"This is actually going to happen": How Alycia Bhatti finally launched Made With Love

For years, the boxes, bottles, and half-made labels for Made With Love sat in a closet in Alycia Bhatti's apartment. Then she found Genie. Today, Made With Love is on presale, and Addiction Nouvelle Lingerie in Beverly Hills wants it on shelves.

The closet years

Before Genie, Alycia had tried to launch Made With Love more than once. She bought the domain. She researched ingredients. She taught herself label design by trial and error. She went to the post office to find out what a single bottle would cost to ship, and got stumped on the answer.

She ordered the pieces anyway: bottles, droppers, blank label paper, colored boxes, honeycomb paper, crinkled paper filler to make each shipment feel like a gift.

A licensed formulator was off the table. The quotes were too expensive. So she bought the raw ingredients in small batches and tried to make the product herself.

"The boxes just kept getting moved around. Eventually [they] got put in the closet because the whole process became overwhelming doing it on my own."

That's where Made With Love lived for years. In a closet. In an apartment. Next to a dream that a working mom couldn't find the time, or the budget, to finish.

"There might actually be a shot"

The turning point came on Alycia's first call with our founder, Vijay.

"That call left me feeling like there might actually be a shot of me getting this product I wanted to make for years finally made."

When she sat down with Genie for the first time, she walked through what she wanted the product to do, what she did not want in the formula, and what her brand stood for. The formula came back with real chemistry behind it. INCI names. Functional percentages. Sourcing flags on specific ingredients.

"I was SO excited. I pretty much knew what I wanted, but the options that were available were really cool. I was able to explain what I wanted to achieve with the product, say exactly what I didn't want as part of the formula, and it helped me to improve what I originally wanted. It even educated me on a few things I was not already aware of, detailed down to potential sourcing issues that may cause an issue for me based on my goal."

And then the line we keep coming back to:

"Once I liked the formula I thought to myself 'this is actually going to happen!' … I literally jumped up and down, lol."

What one week looked like

"Signing up was easy. Using the AI to create the formula was easy, fun, informative and educational. It all happened so fast I couldn't believe it took me so long to get this far on my own."

Within one week of starting with Genie, Alycia had a finalized formula. A prototype was in the works. The momentum gave her the push she needed to finally get the website live for presales and to get her paperwork in order.

"It was like a breath of fresh air."

Where Made With Love is now

Made With Love is currently running presales on its website, which, as Alycia is quick to note, is harder than expected:

"WAY harder than I expected to sell your first presale in an age of Amazon."

Ingredient sourcing is being finalized. Production is queued up. The finished bottles will go to a third-party fulfillment warehouse linked directly to the site. It's a logistics cost Alycia didn't anticipate when she started, but one her husband helped her frame: "You need to prioritize which is more important just so you can get going. You can always change things later." (Her apartment is not, it turns out, the right place to store 500 bottles.)

And there's one thing Alycia didn't see coming: retail.

"Not only are bottles available to purchase on my website, we have 2 physical stores nearby that want to have it in store. That was actually something that didn't occur to me to begin with."

The first of those — Addiction Nouvelle Lingerie in Beverly Hills — is on track to carry the line. A second is close to signing.

Why this matters

Alycia's story is the one we hope to tell many more times.

She isn't a chemist. She isn't a packaging designer. She isn't a shipping logistics expert. She's a working mom with a clear vision for a product and a brand, and a hard ceiling on what the traditional formulation industry could do for her at her budget.

Genie didn't replace her creativity, her taste, or her instincts. It replaced the part of the process that was keeping her stuck: the formula, the chemistry, the ingredient logic. That freed her to spend her energy on the parts only she could do.

Years in a closet. One week to a formula. Beverly Hills next.

That's the arc.

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