Shauna Blanch’s approach to business was formed long before she became an entrepreneur. She grew up watching her parents build and operate a family business together—her father practicing law and her mother managing the front office. Their example taught her that integrity is not a statement a company makes. It is the accumulation of the choices people make when doing the right thing is less convenient, less profitable, or more difficult.
From them, Shauna learned the principles that continue to guide her life and leadership: do the hard work, stand by your people, take responsibility for your choices, and fight for what matters.
Her commitment to advocacy also began early. At eleven years old, Shauna stopped eating meat after learning more about animal welfare and the treatment of animals within commercial systems. That decision became part of a lifelong conviction that personal values should be reflected in practical choices—a belief she would later carry directly into Color Up’s formulation standards, manufacturing practices, and cruelty-free mission.
After earning a Bachelor of Science from the University of Rhode Island, Shauna spent more than a decade in national sales, including work within the pharmaceutical industry focused on dermatology and internal medicine. During the height of the opioid crisis, she became increasingly troubled by a healthcare system she believed too often allowed commercial incentives to outweigh meaningful patient care. After witnessing the devastating impact of addiction in the lives of people she knew, she ultimately left the industry with a firm conviction that health and healing deserved a more compassionate approach.
In 2013, Shauna moved to Colorado and began studying cannabis, plant-based wellness, massage therapy, and hands-on healing. That work became deeply personal in 2014 when her bulldog, Kali, was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. Shauna and her future business partners began making cannabinoid preparations from hemp and cannabis plants they grew themselves, hoping to ease Kali’s symptoms and preserve her quality of life. The experience gave them another year with her and became the catalyst for what would soon become Color Up.
Shauna co-founded Color Up Therapeutics in Denver in 2015. She also personally created the company’s enduring triangle-leaf symbol, drawing inspiration from triangle breathing, the breath of life, and seven interior spaces representing the chakra system. What began as part of her own work with anxiety and self-regulation became the visual identity of a company devoted to balance, education, and intentional care.
Color Up was built inside treatment rooms, classrooms, and a working professional wellness community. From its earliest years, Shauna and her team developed products alongside massage therapists, estheticians, instructors, students, spa professionals, and the clients they served. One of Color Up’s first major collaborations was with the Denver Integrative Massage School and School of Botanical and Medical Aesthetics, where the relationship extended far beyond wholesale product sales. The school provided insight into professional trends, treatment-room needs, and client concerns; Shauna and her team created and refined the formulations; instructors helped evaluate the ingredients; and students and professionals tested the products through hands-on use before the line was finalized.
That collaboration produced Color Up’s first seven-step professional facial system and embedded cannabinoid education directly into the school’s massage and esthetics curriculum. Shauna taught students the science, safety, legality, client communication, and practical application of CBD while working with the products on real clients. Rather than developing products in isolation and later marketing them to practitioners, Color Up built its skincare, education, and treatment systems through sustained collaboration with the people who would actually use them.
What began with small-batch formulations grew into a nationally recognized professional skincare company, a licensed laboratory operation, a 12,000-square-foot wellness and education center, and one of the cannabinoid wellness industry’s most substantial practitioner-training platforms. Through Color Up’s Cannabis Master curriculum, school partnerships, continuing education, live trainings, conferences, and professional programs, Shauna and the Color Up education team have trained more than 7,000 estheticians, massage therapists, cosmetologists, spa professionals, and wellness practitioners.
Color Up brought cannabinoid education into Aveda institutes and Paul Mitchell schools, helping introduce future beauty and wellness professionals to the science, safety, application, and professional use of cannabinoids. The company also built relationships with major spa and hospitality organizations seeking to responsibly incorporate cannabinoid products and treatments into their services.
