A sixth-grade maths teacher told Raneen Awad she would never become anything useful.
Seven years later that same teacher sent her a message asking to sell her products.
Raneen, now 23, runs RENO, a skincare company she started from her childhood bedroom in Israel and which she says now shifts around 3,000 products a month.
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The teacher’s request arrived after the business took off and after Raneen’s Instagram following passed six figures.
“It was a very full-circle moment for me,” she said.
“It reminded me that sometimes people who doubt you at the beginning have no idea what you are capable of becoming.”
The classroom that got it wrong
School bored her. The ambition did not.
“Even when I was in fifth grade, my teacher asked us what we wanted to become when we grew up,” Raneen said.
“Other students were saying doctors, teachers and lawyers. I said, ‘I’m going to be a model, and I’m going to be famous.’ Everyone laughed at me.”
Home was tight. Her father Zidan, 63, worked construction on a low wage.
Her mother Saira, 60, stayed home with five children, of whom Raneen was the youngest. New clothes went to the kids.
“My mother would often go without buying clothes for herself so that she could buy clothes and other things for us,” Raneen said.
“When I was a child, I didn’t fully understand what she was sacrificing for us.”
She started working early. At 14 she signed up to a professional make-up course alongside students in their late twenties and thirties.
At 16 a make-up artist spotted her while she was getting ready for her brother’s wedding, and she began modelling for a beauty salon.
Cheek piercings paid for the lab work
The money that built the company came from somewhere stranger.
At 18, Raneen developed a reputation for cheek piercings, the ones that give the appearance of dimples.
Young women queued outside her parents’ house at 500 shekels, around £110, each.
“I was welcoming girls into my parents’ home and working from a small room there,” she said.
“Eventually, I became so busy that there were days when five to fifteen girls would come to me.”
Then she started teaching the technique, training somewhere between 80 and 100 women.
Around 100,000 shekels, roughly £22,000, went into approvals, manufacturing and setup for RENO, which she says she launched at about 17.
Sold out in four days
The first product was a lip enhancer. Stock of 500 units sold out in four days, as reported by Creatorzine, and she took £3,700 in sales on her first day of deliveries alone.
There was no warehouse. There was no team.
“I started everything from my bedroom,” she said.
“I stored the products there, took the orders myself and packed everything from home.
At the beginning, I didn’t have a delivery company or a team. I personally delivered the orders, and my sister would often drive me around.”
Customers, already following her online, were partly buying the chance to meet her at the door.
Her mother helped pack. Her older sister drove.
Within the first month she bought a pink Mercedes at around 280,000 shekels, about £62,000.
A year later, a red Corvette at roughly £124,000. The range widened into a brightening cream, serums, eye cream and facial soap.
“I can walk into a restaurant and order whatever I want without constantly thinking about the price,” she said.
“If I want something like a Rolex, I can buy it without having to worry about whether I can afford it.
But for me, the biggest difference isn’t really the cars, watches or material things.”
She has also documented a nose job and a procedure to change her eye colour from black to blue, which she says followed years of dry, irritated eyes from contact lenses.
“I honestly don’t know how I found the courage to do it, but I did.” She says she regrets none of it.
Why It Matters
Creatorzine’s view: Raneen’s audience was the distribution network before the product existed, which is the whole model in miniature.
She did not build a brand and then find customers.
She had 264,000 people watching, then gave them something to buy, and the first drop sold out in four days because they already knew her face.
The piercing income functioning as seed capital is the detail worth sitting with.
Creator businesses in markets without easy access to investors tend to get funded this way, by one cash-in-hand skill paying for the next.
Beauty is the most crowded category in creator commerce and the one where founder-led brands keep outperforming traditional launches, particularly in regional markets where incumbents have thin local presence.
RENO has moved past the single hero product that made it.
Whether the brand can survive a day when Raneen is not the one answering the DMs is the next question.
“If there is one thing I would tell my 16-year-old self, it would be this: this is only the beginning.”
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