Wellness Brand Founder Karrel Tobiano Sinfuego on Championing a Purpose-Driven Entrepreneurship

A brand that sells is good, but a brand that people believe in is better. That’s the benchmark Karrel Tobiano Sinfuego sets for Swiss Proli, and the very same bar she holds herself to.

At 26, Karrel already knows that a founder’s life does not come with an ironclad master plan, let alone a safety net. Her initial foray into entrepreneurship was, by her own account, a trial by fire. A marketing major from New York University who spent part of her life between Shanghai and New York, Karrel somehow found herself taking her first professional steps in investment banking before eventually finding her way into marketing, e-commerce, and now, the wellness space.

Today, she sits among the driving forces behind Swiss Proli, the rising homegrown wellness brand established by her mother, chemist-entrepreneur Pinky Pe Tobiano and actress-CEO Julia Montes. Yet framing Karrel merely through the lens of her famous lineage does a disservice to the vision and leadership she brings to the table. Because while she inherited proximity to entrepreneurship, she still had to earn her place within it.

In this METRO exclusive, we sat down with Karrel to talk about the year that changed everything: stepping into her mother’s sphere, soaking in the hard-won lessons about wellness, and discovering what “making it” truly means. What emerges is a founder redefining success on her own terms, a measure calculated more in meaningful impact on her team and the wider community.

2024 was the year everything changed for Karrel. Shortly after coming home from New York, tragedy struck with the loss of her father—followed only a few months later by the passing of her grandmother. Out of that shadow of grief came an awakening that would refashion not only her personal habits but every corner of her life: the imperative to invest in herself first.

“It was a really tough year. That was the time na [I realized] I really have to take care of my health. If I don’t take care of myself, no one will take care of me. And I will literally die,” recalled Karrel.

By January 2025, she had started her own wellness overhaul, with exercise becoming no longer an afterthought. The numbers are part of her story, and she shared them without flinching: Karrel used to weigh around 85 kilos and now sits at around 60. “That took a lot of effort and discipline and also self-love, honestly. You just have to do it for yourself,” she remarked.

Karrel didn’t sugarcoat the lower points of that journey, either, stating, “I feel like the most unaccomplished and the most sad I’ve ever been was when I was really big. Because I was stress-eating, I was binge-eating, and then I didn’t really realize that I was doing this to myself. It’s not healthy.”

The body, she pressed, is “the vessel”—and if the vessel isn’t well, every other success loses its luster. It brings to mind a piece of advice passed down by one of her mother’s successful friends, a line that stuck with her ever since: “What’s the point of money, or your Birkin bag, if you can’t hold it?”

For Karrel, that conviction is personal before it’s professional. It was formed at home, in a family that taught her to take health seriously long before Swiss Proli ever sold its first gummy. Like most good family stories, it began with a mother who couldn’t stop making things.

Pinky Tobiano is a chemist by training, a tinkerer by nature, and a business force by reputation. She loves creating, whether it’s a formula, a tablescape, or an event, and Swiss Proli grew out of that spirit, with Pinky as the formulation brain and actress Julia Montes joining as a partner when her own interest in health aligned with the venture.

At the outset, Karrel had no hand in the project. Fresh out of university, she was deep in the trenches of the family’s manufacturing arm, learning the ropes of supply chain, chemicals, and trading. Swiss Proli was born without her.

Then came April 2025, with the launch of the first product just months away. There was no storefront and no live selling, and the social media accounts were not yet active. Pinky, brilliant in the lab but not exactly fluent in TikTok trends, made a call.

“I was in another country for another business trip and tinawagan niya ako. She’s like, ‘You need to help me kasi this event is happening in three weeks, and I have to launch the business.’ S’yempre, hindi niya alam ‘yung mga gawain ng Gen Z, online marketing or whatever. She asked for help from me and my Ate. I was like, ‘Okay. Maybe that’s something I can help contribute.’ So, I started helping out,” Karrel revealed.

