On March 20, 2024, Katie Sturino, the body acceptance advocate and founder of Megababe, took to Instagram to call out Sima Sistani, then CEO of WW, formerly WeightWatchers, for coming close to, but stopping short of, apologizing for the company’s history of attributing weight loss to willpower and elevating certain body types over others during an Oprah Winfrey special on weight loss and GLP-1s.

On an airplane at the time, Sistani had an unusually uninterrupted stretch to consider how she should respond. She asked herself, “Do I care more about the red tape, or do I care more about how I believe is the right way to show up for these people, for this community? And what do I feel proud of and what lets me look at myself in the mirror every morning?”

Once Sistani landed, she didn’t consult anyone. Instead, she locked herself in a conference room and went live on Instagram, sharing her unvarnished feelings and offering an apology with a candor that the many bureaucratic layers at WW had advised her against. The response immediately prompted calls from the company’s board and legal team, but Sistani says it ultimately proved to be positive for the brand.

Now, Sistani has left corporate America to launch a very different kind of business, the self-funded niche perfume company Liberation of Flowers, but she carries the lessons about open communication from her experience at WW with her as she builds it. She’s been documenting the process on TikTok, where she isn’t afraid to be silly, serious, surprising or even humbled. She has an ongoing series on the unglamorous side of being a founder that covers everything from packing and shipping products to writing notes to retailers.

“It’s made me more comfortable letting people into the emotional and creative process of making something. I think that’s the biggest thing that I brought with me,” she says, adding, “We are in a stage right now where we glamorize founders a lot, and you see a lot of content that shows the outcome, the happy outcomes, and so that’s why very intentionally I started putting out content that’s the non-glamorous side of being a founder.”

Liberation of Flowers represents a dramatic departure for Sistani, not just because she’s transitioning from being a high-powered executive to a bootstrapping founder, but also because she’s entering an entirely new category. Before WW, she co-founded Houseparty, the venture-backed social video app that grew to 100 million users, according to Sistani, raised more than $70 million in funding and was acquired by Fortnite creator Epic Games in 2019.

At Liberation of Flowers, Sistani is starting with a numbered first edition of 2,000 bottles each of three eau de parfums priced at $210 for 50 milliliters: Plot Twist, a citrus-forward fragrance with ginger, myrrh and sandalwood; Divine Intervention, a floral gourmand with rose, cardamom, warm milk and caramel; and Peace Offering, a woody floral with saffron, pomegranate, walnut and sandalwood. Each bottle comes with a card identifying its number in the limited run. The fragrances are rooted in the history of Persian perfumery in a nod to Sistani’s Persian heritage.

Unlike at a technology company, where products can be quickly updated after launch, Sistani can’t easily change a fragrance once it’s in customers’ hands. Developing physical products requires a deliberate approach, one she’s enjoying after years in technology.

“The whole move fast and break things, we’re not doing that obviously with perfume. It’s very intentional. It’s very slow,” says Sistani. “I wanted that shift in my life. In a world where everything is moving super fast, I wanted to build something for the artistry, the craft and that means taking your time.”

“Everybody’s talking about agentic commerce. Community commerce to me is the future.”

Because beauty products take longer to produce and are harder to change after launch, Sistani sees engaging with consumers via social media as an important way to test ideas and learn. She has received input through her TikTok account, and her involvement in #PerfumeTok helped her discover Liberation of Flowers’ perfumer, DreamAir founder Christophe Laudamiel, and fragrance retailers such as Stele, which stocks the brand.

“I actually think bigger brands should be doing this more,” she says. “Everybody’s talking about agentic commerce. Community commerce to me is the future. This is how consumers are going to expect to connect with a brand.”

On TikTok, Sistani has 47,400 followers and 640,300 likes on her personal account, but she doesn’t view those metrics as measures of success. “Trying to chase follows or likes or any of those things is a fool’s errand,” says Sistani, who’s teaching a women’s leadership class at Duke University. “For me, it’s way more about is there a community I can build here and not just even around my brand, whether it’s about leadership and whether it’s me getting to be a part of the overall fragrance community.”

Perhaps counterintuitively, given the centrality of TikTok to cultivating its community, Liberation of Flowers isn’t currently selling on TikTok Shop or relying on an affiliate model. Instead, Sistani is meeting people in person to spread the word through trunk shows and fragrance events.

She’s staying away from TikTok Shop at the outset because she’s concluded Liberation of Flowers’ $210 fragrances are too expensive for shoppers to purchase without smelling them first, but a $50 discovery set and forthcoming lower-priced burning papers could be fits for the platform. Today, Liberation of Flowers is concentrating on direct-to-consumer sales and smaller retailers such as Stéle, Scent Bar, The Conservatory and Vermilion.

“A lot of these small businesses, they help launch brands, but then those brands will move on to a Sephora, will move on to an Ulta, will end up leaving them behind. Those bigger places end up getting the exclusives,” says Sistani, recalling advice from a local boutique owner. “People will come in, try on in her boutique, but buy at Sephora because they want the points. And so that was the other thing I decided would be important to me was that I was not going to be a brand that scaled at all costs, that left those people behind. I would prioritize the select boutiques and apothecaries in my distribution strategy.”

That commitment to growing on her own terms extends to Sistani’s financial expectations for Liberation of Flowers. After leading a company generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, she’s approaching the brand with a simpler goal. “It’s funny, the first time I sat down to look at this, I was like, ‘OK, so my strategy is to not lose money,’” she says. “Obviously, I want to build a successful business that will allow me to continue to invest in new collections.”

If commenters have negative takes on her, her decisions or her brand, Sistani doesn’t ignore them. She cops to reading every comment, even when the criticism stings. She admits she initially questioned how people would perceive her pivot from corporate executive to fragrance brand founder, but her stint at WW helped her weather the discomfort of putting herself out there.

“There is always self-doubt in that and thinking, do I seem unserious? What are people going to think about?” says Sistani. “And the best advice though is it’s none of my business what other people’s opinions are of me.”