What does it mean to truly disrupt an industry—and can one entrepreneur’s vision connect beauty, empowerment, and even space exploration? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, host Marcia Dawood welcomes Shalini Vadhera, a pioneering founder who transformed her passion for global beauty into impact-driven brands and products that have made history by traveling to outer space. Shalini Vadhera shares her journey from a determined 19-year-old entrepreneur in India to celebrity makeup artist, bestselling author, and creator of Ready, Set, Jet—now certified for both human spaceflight and defense use. She’s not only revolutionizing beauty through biotech and space-tested products, but also building communities where women can invest, lead, and thrive. The episode highlights Shalini’s innovative approach to product development, her strategies for empowering women investors, and the game-changing events she’s orchestrated to bring powerful women together. It’s a must-listen conversation for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, innovation, and the real impact that comes from passing the baton to the next generation of changemakers.
What does it mean to truly disrupt an industry—and can one entrepreneur’s vision connect beauty, empowerment, and even space exploration? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, host Marcia Dawood welcomes Shalini Vadhera, a pioneering founder who transformed her passion for global beauty into impact-driven brands and products that have made history by traveling to outer space.
Shalini Vadhera shares her journey from a determined 19-year-old entrepreneur in India to celebrity makeup artist, bestselling author, and creator of Ready, Set, Jet—now certified for both human spaceflight and defense use. She’s not only revolutionizing beauty through biotech and space-tested products, but also building communities where women can invest, lead, and thrive.
The episode highlights Shalini’s innovative approach to product development, her strategies for empowering women investors, and the game-changing events she’s orchestrated to bring powerful women together. It’s a must-listen conversation for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, innovation, and the real impact that comes from passing the baton to the next generation of changemakers.
To get the latest from Shalini Vadhera, you can follow her below!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalinivadhera/
https://readysetjetofficial.com/
https://a.co/d/0cDXtYvR - Passport to Beauty
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Marcia Dawood [00:00:02 - 00:00:06]:
Shalini, welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you today.
Shalini Vedhera [00:00:06 - 00:00:14]:
Oh, thank you, Marcia. I'm so excited to be here. I've been hearing so many of my investors say the nicest things about you. So thank you for having me on.
Marcia Dawood [00:00:14 - 00:00:33]:
That's so nice. Well, oh, my gosh. I was reading all about the things that you've been doing, beauty and space, and I was like, whoa, you don't usually hear those two things together. So please start off. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you created this amazing beauty brand and took it into space.
Shalini Vedhera [00:00:34 - 00:00:55]:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm a very rebellious girl. So I like to break industries. I like to do things out of the norm. I love to pioneer, I love to be a trailblazer. Which is probably why my father sent me to India when I was 19 with a plane ticket and $1,000 and told me to go start my own company. And I secretly thought they were arranging my marriage. So I was like hysterically crying to entire flight to India.
Shalini Vedhera [00:00:55 - 00:01:37]:
And then when I got there, my aunties are like, no, you need to start a business. And many years later, I asked my dad, I said, why did you do that, dad? Especially for an Indian father, that's so progressive and he's, you're very outspoken and you like to do things differently. And I just wanted to make sure you weren't going to get fired anywhere. So I had to make sure you could be self sufficient. And it was just, it was so funny. But I started my career at 19 as an entrepreneur and of course, being a girl and trying to do business with all these uncles, it was not, I was not having a good time. How about that? And I just was getting my degree in international business at the time and I got a job at the Clinique counter there in San Diego and had no idea what I was doing. And the very first customer I had, I remember the exact three products that she bought.
Shalini Vedhera [00:01:37 - 00:02:17]:
And I had. Again, I was so scared because I didn't know how to do makeup or anything. But the next day I received a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a card that said, thank you so much for bringing back my wife. She has cancer. And you put a smile on her face and I'm like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Like, just knowing the power of self esteem and being able to give a woman an opportunity to look good, feel good, and then have the confidence to go out there and just do whatever she wanted. And so that's really where my story began. And from there, just very ambitious and very aggressive and got to work with some of the greats like Lauren Mercier and Danny Sands from Makeup Forever and started freelancing.
Shalini Vedhera [00:02:17 - 00:03:01]:
And then I got a call from NBC Studios in LA to come up and show them my stuff. I didn't really know what my stuff was, but I wasn't going to turn down any opportunity to walk on a Hollywood lot. So drove up there, and within a few weeks, I got my big break on the Tonight show with Jay Leno. I started working there, and that kind of opened up the world of celebrity that got me on television. And at that time, I was doing makeup on the weekends on a show called Hollywood Squares, and Henry Winkler was the executive producer, Tom Bergeron was the host. And still to this day, it was like a crime to get paid to do that because it was so much fun. And they were like, what are you doing on tv? And I said, oh, I don't even know what I'm doing. And Tom had seen what I had done, and he goes, you have to meet my agent.