What followed was a month of sink-or-swim reality. Karrel built the SOPs, wrote the product information, and designed the graphics, mostly by herself, all before the June launch of Lean Quick, the brand’s first gummy. “That was like my journey as a founder. Of starting the brand. It was very trial by fire. It wasn’t the easiest. But I do enjoy it,” she beamed.

Being the daughter of Pinky Tobiano comes with a rare vantage point: you learn front row the art and discipline of what it truly takes to build, scale, and innovate. Karrel openly admires her mother, expressing, “It’s really not easy being a founder. Super hanga talaga ako sa mom ko. I’m super lucky na I get to be living with my idol.”

Still, none of this has come easy. She also knows that admiration does not always equal consensus. The two possess strong personalities and their visions sometimes inevitably clash. However, Karrel no longer misinterprets disagreement as a challenge to her leadership, but rather as an invitation to bridge veteran experience with a modern perspective.

Karrel is, in her words, “the youngest in the room.” At 26, she sits alongside her business-mogul mother, as well as Julia Montes and other owners, most in their 30s and up. That can be an advantage when the conversation turns toward Gen Z, digital culture, or the way younger consumers discover brands. But it can also mean having to prove that youth does not equal inexperience.

“Alam naman natin na sometimes, working with Gen Z can be quite challenging. Although we have a lot of good ideas, we tend to be more emotional. That’s something that I learned about myself as well,” she admitted.

Not dimming her voice or diluting her conviction, she focused on finding the exact wavelength that allows her message to land with clarity and authority. “But ‘yun nga, since we have so many good ideas that we have to share, we just have to find the right way of communicating it that other people will understand. I think what I really learned was how I blend the ideas together na parang I have to earn the respect din of other business people, of other owners. It’s like ‘Look, I may be young but I’m qualified,’ but I also have to show respect,” Karrel explained.

That means recognizing what it took for her mother to reach her position and that older colleagues often hold context she doesn’t have yet: “Walang biro, that’s very hard. I have to respect my Mom when she says, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.’ I respect that. But I also put my own twist onto it. Maybe let’s not do this, but let’s adjust it and then let’s meet in the middle.”

“I have to earn my seat at the table. It’s very hard being the youngest in the room. And I have to present myself well. But I also have to understand that sometimes, these older people who’ve been in the industry longer, they come with a multitude of experience. I really have to accept that maybe they’re seeing this dahil may dahilan talaga. And I really have to still prove myself in some areas. I’m very blessed kasi I’m a small fish in a big pot, not a big fish in a small pot,” she added.

The most useful advice Karrel’s taken from her mother is two-part. First is: “Don’t act on your emotions. I really learned from her that kapag galit ka or you’re going through something hard, don’t make a decision. Sleep over it. And then brood over the decision. It’s not about being only happy, sad, or angry. You have to make a decision after very, very careful thought and with neutral emotions.”

Second is “Listen first and talk later.” Karrel is self-described as a yapper, and admits that the last one takes work. “Normally, as I know naman, I’m not the smartest one in the room. Even for me, after having experience in e-commerce and business founding after a year, sometimes I have to remind myself constantly na ‘You’re younger, you may have experience but always listen to others first.’ They might know a little bit more about life than you since they are older. So you tend to learn more by listening than talking,” as she put it.

For someone who describes herself as a “yapper,” the advice is perhaps especially useful. Karrel is naturally expressive, enthusiastic, and quick to engage. But entrepreneurship has taught her that not every feeling deserves an immediate reaction.

Embracing the jack-of-all-trades label, Karrel turns her cross-industry curiosity into a competitive edge, connecting dots and building bridges between seemingly separate worlds. “I like to just try a lot of different things. And that’s what led me into being in finance, but also being in marketing. It’s kind of like the best of both worlds na,” she said, emphasizing how she does hobbymaxxing.

Karrel usually starts her day at around 6:30 in the morning. She prepares herself, puts on clothes she has already chosen the night before, heads to the gym at 8 a.m., and only after that does she walk into the office and block out her entire day: events, meetings, and the other business she runs alongside Swiss Proli.

