The final formula
The skincare founder who traded
the hustle for a slower life
The final
formula
The skincare founder
who traded the hustle
for a slower life
The croissants were exceptional. Gabrielle Requena had collected them before dawn, venturing out into the crisp Byron Bay winter morning while most of the town was still asleep, to visit the bakery she considers the best.
It was a thoughtful gesture for guests she had never met, but not an entirely surprising one.
The founder who spent 12 years building Wrinkles Schminkles into a global skincare brand has always believed the little details matter. These days, however, she’s trying to pay attention to something else.
On the coffee table sits a copy of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, a book that argues against the modern obsession with constant productivity. Gabrielle smiles when it’s mentioned.
“It’s hard going,” she admits.
For years, Gabrielle measured her days by product launches, retailer negotiations, overnight sales reports and the next problem waiting to be solved. Learning not to fill every hour is proving every bit as challenging as building Wrinkles Schminkles.
Nestled in the hills above Byron Bay, her light-filled home is the reward for years of relentless ambition. A sanctuary, wrapped in a timber deck and framed by trees that ensure it is hidden from the outside world. Massive bi-fold doors dissolve the boundary between inside and out, making the living room and deck feel like a single, open space. Beyond the timber servery window, the canopy sways in the breeze. Inside, a laptop and second monitor on the kitchen bench reveals she remains more entrepreneur than entertainer.
Retirement was never the plan. Instead, the Bond University alumna is learning to build something less tangible than the business empire she sold last year for what she describes as a “significant outcome.”
Space.
“I’d wake up and my brain was so full all the time,” she says.
“I don’t have those 25 tabs for the day of things I knew I had to get to anymore.
“Grateful doesn’t cut it. It’s become a bit of a cheap word that we’ve overused. I am deeply grateful for being able to operate at a much more peaceful place.
“And I don’t even think I’m fully at that peaceful place yet. I think I’ve got a lot more decompressing to go.”
Even our photoshoot reflects the transition she finds herself navigating. Gabrielle begins with a flurry of suggestions where each picture should be taken. Old habits linger. After years of directing a global business, taking charge comes naturally. Later, she relaxes, trusting photographer Cavan Flynn’s eye and smiling appreciatively when the best images come from places she hadn’t planned.
However, when we suggest a few shots among the dense greenery surrounding the house, Gabrielle the CEO briefly reappears.
“People aren’t going to think I’m living off the grid, are they?”
It’s a throwaway comment, but one that captures this chapter of her life perfectly.
She has stepped away from the business she built. She just hasn’t stepped away from herself.
Nestled in the hills above Byron Bay, her light-filled home is the reward for years of relentless ambition. A sanctuary, wrapped in a timber deck and framed by trees that ensure it is hidden from the outside world. Massive bi-fold doors dissolve the boundary between inside and out, making the living room and deck feel like a single, open space. Beyond the timber servery window, the canopy sways in the breeze. Inside, a laptop and second monitor on the kitchen bench reveals she remains more entrepreneur than entertainer.
Retirement was never the plan. Instead, the Bond University alumna is learning to build something less tangible than the business empire she sold last year for what she describes as a “significant outcome.”
Space.
“I’d wake up and my brain was so full all the time,” she says.
“I don’t have those 25 tabs for the day of things I knew I had to get to anymore.
“Grateful doesn’t cut it. It’s become a bit of a cheap word that we’ve overused. I am deeply grateful for being able to operate at a much more peaceful place.
“And I don’t even think I’m fully at that peaceful place yet. I think I’ve got a lot more decompressing to go.”
Even our photoshoot reflects the transition she finds herself navigating. Gabrielle begins with a flurry of suggestions where each picture should be taken. Old habits linger. After years of directing a global business, taking charge comes naturally. Later, she relaxes, trusting photographer Cavan Flynn’s eye and smiling appreciatively when the best images come from places she hadn’t planned.
However, when we suggest a few shots among the dense greenery surrounding the house, Gabrielle the CEO briefly reappears.
“People aren’t going to think I’m living off the grid, are they?”
It’s a throwaway comment, but one that captures this chapter of her life perfectly.
She has stepped away from the business she built. She just hasn’t stepped away from herself.
A different measure of success
The journey to Byron Bay didn’t begin with a business plan. It began with loss.
In 2021, Gabrielle’s stepfather Richard Doggett, the man she describes as the rock of her family and her greatest champion, died suddenly in an accident on the family macadamia farm in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales.