Shalini Vedhera [00:03:01 - 00:03:39]:
I went to meet his agent and she's, you're very cute. Let's get you in a helicopter. And I'm like, no and no, I don't want to go in a helicopter, but I want to be a brand. And she goes, I don't know what that means. And I said, I don't either, but I know that I need to get to New York City. So everybody hustled and helped me build my tape. And within a few weeks, I was in New York doing the CBS early show, and they started flying me in pretty regularly. And then in true New York fashion, the producer came up to me and she's like, why the f are we flying you in first class and putting up what makes you so different? And at that time, nobody was really talking about global beauty, multicultural beauty.
Shalini Vedhera [00:03:39 - 00:04:06]:
And I said, well, one, the US Is the greatest melting pot in the world. We have skin tones being born minute by minute, and no one's really addressing all of those skin tones. And two, I traveled so much as a child to visit my grandparents. People always wonder why Indian women have traffic stopping, shiny hair, and Chinese women never seem to age, and Brazilian women have these amazing bodies. And it's not genetics. It's all of these beautiful rituals and secrets that have been passed down. So that's okay. You need to focus on that.
Shalini Vedhera [00:04:06 - 00:04:43]:
And that is really when everything hit in the world of beauty. For me, that became a very distinct Voice and niche for me of global beauty. I was then offered a publishing deal by St. Martin's Press to write a book on it. Spent the next two years traveling the world meeting the most incredible women from the villages to the skyscrapers who were more than excited to share their culture with me. And then that's when I launched my first brand in Sephora, qvc, Victoria's Secret with everything based on these global beauty secrets coming out of that exited that brand. Felt that there was not enough resources for women. Especially as a female founder.
Shalini Vedhera [00:04:43 - 00:05:15]:
I never met another woman investor. I was always the only woman in a boardroom. I there was a lot of sexual harassment and bad behavior that I was always facing. And so I ended up launching a women's platform called Power Beauty Living. And within a year the United nations invited me to launch globally on the floor of the UN to 350 diplomat CEOs and country heads. So we brought one of our events which was all about powering up your business. So mentorship for women by women, powering up your beauty. What are you doing for unmatched confidence so you have unmatched leverage.
Shalini Vedhera [00:05:16 - 00:05:55]:
And then powering up your life. What are you doing for your internal self care that whatever's going on out here is not going to rock you. And so really started doing a lot of these events. Thought maybe 20 of my girlfriends would show up and we would have women, 175 women come to these events. So I knew that there was something there about community and being in a room of like minded women. From there I ended up launching Passport to Beauty based on my book with a media deal in Amsterdam and a box collaboration here in the US where I would travel to different countries around the world. We would show you all the beauty secrets. I would go into a lab, create those secrets for you and then curate the whole trip as if you were going with me.
Shalini Vedhera [00:05:55 - 00:06:35]:
And while I was doing that, because I had such a a rich relationship on supply chain globally, I started creating brands for Paramount Studios for the Baywatch movie, Turner Classic Movies. Retailers, celebrities, influencers. And that's really where now Ready, set, jet comes into the picture. I found out I was receiving the Mahatma Gandhi Award at the British House of Lords for my work in women empowerment and beauty and flew to London, got this amazing award. Met Baroness Firma from the British Parliament who medaled me. She actually scared the crap out of me. So I was like this woman needs to be my mentor because she's really scary. And shortly thereafter the government of India and Britain came to me.
Shalini Vedhera [00:06:35 - 00:07:16]:
And they said, we want more impact. Shalini, can you bring it? Can you bring your impact to this side of the world? And I really wasn't ready to do a nonprofit at that point. For me, I really wanted to utilize the fact that beauty is this universal language that every woman's spoken to me, whether it's they're in a slum, they're in a village, they're on Rodeo Drive. It's just been a language that everyone has spoken. And so I was like, how do we create impact by scaling a global brand and then scaling the impact there? And so met with Baroness Firma and said, look, we have this opportunity. I want to use beauty as a vehicle for change. Like, I honestly cannot just do another red lipstick. It's just, I.
Shalini Vedhera [00:07:16 - 00:07:29]:
There's no reason we don't need any more of that. And so we decided to do everything very intentional. And so she said, go raise money from just women. And so I said, wow, how do I. I don't even know. They don't have a risk appetite. They don't invest. They.
Shalini Vedhera [00:07:29 - 00:08:03]:
Then she goes, go teach them. So proud to say we're 90% female funded. And I had made a lot of the managing directors of venture capital, private equity, family offices, personally invest. So I had the leash and the freedom to go and innovate in ways that I did with my first brand, where all of a sudden, we broke the global beauty story into the United States. I had my eye on space for a very long time. And I was with my chemist, and I'm like, this is ready, set, jet. We literally need to ready, set, jet this to Richard Branson and go to space. And they were.
