant growth.

Here are my ideas..

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