Even while continuing to grow the business, the grief quietly reshaped her priorities.
“It became the personal trigger to sell,” she explained.
“I kept asking myself, ‘If I died tomorrow in an accident, would I feel like I have lived, or am living, a life to my complete fulfilment?’”
“The answer was no.”
Professionally, she had achieved what many founders spend their lives chasing. Personally, she realised there wasn’t room for much else.
“I’d achieved success in business, but what about my personal life and getting to have other experiences I hadn’t had yet?
“There simply wasn’t capacity for having everything.”
By 2023, the decision had become clear. Not to slow the business down. To build it even further. And then let it go.
From consultant to creator
Long before Wrinkles Schminkles, Gabrielle was a consultant. After graduating from Bond University in 2001 with a Bachelor of Commerce and Masters in Ecommerce, one of her lecturers helped prepare her for interviews with Deloitte, marking the start of a career that would also include eBay, high-growth technology companies and eventually her own e-commerce consultancy.
“I’ve always loved consulting,” she says.
“I love problem solving. I love learning about new industries.”
Her big idea stemmed from something surprisingly ordinary. Like many women in her thirties, Gabrielle began noticing lines across her chest and face caused by years of sleeping on her side.
She found creams and serums disappointing and became fascinated by medical-grade silicone, a material long used to help reduce scarring. Working with manufacturers in the United States, she cycled through what she estimates was close to 37,000 prototypes before arriving at the product she believed was ready for market.
At the same time, another trend was gathering pace. Injectables were becoming mainstream and beauty brands were embracing the language of “anti-ageing”. It didn’t sit comfortably with her.
“I didn’t want to make people feel fearful about ageing,” she says.
“This was meant to be a light-hearted, easy-to-use product that actually gave results.”
That philosophy even extended to the name. Wrinkles Schminkles wasn’t the product of an expensive branding agency.
Gabrielle came up with it herself. Not everyone agreed.
“For the first year or two people would say, ‘We don’t understand this brand name,’” she recalls.
“I think the world caught up.
“I was probably a little ahead of the time in how I branded the business.”
When luck meets preparation
If Wrinkles Schminkles taught Gabrielle anything, it’s that luck rarely arrives on its own. Sometimes it wears the face of a television producer.
Sometimes it looks like a teenager scrolling TikTok.
In 2018, Shark Tank, the television series where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to some of Australia’s most successful investors, offered Gabrielle a national stage.
She walked away without a deal, but with something far more valuable.
“Shark Tank has been the gift that keeps on giving,” she says.
“To the day I sold the business, and probably even now, it’s still our best-performing ad set in Meta.”
If Shark Tank opened the door, social media blew it off its hinges.
In 2022, a 17-second TikTok video featuring one of Wrinkles Schminkles’ forehead patches exploded across the platform.
Viewed more than 55 million times, it became the kind of marketing moment every brand dreams about but few ever experience.
The effect inside the business was immediate.
“We watched our entire global supply of forehead patches disappear,” Gabrielle says.
“We sold out in every country.”
She acknowledges luck played its part, but believes entrepreneurs have to be ready when it arrives.
“As a founder-led business with a small lean team, you get opportunities, you see opportunities, you’ll get that email, but you reply to that email that day and you do not let that go,” she explains.
“You’re fighting for every dollar and every opportunity.”
A morning television show in the United States wanted to feature the product. They made it happen.
“There were times we’d do $350,000 in revenue in 24 hours,” she says. “Those opportunities just kept opening doors.”
By the early 2020s, Wrinkles Schminkles had grown from an $80,000 idea into an international brand turning over almost $20 million a year. The company had expanded into Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Major retailers had come on board. A loyal online community had embraced not only the products, but the brand’s philosophy of approaching ageing with humour rather than fear.
From the outside, it looked like the obvious moment to keep pushing. Instead, Gabrielle started thinking about stepping away.
The messy middle
Selling a company isn’t the finish line most people imagine.
“The sale process is all theatre,” she says.
“The buyer is trying to find cracks in your business to devalue it. And you’re trying to defend value.”
The day the deal eventually closed she sat in a Sydney office refreshing her banking app until the funds appeared. When they finally landed, there was no champagne. No extravagant celebration.
“I closed my laptop, went back to the hotel, ordered a glass of red wine and KFC Uber Eats and went to bed.”
