Dermalogica: Jane Wurwand (2016)

Hey really quick before we start the show, you may have heard of this, but if not, I want to tell you about this amazing, exciting event that we're planning. It's our first ever How I Built This Summit. It's an all day gathering for innovators and entrepreneurs sponsored by American Express, and we're hosting it this October 16th. In San Francisco. Throughout the day, I'll be doing live interviews with incredible entrepreneurs like Airbnb's Joe Gebia, Lisa Price of Carol's Daughter, Jen Hyman of Rent the Runway, John Zimmer of Lift, and Katrina Lake of Stitchfix. We're also going to have workshops with Experts and guides there to provide you with lots of advice. Plus, you're gonna meet hundreds of people just like you. Builders who are taking their ideas to the next level. So if you want to find out how to get your tickets, go to npr.org slash summit. Oh.

And this episode, we originally ran it back in the fall of twenty sixteen. Hope you enjoy it. We went to a contract manufacturer in Los Angeles, literally sort of fell on our swords. and told him our our dream, gave him the pitch and said, We need you to do like a test run for us.

He said look, I've absolutely no reason. to do this because Ninety nine percent of everyone that sits opposite me telling me this story does not succeed, but for some crazy reason, I think you've got something interesting and I wanna be in for the ride. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

Guy Raz and on today's show how Jane Whirwind went from doing facials for women at a beauty parlor To building one of the leading skin care companies in the world. Thermologica. really begins about a month before she turned three.

Because that month. Her father passed away. N Gene. barely remembers that all of a sudden her mom had to get a job.

There were four girls in the family to feed, and she now had to do it all on her own. This was Scotland in the nineteen fifties, and Jane's mom happened to have a skill. She was a qualified nurse. So even though she hadn't worked for many, many years, She was able to find a job. And also Pass along an important lesson. The five words that changed my life were my mum saying to my sisters and myself, learn how to do something. Learn how to do something. She was absolutely adamant that we each of us had to get a skill set training. That no matter what happened if we were somewhere anywhere in the world,

we would have a skill set in our hands that we could Go to work. Immediately and earn money and keep food on the table. Jane Rowan decided on her skill. She'd become what was called at the time

A beautician. And right after she got her qualification at age nineteen, She started looking for work. quite honestly, it sounds so flippant now, but it was freezing cold. It was the winter of nineteen seventy seven. I think it's one of the coldest on record. And I'm reading the Sunday paper and I wanna see where is the hottest place on earth because I d I have to feel better about this freezing cold

flat that I'm living in. So I look at the weather in the Sunday paper and it said Johannesburg, South Africa. It was like 107 degrees. I'm like, oh my God, I wish I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And as I turn the page, it's like the universe sending me a sign. There's a quarter page advertisement from the South African government saying If you meet our prerequisite kind of qualifications we will pay an assisted passage for you to emigrate to South Africa as long as you agree to live there for two years. And I thought Good grief. I could be in Johannesburg in a month. And um they had a list of ten careers that they wanted to recruit to South Africa and they were all vocational training. The number one was butchers, the number two was patisserers, third was a hairstylist, and the fourth was a beauty therapist. And there I am. Six weeks later I was on a flight to Johannesburg. And and so when you got there were were you actually able to find a job?

Yeah. and when I got to Cape Town I sat in this immigration hotel and I picked up the yellow pages and I literally started calling salons in the yellow pages to see if they would hire me. And by five thirty that evening I had a job.

Was it was it weird? To live there at the time. I mean, what was it like to be there? It was Completely.

different to anything I'd ever experienced. You know, I remember my first day going to work, I was taking a bus Um the buses kept coming, I kept putting up my arm and they weren't stopping and I couldn't figure out what was going on because on the front of the bus it said C Point and that's where I was going to work. And a woman at the bus stop finally said to me, You not they're not gonna stop for you because on the bus at the front it said ni blanc and it means non white. I said

What? And she said, Well you have to wait for a bus. For white people I like. What anyway, so that was um one of my first introductions. I I had never seen it, obviously, I'd never seen anything like that. Yeah, it must have been it must have been strange. When you were there w In in South Africa, were you more or less doing the same thing that you've been doing in London? Yeah, skincare, manicures, pedicures, everything that I've been doing and trained to do, and in love with the industry and and feeling so happy that I had this training because literally

