Meet Board Member Stephanie Morimoto of Asutra
Great Products and Partnership with a Tennis Icon = Net Profits for Self-Care Company
Stephanie Morimoto (right) is owner of Asutra, a Chicago company that makes natural self-care products. Venus Williams (left), the famed tennis star, loved Asutra’s products so much that she became Chief Brand Officer and part-owner of the company.
The growth chart for Asutra, a Chicago-based producer of natural self-care products, has been a straight line upward over the past 4-1/2 years. Owner Stephanie Morimoto’s road to Asutra was less linear.
A graduate of Brown University, Morimoto spent more than five years as a development officer for the Teach for America organization, then served as Chief External Relations Officer and Co-CEO for New Leaders, an organization that recruits and trains school leaders who focus on improving education results for poor and minority students and aims to promote system-level policies and practices that provide support to these leaders.
During that latter tenure, though, she became a satisfied customer of a fledging self-care products firm. When she learned that the owners wanted to sell the company, she switched tracks to entrepreneurship, and was glad she did.
While the founders’ focus was incremental growth on Amazon, market research made Morimoto confident that Asutra’s products — with benefits ranging from pain relief and sleep support to skin care, exercise recovery and rest & relaxation — would succeed in retail outlets. And she was spot on: The company quickly got on shelf at 4,000 CVS stores, and then was onboarded in Target stores nationwide.
Asutra also does strong business with niche natural product retailers such as iHerb, Thrive Market and Grove Collaborative; several natural grocery store chains; and still sells on Amazon.
Asutra had strong talking points in appealing to a natural products consumer base. The company, woman- and minority-owned, emphasizes that its products are made with plants, minerals and essential oils; are never tested on animals; and are free of parabens, phthalates and petroleum.
And the appeal of her products to a famous customer — international tennis star Venus Williams — provided Asutra with its first big break.
Not long after Morimoto took over at Asutra, she learned that Williams used the company’s pain relief creams, which her trainer found on Amazon, and she wanted to talk and find out more about the brand. “So of course, my jaw dropped,” Morimoto said.
Just an endorsement from a celebrity like Williams would have been golden for a young company such as Asutra. But it turned into much, much more.
“She signed on to help us promote the brand and the business and become a part owner,” Morimoto said of Williams, who also holds the title of Asutra’s chief brand officer. “We have kind of an interesting relationship with her. She has earned equity in exchange for doing services for us. So she'll do press interviews or she'll post to social, and each year she's gotten a small chunk of the business.”
She continued, “It's also great that she she genuinely loves the products, she loves our skin serums.” Asutra even markets a selection of its products as the “Venus Williams collection.”
Asutra owner Stephanie Morimoto at the company’s packaging and shipping facility on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Photo by Bob Benenson.
Asutra’s second big break was a matter of very fortunate timing. As Asutra’s sales and interest from retailers grew fast, Morimoto knew that the company needed to scale up production quickly. After a national search turned international, she found a co-manufacturer in Budapest, Hungary. She and her team traveled there to close the deal in February 2020 — just before the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Three weeks later, everything shut down. But they were still able to produce and ship to us, which was a godsend,” Morimoto related.
Along with the Budapest operation, Asutra makes a few of its products in Michigan and in China. The products then channel through the company’s packaging and fulfillment center — its former production facility back in its early start-up days — located in an unprepossessing commercial area of Chicago’s Old Irving Park neighborhood.
We salute Stephanie Morimoto for the breakout success of one of Chicago’s star natural products company and are proud that she is a member of Naturally Chicago’s board of directors. We urge you to click the button below to visit Asutra’s website, learn more about its self-care products, and do some shopping online.
Owner Stephanie Morimoto and her Asutra team at the company’s packaging and shipping facility. Photo by Bob Benenson.
This article was written by Bob Benenson, Naturally Chicago communications consultant and independent publisher of Local Food Forum.