Dermalogica: Jane Wurwand (2016)

Jane Wurwand moved to Los Angeles with a suitcase and a beauty school diploma. She started what would become Dermalogica, an international beauty empire that set the standard for skin care. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," we check back with Nick Gilson for an update on his company, Gilson Snowboards, a snowboard & ski company based in Pennsylvania. (Original broadcast date: October 24, 2016) See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  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 Gebbia, Lisa Price of Carol's Daughter, Jen Hyman of Rent the Runway, John Zimmer of Lyft, and Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix. We're also going to have workshops with experts and guides there to provide you with lots of advice. Plus, you're going to meet hundreds of people just like you, builders who are taking their ideas to the next level.

• 0:44Guy Raz?

  So if you want to find out how to get your tickets, go to npr.org/summit. Oh, and this episode, we originally ran it back in the fall of 2016. Hope you enjoy it.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  We went to a contract manufacturer in Los Angeles, literally sort of fell on our swords and told them our dream, gave them the pitch, and said, "We need you to do like a test run for us." He said, "Look, I have absolutely no reason to do this because 99% 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."

• 1:38Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:49Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Jane Wurwand went from doing facials for women at a beauty parlor to building one of the leading skincare companies in the world. Dermalogica.

• 2:04Guy Raz?

  So the story about Jane Wurwand really begins about a month before she turned three, because that month, her father passed away. Now Jane barely remembers him, but what she does remember is 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 1950s, 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.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  The five words that changed my life were my mom 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.

• 3:07Guy Raz?

  So when she was old enough, Jane Wurwand decided on her skill. She'd become what was called, at the time, a beautician. And right after she got her qualification, at age 19, she started looking for work.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I decided, quite honestly, it sounds so flippant now, but it was freezing cold. It was the winter of 1977. I think it's one of the coldest on record. And I'm reading the Sunday paper, and I want to see, where is the hottest place on earth? Because 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 qualifications, we will pay an assisted passage for you to emigrate to South Africa, as long as you

• 4:06Speaker 01

  agree to live there for two years." And I thought... Good grief, I could be in Johannesburg in a month. And they had a list of 10 careers that they wanted to recruit to South Africa. And they were all vocational training. The number one was butchers, the number two was patisseries, 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.

• 4:29Guy Raz?

  And so when you got there, were you actually able to find a job?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 5:30 that evening, I had a job.

• 4:49Guy Raz?

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

• 4:53Speaker 01

  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. And 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, they're not going to stop for you because on the bus at the front, it said Ni Blanc and it means non-white. And I said, what? And she said, well, you have to wait for a bus for white people. And I'm like, what? Anyway, so that was one of my first introductions. I'd never seen it, obviously, I'd never seen anything like that.

• 5:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it must have been strange. When you were there in South Africa, were you more or less doing the same thing that you'd been doing in London?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, skincare, manicures, pedicures, everything that I'd been doing and trained to do and in love with the industry and feeling so happy that I had this training. Because literally, as odd as it sounds, I know I could walk out of the studio today, I'll have a job by tomorrow because there is 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 going to get work.

• 6:06Guy Raz?

  So how long did you end up living there?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  I lived in South Africa for four years.

• 6:10Guy Raz?

  And is that where you met your husband?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I met him in South Africa, he's from Cape Town. And 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 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 to immigrate 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 and 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.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  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. I'd hired an immigration attorney in L A. And four months later, I was on a flight to Los Angeles.

• 7:11Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 7:14Guy Raz?

  So you get to LA and this is like early eighties?

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was January nineteen eighty three. I was twenty four and never been so excited in my life. Landed in Los Angeles with a suitcase in one hand. And my beauty school diploma rolled up and tucked inside. And 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, because otherwise you'll put yourself off.

• 7:42Guy Raz?

  Right, right.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  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 and I landed and I said, all right, well, I'm going to get a job in a salon. So I'm going to start calling my trusty, you know, Yellow Pages. And the first thing that struck me was there were hardly any advertisements for skincare salons.

• 8:07Guy Raz?

  They were mostly just like hair and yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm like, this is kind of weird. Anyway, then I quickly realized they the ones I could find, and there was literally a handful, were all in Beverly Hills. And a very sort of elitist, expensive.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Sort of offering. So I went and interviewed at what 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 skincare treatments were all European. I could, you know, hear their accents. 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.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  And the Europeans can't sell. So I, that's how I do it. So 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 combining with that, retailing and selling.

• 9:28Guy Raz?

  I'm surprised that like skincare wasn't a big thing in, in the US at the time. What, so, so what was a normal skincare regimen?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 10:18Speaker 01

  audience for the next era in skincare.

• 10:23Guy Raz?

  So at that, at that point, did you, like, what did you do?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I went back, sat with Raymond, my partner, and he was-

• 10:30Guy Raz?

  Now, now your husband?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  No, we weren't married then. We was, we were just dating and living together.