As odd as it sounds, I know I could walk out of of I could walk out of the studio today. I'll have a job by tomorrow because there is a such a demand for the work we do and if you're skilled at it and you're good at it and you love it, you're gonna get work. So how how long did you end up living there? I lived in South Africa for four years. And is that where you uh where you met your husband? Yeah, I met him in South Africa. He's from Cape Town. And um he was already in process. for a green card for the United States, and while we were dating, his green card came through.

and I mean I I can't even explain how exciting it is. It is like getting the golden ticket in a Willy Wonka chocolate bar. It's it's so hard legally and do it properly, and he did and it and off he went. And I was so excited for him. And

At the same time I had a job with an American company when they were based in Los Angeles and within a few months I actually got offered a training trip to Los Angeles and so I met him when I came on that business trip and together we just said We've got to do something here. This is such an amazing country and such an amazing opportunity. I went back, gave him my notice and I'd hide an immigration attorney in LA and Four months later, I was on a flight Wow.

So you get telling this is like early eighties. Yeah, it was January nineteen eighty three. I was twenty four and um never been so excited in my life. Landed in Los Angeles with a suitcase in one hand. and uh my beauty school diploma rolled up and tucked inside.

And uh had no idea that there was an unemployment rate of ten point four percent in California at that point. It's always good not to know these things, you know,'cause otherwise you'll put yourself off. And so my boyfriend had been looking for a job for six months, couldn't find anything, was living in a one bedroom apartment in Marina Del Rey, ready to take anything. And uh and I landed and I said, All right, well I'm gonna get a job in a salon. So I'm gonna start calling my trusty, you know, yellow pages. And the first thing that struck me was there were hardly any advertisements. For skin care.

They were mostly just like hair and yeah. Yeah. This is kinda weird. Anyway, then I quickly realised the the ones I could find, and there was literally a handful, were all in Beverly Hills. And a very sort of um

Elitist expensive sort of offering. So I went and interviewed at one I called, got a job interview, went to interview. And when I got there The people at the front desk were all American.

And yet the people I was seeing in the white uniforms who were offering the skincare treatments were all European. I could you know hear their accent. So when I had my interview, um They said, Do you have any questions? I said, Yeah, I do have a question. Why? I just noticed all the people are American on the front desk and all the people in the treatment rooms are European. And the woman who owned it, who was French, said to me, Well, it's really simple. The Americans have horrible training, they don't know how to give a skin treatment, and the Europeans can't sell. So I'm that's I do it. I walked away from that interview thinking, repeating what she just said to me in my head, and I thought

I think we've just spotted the greatest opportunity in this industry and that is Train Americans how to do better skin treatments and And Combining with that

Retailing and selling. I I'm surprised that like skincare wasn't a big thing in in the US at the time. So so what was a normal skincare regiment? Very limited because it was all big hair, big shoulder pads, Dallas, it was all makeup. I mean you could pick up magazines then, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, fashion magazines There were always articles on makeup. There was nothing on skincare. The dermatologists were all saying, Oh, you can use anything, you can use soap and water. And and I knew that not only did the correct products work and you got a result on the skin, more importantly Yeah.

When you receive a treatment in a salon, it's about human connection and human touch. And there's something much bigger happening in every salon than just the service you're receiving. So I was absolutely convinced. there was a waiting audience for the next era in skincare. So at the at that point did you

Like what did you do? I went back, sat with Raymond, my partner, and he was now your husband. No, we weren't married then. We was we were just dating and living together. Right. So he was having the same experience because oddly enough The only job he'd managed to secure was selling skin care equipment for a Japanese company, commission only. And we'd both come from the industry, we've both been in cosmetics. So He couldn't sell one piece of this Japanese equipment which was amazingly sophisticated. It was like equipment to do what? To do skincare. To do steaming and exfoliation and it was brand new cutting edge and he wasn't selling a piece. He was going like door to door to salon to salon trying to sell it. Yeah. And so they were saying we don't even understand what it is you're selling.