She also makes room for the things that have nothing to do with a balance sheet. Running, reading, journaling, and lately, learning how to DJ. Her understanding of well-being was also shaped by a class she took at NYU called The Science of Happiness, where she encountered psychologist Martin Seligman‘s PERMA framework.

Rather than treating happiness as the ultimate goal, the framework considers well-being in terms of positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. For Karrel, the idea landed because it allowed wellness to become bigger than physical health.

“Basically, the way I like to summarize it is you have to put work in every one of these buckets or letters, or else you will give yourself away. For example, you have to have meaningful relationships with people. You have to do work that means something to you. You have to be engaged, and you have to have positive emotions. But also, not discounting, you also have to be healthy in your body—mentally and physically. If you don’t take care of both, then of course, it contributes to each other,” she shared.

Her understanding of wellness also extends to how she manages people. Coming from a manufacturing background, Karrel understands the traditional demands of business with a Monday-to-Saturday rhythm. Manufacturing does not always lend itself easily to flexibility; machinery, production schedules, and operating costs create practical limitations.

But Karrel also believes that creative people need room to breathe. She knew that creatives can’t be creative on an assembly-line clock. One of the changes she advocated for was allowing the team to work from home on Saturdays unless there was an event. She also introduced quarterly appreciation activities for the team, the latest being a matcha-making class, with Pilates possibly next.

“I just want to treat them, and I also want to expose them to experiences that creatively make them think or simply just show my appreciation for them. Kasi s’yempre being a creative, you’re not only thinking naman during work, you’re thinking din kahit naliligo ka sa gabi,” she said.

Karrel talked about a moment that made her proud: she and her sister were playing tennis when a stranger mentioned using Swiss Proli, without knowing who they were. Then there are the run club regulars who walk up to her with their own stories on their personal encounter with the product. “Every time I hear a story, it makes me so proud of the brand,” Karrel smiled.

On her ultimate sign of having made it, she went on: “I think the most explicit one is export. I really want to be a homegrown Filipino brand that’s exported abroad. That’s the goal for the next 1 to 3 years, hopefully.”

“Once I see a Filipino homegrown brand abroad, I don’t know, but every time I see it, na–pa-proud ako. Instead of us patronizing a lot of foreign brands, it’s about time for a Filipino brand to go global. Love local!” she exclaimed.

When asked what she’d tell other young founders, her advice is a little unexpected from someone who calls herself a thinker: fail faster.

“If you think so much, you end up not doing,” Karrel pressed. The founders who move quickly, as she pointed out, simply learn what doesn’t work sooner. Confessing how she holds herself to a very high standard and takes mistakes personally, her daily reminder to herself is this: “You just found another way that it didn’t work, so you just have to push on again and again, then you pivot.”

There’s one more rule she follows, and it ties everything together. If she’s selling supplements, she has to be the living example. “Before I even hire KOLs or affiliates or my staff, I should be the prime living example that I believe in my product. Every product I have, I use it. It’s easy to make a brand, but you have to lead by example,” Karrel ended.

In a market flooded with single-ingredient supplements, Swiss Proli currently operates with a deliberately selective product portfolio. Karrel explained that products are tested extensively before they reach the public, with her often serving as one of the testers.

The brand’s calling card is what it calls multi-molecule formulation. Where many competitors sell a gummy built around one hero ingredient (sya, apple cider vinegar), Swiss Proli packs several actives into each piece. There are five in Lean Quick and eleven in the Night Gummies. The thinking is simple: why separate things that work better together?

The next launch leans hardest on that idea. Cell White—which went live online last October 10 with an offline launch on October 23—combines apple stem cell extract, glutathione, marine collagen, vitamin C, and hyaluronic acid in one gummy. But the bigger ambition extends beyond the products themselves. Karrel wants Swiss Proli to evolve from a wellness brand into a movement and a thriving community.

Photos by Andrei Suleik