Shalini Vedhera [00:08:03 - 00:08:55]:
Look, they looked at me like I was crazy. Well, clearly the universe heard me, because when I moved back to San Diego, I happened to be on a walk, and I just. We talked to everybody here. So I met a guy and we were just talking, and he's like, what's your moonshot, Shalini? And I'm like, smile, space. And he goes, wow, that's crazy. And I said, there's so much science and innovation and everything's accelerated there that why isn't anyone utilizing space as the ultimate testing lab for all his ancient wisdom or any of these next gen products? He's like, oh, that's interesting. Ended up meeting him again, giving him some products for his wife. And then as the story goes, I got a text from him a few weeks later, and he said, hey, do you want to pitch my CEO and COO in Houston? And I Said, what's in Houston? And he goes, I happen to work for one of the largest space companies, Shalini.
Shalini Vedhera [00:08:55 - 00:09:43]:
I think it's interesting that you want to go to space. So met his CEO and coo, and they're like, great. Do you want to do this for marketing? Do you want to just go up? And I'm like, no, I want to create an entire category that doesn't exist, because I feel that we have an incredible opportunity to learn from the harshest environment known to man. And how do we translate that now with climate change and women that are going literally from the beach to the boardroom to the boarding gates, the amount of stress we're under and how that's inflaming the skin, it's no different than the stressful environments of these extreme conditions. And so we went through eight months of rigorous testing. And we had everybody in from, like, the major space companies to science scientists, researchers, human space flight engineers. I was getting nervous, Marcia. I'm like, wow, these are a lot of people in my formulas.
Shalini Vedhera [00:09:43 - 00:10:20]:
And then I got a call from the CEO about eight months later, and he was laughing, and I said, what's so funny, Cesar? And he said, shalini, we're all scratching our head. How did you know the exact percentages for space? And I said, I did. I knew that we were going to sell globally. I knew we'd be in deserts, we'd be in snowy regions, we'd be in tropical regions, we'd be in polluted cities. And so I really wanted to thaw that, how that's affecting the skin. And that's what got Axiom involved. And then we were invited to go up on the historic Axiom 4 mission. So the products flew with four amazing astronauts.
Shalini Vedhera [00:10:20 - 00:11:02]:
And again, I feel so blessed that our commander was Commander Peggy Whitson, the most decorated female astronaut in history. And then, of course, the group captain was the first Indian astronaut to go up in 41 years. First Indian astronaut to ever go to the International Space Station. So I could not have written even better. So we were able to validate the performance of these products in space. And now we are the first company in the world not only certified for human spaceflight, we also broke a defense record, hitting a TRL 1 to 9 in 120 days. We partnered with a defense company. We are also the first quadruple use case in the world of defense, space athletes, consumer.
Shalini Vedhera [00:11:02 - 00:11:08]:
And we're doing all of this via biotech. So that is where. That's how we got to space. I know it's a Long story, but.
Marcia Dawood [00:11:08 - 00:11:13]:
Wow, that's quite a story. Okay, wait, how does the defense piece fit in there?
Shalini Vedhera [00:11:14 - 00:11:48]:
Well, we partnered with Blackstar Orbital in the United States, so they're a space and defense company here. And the products, they were part of our mission to go up. We aligned with all of their science, their validation. And I did not know a lot about defense, but the products work so well that we are now entering the world of defense with the next generation of products that we're creating. But the entire process on the defense side of the TRL one to nine sometimes takes five to 10 years. And we did the entire thing in 120 days because we had a space flown mission attached to it. Wow.
Marcia Dawood [00:11:49 - 00:11:49]:
Amazing.
Shalini Vedhera [00:11:50 - 00:12:25]:
Yeah. And I'm having fun. 50 and when you're in your 50s, you're like, oh, I've done it all. I've met everybody, like what's there to do? And I'm just having the best time of my life. Chasing rockets is pretty much what we do. But also innovating and getting an entire world open up to me, which just new people, new opportunities, new ways to utilize science and formulas that are actually helping humanity. Yeah. And building out how do we really take advantage of the fact that we have an opportunity to help humanity as a whole and to bridge something that seems so, so far away and make it relatable now to women everywhere and men are they all have FOMO now.
Shalini Vedhera [00:12:25 - 00:12:26]:
They all want their own baton.
Marcia Dawood [00:12:27 - 00:12:38]:
All right, so tell us more about the formula and how you developed it so that it would. You're basically trying to get it to hold up in space and be. Tell us more about that. I'm a little.