So we were having this epiphany sort of together because he was like, How come they don't understand what I'm selling when this is absolutely standard in Europe and the rest of the world? And we sat down and said, The opportunity is Huge. We can teach how to do correct skincare treatments. And

we can sell this equipment to the people that we're teaching. So right then and there you decided to start building a plan to create a business. Yeah, we actually cooked it up together on a drive back from San Diego. Took us two and a quarter hours. And in that drive we completely talked through our business plan. Ray got back and we wrote it out on the kitchen table. on five pages of yellow legal paper.

And the plan and the plan was The plan was to train the Professional skin therapist, then called an aesthetician. and we were gonna take everyone who was licensed and we were going to bridge it to the two year training that we felt would bring them up to a level of proficiency where they could be successful. So the goal was really simple. We're gonna make skin therapists more successful and able to run their own business and be financially independent. So so the idea was that you guys would open up a school and you would you would train them? Both you and Ray?

Yeah, so Ray was gonna still sell equipment, he was gonna stay on the road, I was going to teach. I was going to use the equipment he was selling in the classes I was teaching, sell the equipment after the class, and we called it the International Dermal Institute. How did you even have Cash to start uh to to open up a No cash. Yeah. It was a hell of a difficult to get a lease.'Cause remember we were immigrants, we had no credit rating, we had no bank references, we had nothing. So the only space we could find was an empty space that had been empty for years next to the social security office in Marina Del Rey. And they'd found it very difficult to lease.'Cause there's like long lines of people waiting for their checks every day. Yeah, exactly. Fantastic. We had sitting, you know, people waiting to receive skin treatments. So we rented it.

And then we got the equipment from the Japanese manufacturer, put that in. And we were off to the races, and now the challenge was Who were we going to train? Because we didn't know anybody. Right. I mean we just you you You hung a shingle out, but like people had to know like who you were.

Well, so we knew that our target market were licensed aestheticians. So in other words, they had to already be licensed. to work in the industry. So I called the State Board of Cosmetology in Sacramento, California. and I called them and I said, Do you have a list of everyone licensed in the state of California? to perform skincare treatments. And it was a very short list. It was like twenty three hundred names. And they said, Yes, we do. And I said, Is that list Available, is it public record?

And they said yes. And I said, Can you sell me the list? And they said, Yes, we can sell you the list. It's twenty five dollars. And would you like us to print it on Avery label? So I said, Yes, please. And they did. Wow. And so we got in the mail. Just like the label of every person who's licensed. Yeah. So that was it. And we we sat in the library, we got a phone book out. Thank goodness for the phone book in those days. And we plotted the zip codes within a fifty mile radius of Marina Del Rey. And we peeled off all the labels that fit those zip codes and we sent out a postcard saying this is who I am, this is my qualification.

I'm teaching a free one day class. We mailed it out and we were hoping we'd get, I don't know, like a dozen responses. We had seventy responses within twenty four hours. So you were offering a free one day class to bring people in to get them so people would know what you're what you're doing. Yeah. So We took 70 people, rented chairs took 70 people, and after a couple of weeks of doing the free class, we charge$10 a person. So now we had seven hundred dollars. In that one day which is huge. And you were like teaching what? Like cleansing, double cleansing, steaming, exfoliation, massage.

and then um toning and moisturizing. It was very simple. And so by December of nineteen eighty three. I was offering eight different classes. And you were teaching all of those classes? Everything, yeah. To every class, did all the laundry, took the laundry home at night to our one bedroom apartment, sat in the garage laundromat. Wow. And and never slept. Never slept, worked. I don't know. Sixteen hours a day.

Seven days a week. For years. For years. Didn't take a salary. Because I mean pr presumably you you you don't become rich by teaching classes. No, no, no. We were actually earning enough to pay the rent for the school and cover three hundred dollars a month for me. I was taking three hundred dollars a month out of the business to just sort of buy underwear and pantyhouse. Ray kept his job as a sales rep and he was making enough money to pay our rent on our apartment. And a big night out was a burger on a Friday night. That was huge. I mean we saved everything.

And for three years it was Just us, a guy who emigrated who was a friend of ours, who joined us and slept on our floor in a futon. And he was out pushing the classes, he was out sort of as a sales rep. And that's what they did. And were they full classes? Yeah, I had full classes with wait lists. Yeah, well people were flying from San Francisco, they were flying from Phoenix, they were coming from Nevada.

they were meeting each other, they were rooming together, they were they were forming friendships. The class would finish at five And we order you know, pizza and box wine by seven thirteen. I love that you're like doing all the skin care and then you're eating burgers and pizzas too. That's very heartening to hear. You weren't eating like kale salads and like lemon water. No, we were not. We were eating, you know, twicks and uh Kit Kat.

