Gewd Botanicals

A Pre-Med Student’s Skincare Line

By, Bella Lubinskas

&

Hadia Moosvi

Malique Middleton is a pre-med student at VCU that wants to innovate in skincare. As a graduate student, he is working on Gewd Botanicals, an all natural skin care line that is Gewd for the Earth, you, and everyone in between. Check out this interview with Malique and learn how one student is combining innovation and skincare while studying pre-med.

What inspired Gewd Botanicals?

Actually, it started off with my mom. She started a salt scrub business, and in high school I had really bad acne. I started using this product called Clearasil, and it was giving me really bad chemical burns. She was like, ‘Why don’t you just try making some products yourself?’ So I ended up sitting on Google – I think this is my freshman or sophomore year – and I literally just went down this rabbit hole learning about essential oils and all these natural remedies for skincare and stuff. Then, I ended up starting to make my own product. I started off with the scrub. Next thing you know, I found out about oil-based face washes and then found out about shea butter-based moisturizers and stuff, and I just started building the brand from there. Then I ended up going to JMU. I started making products there in my freshman year in my dorm, and then one of my friends came up to me, and she was like, ‘You need to turn this into a business.’ So I started doing it from there.

How did you find out about Shift?

One of my friends, Jack. I think he’s currently in the master’s program – Jack Oppenheim. He told me about Shift Retail and to apply to it, because he was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’d be perfect for this.’ And then I also follow you guys on Instagram. So I saw a couple of things about that.

Did you get to interact with the Instagram a lot?

I did not that much. I’m trying to mitigate my social media right now because I’m in the premedicine graduate program over in the School of Medicine. So, social media has been a little bit of my downfall with procrastination, but I keep up with what you guys are doing which is really cool.

What’s it like combining that pre-med track with innovation and entrepreneurship?

It’s definitely a juggling act which is really fun. It’s really cool, though, because it integrates all of my hobbies with my career plan. I’m doing the premedicine graduate program in order to become a Ph. D-M.D student which is the long term goal. I want to do dermatology as my specialty, so I can go back and say that the skincare line is dermatologist recommended. In undergrad, I did my degree in biology, entrepreneurship, and pre-medicine, and my concentration was plant biology. I got to investigate phytochemicals and how those interact with the microbiome of the face and stuff and just sort of tethered those together. It’s a little bit more hard this semester because I’m taking Biochemistry, Physiology and Anatomy at the same time. So what I’m doing is this fall allowing Shift to sort of take up over more of the retail front, and then I’m just going to focus more so on the studies. Next spring, which is when I start doing all of my community garden activism stuff and everything like that, I’ll be able to do farmers markets and a whole bunch of other things where I can actually dedicate more time to that.

What were the first steps for you taking this idea, your major, to something tangible?

So, the very first step was trial and error, I would say. It started off with me making the products in my freshman year dorm. My friend encouraged me to start turning it into a business, but I was like, ‘Okay, if I’m going to do that, I need to find out if it’s even going to be feasible.’ So I started making some products in the basement, and when people would stop by, they were like, ‘Hey, can I get some of these products?’ So I’d just give it to them for free, as long as they gave me feedback on how they worked and this and that. Once I picked up on the fact that there was actually a market for people who are interested in natural products and everything like that, I started working with various works across JMU to do little workshops and stuff where I could get live feedback; so people actually doing scrubs and stuff with me and learning about skincare and so forth. Once I got that all fine tuned and everything, I actually got accepted into JMU’s entrepreneurship minor. I think I was either the first or the second cohort. So we got to learn about some of the fundamentals about running a business, LLCs, how to write business models or link canvas models and stuff like that. I’m a biologist by trade, not so much of a business person. But, I got to learn a little bit of those attributes so that was really cool. Learning about the fundamentals of the business was the big thing and then also testing the waters to find out if it was feasible.

How do you maintain more of a work-life balance?

I call it a juggling act. Sometimes I do drop the ball on one thing, but as long as you pick that other thing back up, and throw it back up in the air, and it’s back way higher than the other things, it kind of works out. But I like to do this little to-do list on my phone or on my little handy dandy notebook that keeps track of what I want to get done, check those off. Then also balancing school is every day, and especially with the way that they program set up, I literally have biochemistry and physiology every single day, anatomy on Monday and Wednesday. It’s kind of like, okay, there’s no way not to drop the ball on those. So, I go to class and then I find whatever time I can throughout the day because this is my hobby, to do something related to Gewd Botanicals. It’s fall right now, which is a little sad, but summertime is our big campaign for Gewd Botanicals because we’re involved in lots of green spaces across Richmond, and I get to do a lot of gardening and stuff. This summer is going to be really cool because we’re going to be using some of those green spaces to produce some of the botanicals and stuff that we use in the skincare line too.

Where do you see yourself long term with this?

I want to be way bigger than Lush. I love all natural skincare. One thing that I also really like about this potential is we have the opportunity to do good stuff with the community, good stuff with people, and then also the jars, all the essential oils and stuff like that - those are all natural. The jars are called post-consumer plastic. So they buy up all the plastics from across the globe, melt them down and then turn them into these jars. So, we’re actually not adding any plastic waste and so forth. The long term goal is to definitely keep up the good work and all attributes - good for the skin, good for the people, and good for the earth itself.

Do you have a main inspiration for this?

Definitely my mom… She starts an idea, and then when she gets tired of that and it makes her enough money, she moves off to another one. She ended up shifting out of the skincare space, and I was like, ‘I actually like this, and I can see this going somewhere.’ So I just started making my own stuff and took off from there.

Do you have any mental health things that you do?

Gardening. Scientifically, we did a bunch of studies at JMU. One of my professors encouraged us to look at a bunch of scientific literature about the effects of forest bathing, and just spending time gardening and stuff like that with me. I’m a very high paced person. My heart beats really quickly sometimes, and I’m just running in my head. The one time that I’m very slow is when it comes to gardening. It gives me a chance to breathe and to only focus on whatever I’m doing in the present.

Project Name

Noodlers

Product Type

Physical Product

Development Stage

Minimum Viable Product

Graduate Student VCU

Brandcenter: Experience Design