Curie:a side-hustledeodorant thatgot 2 hours topitch the sharks,then sold out
Sarah Moret was a CPA who could not find an aluminum-free deodorant that actually worked, so she made her own with twelve thousand dollars of savings and named it after Marie Curie. She got two hours' notice to prep her Shark Tank pitch, walked out with a deal, and sold out within a day. Curie is now in over a thousand Target stores.
Sarah Moret did not set out to start a beauty brand. She was a CPA who had spent years in public accounting and venture capital, the kind of person who reads a balance sheet for fun, and she just wanted a deodorant that worked without aluminum. Every clean one she tried failed by lunchtime.
So she did the thing finance people are not supposed to do with their savings: she spent twelve thousand dollars of her own money learning to make one herself. She named it Curie, after Marie Curie, and started selling it on the side.
It was a side project, not a plan. It just happened to be a side project run by someone who knew exactly what a business needs to survive.
That turned out to be the difference. A lot of people make a product they like. Far fewer make one and also know, instinctively, how to price it, how to fund it, and how not to run out of cash before it works. Moret had spent her whole career on the second part.
Curie grew the disciplined way, the way someone who used to sit on the investor side of the table would grow it. No outside money at first, no burning cash to fake momentum, just a product that had to earn its own next batch. The numbers went up the honest way.
Before she ever stood in front of a camera, Curie was already in more than three hundred stores, including Nordstrom, Anthropologie and SoulCycle. The brand was working. It just needed a bigger stage, and the biggest one in retail was about to call.
When Shark Tank came, Moret got about two hours' notice to prepare the pitch of her life. She walked out of it with a deal: three hundred thousand dollars for fourteen percent, from Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran. Cuban later dropped out, Corcoran stayed in, and the clean-beauty brand had a shark in its corner.
The episode aired in 2022, and within a day Curie had thousands of orders and nothing left to ship, with a five-thousand-person waitlist behind it. The finance brain that built it quietly came in handy again here, because selling out on national television only helps if you can fund and fulfil what comes next. Curie could.
From a few hundred boutique doors to the big-box aisle.
A deodorant made on the side by a CPA now sits in the same aisle as the companies she used to audit.
In early 2025 Curie landed in more than a thousand Target stores, part of a footprint that has grown past forty-five hundred doors, while still selling direct on Shopify and shipping more than a million deodorants a year. It expanded into body wash bars and new scents without losing the thing it started as: a clean product that actually works, made by someone who understood the business as well as the formula.
The deodorant that started it
Curie's aluminum-free Clean Deodorant, fourteen dollars, the product Sarah Moret first made in search of one that simply worked. It is the stick that sold out on national television, built a five-thousand-person waitlist, and carried a side hustle into more than four thousand stores.
Curie, in five moments
The arc
- 2018Sarah Moret, a CPA frustrated by aluminum-free deodorants that did not work, makes her own with $12,000 of savings and names it after Marie Curie.
- 2019-2020Curie does $125K in year one and $700K the next, landing in 300+ stores including Nordstrom and Anthropologie, all before any television.
- 2022With about two hours to prepare, she wins a $300K Shark Tank deal from Mark Cuban and Barbara Corcoran, then sells out within a day with a 5,000-person waitlist.
- 2024Curie sells more than a million deodorants and expands into body wash bars and new scents.
- 2025-2026The deodorant lands in over a thousand Target stores, part of 4,500+ doors nationwide, still selling direct on Shopify.
The throughline is the part nobody puts on the label: the founder who could make the product and read the spreadsheet. Plenty of people invent something people like. Curie worked because the person who made it had spent a career learning how to keep a company alive long enough for people to find it. The brand that started as a side hustle now answers to customers in thousands of stores, which is exactly the kind of problem a CPA likes to have.
Stories of brands built to last on Shopify
We profile the operators behind the brands we admire, how they started, what they got right, and what made them durable. Reported like a feature, not a pitch.
Read more stories