So at that time, like you know, eighty three to and and this was sort of the the first few years of it. I mean did you see yourself as an entrepreneur? Did you did you have visions of making this a huge thing, or was this just something that you loved doing that you were it wasn't well, first of all, I didn't use the word entrepreneur. I'm not sure I really knew knew that word. Maybe I did. It wasn't a hot, sexy word like it is now. Um I just thought I'm gonna lead a tribe, we're gonna change this industry. And so for three years the International Dominic Institute was our only business. But very quickly I realized and Raymond and I both together said, What product are they using when they go back to their sounds? And when I would ask them this, they would say They were all European products, French, German and Italian. And I said, Why are you not using American products?

And they said well Which ones? And I realised there were no American made products in the salon industry. There were tons in the department store and in the drug store. There was nothing in the salon industry. And it was like A light bulb went off for both Raymond and myself we both said Okay.

The big opportunity. Is product. And Ray said to me If you had to write down the kind of products you want to use, do you believe you could write down the briefs for a line? And I said, absolutely. And he said write down the briefs.

and let's set about making a product line. When we come back in a moment, we'll hear how Jane and Raymond invented that new line of skin products and how they almost lost it before it even got off the ground. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this. From NPR It's how I built this from NPR.

I'm Guy Raz. So It's about nineteen eighty five, and Jane and Ray have decided to create a whole new line of skincare products and They want it to be different than anything else on the market. I wanted cleansers that would completely rinse off with water. I wanted to develop um an exfoliant that would be really, really efficient and not cause irritation to the skin. I have an allergy to lanolin, so I didn't want any lanolin in the product. I wanted no mineral oil, no fragrance. No drying alcohol, no artificial colour.

Ray named the line Dermalogica. We had the International Dermal Institute, so it was kind of fit in with that. And we wanted to launch a line that was a bridge between a pharmaceutical product and a skincare product, a cosmetic. Yeah, it sounds like it's like a made in a lab sort of clean. Yeah. We step forward with no jars, only bottles and tubes. And we didn't have sort of pink jars with gold Tops and pink boxes. We had grey and white packaging. Our packaging looked pharmaceutical. Many times people criticised it in the early days as it was ugly. And we felt it was utilitarian and that was the image we wanted. That was who we were.

for most of your career at that point and you were still really young, you were in your your early twenties or mid twenties. Yeah. How did you know how to make the stuff? Had no idea. Yeah. So So um I spoke to a chemist who we knew and he said, look, if you're looking for a chemist that can make the product, you want to use a lot of botanicals and plant extracts, speak to the raw material suppliers for the plant extracts and ask them Who in Los Angeles is formulating product, if anyone, using a lot of plant extracts?'Cause you need to work with someone that knows these materials. And that was what we did. We contacted the raw materials supplier in New Jersey, asked them, Do you have any chemist LA that are using your materials? And they gave us a list. And we started calling the list.

And uh out of the seventy names we had, five would take our call. And of the five there was one that number one was willing to work with us and number two we felt could do it. And this chemist was in LA? Yeah, he was in LA. He's since passed away, but he was in Los Angeles and we couldn't pay him, that was the other thing. So we figured out Raymond figured out this amazing kind of way of paying him based on

The first two years of manufactured product. So a percentage of the product that we manufacture, not a percentage of sales, because we wanted to make sure he was tied into the fact that if we weren't actually able to ever make this product, he wasn't gonna get paid. Yeah. And he agreed.

And and what did you decide to make? What was there one product or two products or two? Twenty seven products. Right off the back. Why so many? Well, because we needed to go in with a full footprint. If we went in with one or two products, we couldn't capture a skin therapist's attention and say you need to use this exclusively in your room and you need to sell this to your clients. It wouldn't have been enough. So it was like creams and cleansers. So it was three cleansers, two moisturisers. Three boosters, two ms, two. An I make up remover. Um, and then we had I think eight or nine products that were professional only, peels and professional masks and things that would only be used in the treatment room. And this chemist, he was making all these products in the lab. Yeah, he was like rumple stilt skin. He was formulating them all and you were going and testing them out and saying, Well, adjust this a little bit or Yeah.

