Before live selling dominated social media and before e-commerce became part of daily life in the Philippines, a woman from General Santos City quietly built one of the most trusted names in online health and beauty. She doesn’t appear on every livestream, nor does she front her brand with flashy campaigns. Yet in the country’s biggest e-commerce platforms, Kristine Andaya’s name carries weight.
“I had no business background—so every day, I learned about e-commerce from my manager at Lazada,” said Andaya, founder of Kanna Health and Beauty.
Starting from GenSan was not easy. Logistics were limited, and online selling was still in its infancy. But with persistence and support from Lazada, Andaya was able to grow her business.
“I was able to focus on selling, I got to save up, and I established my business,” she said.
Andaya’s path to entrepreneurship was not a straightforward one. A nursing graduate from Ateneo de Davao, she belonged to the pioneering 2005 batch that rode the global nursing boom.
“I became a nurse because it was trending at that time,” she recalled. “Ninety percent of our batch went abroad. I stayed.”
Her entrepreneurial streak, however, was evident early on. Growing up with an OFW mother and separated parents, she felt a strong push to succeed. She married young, at 21, to businessman Robert Andaya, determined to build a stable family life.
“I started with a beauty salon, then a small grocery and a pharmacy,” she said. “But medicines didn’t sell fast enough, and they expired. I also tried ukay-ukay, sold fruits, vegetables, even smoked fish.”
The turning point came in 2014 when she tried selling supplements through Lazada. At the time, the platform was still focused on electronics. Seeing potential in its health and beauty category, Andaya signed up despite the lack of logistics in her area.
“There was no pick-up point, no drop-off point,” she said. “I used Lazada fulfillment. I left my stocks in their warehouse in Laguna. I just handled the back-end from GenSan.”
With a starting capital of P2,800, Andaya built Kanna Beauty into a thriving business. By 2019, she moved operations to Manila, running everything from a cramped 22-square-meter condo in Pasig. Today, she operates out of a 900-square-meter facility in Quezon City with 14 employees.
Her pharmacy degree helps her ensure product quality, particularly for supplements, which remain her core business. “The market is not yet saturated,” she said. “Find the right niche.”
Kanna Beauty now sells on Lazada, Shopee, TikTok, and Zalora. Lazada sends Andaya to China and Singapore to learn sustainability practices in e-commerce. Her network of more than 300,000 affiliate marketers includes individuals who earn hundreds of thousands of pesos weekly promoting her products.
Among her top-sellers is Ohayo, a Japan-made glutathione supplement. “It’s effective because it has a higher milligram of glutathione with good boosters,” she said, noting that they sell up to 10,000 bottles daily.
Despite the scale of her business, Andaya avoids celebrity endorsements. “I’d rather give the income and commission to the ones promoting our products,” she said.
Her goal now is to expand Kanna Beauty further and apply strategies she learned from Alibaba’s headquarters in China, where she represented the Philippines alongside other Southeast Asian markets earlier this year.