Shalini Vedhera [00:12:38 - 00:13:05]:
So there's a lot of obviously constraints around going to space. If you're going to be in a rocket, especially a manned rocket with human beings, you can't have any off gassing. There's a lot of conditions with zero gravity. Like you can't have water because the particles are going to move around. But I understood what actually happens to the skin in that environment. Extreme dehydration. Because everything cooled down. You can't have products that are going to like tear the skin because that opens you up for having a risk of infection.
Shalini Vedhera [00:13:06 - 00:13:42]:
You're exposed to really heavy levels of radiation. And so I'll show you actually our products. So this is the kit we had done with Black Star Orbital. So these are all the space flown formulas in here. So first off, when I created these, Marcia, I really went back to the basics of what are three questions that I've Heard from every woman my entire career. That clearly are still an issue because I'm still. I'm still getting these questions. And they were, how do I save time? I don't have an hour to spend on my skincare and makeup routine, and I'm really not interested in that.
Shalini Vedhera [00:13:42 - 00:14:21]:
How do I save space? I'm really tired of heavy bags. And when I travel, I don't like it when things spill in my bag. And three, can you tell me what products I really need to buy? Because I'm spending. I'm wasting money on products that just don't perform. They're either not doing anything to my skin, they're melting, they're coming off within an hour, and I feel like I'm just wasting a lot of money. So I went into the lab with that foundation of, okay, we need to create something that is going to address these three big issues. I continue to hear, then we need to also create something that's gonna protect the skin. In environments like deli, the pollution levels are so high.
Marcia Dawood [00:14:21 - 00:14:21]:
Yes.
Shalini Vedhera [00:14:21 - 00:14:50]:
You know, imagine the accelerated aging from all the free radicals and the environmental factors of what's happening to the skin. And then third, I don't like things that spill either. So all of the products, first off, are anhydrous, so they're waterless technology. And then what I did is first, I named it the Baton, the Beauty Baton. And the reason I named it the Baton is I wanted more women to learn to pass the Baton to another woman. Nothing bad's gonna happen. The world is abundant. There's enough for all of us.
Shalini Vedhera [00:14:50 - 00:15:11]:
And when we come together, it's magic. We rise together in the most powerful way. So that's one. The first reason why we named it the Baton. Second, the waterless feature is because, again, we didn't want things that were spilling. We wanted things that you could use on the go. These are all multifunctional. So each side of the Baton, you're getting two to four products.
Shalini Vedhera [00:15:11 - 00:15:44]:
One. So think about how much it would cost to have four products, four products, and how much weight that bag goes into. So every side is multifunctional. And then in addition to that, I had to stay true to who I am. So lots of ancient wisdom, like the beauty secrets of India, Egypt, Mexico, France are all in here. But where we start to go into the next level and why we're playing in space is we utilize a lot of biotech. And growing up in San Diego, the ocean is just part of my life. I smell the salt air, and I know I'm home.
Shalini Vedhera [00:15:45 - 00:16:34]:
And the ocean is also the one thing that connects women from every part of the world. And so we really dive deep into oceanic biotech and really looking at the secrets of Korea and Taiwan and these Asian countries where they really have so many benefits of seaweed and algae and whatnot. So the biotech is what's really going in there and reducing the inflammation. It's going in there and it's building the respiratory systems at a cell level, it's increasing the moisture barrier. So these are no longer about skin care, it's about how are we extending the life of the skin, how are we building the resilience of the skin. So this is the hydrate and glow baton. So on one side you'll see you've got a very rich multipurpose balm. One thing is because they're waterless, they're very concentrated formulas.
Shalini Vedhera [00:16:34 - 00:17:06]:
So they're going to last long, they're going to wear long. A little goes a long way. So this is actually inspired by my producers in Amsterdam when I had that media deal. It was freezing when we were shooting there. And they take out one product and they'd groom their brows, then they'd put it on as mascara. And I'm like, I'm just watching them, I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Then they be putting it on their cuticles, their lips, around their eyes, then they're putting it in their hair. So I'm like, what are you guys using? Would you keep using this one container for everything? And they said, oh, we believe in minimalist beauty, Shalini.
Shalini Vedhera [00:17:06 - 00:17:47]:
We like to get the most out of one product. So I took that into this brand of, okay, this can be used anywhere. You need that boost of moisture and then you're going to get all of the great anti aging skin brightening benefits because of the coconut oil, the castor oil, seaweed. We've also used a beautiful biotech marine retinol. So you're going to get all the benefits of retinol without the peeling, without the redness, without the hyperpigmentation from going in the sun. So this side has this multipurpose balm. Now on the other side we have a waterless technology in an exfoliating scrub. So this is actually an exfoliating balm.
Shalini Vedhera [00:17:47 - 00:18:05]:
So what we did is we took the secrets of the sugar scrubs from around the world, but we pushed it into our balm with a waterless technology. So all you do is you swipe it on, massage it in, you'll feel the very nice