From the desk of Rebecca Zhou: on building a care company

Hi there,

As we approach our fifth anniversary, I’ve been thinking not just about where we’ve arrived or where we’re headed, but about what has brought us here. Our story, ethos, and curiosity shaped our first products, the way we work, and our belief that with enough focus and intention, everything can be different. Five years later, those same ideas continue to guide everything we make.

When Soft Services began, formulas that actually produced results on body skin—improving acne, KP, rough texture, and dry skin—were hard to come by. The few treatment options available relied on the same handful of ingredients, leaving people, myself included, searching through years-old Reddit threads, questionable Amazon reviews, and international drugstores for solutions. Facial skincare had already shown what was possible through decades of innovation. We believed body skin deserved that same attention, and that we had the enthusiasm and resources to build something different: a care company.​

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Left: my early sketch of the care company mark, right.

​Creating novel solutions always requires curiosity, creativity, and dedicated care—the kind of work where a few people focus on a single problem for a long time, asking fundamental questions and seeing where they lead. We consulted experts in dermatology and chemistry to identify which ingredients, and at what concentrations, would produce results on body skin against specific concerns. From there, we slowly added non-actives that kept skin calm and comfortable as it changed. We untangled intersecting factors and solved for multiple variables, like sustainability, price, and ease of use, without making one thing worse in order to make another better. This slow, steady, solution-driven process is what makes our products and approach fundamentally different from anything else on the market—targeted, reliable, and above all, effective.

Growing up in dance, I learned that rehearsal deserves the same effort as performance. Repetition matters and every step counts. Building Soft Services has meant five years of applying this practice: asking questions, testing formulas, refining details, and starting over when something wasn't right.

What we put into the world is our performance, shaped not only by our immediate surroundings but by the worlds of art, film, music, design, and fashion at large. I feel grateful that our work demands from me a constant disposition toward wonder and attention to detail as I move through the world. Details accumulate: chiffon draped around a bottle, the weight of a marble teapot, the color of a peeled tomato, ivy climbing across a stone. They remind me that the objects we live with every day can be as considered as they are functional.​

Inspiration from China and South Korea, where material, color, ritual, and function often meet in ways I return to again and again.

​​Creating solutions was, and continues to be, imperative, but never at the expense of craft. We do not aim to put things into the world that simply exist. We want them to work, and we want people to love using them. We believe a solution can also be a ritual, that efficacy and design are not competing values, and that the best version of anything leaves people better than it found them.

Over the coming weeks, we’re inviting you backstage. We’ll share more of what makes Soft Services what it is today: the principles that shaped us, the questions we keep returning to, and the details that continue to guide everything we make. We’re excited to share it with you.

x Rebecca