When Shizu Okusa decided to start a new business, she knew where to find the best guidance. “I wanted to reverse engineer everything I did wrong in my last company,” she says.
Raised on a farm in Vancouver by Japanese immigrants, she’d founded a cold-pressed juice brand called JRINK after feeling burned out at Goldman Sachs. It had nine shops and sold in two Whole Foods stores. But it was hard to make a lot of money. So in 2020, Okusa took all the lessons she learned and created Apothékary — an herbal remedy business that’s now profitable, and drove roughly $25 million in revenue last year. Here’s what Okusa saw go wrong, and how she made it right.