About the Founders
Santo Cabo was founded by Anastasia Grahn and Derrick Grahn, partners in life and in business. What began as a personal pursuit inside their home in Baja grew slowly into a skincare company built from necessity, discipline, and years of hands-on work.
Anastasia formulates every product. She leads production, formulation development, and the technical side of the company. Derrick builds the structure around it: the systems, spaces, and business architecture that allow the work to endure.
Their strengths are different, but aligned. Anastasia is exacting, deeply curious, and relentlessly hands-on. Derrick is a builder by nature, focused on structure, longevity, and execution. Together, they have spent more than two decades creating ventures across hospitality, media, real estate, and consumer products.
Santo Cabo is the most personal of them all. It did not begin with a market opportunity. It began with a real environment, real skin, and the desire to make something better than what was available.
About Anastasia Grahn
Co-Founder of Santo Cabo
Anastasia Grahn arrived in Los Cabos in 2005 with her then boyfriend, now husband and business partner, Derrick Grahn. Baja revealed itself quickly.
Skin behaved differently there.
The combination of sun, salt air, desert wind, and dry heat created a constant strain that most products did not seem built to address. At the time, everyday skincare options in Los Cabos were limited, and many of the formulas she found relied on synthetic ingredients she did not want to use on her own skin day after day.
So she began studying.
With a background in holistic nutrition and a long-standing interest in natural health, Anastasia immersed herself in how skin functions under environmental stress. She read medical literature, studied traditional remedies, and taught herself the chemistry of oils, botanicals, waxes, minerals, and actives. The deeper she went, the clearer it became that many skincare products were made first for manufacturing ease and shelf life, not for skin living under real conditions.
Eventually, she began formulating for herself.
The earliest batches were made for daily use. For her own skin. For Derrick’s. Later, for their family. They were practical and useful, made with care. Friends tried them and asked for their own. Then their friends did the same. Word spread quietly, the way worthwhile things often do.
In 2006, she gave the growing collection of formulas a name inspired by the place that shaped them: Santo Cabo.
During those early years, the work happened in the couple’s finished cellar, a cool room built into the hillside of their home. Half underground, half open to light through a door and windows, it stayed naturally temperate year-round. It became the first true home of Santo Cabo. Batches were made there by hand, with care, repetition, and a growing conviction that the products were worth pursuing seriously.
As demand grew, people began arriving at the house to pick up jars and bottles themselves. What started as a personal practice became a steady stream of customers seeking Face Gold, Age Care, Deodorant Mineral, and the formulas they had come to rely on.
The company expanded gradually, then decisively.
A first store opened in San José del Cabo. Production moved into a larger warehouse with a laboratory and a dedicated kitchen. A second location followed at Flora Farms, then another in Cabo San Lucas. In 2012, Santo Cabo launched online so customers who had discovered the line in Baja could continue ordering from anywhere.
Today, Anastasia still formulates every Santo Cabo product herself. Each formula begins the same way it always has: with a real problem to solve.
Skin dried out by desert wind.
Skin overexposed to sun.
Skin irritated by conventional products.
Skin asking for less, but better.
The goal has never been novelty. It has never been trend. Santo Cabo does not formulate to fashion, and it does not add ingredients for marketing theater. Every ingredient must earn its place. Every formula must be useful first.
That standard remains unchanged.
About Derrick Grahn
Co-Founder of Santo Cabo
Derrick Grahn is a builder of companies, spaces, and ideas.
His work has spanned hospitality, media, nightlife, real estate, restaurants, and consumer brands, but the throughline has always been the same: create something from nothing, shape it carefully, and build it to last.
He studied sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a full scholarship, and that discipline still informs the way he works. Structure matters. Form matters. So does restraint. The act of building, refining, and giving shape to raw material became a pattern that extended well beyond art.
In the 1990s, Derrick was among the early pioneers producing rave events across the United States. He later worked across nightlife, restaurants, retail, music, and film, including the award-winning mockumentary Street Thief. By the early 2000s, his career had already taken on the shape it still holds today: entrepreneurial, creative, and unafraid of building unconventional things from the ground up.
In 2005, he left Chicago for Los Cabos with plans to open a restaurant. Just before that move, he met Anastasia Snider, the woman who would become his wife and lifelong business partner. Their relationship began at the edge of a major transition and quickly became part of the life they would build together in Baja.
Over the years, the two co-founded multiple ventures, including Cabo Social Magazine, a luxury coffee-table publication that captured Los Cabos during a period of rapid change and growth. Their work in the region expanded into hospitality and destination businesses, with Derrick contributing to the design, operation, and creative direction of numerous ventures in Baja over the past two decades.
Within Santo Cabo, Derrick’s role has always been to support, elevate, and build around what Anastasia created from the ground up. While she leads formulation and product development, he focuses on infrastructure, executive leadership, physical spaces, and the broader business framework that enables the brand to grow without losing its identity.
He often puts it simply: his job is to help protect and elevate the work.
That instinct carries across everything he builds. A company, to Derrick, is not an idea alone. It is a structure. An environment. A living system that must be shaped with intention if it is going to endure.
Two Builders
Together, Anastasia and Derrick Grahn have spent more than twenty years building businesses side by side.
Some were in hospitality. Some in media. Some in real estate. Santo Cabo is the most personal because it began closest to home, closest to daily life, and closest to necessity.
They are married, raising a family, and divide their time between Phoenix and Los Cabos. Across every venture, the foundation is the same: shared standards, shared taste, shared discipline, and a belief that worthwhile things should be built carefully.
Not quickly.
Not noisily.
Carefully.
Santo Cabo reflects that belief in its purest form.
