After a process that took several years of product development and a resignation from her career as a marketing professional, Jackie launched Recess—a wellness company designed with the motive of making our lives just a little bit easier. Her product offerings revolve around the concept of real women living real lives. While she went into creating body wipes, face wipes, and deodorant wipes with the inspiration of a quicker post-exercise hygiene routine, Recess is perfect for all of the little moments of sweat throughout our days, like when it’s 85+ Fahrenheit out and we’re running from meeting to meeting, or that long travel day schlepping a carry-on across and airport.
With a background in beauty and wellness marketing, Jackie was well prepared to launch a brand in the evolving field. “I think there’s an emotional shift where beauty use to be about literal beauty and aesthetic and anti-aging all about wrinkles,” she says. “I worked at Estée Lauder at the beginning of my career and I felt like I spent most of my time talking about anti-aging, wrinkle prevention, and brightening. Beauty used to be from the outside-in, and I think people are finally understanding the alternative. It really stems from taking care of yourself in ways that aren’t just putting a topical cream on and hoping for the best.”
Like Jackie, customers today are increasingly concerned with what they are putting in and on their bodies. So in creating the Recess wipes, quality of ingredients was of equal importance as convenience of the products. “Before, everything that I could get on the market that was convenient wasn’t good quality, and everything that was of good quality wasn’t convenient,” Jackie says. “Quality and convenience were the two factors that were identified very early on and still stayed at the top as most valued.”
On average, it takes about a year to develop each product, going from discussions with dermatologists to identify the best ingredients to meet each goal, and in-depth testing procedures. The aloe body wipes are made with aloe, witch hazel and green apple extract, the deodorant wipes from tea tree, acai extract, and chamomile, and face wipes are made from eucalyptus and caffeine. The wipes each come individually wrapped, so as to not take up too much space anywhere. “I can literally put two in my purse, two in my gym bag, two in my desk, two in my car, and sort of just have it everywhere without taking up space,” Jackie explains.
“There are two things that rise to the top with our consumers, quality and convenience, which is cool because that kind what we designed it around,” Jackie says.
Recess only just launched, yet it has been doing extremely well, likely because Jackie is serving consumers just like herself and knows what they want.
“I think the think I’m most proud of is the fact that our customers are really happy,” she says. “As anyone working in any kind of brand knows, if you happy customers, it makes everything else a lot easier. And it’s also a lot more meaningful to know that something that I personally believed in can succeed.”