In 2019, Color Up partnered with the Red Door Salon & Spa network to introduce CBD-enhanced professional treatments and retail products across its locations. The partnership required Color Up to meet the operational, regulatory, insurance, manufacturing, stability, and training standards expected of a nationally recognized luxury spa organization. Color Up later supplied products and professional education to Caesars-affiliated spa properties, including Qua Baths & Spa and Harrah’s, as well as local Hyatt Hotels. These relationships involved more than product placement. Shauna and the Color Up team provided staff education and training designed to help spa professionals understand cannabinoid science, product use, treatment integration, and responsible client communication.
One of the company’s most meaningful professional relationships began in 2018, when Shauna met Becky Kuehn, founder of Oncology Spa Solutions. Becky is a leading educator in oncology esthetics and has built some of the most influential training programs for estheticians and cosmetologists learning to provide informed and appropriate services for people affected by cancer.
Following extensive professional use of Color Up products in hospitals and with oncology patients, Oncology Spa Solutions approved selected Color Up formulations for use by appropriately trained professionals. The relationship between Shauna, Becky, Color Up, and Oncology Spa Solutions has continued for years. Today, Color Up continues to support Becky's broader mission to improve the standard of care available to oncology patients within the beauty, spa, and wellness industries.
Shauna’s commitment to animal welfare has remained equally concrete. As a lifelong advocate, she made cruelty-free formulation and manufacturing a non-negotiable part of Color Up’s standards. In 2019, Color Up became approved through PETA’s Beauty Without Bunnies program and has maintained that commitment as part of the company’s broader ethical foundation.
Shauna’s leadership and advocacy also earned her recognition from Westword as Best Cannabis Influencer. The distinction reflected not only her knowledge of cannabinoid wellness, but her willingness to speak publicly, educate professionals, challenge misinformation, and help build legitimacy for an industry that was still routinely dismissed or misunderstood.
Color Up’s growth did not occur under ordinary business conditions. The company operated in an industry facing banking restrictions, payment-processing shutdowns, advertising exclusions, shifting regulations, inconsistent enforcement, and barriers that conventional skincare companies rarely encountered. Shauna and her team repeatedly had to rebuild systems that other businesses could take for granted.
The COVID-19 pandemic intensified those challenges. Spa closures, school shutdowns, treatment-room restrictions, and the sudden loss of major professional accounts disrupted the ecosystem Color Up had spent years building. Even so, Shauna remained focused on supporting practitioners—many of them women operating small businesses—who depended on Color Up for products, education, professional credibility, and community.
In June 2023, following a change in the founding partnership, Shauna purchased the departing owners’ interests and assumed responsibility for carrying the business forward. The transition required the company to operate temporarily under the VXN Wellness and related names, disrupting years of brand recognition, search visibility, customer familiarity, and institutional history.
The years that followed tested nearly every part of the business. They also clarified what Shauna was unwilling to surrender: clean, effective formulations; practitioner relationships; the company’s educational mission; and the community that had been built since 2015.
After restructuring the company and establishing its next generation of leadership, Shauna led its return to the Color Up name. The decision was more than a rebrand. It restored continuity, history, and identity for the customers and professionals who had known and trusted the company for more than a decade.
Today, Shauna serves as co-founder and co-owner of Color Up. She is also a Licensed Massage Therapist, Certified Reiki Master, yoga teacher, and educated Esthetician (though she never took her exam after graduation in 2020 due to her responsibilities to Color Up during that time). Her work sits at the intersection of cannabinoid education, professional skincare, entrepreneurship, animal welfare, mental wellness, practitioner advocacy, and reform of the systems through which Americans understand and access care.
She continues to lead Color Up as both a product company and a professional ecosystem—one built to support the people who perform the work of healing, touch, care, and human connection every day.
For Shauna, Color Up has never been only about skincare or cannabinoids. It is evidence that a company can be commercially ambitious without abandoning its ethics, that education can change an industry, and that survival can become a form of leadership.
More than a decade after its founding, she remains guided by the lesson her parents demonstrated from the beginning: integrity is not what a company says when things are easy. It is what its people choose when the outcome is uncertain and the work still has to be done.