I briefed him, he came back two days later with a little cardboard box with samples, and I thought we can't possibly have made these that quickly and they can't be right. I mean he must have gone to Save On and bought them or something. But they were great. I mean and and in nine months We had developed twenty seven formulas. and we'd named them in one afternoon. How were you like even funding that product?'Cause'cause you think about that today, like that process, you would just think it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to test it and just to like get it into the tubes and Well it probably should. How d yeah, how did you how were you able to do it? We were buying tubes that nobody wanted, we were buying five hundred at a time that they were selling to us for you know filling them yourself? No, but we went to a contract manufacturer in Los Angeles literally sort of fell on our swords.

and told him our our dream, gave him the pitch, and said, We need you to do like a test run for us. And we can pay you like five hundred dollars or whatever it was. And And his minimum ones were thousands, you know. And and without him, we really wouldn't have the company'cause he looked to us after we'd been sort of like pitching crazily for an hour. He said, Look, I've absolutely no reason to do this because

Ninety nine percent of everyone that sits opposite me telling me this story does not succeed, but for some crazy reason, I think you've got something interesting and I want to be in for the ride. By the way, had you how were you able to test the the product. I tested everything and approved everything. And yourself? Mm-hmm. You just Tested on your skin and you were like your own guinea pig. I was my own guinea pig and then I took it to class.

And I we the students had to ask them what they thought. And they loved it. And they were using it in the classroom. Just out of curiosity, does that have to go through like any kind of regulatory commission or anything? Well, we won't F first of all, you know, we were very n young and new company and a lot of the rules I suppose we weren't even aware of probably. But um at the time and still we weren't using any ingredients that were controversial. We were eliminated a lot of the irritating ingredients

And so in the nine months that we were testing the product as we were developing it, we hadn't had any incidents of reactions or allergies, et cetera. I mean so that was it? You just launched? Yeah. So we launched in January of nineteen eighty six. And the crazy thing was the chemist who developed these formulas, who we were going to pay off over a two year period, came to us in December. of uh eighty five, so a month before we were due to launch, and said that he did not believe

in the product he didn't believe we could be successful in a new venture. Why why did he say that to you? Because he'd just seen so many startups fail. This is the this is the chemist This is not the factory owner. This is the guy that you like. No. This is Rumpel Stiltskin. He just said, I don't think it's gonna work. Yeah, I don't think it's gonna work. I'd like you to pay me out for the formulas now. And we didn't have any money to buy the four. What was it gonna cost you? Well I mean th he wanted something extraordinary and we whittled him down and it came down to you know sort of fourteen thousand dollars. Which probably was a lot of money for you in nineteen five. It was like telling us you wanted ten million. Why did the chemist not think it would work? I think he didn't believe in us. I think he believed in the formula. I think he thought these are two immigrants.

These crazy immigrants, how what do they know about starting a company? What do they know about funding a company? You can't just start a skincare company. Were you freaking out? Yes, we were freaking out, but we had to figure this out and scramble, put it together. So we borrowed money from family, we put together everything we could from the school. We put it together when we paid him. But weren't you so nervous? Like if this is the guy saying to you this is not gonna work And you're like, we better come up with a fourteen thousand, but we're gonna be kind of screwed because this guy's saying it's not gonna work. We were worried that the formulas he was giving us literally we you know, kinda exchanged on the table of a cocoa's diner. He passed the Manila envelope of formulas over, we passed the money over. And uh We were worried that the formulas he'd given us were not the formulas that we'd approve, but we actually had

the guy who was gonna manufacture the product, uh, look at the formulas for us and he said, No, this is this is it. They're right. It's the real deal. I'm just thinking about that that moment where a guy who's a total expert is saying to you who who's never manufactured skincare products that this isn't gonna work and yet you have to come up with fourteen thousand dollars to pay him Did you have any doubt? No.

