07.15.2020
Episode 158: Joy Harari, Founder and CEO of Shore Magic
Summary
Joy Harari, Founder and CEO of Shore Magic, pulled from her own childhood experiences when building her brand. She is a certified holistic health coach and created a digestive collagen supplement from fish skins that is not only effective and healing, but also helps you look good from the inside out. She first discovered the powers of marine collagen while working with children suffering from ADD and autism.
Tune in to this week’s episode to find out more about her journey and how she makes age feel like just a number.
Transcript
| Announcer | Welcome to WHERE BRAINS MEET BEAUTY® hosted by Jodi Katz, founder and creative director of Base Beauty Creative Agency. |
| Jodi Katz | Hey it's Jodi Katz, your host of WHERE BRAINS MEET BEAUTY® Podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. This week's episode features Joy Harari. She is the founder and CEO of Shore Magic by Generation Joy. If you missed last week's episode it featured Dr. Ava Shamban, who's a dermatologist and founder of Ava MD and SKIN FIVE clinics. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to the show. I am so excited to be with Joy Harari. She is the Founder and CEO of Shore Magic. Welcome to WHERE BRAINS MEET BEAUTY®. |
| Joy Harari | Thank you, so nice to be here, so nice of you to invite me. |
| Jodi Katz | It's so nice to see your face. We're recording via Zoom because we are still in quarantine, and probably will be for quite some time before we go back to recording these live in our studio on 29th Street. |
| Joy Harari | We'll get there. |
| Jodi Katz | Yep, we will. But this is fun. I like seeing people's faces. I think that's the most important part that when we're recording we can see each other's face. Joy we have so much to talk about. Your background is so interesting, so varied and these incredible themes. I'm going to let you tell your story because I think that it's a story that so many of our listeners are going to be very interested in. The thing that I think is so fascinating is that what you've built for yourself right now with Shore Magic is something that you built for yourself not only after your kids were born, but after your kids were married. You really are doing something that many people think about, and some of them don't have the courage to do it, so I think they'll really love your story. |
| Joy Harari | Thank you. |
| Jodi Katz | Let's go back in time to how you walked into the world of wellness. |
| Joy Harari | I was actually born into the world of wellness. I was born with celiac disease. My mom who was super smart I don't know how she did it, but she found a doctor who happened to be the father of the select carbohydrate diet like he's written about in many books. He had an office in Manhattan. His name was Dr. Sidney Valentine Haas. I was one year old, and I was crying through the night. She didn't know what to do with me. She went to this doctor and in a few years on his diet I was completely healed of celiac. Just with diet only with diet, nothing else, no supplements, nothing, just diet. I guess eating a certain way over time helped my biome, and my body just regulated and healed. I always had set down a foundation for me that food and health go hand in hand. Then throughout my life I was always into health and what I ate, and looking into different things and how it affects you when... I always put two and two together, because that was always in the back of my mind that food could heal you. |
| Jodi Katz | Dealing with celiac as a child, this is long before people were talking about this right? |
| Joy Harari | Yeah. |
| Jodi Katz | There weren't choices for you in the marketplace then. Do you remember as a kid going to birthday parties and not eating what the other kids were eating? Do you have memories of that? |
| Joy Harari | My mom did it in a way that made me feel special. When the other kids were running to the ice cream truck, she would say, "Here Joy, you get these apple juice pops." She would make her own ices for me. It never bothered me. I guess when you haven't tasted sugar, you have a different palette and it just I didn't care. I didn't care. It was never something I felt deprived from, so she did a good job. |
| Jodi Katz | Yeah that's amazing. That's wonderful. I'm sure that was a lot of hard work for her. |
| Joy Harari | Yeah, absolutely. When I got older, when my kids were already married, when I got older I was always delving, always reading, always into different dietary theories and learning about, I had books galore on different dietary theories. Then when my kids got married, I decided to get my credentials, and I went back to school and I became a certified holistic health coach and a certified EFT coach. I opened a practice and also a GAPS specialist, and psychology syndrome specialist. I opened a practice dealing with children with digestive issues, many on the autistic spectrum and depressed and anxious adults. That was really rewarding for me because I was able to see that what was going on and the symptoms that people had just changing from the diet that I gave them. It was about a couple of years into my practice that I had an issue with kids not wanting to have the bone broth that I was recommending they have every day to heal their gut. The main component of the bone broth is collagen. I wanted so badly to help the mothers because in those days there was no bone broth on the shelf in the health food store. You had to get those bones and boil them for hours. The mothers were going crazy because they were doing it and they were willing to do it, but then the children didn't want to eat it. I wanted so badly to come up with something for them that was easy. I scanned, I'm telling you the entire world. I was on a mission to find the best, most pure collagen powder because I knew that that would be so easy for them. They could just put two scoops in a smoothie for the kids, and they wouldn't even think twice. The mothers were going crazy with this bone broth thing. I literally tried like a million different collagen powders, and I knew I wanted a marine collagen, something that was sourced sustainably. I wanted it from fish skins. I had researched this and I know everything. I became the expert on collagen, and I knew everything about it and how it was produced. I knew that I didn't want it to be hydrolyzed with hydrochloric acid because that is a irritant to the digestive system. I knew I wanted it to be hydrolyzed with natural enzymes and broken down to a tiny little molecule that could be bioavailable. I knew what I was looking for. Finally, I was answered, my prayers were answered I found it. It was tested, it was certified hypoallergenic and the best that you could find. Tested and only wild fish and the fish skins not the scales. I knew exactly what I wanted and somehow I got it. I started using it in my practice. |
