by: Julia Kang-Reeves
Chief Marketing Officer
On May 24, Henry and Sunny Kang celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.
I share this news not only because they’re my parents, but because they founded our company over 50 years ago. Which makes this milestone even more astonishing.
When I googled the material associated with the 60th wedding anniversary, most lists only went up to 50 years, associated with gold. But I did locate one that went up to 60, which indicated the diamond. Of course.
It takes 1 to 3 billion years to make a diamond. And extreme pressure. It starts with pure carbon, whose atoms gradually form bonds and crystallize. There are no short cuts, no hacks. You must wait and let nature take its course.
The process bears gifts along the way. I refer to marriage and observing my parents during my lifetime. My father was 27 and my mother 25 when they wed in Seoul, Korea. Their union endured immigrating to America, adapting to a foreign culture while raising three children and building a business from scratch.
In the Chinese Zodiac, my father is a dragon, and my mother is a horse. Two headstrong people potentially spell disaster, but yoked together, their bond crystallized in unexpected ways. What I learned was occult and precious: you are paid dearly when you struggle. There was no exception to this rule of nature. At each turn, at each death-defying risk and herculean undertaking, they gave it their all and were rewarded. What each contributed, under pressure, transformed into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
What I learned was that at each turn, you had an out. You could give up. Preserve yourself. Or you could reach for the next rung – risking failure, humiliation or whatever was your worst fear.
No doubt, there are other ingredients to this alchemy. Faith. A dream. An eye for opportunity. “One thing about dad,” opined my brother, John, who founded Earth Therapeutics, “is that he never gives up.” During the first years of getting the brand off the ground, John had a poster up by his desk echoing those very words: never give up. The cartoon depicted a frog grabbing the neck of a stork that was swallowing it.
30 years later, the buyers at ULTA affectionately refer to Earth Therapeutics as an OG brand. Our vendor number is #1001; we were the 1001th brand ULTA brought on when they placed their first order with us in June 1993. At that time, ULTA was 8 stores in Chicago; now there are 1,445 stores across the US. Through thick and thin, over 30 years, Earth Therapeutics has remained the #1 bath accessory brand at ULTA.
Which brings me full circle to the necessity of time. You can’t hurry love. In the interval, a lot of drama transpires, perhaps unseen. Every marriage is a mystery from the outside. But one can imagine the atomic slow dance, the bonds that form gradually, fortified by litmus tests of trust, patience and daily commitment.
What results is something rare and precious. The real thing.