• 10:34Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  So he was having the same experience because oddly enough, the only job he'd managed to secure was selling skincare 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.

• 10:55Guy Raz?

  It was like equipment to do what?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  To do skincare, to do steaming and exfoliation. And it was brand new, cutting edge, and he wasn't selling a piece.

• 11:03Guy Raz?

  He was going like door to door, to salon to salon, trying to sell it?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:31Guy Raz?

  So right then and there, you decided to start building a plan to create a business?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:54Guy Raz?

  And the plan, and the plan was?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  The plan was to train the professional skin therapist, then called an esthetician.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  And we were going to 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 going to make skin therapists more successful and able to run their own business and be financially independent.

• 12:28Guy Raz?

  So the idea was that you guys would open up a school and you would you would train them, both you and Ray?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Ray was going to still sell equipment. He was going to 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.

• 12:53Guy Raz?

  How did you even have cash to start, to open up?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  No cash.

• 12:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  It was a hell of a difficult to get a lease because 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.

• 13:18Guy Raz?

  Because there's like long lines of people waiting for their checks every day.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:37Guy Raz?

  Right. I mean, we just, you hung a shingle out, but like people had to know like who you were.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Well, so we knew that our target market were licensed estheticians. 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 2,300 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 $25.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And would you like us to print on Avery labels? And I said, yes, please. And they did.

• 14:27Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  And so we got in the mail.

• 14:29Guy Raz?

  Just like the label of every person who's licensed.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  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 50 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 70 responses.

• 15:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Within 24 hours.

• 15:05Guy Raz?

  So you were offering a free one day class to bring people in to get them.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 15:09Guy Raz?

  So people would know what you're what you're doing.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we took 70 people, rented chairs, took 70 people. And after a couple of weeks of doing the free class, we charged $10 a person. So now we had $700 in that one day, which is huge.

• 15:26Guy Raz?

  And you were like teaching what? Well, like.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Cleansing, double cleansing, steaming, exfoliation, massage, and then toning and moisturizing. It was very simple. And so by December of 1983, I was offering eight different classes.

• 15:44Guy Raz?

  And you were teaching all of those classes?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Everything, yeah. Taught every class, did all the laundry, took the laundry home at night to our one bedroom apartment, sat in the garage laundromat.

• 15:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  And and.

• 15:55Guy Raz?

  And never slept.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Never slept, worked, I don't know, 16 hours a day, seven days a week. For years, for years, didn't take a salary.

• 16:05Guy Raz?

  Because, I mean, presumably you you don't become rich by teaching classes.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  No, no, no, we were actually earning enough to pay the rent for the school and cover $300 a month for me. I was taking $300 a month out of the business to just sort of buy underwear and pantyhose. 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 on a futon. And he was out pushing the classes. He was out sort of as a sales rep.

• 16:45Guy Raz?

  He'd go to salons and say, hey, there's these classes.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, here's these classes. Come and take a free one first, and then we'll sign you up. And that's what they did.

• 16:52Guy Raz?

  And were they full classes?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  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'd order, you know, pizza and box wine by seven thirty.

• 17:13Guy Raz?

  I love that you're like, doing all the skincare, and then you're eating burgers and pizzas, too. That's very, that's very heartening to hear. You weren't eating like kale salads and like lemon water.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  No, we were not. We were eating, you know, Twix and Kit Kats.

• 17:28Guy Raz?

  So at that time, like, you know, eighty three, and this is sort of 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?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  No, 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. I just thought, I'm going to lead a tribe. We're going to change this industry. And so for three years, the International Dermal 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 salons? 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 realized there were no American made products in the salon industry. There were tons in the department store and in the drugstore. There was nothing in the salon industry. And it was like, a

• 18:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:50Guy Raz?

  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.

• 19:10Guy Raz?

  It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's about 1985 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.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  I wanted cleansers that were completely rinsed off with water. I wanted to develop 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 color. 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.

• 20:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it sounds like it's like a made in a lab, sort of clean.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we stepped 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 gray and white packaging. Our packaging looked pharmaceutical. Many times, people criticized 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.

• 20:28Guy Raz?

  You'd been working with these products for most of your career at that point. You were still really young. You were in your early 20s or mid 20s. How did you know how to make the stuff?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Had no idea.

• 20:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  So 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? Because you need to work with someone that knows these materials. And that was what we did. We contacted the raw material supplier in New Jersey, asked them, do you have any chemists in LA that are using your materials? And they gave us a list. And we started calling the list. And out of the 70 names we had, five would

• 21:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:28Guy Raz?

  And this chemist was in LA?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  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 products. So a percentage of the product that we manufactured, 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 going to get paid.

• 22:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And he agreed.

• 22:04Guy Raz?

  And, and what did you decide to make? What, was it one product or two products?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Twenty seven products.

• 22:10Guy Raz?

  Right off the bat?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Right off the bat.

• 22:11Guy Raz?

  Twenty seven products?

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:12Guy Raz?

  Why so many?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:28Guy Raz?