You didn't think you didn't think maybe he's right. N no, he couldn't be right. It wasn't possible because if he was right, we were about to launch into the he biggest disaster of our lives. But that may have been the case. Yeah, but we turned each other on with self repeated enthusiasm. You you and Ray. Yeah, we just you and Ray were like, This is gonna work. Yes, it's going to work. Isn't it? And if one of us was having a modicum of doubt, guaranteed the other one was having a good day. So on the days when I might be saying, We're not crazy, right? Ray be saying, No, you of course we're not crazy. The students love it. This is gonna be great. And on the days when he was saying, I think it's a house of cards, maybe it's all gonna collapse, I'd be saying, No, no, no, we just had the greatest class, it was so fantastic, everybody's excited, this is going to work. And you know what? If it doesn't work We'll do something else. It's not the greatest disaster in the world. We have nothing to lose, basically.

And it was exciting. And what if it works? And we did the classic immigrant thing where look at the population. It only takes one percent of the population to buy one product and it's already enormous, bigger than it could ever be in the UK. So let's go for it. Okay, so you had no investors and And you basically figured we'll sell the product and that will fund the manufacturer of more of the product. Yeah, exactly. And most of your customers were who? My students. The first account we opened was in Bakersfield, California, and

And uh This was one of your students who had a salon there, or Becky Sinclair was her name. She walked up with a cheque and I said, Becky, I haven't even shown you the product and she said, Jane, if you and Raymond are in I'm in two. And I said, You're our first account in the world.

And that was it. My students came up, they came up, they said, We want in, we want to be part of it This was a California made skincare product and we were gonna take on the world. And you were not selling this in stores, right? It was only No, no, no, only salons. You had to have a skin therapist. I had to have a s therapist who sold this to you. Mm-hmm And and why was that? Why wouldn't you just like sell it in Walgreens or something? No, because because I'm a skin therapist. We knew that this was an educated cell. It had to be people that understood the skin. And also these were the people that brought us to the party. And my mum another piece of advice she gave me was you leave the party with the person you went with. So we w we're committed to skin therapies. How did Dermalogica do in in that first year?

Did a million dollars in our first year. That's insane. It was So Insane. like had all these buyers who wanted to uh like buy you out.

Yeah. And lots of people wanted to lend us money. And you didn't take any of it. No. Because we wouldn't even sales were was just funding the business. Yeah, and it was so exciting. It was great. I mean that first year we were plowing everything back into the business, you know, more staff. We hired a direct sales force. We wanted people walking in that were dermalogica. And so we were putting everything back into building the business. But how are you like teaching classes and hiring a staff and like building a uh an organization. We were working our tails off is what we were doing. I didn't hire another teacher until nineteen eighty seven.

So I was writing the classes, teaching the classes, and still doing the laundry. And Raymond, uh, and a couple of other people were handling the product. When the classes finished at five o'clock, we were doing the UPS orders. I was packing the boxes, sealing the boxes, writing the labels. There were five of us in the company. We did Everything. We finished it ten o'clock at night, eleven o'clock at night. Everyone came back to my house our flat for spaghetti. And then we were back at work at seven thirty the next morning. When did you and and Ray

sort of sit back and say, uh, we might actually get really rich from doing this thing that we never Uh Last year. Ha ha ha.

Well I mean no I mean We knew we had a tiger by the tail that first year. Yeah. And um we knew that we had to spend spread ourselves internationally. We needed eggs in all the baskets so that if there was a recession in one place it wasn't gonna take our business down. And the International Dermal Institute is now the number one provider of advanced education in the industry worldwide. We train a hundred thousand skin therapists every single year. And last year our our wholesale turnover was a little north of two hundred and fifty million dollars. That's incredible.

So you guys were you basically ran the company for almost thirty years. Yeah. You ran the company. And Decided to sell it. Last year you sold it to Unilever. Mm-hmm. Why did you why did you decide to do that? Well

You know, we'd run the company as what I sort of say was, you know, a beneficial dictatorship. We've always had a great team. we still have a great team, but the decisions ultimately came down to Raymond and myself. Product approval, advertising, everything, the brand ID And and you know, we realized much though we hate to think about it, the death rate is holding steady at a hundred percent. So ultimately we were gonna have to make a plan of what we wanted to do with the company. We have two daughters, they're seventeen and twenty two, and neither of them wanted to come into the business and we didn't want them to. We told them even kind of before they were born, we decided if we ever have children, they're not coming into Damologica. It's our dream and we believe it's a burden to kind of shoulder your children with that responsibility. And so we had decided we'll hire a CEO and we've gone through a couple of CEOs

in the eight years before we decided to sell and we it just wasn't working. And we realised the problem probably wasn't the CEOs, the problem was probably us. Because we are the founders, you know, and we have this sort of Uh passion about the ownership. And it's very hard to run a company when the founders are in place and kind of want to have the last word. Yeah. And so we decided we should at least explore the idea of an acquisition.