| Jodi Katz | Joy, I think what's so interesting about what you were doing for the parents of your patients at that time, it's exactly what your mom was doing for you when you were a kid, right? |
| Joy Harari | Exactly. |
| Jodi Katz | She worked so hard to solve this for you, and then you were working so hard to solve this for these other parents. It's really like a sweet symmetry, isn't it? |
| Joy Harari | Yeah, it really is, and even more than that is when I read about Dr. Haas, and I said, "Here's a man who healed me and now I'm carrying on his work. I'm doing exactly what he did for me for other people." That to me was, I feel very sentimental about it. It's really amazing. |
| Jodi Katz | How did you hone in on the GAP protocol when you were studying? |
| Joy Harari | I had learned hundreds of dietary theories, and I wanted something that would really, really be effective and healing to people, not just a diet or it's going to be good and you'll lose weight or you'll look better. I wanted something that was going to impact people really from the inside. My heart is always with children. I knew that I wanted to specialize in something that would help children, and I saw what was going on with autism and ADD, and how children were suffering with these things. I really had motivation to help there. I guess it was just all through research and coming across this GAPS protocol, and reading up on it and learning with the doctor that invented it. She credited the doctor who healed me, it's so interesting. I took that whole course and learned how to apply this. With my EFT skills, which is Emotional Freedom Technique, I don't know if you've heard of it. It's tapping on certain parts of the body, certain acupressure points that allow you to release emotions tied to different experiences and different things. The children that I was dealing with have many tactile issues. They could get very nervous from touching broccoli because it's bristly on top. Then I can tap with them on those issues, and they will release, and then they can eat the broccoli with no problems. |
| Jodi Katz | How interesting? |
| Joy Harari | It's really interesting how I was able to incorporate the two of those things. Also, I taught the kids when they were feeling anxious, they were feeling like they needed to get up and run across the room, to tap on their fingertips and breathe in. They were helping their friends. It was the cutest thing I ever saw. It was like there was a six-year-old boy and his friend fell and he said, "Oh, I know how to make you feel better." He started tapping on a certain point on his hand that I taught him, and his friend stopped crying. It's so cute. It was so cute, but it's an amazing, amazing technique. It's amazing modality for emotional freedom. |
| Jodi Katz | When you were working with these families, were the parents surprised that the key to success would be in food and nutrition? |
| Joy Harari | Yeah. As I succeeded with children, the word got out and I had more and more different people coming to me. I was giving classes to mothers to support them so that they would be able to support each other. One was making bone broth and the other one would make a healthy cookie, and they would swap. Things like that. I made a little community out of it. The best part was the kids were so much better. Then with the collagen, that was the amazing thing, because the collagen by itself was putting everything over the top. It was incredible. The digestion was better. Their symptoms were better. Their agitation was better. Their anxiety over these things were better. Then the mothers started loving it because they're looking younger, their skin is looking beautiful, their bones are getting better. Anything that was going wrong, their joints, their muscle problems, whatever was going on with them they started seeing results with. I really had no idea that the collagen had such a wide range of things that it helped. I was able to really learn through my practice and seeing people using it, what the benefits were. Then the grandmother started using it, and their arthritis got better and their hair looked good. It was amazing. It took off through word of mouth. I had people calling me up "You know that powder that so-and-so had, she told me about it. Can I get some?" On and on and on. Then I had a choice. I saw this amazing thing, and do I want to take it to the world? Or do I want to just keep it for the 200 people that are in my practice? I chose to create Shore Magic and take it out to the world, and the rest is history. |
| Jodi Katz | Joy, are you allowed to refer back to the learnings that your Shore Magic formula, like the impact it had on your patients when you talk about Shore Magic at Saks Fifth Avenue. Are you allowed to use these benefit stories in marketing of the product? |
| Joy Harari | Yeah. We can use testimonials, and we can say that it helps certain things or it may help certain things or it supports those things. But we can't make claims, but we do have science behind us. We have published science that was done and we saw. When I was doing this before I was going to go out into the world with this product, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't doing any harm. That there was no something hidden that I didn't know about that maybe it could be bad for. That it was really as good as what I thought. We had a scientist, a research scientist actually did research on a cellular level in the laboratory. He taught us things that I cannot even tell you are amazing. He said he created a test that shows that it crosses the blood brain barrier, and it helps in neurogenesis, which means that it helps create new brain cells. The implications for memory, cognitive ability, the elderly population, the implications are insane. When I saw that, I just was so excited about it. The scientist himself was so excited that he said, "Nobody knows this." He said, "I didn't know this." All these different things, the wound healing and the skin repair, and all of these things, he was flipping out. He said, "I'm going to get this published." He took it to the biggest peer reviewed scientific journal, one of the biggest in the world, and they actually published it and it has our name in the citation, Shore Magic collagen. The whole thing is just, the fact that we know that our product is pure, is bioavailable, is absorbable, the body picks it up and utilizes it. The way that we see clinically that it's happening to know scientifically that we are correct is everything to me. Because I can then go out with confidence and know I'm only doing good for people. That's really important. |
