Andrea Lisbona grew up in Barcelona, Spain, in a family of entrepreneurs. She knew she wanted to follow in the family tradition and start her own company, but wasn't sure where to start. Ultimately, she began searching for a product category that was ripe for transformation, but wasn't in a space with too much competition.
Ultimately, she decided on hand sanitizer. This was back in 2014, and Lisbona believed hand sanitizer could become more of a daily routine product, like skincare — if only it looked and smelled better. "No one looks forward to sanitizing their hands," she says. "It was mostly done in the health-care space."
So she and her husband launched a series of hand sanitizers in Barcelona, but struggled to establish the brand in the European market. "We knew that we had a good idea, but to make it really take off, we needed to leave our families behind and cross the Atlantic for the U.S.," she says. "That's what we did in 2018."
They moved to Miami with their hand-sanitizer company, Touchland, which, ironically, was doing fine until the pandemic — when everyone suddenly wanted hand sanitizer. Supply chains collapsed as all kinds of........