From treatment room to retail shelf: how an esthetician built MINDt Cosmetics
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Katharina Mindt-Weber is a trained esthetician who spent years in field sales for major cosmetics brands before opening her own studio in Germany in 2015. She built that studio the same careful way she now builds skincare: one client at a time, by appointment only. In 2023, after watching her clients' skin for the better part of a decade, she launched her own product line, MINDt Cosmetics, on Selfnamed.
She has a line she uses on clients who think skincare can wait. "I like to describe it as the one piece of clothing we wear for our entire lives," she says. "We can replace our shoes or clothes when they're worn out. We can't replace our skin."
That's the lens she built her whole studio around, and eventually MINDt itself.
Key Takeaways
A salon owner doesn't need to leave the treatment room to build a brand. Katharina runs MINDt alongside her studio, testing every product on her own clients before it's ever sold.
She tests everything on herself first. Her own reactive skin is the first checkpoint for any formula, before it reaches a single client.
Her own line keeps the consultation and the sale together. Clients can't just take her advice and buy the same product cheaper online elsewhere.
Less is more, if it's the right less. She's watched simplified routines calm reactive and rosacea-prone skin faster than piling on more products.
Starting small beats waiting for a finished plan. MINDt grew one tested product at a time, not from a big launch.
Her guiding line: "wie innen, so außen"
Ask Katharina what happens when a client sits in her chair, and she doesn't start with the products. She starts with "wie innen, so außen," roughly, "as within, so without."
"I never look at the skin completely in isolation," she says. Stress, hormones, nutrition, and lifestyle all show up on the face, especially with the acne, rosacea, and reactive skin she sees most. So before she reaches for an active ingredient, she's asking a bigger question: why is this skin doing this in the first place?
It's also why she doesn't see modern equipment and old-fashioned skin wisdom as opposites. She uses microneedling and microdermabrasion right alongside a slower, more holistic approach. "I don't think we have to choose between those two worlds," she says. "Using modern technology where it offers genuine value, while never forgetting that we're working with a human being, not just a surface of skin."
A studio built around a single mother's calendar
Katharina's studio takes one client at a time, by appointment only, no waiting room, no phone ringing mid-treatment. That's partly a quality decision. "I don't want the door constantly opening, the phone ringing, or the next client already waiting," she says.
It's also just how her life works. She's self-employed and a single mother, and building a business meant designing a schedule that could hold both. "That didn't mean fitting in as many appointments as possible," she says. "It meant creating a structure in which quality, profitability, and my personal life could work together." She's candid that she's also a perfectionist who finds it hard to hand off her own work, "certainly a strength, but perhaps also something I still need to learn, trusting more and allowing myself to delegate."
The client she never forgot
One client in particular pushed her toward building MINDt. She'd arrived with mild, hormonal acne after months on products that had overwhelmed her skin. By the time Katharina saw her, the skin barrier was badly compromised, reacting to almost everything.
Katharina went looking for something that could calm skin like that and rebuild its barrier, without stopping at the basics. "Especially for skin over 40, I don't simply want to avoid reactions. I also want to address its other needs." She couldn't find it on the market. That search became Guardian, MINDt's prebiotic gel serum, and one of the first products she built.
She tested it on the toughest skin she had: her own
Katharina found Selfnamed while deep in a search across private label manufacturers in Germany and beyond. "Honestly, I was becoming a little desperate, because I simply couldn't find the combination I was looking for," she says. She ordered Selfnamed samples and ran the only test that mattered: her own face, which has been reactive and hard to please since her training days.
Selfnamed held up. "I was surprised by how well my skin tolerated the Selfnamed products." The business side held up too: the formulations fit her philosophy, the price-performance ratio worked, and there was no need to commit to huge MOQs just to get started. What she didn't expect was how much better the results would look once she started seeing them on her clients, week after week, not just on herself.
Less is more, if it's the right less
Watching the same clients use the same products for months taught her something. "What has surprised me most is how much can be achieved when skincare is reduced to what the skin actually needs." Barriers got steadier. Reactive and rosacea-prone skin calmed down. "Less really can be more, as long as the less is the right thing."
From test bottle to shelf, on her terms
A new MINDt product starts with Katharina watching what Selfnamed develops and what's trending in the wider market, but she doesn't chase every trend. Her filter: does the skin actually need this, and does it fit what she sees in her chair every day?
If something interests her, she orders it unbranded and tests it herself for two to three weeks before it earns a spot in the range. Once she decides, it moves fast. "The name and label can often be created within a day or two, and then I place the order." She still does nearly all of it herself: testing, naming, label design.
Four products she can never let run out: Guardian, her prebiotic gel serum; Protect, a niacinamide gel serum; Peel Off, a lactic acid exfoliant; and Drink, a hyaluronic acid serum. "There wasn't really one single surprise bestseller," she says. "What surprised me more was how quickly these four products became true essentials that clients come back to purchase again and again."
Selling without selling
Recommending your own product to someone mid-treatment is a different game than selling online, and Katharina has a rule for it: it should never feel like a pitch. Clients meet the products on their own skin, not on a shelf, so she talks them through what she's using and why, and stops there.
She tells younger clients that a monthly facial without any routine at home is "a little like going to the gym once a month and spending the rest of the time on the sofa." The treatment helps. The daily habit is what actually works.
There's a sharper reason she builds it this way, too. She's watched clients take a consultation they paid for in her chair, then go find the exact same product cheaper online during a sale, elsewhere. "In the worst case, the cosmetician has provided the entire consultation and someone else ultimately makes the sale." With her own line, the advice and the product stay together, and so does the relationship.
Freedom, plus the honest parts
Owning her line changed what Katharina can offer. "I decide which products belong to MINDt, what they're called, and how I combine and structure them within the line," she says. No rigid systems, no being boxed into someone else's range.
She's upfront that the early days with Selfnamed had friction, the kind any founder runs into while a young company is still finding its footing. What stayed with her wasn't the friction. It was what happened next. "Many of those things have since changed," she says. "I have the impression that the company is agile, recognises developments, and is willing to change things rather than holding on to a structure simply because that's how it has always been done."
Her advice to anyone thinking about it
Katharina's take for other salon owners weighing their own line is blunt: don't wait for a finished concept. "Don't feel you have to start big," she says. "Choose products you genuinely believe in, test them, listen to your clients, and allow the line to grow alongside your business."
That's exactly how MINDt happened. Not a plan drawn up on a whiteboard, but one client, one tested formula, and one label at a time, built by someone who still treats her own skin as the first test subject for everything she sells.
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