Built From Experience: Meet the Founders
Kirsty Sinclair and Elke Richter are the co-founders of Saela. Between them, they have worked across clinical treatment environments, marketing, product development, sales, education and everything in between. They have advised, treated, and built and through all of it, they have developed a rare and specific kind of knowledge: not just what skin and people need in theory, but in practice, day after day, over time.
Kirsty Sinclair, co-founder of Saela, has spent more than two decades working in the skincare industry. In her 30’s, navigating the early years of motherhood, Kirsty noticed something shift. The sleep deprivation, the relentless pace, the particular kind of stress that comes with building a business and raising a family simultaneously - it began to show up in her skin. Skin that had always been resilient, that had tolerated cosmeceutical products without complaint for years, became reactive. Unpredictable. Easily unsettled by the very things that had previously caused no issue at all. Excess was no longer working.
It sent her deep into research. Into inflammation, cortisol, and the relationship between the body's stress response and skin behaviour. Into what it actually means to support skin health over the long term and in the reality of a full, demanding, beautiful life. She changed her approach entirely.
Not quick fixes, not complexity and excess. Instead: daily habits, incremental improvement and the compound effect of small, consistent actions repeated over time. The same philosophy, she realised, that was beginning to reshape how many people approached their health and their lives more broadly.
We are living through a cultural shift. The era of hustle, of high-intensity everything, of the pursuit faster results - it is giving way to something more considered and more sustainable. A growing understanding that the considered, refined, consistent approach is not the lesser option. It is often the most intelligent one.
Time is the most finite resource in her current season of life. Her priorities are her family and her businesses. The moments for self-care are as rare as they are short. A simple routine, products that work, but also feel genuinely pleasurable to use. Not to mention the joy of no decision fatigue!
This is the life that Saela was designed for.
Elke Richter, Saela's co-founder, arrived at the same place through her own version of the same journey. Like Kirsty, she has spent over 20 years in the skincare industry. Elke has found that the most clarifying education came not just from the industry, but from her own life. The particular demands of running a business while raising children. The way hormones shift suddenly, stress increases, life gets busy. The experience of watching skin behave differently and having to learn how to respond to it.
What Elke found mirrored what Kirsty had discovered: that the answer was never more. It was better quality, smarter, more considered. A routine refined to what genuinely worked, used consistently.
Two women. Different backgrounds, different expertise, but the same lived experience of what often occurs as we age. The lived knowledge of what it means to care for your skin and yourself when time is finite, life is full, and the moments you carve out for stillness are too valuable to waste on a complicated 20 step routine.
Saela is for the person who has started investing in themselves. In the practise of simplification. A person who values quality over quantity. Who romanticises the small rituals and moments in life. Who understands that consistency is the path to success.
As both Kirsty and Elke came to know, that the compound effect is real and the most extraordinary results are built one day at a time.