| Jodi Katz | How did you make the decision between focusing on an adult population for Shore Magic, versus the children? I'm sure this was a hard decision, because you saw how helpful it was for kids. Obviously it's like it looks very premium and very beauty, so you made the decision and really went for it. What was that decision-making process like, and how did you end up where you are? |
| Joy Harari | I'm going to tell you a story. It's really interesting. First of all, I feel like women tend to be the ones to make things go viral. They talk about what they're using, they share it. This one needs it, that one needs it. I just feel like there's more of that among women. I feel like when something... I'll tell you a story that happened. I had an elderly woman who came to me and she said, "Joy," she knows I'm a health coach. She knows I know my stuff. She came to me she said, "Joy I have a problem with my shoulder. I can't sleep at night. I have so much pain in my shoulder." I said, "Listen, you have to try my powder because it's amazing. My collagen powder will help you. I really hope so" She started taking it. I see her three months later and I said, "How are you doing? Are you loving the Shore Magic?" She looks at me and she says, "Look at my skin, look at my hair. Look what I look like? Everyone is telling me." I turned around to her I said, "But wait, how's your shoulder." She looks at me and she said, "I forgot about that." |
| Jodi Katz | Oh my God that is hilarious. |
| Joy Harari | Her motivation, and this happens so many times with people that their motivation, like the thing that made them really want to keep taking it was how good they were looking as opposed to... I'm sure they love how they were feeling, but when you look really great it's very motivating. I think that that's when I made my decision it has to be a beauty product. Then whoever's taking it for beauty product is going to read, and is going to find out that it's going to be great for their kids. It's going to be great for their husbands. When the husbands see the wives looking good don't think they don't dip into their stash. All the men in my family take it, my sons take it, my son-in-laws, my husband. They also use my skincare. Everything is unisex. In addition to my collagen, I developed a skincare line in France, organic with micro engineered collagen in it. The collagen is further broken down into a teeny, teeny, teeny little molecule, that can actually penetrate the pores of the skin. It's amazing. I have 11 formulations, 11 different skincare products that are so beautiful. That's how we became a beauty company. But it's really great for children, for pregnant women, for elderly people. It's good for everyone for dental, bones, wound healing, it's still great for everything. |
| Jodi Katz | What I want to remind my listeners is that you started your education in nutrition and wellness after your kids were married. You started creating this product and researching this product after your kids were married. You started the marketing of Shore Magic and the subsequent skincare products after your kids were married. You can do it. This can be done. |
| Joy Harari | Yeah. To me age is a number. There is nothing that a person can't do as long as they're still energetic and they're still willing to learn and grow. The truth is, being in business is like one of the most, it's one of the most stimulating things as far as personal growth. I find that I've grown more as a person in so many ways by being in business, and I've learned so much, so much. It's incredible. I love it. |
| Jodi Katz | Okay, then my last question for you is based on what you just said, you've learned so much. What's been the biggest surprise to you walking into the beauty industry this way? What has you thinking like, "Oh my God, I can't believe this is the way it works." What's been the biggest entrepreneurial surprise? |
| Joy Harari | I think that when you're really naïve... I walked into Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus, into these places that shut the door on so many people. I walked in with so much confidence, and here I was opening up another section in the beauty counter. It wasn't like, they have a million supplements. It's like a new category. Here I am showing it to them and telling them, "Everyone needs this, from the inside they have to be beautiful as well as the outside." They loved it. They absolutely loved it. I went in with so much positivity that oh my goodness they're going to be so excited because they need this. There was so much acceptance to what I was bringing, and I think that when people were so surprised that there was so much acceptance, I realized, "Wow, I was a little too confident walking in because most people get rejection at least a little bit, and I really didn't experience that." I was so fortunate and so blessed to be received with so much excitement. I think it was the timing. I think that people are realizing how much what you put into your body is going to show on the outside, and how that self-care requires being much more cognizant of what you're taking in. I think that the world's got to that point exactly when we came to market, and it was just a really lucky blessing for us. |
| Jodi Katz | Well, Joy, thank you so much. I love your story. I'm so proud of you. You've really climbed a few mountains here in the past few years, so thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with our listeners. |
| Joy Harari | Thank you. Thank you for having me. |
| Jodi Katz | For our listeners I hope you enjoy this interview with Joy. Please subscribe to our series on iTunes, and for updates about the show follow us on Instagram @wherebrainsmeetbeautypodcast. |
| Announcer | Thanks for listening to WHERE BRAINS MEET BEAUTY® with Jodi Katz. Tune in again for more authentic conversations with beauty leaders. |
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