Tiya Shah represents a new generation of entrepreneurs who are learning to build businesses by combining creativity, research, and a willingness to navigate uncertainty. As the founder of Reeh Beauty, Tiya Shah has taken an idea and developed it into a beauty brand through 14 months of preparation, product development, testing, and continuous learning. The launch of Reeh Beauty’s first product collection, Longwear Eye Tints, marks an important step in a journey shaped by experimentation and practical problem-solving.
Starting a business involves much more than announcing a product or creating an attractive brand identity. It requires understanding customers, making decisions with incomplete information, and improving an idea until it becomes something people can use. Tiya Shah’s experience illustrates how these responsibilities come together when building a consumer-focused business from the ground up.
Turning an Idea Into a Beauty Product
Reeh Beauty’s journey involved 14 months of building, including 12 months dedicated to research and development. During this period, Tiya Shah worked toward developing the brand’s first collection: Longwear Eye Tints in seven versatile shades. The intention was to simplify the eye makeup routine by creating products designed for everyday usability and variety.
Although a product launch may appear straightforward from the outside, the process behind it can be complicated. Product development requires attention to formulation, shade selection, usability, presentation, and customer expectations. Each decision influences how the final product performs and how consumers perceive it.
For Tiya Shah, the development process included more than 48 formulation iterations. This number highlights the amount of refinement that can be required before a product is ready for the market. Rather than treating the initial formulation as the final answer, the process involved repeated attempts to improve the product.
This approach reflects an important lesson for entrepreneurs: the first version of an idea is often only the starting point. Progress depends on identifying what needs improvement, testing possible solutions, and remaining open to change.
Learning Through Direct Involvement
One of the notable aspects of Tiya Shah’s journey is her involvement across different departments of the business. She described getting hands-on experience, learning areas she previously knew little about, and figuring things out along the way.
For a founder, this kind of involvement can provide a practical understanding of how a business operates. Product development, marketing, customer communication, website management, and order handling may appear to be separate responsibilities, but they influence one another. A decision made in one department can affect the customer experience in another.
Tiya Shah’s experience demonstrates the value of learning beyond one’s existing knowledge. Founders do not necessarily begin with expertise in every area they must manage. However, a willingness to investigate problems, seek answers, and participate in the work can help them develop the skills needed to lead a growing business.
This process also requires accepting mistakes as part of learning. Building something new rarely follows a perfectly organized path. There can be delays, unexpected challenges, and decisions that need to be reconsidered. The ability to respond constructively to these situations becomes an important part of entrepreneurship.
Understanding Customers Before Launch
A product can look promising to its creators while failing to meet the expectations of its intended audience. This makes consumer feedback especially important in the beauty industry, where preferences, skin tones, application habits, and personal routines vary widely.
As part of Reeh Beauty’s development, Tiya Shah and her team conducted consumer testing with more than 50 women across different age groups and skin tones. This step offered an opportunity to evaluate the product beyond the development process and consider how it might serve actual users.
Consumer testing can help businesses identify strengths, discover practical concerns, and understand how people respond to a product. It also creates an opportunity to examine assumptions before investing further in production and marketing.
For Tiya Shah, incorporating this stage into the journey highlights a useful principle: customer understanding should be part of product development rather than something considered only after launch.
Listening to different perspectives can make a product more relevant to its audience. It also reminds entrepreneurs that building a brand is not simply about expressing their own vision; it is about finding a meaningful connection between that vision and the needs of customers.
The First Launch and Its Early Response
Reeh Beauty’s launch provided an initial opportunity to observe how the market responded to its first collection. According to Tiya Shah’s announcement, the launch video reached more than 41,000 people, and the brand received over 100 orders in less than 48 hours.
These early figures offered encouraging signs of interest in the product. The positive feedback she received about the formulation, shades, and website also provided information about how customers experienced different aspects of the brand.
However, an early launch is only one stage in building a sustainable business. Initial attention must eventually be supported by consistent product quality, reliable customer service, effective communication, and a clear understanding of what encourages customers to return.
Tiya Shah’s next challenge will be to learn from these early responses and use that information to guide future decisions. As the business grows, customer expectations and operational demands may also change. Maintaining the willingness to learn will remain important.
Building a Brand in the Public Eye
Throughout the 14-month journey, Tiya Shah documented her experience on Instagram. Sharing the process of building Reeh Beauty allowed her to present not only the final product but also the work and uncertainty behind it.
This kind of documentation can help audiences understand how a business develops. Instead of seeing only polished launch material, followers can gain insight into the experiments, decisions, and adjustments involved in bringing a product to market.
For emerging entrepreneurs, sharing a business journey can also create opportunities for conversations with potential customers. Questions, reactions, and feedback can help founders better understand their audience while making the development process more transparent.
At the same time, building publicly requires a willingness to show the unfinished parts of entrepreneurship. Not every experiment succeeds, and not every decision produces immediate results. Tiya Shah’s description of the experience as challenging and chaotic acknowledges that growth often involves managing several uncertainties at once.
The Next Chapter for Reeh Beauty
At 23, recently turning 24, Tiya Shah launched the first collection from Reeh Beauty after more than a year of development. Her story is not simply about launching seven eye tint shades; it is about the process of transforming an idea into a product through research, repeated testing, customer input, and direct involvement.
The long-term direction of Reeh Beauty will depend on how effectively the brand responds to customers, maintains product standards, and adapts as it grows. The initial launch provides a foundation, but the decisions that follow will shape the business over time.
Tiya Shah’s experience offers a practical reminder to aspiring founders that entrepreneurship is an ongoing process of learning. Ideas become stronger when they are tested, assumptions improve when they are questioned, and products become more relevant when customer needs are considered carefully.
Reeh Beauty is at the beginning of its journey. For Tiya Shah, the work now extends beyond introducing a first product collection to understanding the market, strengthening the brand, and building a business capable of developing with its audience.
The most useful lesson from her journey is that progress does not always come from having every answer before starting. Sometimes, it comes from committing to an idea, doing the necessary work, learning through the difficult stages, and improving with each step. That process is what turns a launch into the beginning of a business.
