My degree is in literature, my working days involve corporate data, and this September I opened a beauty clinic. It is a combination that takes a little explaining.
I speak English, Spanish and French, and my earlier experience in entrepreneurship covered automotive, hospitality and real estate. For the past eight years, I have worked in corporate, specialising in HR intelligence systems, data governance and data quality. I was comfortable asking questions about information long before I considered a clinic. Completing the Business Intelligence MBA at Bucharest Business School in 2025 gave those questions a wider reach. I began looking more closely at what made a business worth choosing, and at what I might overlook when an idea appealed to me.
What led me to Celara
The interest in beauty began through conversations with a family friend who operated a body contouring clinic under a franchise in Herăstrău. I wanted to know more about the services, the technology and the people using them. The more I learnt, the more I could imagine building something in this industry. That was an enjoyable stage. Possibilities were opening up, and there was still room to consider what a new business might be. It was also the point at which I needed to pay attention to my own enthusiasm.
Part of the appeal was how directly the work touched people’s everyday lives. A person makes time for a visit, arrives with a particular concern and hopes to feel better about something that matters to them. Thinking about the business from that end helped me see why the small decisions would count. The experience would begin well before a therapist switched on a machine, and influence whether that person wanted to come back.
The idea that became Celara Clinique was to bring body contouring, physiotherapy, beauty services and facial treatments together in an independent business, built from scratch. I was drawn to the possibility of offering complementary services in one place. There had to be a reason for them to share an address. I wanted to understand what someone would gain from finding them together, and what we would have to do well for that to matter. That became the question behind the project: why would somebody choose us?
My previous experience in entrepreneurship was useful, though I was entering a field I still had to learn. I began mapping Bucharest’s operators, their services and the technologies they used, including equipment launched in 2025. I wanted to understand the choices a client already had. A new clinic would enter that world with its own offer and its own assumptions. Looking at what was already there helped me think about where we might fit, and where being new would make very little difference.
It was tempting to picture the finished clinic through its equipment. Learning about a new technology can make the possibilities feel quite close. You begin to see what you might offer. I had to take that interest back to the less glamorous questions. What did I need to know before committing to it? How did it fit the services we were considering? The MBA had made me more deliberate about defining my information needs before collecting, verifying and analysing what I found. The point was to make a decision with a clearer understanding of what it rested on.
My corporate work had already taught me to be careful with information that appeared precise. In this project, a supplier’s description, a competitor’s offer and a client’s expectations each told me something different. Bringing them together required judgement. It was easy to be impressed by a presentation. Understanding what it supported, what needed checking and what remained uncertain took more work. I found myself using familiar habits from data quality in a setting where the questions were much more personal. The choices would help shape a business I was preparing to build.
Porter’s Five Forces helped me look beyond the appeal of the offer itself. Clients had alternatives. Equipment decisions involved suppliers whose role would extend into the business we were creating. Other operators could enter the market or offer a different way of meeting a similar need. I wanted to understand where a competitive advantage might come from, and what could put it under pressure. A service could be attractive and still leave us with a difficult business to run. I needed to consider both possibilities.
Analysis of Competing Hypotheses made me examine my interpretation of what I was seeing. Interest in a technology might reflect a lasting need, persuasive promotion or curiosity about something new. Each explanation would lead to a different reading of the opportunity. I had to give some attention to the explanation I found least convenient, too. Once you start imagining a business as yours, information that supports it can feel especially convincing. This method gave me a way to look for what might challenge my assumptions before we committed too much to them.
I could not research my way out of every uncertainty. Before opening, we could examine the equipment, the training it required and the practical demands of the services. We could ask people what they wanted. Whether they would choose our particular combination, and how it would fit into their lives, would become clearer through experience. That distinction mattered. It gave me a way to decide which questions deserved more work before committing and which we would need to follow after opening. I wanted to recognise a weak assumption early enough to change it. After investing so much thought in the project, staying willing to revise a decision, even one that had initially looked sound, would require the same discipline as making it in the first place.
I also asked my future business partner, Mihai, to survey clients of the existing clinic. We wanted to understand what could be done differently and which complementary services they would like to find there. That question brought the work closer to the people who would eventually decide whether the offer was useful. I could spend a long time thinking about the potential of a service. Someone who had already experienced it would approach the conversation from another direction. I wanted that perspective in the discussion while we were still shaping the business.
The opportunity was becoming clearer, along with what we would be taking on. Bringing several services together meant considering how they affected one another. Equipment choices had implications for training. The range of treatments affected the space we needed. I kept moving between these decisions as the project developed. That was where the strategic approach became practical for me. A choice that looked sensible on its own had to work with the rest of the business. We were beginning to see the commitments behind the idea.
The conversations with suppliers marked a turning point. General concepts became specific proposals, deliverables and expected results. We could assess what was being offered and what we needed to prepare on our side. The project started to feel more concrete. Training the therapists and helping them become familiar with the technologies received particular attention. I wanted the care put into selecting the equipment to carry through to the people using it. A client would experience their work directly, long after our discussions about which technology to choose were over.
The name involved another look at the market. I wanted it to suggest vitality, health and the feeling of being well. Words such as life, care, beauty and skin took us towards a vocabulary I wanted to move away from. Celara emerged from that search. With my background in languages, I found this part of the project especially interesting. A name carries an intention, but people give it meaning through what they experience. We knew what we wanted it to suggest. The work of making that association real would continue after opening.
Finding the premises became a project of its own. We looked for space and privacy, a layout that supported hygiene routines, and somewhere people could feel comfortable throughout a visit. Letting go of an address in an area traditionally regarded as premium was a difficult choice. We chose a location in Tei, with access from Pipera, northern Bucharest and the central parts of Sector 2. The premises offered up to eight parking places. In a crowded city, arriving for an appointment deserved as much thought as the room in which it would take place.
I am continuing my corporate career, alongside my role as co-founder responsible for strategy and development.
On 16 September 2026, we opened Celara with a cocktail party attended by 100 guests. We could finally welcome people into the place we had been planning. The people who visit will have their own reasons for being there, their own expectations and their own sense of whether we have met them. I want to understand those decisions as carefully as I have examined our own. We have made our choices about the business we want to build. The work ahead is to make it worth choosing.
ABOUT
- Patricia Alexe, Business Intelligence MBA graduate (2025); co-founder, Celara Clinique
