Dr Saba Qutub, a doctor-mum and an Aligarh Muslim University-trained general practitioner based in Geelong, Victoria, has built an award-winning Australian skincare brand — DRSQ Skincare — after arriving in Australia in 2007 with a medical degree, no business background, and no family support network.
It is 2013.
I am sitting in the back room of a small clinic in Geelong, Australia.
My three-month-old daughter is asleep in the room next door.
My next patient arrives in four minutes.
My family is 10,000 kilometres away in India.
My husband is at work.
There is no one else.
This is what building my first business looked like.
I grew up in Aligarh, a small city in Uttar Pradesh, India,
I studied medicine at Aligarh Muslim University and graduated with my MBBS in 2005.
My family had no business background and no blueprint for what I was about to attempt.
In 2007, my husband and I moved to Australia.
I rebuilt my career, completed my Fellowship with the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in 2012, and established myself as a GP in Geelong.
But something kept bothering me.
Patients were confused — spending hundreds of dollars on skincare products that were not helping them, following complicated routines built on marketing trends rather than science.
I kept asking myself a simple question: why was skincare becoming more complicated when it should be becoming simpler?
Before I could answer it, I experienced something most people do not see behind successful businesses.
Failure.
My first business failed. I called it ANYWORK. It went nowhere.
My second business — a skin clinic I opened in 2013 — also closed.
When that clinic closed, I did not just lose money. I lost confidence.
But every patient I had seen, every woman overwhelmed by a 12-step routine that was damaging her skin, was quietly depositing something into me — data, insight, purpose.
In 2017, I opened Armstrong Health, the first full-service medical centre in the Armstrong Creek community of Geelong.
That same year, I began formulating what would become DRSQ Skincare.
The name is simple: Dr S Qutub — my title, my initials, my promise on every bottle.
I did not have investors or a business degree.
I had a decade of clinical experience and the stubbornness that only comes from having failed twice already.
DRSQ launched in 2019 and has since won the Beauty Shortlist Award across multiple categories, the Multicultural Business Excellence Award, and the Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Revenue has grown 75% year-on-year, with 30% of customers returning again and again.
The brand is now preparing for global expansion into the Middle East, the United Kingdom, India, and the United States.
There is a certain kind of AMU alumna who leaves Aligarh with a degree and a dream, and finds herself years later building something from nothing in a country that did not know her name.
She does not make headlines when she starts.
She makes them when she refuses to stop.
Comments