Written by: TRACY BYRNES

The title on Victoria Tsai’s business card is Chief Treasure Hunter atTatcha, the skin-care company based on ancient Japanese traditions. It could very well say founder, CEO and product developer.

But Tsai has been on a continual hunt to find that ideal combination of living simply and naturally and appreciating this life.

And her journey reminds us all that if you have a problem or an issue, odds are good someone else is suffering from it as well.  So fix it and build your business around the solution.

Life Is a Gift

As a fixed-income analyst at Merrill Lynch, Tsai worked in the World Financial Center, which was across the street from the Twin Towers.

So she saw everything on 9/11.

And everyday thereafter. “Every time they recovered another body we knew because they would cover it with the American flag,” remembers Tsai.

And then her once-athletic husband got very sick for the next two years after the attacks. “And they still don’t know what happened,” she says.

“Plus I just didn’t believe in what I was doing anymore,” says the Jersey Girl, whose parents came from Taiwan.

So she knew it was time — they had to get out of there.

Life is a gift, she says. Don’t waste it.

Fix Yourself First

She went back to business school and got a job launching consumer products in China. But she made the grave mistake of testing way too many of those products on her own face. She ended up with acute dermatitis – which is basically a bleeding, blistering red rash – and couldn’t find anything to cure it.

In the process of researching a treatment for herself, she learned that the FDA has no oversight over cosmetics here in the States. “Ingredients are innocent until proven guilty here,” she says. “There are no advance protections in place for consumers.”

And the chemicals in some of the products she tested were obviously the reason for her current condition.

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