The next morning friends and family were desperately trying to contact her. Had it gone through? Was she OK?
“You think when you sell that’s when you celebrate,” she says.
“But it’s not.
“There’s a lot of different points in time between the sale, integration, exit... and then actual true space in your life.”
She describes it as layers slowly peeling away. First came the financial integration. Then the operational handover. Then, for the first time in 12 years, a holiday where the laptop genuinely stayed closed.
The final layer was unexpectedly simple.
“The biggest final moment,” she says, “was when they cut my email off.”
That moment brought relief. But it also brought emotions she hadn’t anticipated.
“At Christmas, when I finally had time to stop, I really grieved the business.”
Even now, she admits there are flashes of envy when major retail partnerships she helped secure finally launch without her.
“They’re all very normal emotions,” she says.
“But where I am now…”
“I just feel elation.
“And peace.”
Letting go
Peace, however, doesn’t mean standing still. The creative mind behind Wrinkles Schminkles hasn’t quite reached the “work schmirk” stage.
Instead, Gabrielle is deliberately designing a portfolio career – one built not on relentless growth, but on choice. There are a handful of clients she has chosen carefully, angel investments she is beginning to explore and conversations about board appointments.
The day after our visit, she launched her advisory venture, The Exit Files, on Substack, sharing the kind of advice only someone who has lived the journey can offer.
“The things I’ve learnt in hindsight are the things I really want to mentor other people on,” she says.
She knows what it feels like to bootstrap a company from an idea. To hear investors say no. To ride the extraordinary highs of viral success. To negotiate an exit. To grieve a business that had become part of her identity.
Most importantly, she understands that selling a company isn’t the finish line. Sometimes it’s simply the moment you finally have the freedom to ask what comes next.
Perhaps that’s what the laptop on the kitchen bench really represents. Not another business to build. Just the freedom to choose which one is worth opening.
The best thing the sale bought Gabrielle Requena wasn’t a house in Byron Bay. It was the luxury of deciding what comes next.
The messy middle
Selling a company isn’t the finish line most people imagine.
“The sale process is all theatre,” she says.
“The buyer is trying to find cracks in your business to devalue it. And you’re trying to defend value.”
The day the deal eventually closed she sat in a Sydney office refreshing her banking app until the funds appeared. When they finally landed, there was no champagne. No extravagant celebration.
“I closed my laptop, went back to the hotel, ordered a glass of red wine and KFC Uber Eats and went to bed.”
The next morning friends and family were desperately trying to contact her. Had it gone through? Was she OK?
“You think when you sell that’s when you celebrate,” she says. “But it’s not.
“There’s a lot of different points in time between the sale, integration, exit... and then actual true space in your life.”
She describes it as layers slowly peeling away.
First came the financial integration. Then the operational handover. Then, for the first time in 12 years, a holiday where the laptop genuinely stayed closed. The final layer was unexpectedly simple.
“The biggest final moment,” she says,
“was when they cut my email off.”
That moment brought relief. But it also brought emotions she hadn’t anticipated.
“At Christmas, when I finally had time to stop, I really grieved the business.”
Even now, she admits there are flashes of envy when major retail partnerships she helped secure finally launch without her.
“They’re all very normal emotions,” she says. “But where I am now…”
“I just feel elation.
“And peace.”
Letting go
Peace, however, doesn’t mean standing still. The creative mind behind Wrinkles Schminkles hasn’t quite reached the “work schmirk” stage.
Instead, Gabrielle is deliberately designing a portfolio career – one built not on relentless growth, but on choice. There are a handful of clients she has chosen carefully, angel investments she is beginning to explore and conversations about board appointments.
The day after our visit, she launched her advisory venture, The Exit Files, on Substack, sharing the kind of advice only someone who has lived the journey can offer.
“The things I’ve learnt in hindsight are the things
I really want to mentor other people on,” she says.
She knows what it feels like to bootstrap a company from an idea. To hear investors say no. To ride the extraordinary highs of viral success. To negotiate an exit. To grieve a business that had become part of her identity.
Most importantly, she understands that selling a company isn’t the finish line. Sometimes it’s simply the moment you finally have the freedom to ask what comes next.
Perhaps that’s what the laptop on the kitchen bench really represents. Not another business to build. Just the freedom to choose which one is worth opening.
The best thing the sale bought Gabrielle Requena wasn’t a house in Byron Bay.
It was the luxury of deciding what comes next.
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