Her Story
About Shubhra
Shubhra Sharma serves as founder and CEO of Cria Hair, a wellness venture offering hyper-minimalist, 100 percent organic hair care and scalp care products designed specifically for menopausal women. The company is built around a scalp care formula developed over 25 years by her biochemist father and homeopathic physician mother, which she discovered in her late father's diary and scaled into a business focused on strengthening hair roots and calming irritated scalps. An anthropologist by training with a PhD in sociocultural anthropology and an EMBA from the Essex School of Business in Paris, Sharma has spent the last two decades working at the intersection of entrepreneurship, education, and community building. She teaches an MBA program where she designs courses that connect graduate students with real-world entrepreneurial challenges faced by community organizations. Earlier in her career, she spent four to five years working with the Women's Education Center in India and was a co-founding member of Khabar Leheriya, the only rural women's newspaper in the world and the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary Writing with Fire. She also delivered a TED Talk titled Aloneness as Reclamation. As a solopreneur, Sharma handles all aspects of her business, from website development to marketing, while emphasizing values of empathy and integrity in her partnerships and personal life.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Shubhra
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I really haven't received external advice. I had to extract a lot of these advices from myself through my own experiences of building an enterprise on my own. Traumatic brain injury, personal losses, body collapse, and early menopause led me to never really abandoning myself even when there were many enticements to do that.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
You can't do it alone. But you also figure it out first and foremost, yourself. Building an enterprise will require you to really do the dirty work of looking inside of yourself and ask the hard questions. Be prepared to find it also do not like. But then at the same time, figure out ways to solve those problems, solve your inner anxieties, solve your inner stoppages that prevent you from taking your creativity and scaling it.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
As a solopreneur, the challenge has been around partnerships, not being able to find the right partners who want to do the work. People who wanted equity but didn't want to do the work, or wanted the formula but didn't know how to return genuine value. My superpower has been finding ways out and solving problems to keep the business moving.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Empathy and integrity are the two that I share both for me. I've had to come face-to-face with betrayal within my entrepreneurial journey, and learned to not see it as a personal statement but to learn from it, move forward, and have the courage to ask outright about qualities like integrity and empathy in potential partners.
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