We'd never taken a phone call from anyone that was interested in buying never even taken a call'cause we said we don't even want to have the conversation. It's a distraction. And so we we kind of lined up Who we thought would be the the right partners for us. And then we we set about Deciding which ones we wanted to court.

And Unilever were very aligned with us on their sustainable living plan, they're very aligned with us on a value system. And so we decided to go forward. And uh I have to say we're one year in and it's been a fantastic year. So much so that Raymond and I kept a small percentage of the company and we're still involved. And that uh the chemist, the one who like bailed a month before Demologica launched, did he ever come back to you guys and apologize? No, never. He never did. No, he was like Rumpel Stiltskin that flew out the window and never came back. You know, it it's

I mean it's amazing like looking back at your story. Because your your mom was a widow with four girls. And uh that she had to raise on her own. And she must have been a little worried when you left England for South Africa and then to the US with very little What did she make of your of your success?

No, I know that she was really proud. She felt validated in the direction that she'd pushed us in. She passed away in two thousand and one. But she saw our success. And the last uh months of my mum's life she had Alzheimer's I'm not sure she remembered. anything about Domologica. She remembered me and I sat on her bed when she was in hospital and I was giving her a manicure. I was right back to filing her nails and painting them and she was watching me and she looked across at the woman who was in the chair next to her.

And uh she said to her with a huge look of pride, she said uh, My daughter's a qualified manicurist, you know. And uh and I smiled as I was doing it because I thought the if she doesn't remember anything about the success we've had, she's really proud that I got that training and I'm going to be okay. And I was. Jane Rwind, founder of Dermalogica. She now spends most of her time on helping women around the world become entrepreneurs through her foundation. And of course we couldn't let Jane go without asking for her number one skincare tip. So

Here it is. Single best thing you can do for your skin is keep it out of the sun. So you wear a sunblock, you wear your hat. Uh stop flying out in the sun. Get busy, start your business.

And go out and change the world. Mm. And please do stick around because in just a moment we're gonna hear from you about the things you're building. Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're gonna update a story we ran about a year ago. This one comes from Winfield, Pennsylvania.

My name is Nicholas Gilson, and I am one of the original founders of Gilson Snowboards. Nick and his business partner sort of fell into the snowboard business. They were middle school teachers in Nashville and did a science project where they challenged their students to build a better snowboard. I brought in the original prototype for an idea I had when I was my student's age when I was in a middle school. And that idea? was basically to design a board which instead of being flat at the bottom, and Nick hoped that it would make for a faster ride.

And even though their first design totally failed, They eventually came up with one they loved. With this board, you can actually ride close to flat and engage these really surfy, drifty maneuvers that allow you to get through the trees way easier with way more surfy motion. And so with barely any money, Nick and his partner quit their teaching jobs and set up a snowboard shop inside a stable in Pennsylvania. It was an active stable. It was an active stable. There were donkeys and horses next to our machines. And in that stable, Nick says, they were able to make their boards even better. And we then started to travel the country, starting a company much the way our grandparents would have. We need to tangibly and physically share something with people. And so we went out and immersed ourselves in the community, traveled 17,000 miles from coast to coast, and started getting these people on the boards. Now since we last spoke to Nick

His team has traveled 17,000 more miles. to slopes and parks across the country. letting people sample Gilson snowboards for free. The company is now four years old, they've sold thousands of boards, and they've recently expanded. To skis. You can find out more about Gilson's snowboards on our Facebook page and of course

If you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing about the things you're building. And thanks so much for listening to our show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, you can go to howibuilthis.npr.org. Please also subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, or however you get your podcasts. You can also write us at hibt at npr.org. You can tweet us too at how I built this. My Twitter address is at guy. Our show is produced this week by Rand Abdelfata. Ram Teen Arablui composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkin Poor, Thomas Lou, and Jeff Rogers.

Our intern is Noor Kutzi. I'm Guy Roz, and you've been listening to how I built this? From NPR.

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