The poised and well-dressed Leonica Kei might not look it now, but the entrepreneur was quite the rebel growing up. She barely knew English when she moved to Singapore at the age of 5, but never let that stop her from doing her best in school and rolling the dice and heading to London to study hairdressing without her parents’ knowledge.
In a world of heady valuations and meteoric rises (and even more epic drops back to Earth), Kei’s eponymous trichology business—Leonica K—is a throwback to an era when doing business was about keeping costs low, recouping your initial investment and bootstrapping your way to profitability.
It has been 30 years since Kei started Leonica K, but she still remains passionate about trichology and solving people’s hair and scalp problems.
The entrepreneur tells us about her struggles when she was young, how she pushed to keep the business growing while raising children as a single mother, and why she’s not yet ready to retire, as she prepares to unleash her newest venture, hair and body products.
Leonica K shampoo. 
Leonica K body wash 
Leonica K hair mask. 
Leonica K hand spray. 
Leonica K hand wash.
These are the lessons she has learnt.
Episode List
- Episode 1: Ankiti Bose on the battles she faced while at the helm of Zilingo.
- Episode 2: Tjin Lee addresses that controversial social media post and why she will continue speaking out.
- Episode 3: Tan Shin Hui gets honest about the difficulties being a female leader in a hospitality business.
- Episode 4: Karl Mak shares how he turned a joke Facebook page into a multi-million-dollar media empire.
- Episode 5: Joel Leong looks back at ShopBack’s growth from a scrappy start-up to its current unicorn status after its latest funding round.
- Episode 6: Anna Lim chronicles the Soup Spoon journey of the past 20 years and her dreams of building the “Starbucks of soup”.
- Episode 7: Magnus Grimeland shares why we need more children and his big bets for the future, as a venture capitalist.
The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.