  So it was like creams and cleansers?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  So it was three cleansers, two moisturizers, three boosters, two masks, an eye makeup remover. 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.

• 22:48Guy Raz?

  And this chemist, he was making all these products in a lab?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was like Rumplestiltskin.

• 22:52Guy Raz?

  He was formulating them all and you were going and testing them out and saying, well, adjust this a little bit or?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  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 Savon and bought them or something. But they were great. I mean, and, and in nine months, we had developed 27 formulas and we'd named them in one afternoon.

• 23:19Guy Raz?

  How were you like even funding that product? Because 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.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Well, it probably should.

• 23:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah, how did you, how were you able to do it?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  We were buying tubes that nobody wanted. We were buying 500 at a time that they were selling to us.

• 23:39Guy Raz?

  Filling them yourselves?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  No, but we went to a contract manufacturer in Los Angeles, literally sort of fell on our swords and told him 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 $500, whatever it was. And, and his minimum ones were thousands, you know? And without him, we really wouldn't have the company because he looked at us after we'd been sort of like pitching crazily for an hour. He said, look, I have absolutely no reason to do this because 99% 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.

• 24:29Guy Raz?

  By the way, had you, how were you able to test the, the product?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  I tested everything and approved everything.

• 24:34Guy Raz?

  On yourself?

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:36Guy Raz?

  You just tested on your skin and you were like your own guinea pig?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  I was my own guinea pig and then I took it to class and I, we, the students, I had to ask them what they thought. And they loved it and they were using it in the classroom.

• 24:49Guy Raz?

  Just out of curiosity, does that have to go through like any kind of regulatory commission or anything?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Well, we weren't, first of all, you know, we were very young and new company and a lot of the rules, I suppose we weren't even aware of probably. But at the time, and still, we weren't using any ingredients that were controversial. We would 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.

• 25:23Guy Raz?

  I mean, so that was it? You just like, you just launched?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we launched in January of 1986. 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 85, 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.

• 25:49Guy Raz?

  Why did he say that to you?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Because he'd just seen so many startups fail.

• 25:54Guy Raz?

  This is the chemist, this is not the factory owner, this is the guy that you like.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  No, this is Rumplestiltskin.

• 25:59Guy Raz?

  He just said, I don't think it's gonna work.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  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 formulas.

• 26:07Guy Raz?

  What was it gonna cost you?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, he wanted something extraordinary and we whittled him down and it came down to, you know, sort of $14,000.

• 26:15Guy Raz?

  Which probably was a lot of money for you in 1905.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Huge. It was like telling us you wanted 10 million.

• 26:21Guy Raz?

  Why did the chemist not think it would work?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  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, what do they know about starting a company? What do they know about funding a company? You can't just start a skincare company.

• 26:38Guy Raz?

  Were you freaking out?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yes, we were freaking out. But we had to figure this out, scramble, put it together. So we borrowed money from family, we put together everything we could from the school, we put it together and we paid him.

• 26:51Guy Raz?

  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 14,000, but we're gonna be kinda screwed because this guy's saying it's not gonna work.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  We were worried that the formulas he was giving us, literally, we, you know, kinda exchanged on the table of a Coco's diner. He passed the manila envelope of formulas over and we passed the money over. And we were worried that the formulas he'd given us were not the formulas that we'd approved. But we actually had the guy who was gonna manufacture the product, look at the formulas for us. And he said, no, this is it. They're right. It's the real deal.

• 27:28Guy Raz?

  I'm just thinking about that moment where a guy who is a total expert is saying to you, who's never manufactured skincare products, that this isn't gonna work and yet you have to come up with $14,000 to pay him. Did you have any doubt?

• 27:43Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:44Guy Raz?

  You didn't think, you didn't think, maybe he's right?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  No, he couldn't be right. It wasn't possible because if he was right, we were about to launch into the biggest disaster of our lives.

• 27:55Guy Raz?

  But that may have been the case.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we turned each other on with self-repeated enthusiasm.

• 28:01Guy Raz?

  You, you and Ray?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:03Guy Raz?

  Like you and Ray were like, this is gonna work.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  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 would be saying, no, 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 1% of the population to buy one product

• 28:49Speaker 01

  and it's already enormous, bigger than it could ever be in the UK. So let's go for it.

• 28:57Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you had no investors and, and you basically figured, we'll sell the product and that will fund the manufacture of more of the product.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:07Guy Raz?

  And most of your customers were who?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  My students. The first account we opened was in Bakersfield, California. And

• 29:16Guy Raz?

  This was one of your students who had a salon there or?

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, Becky Sinclair was her name. She walked up with a check 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 too. 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 wanna be part of it. This was a California-made skincare product and we were going to take on the world.

• 29:43Guy Raz?

  And you were not selling this in stores, right? It was only-

• 29:45Speaker 01

  No, no, no, only salons. You had to have a skin therapist.

• 29:48Guy Raz?

  You had to have a therapist who sold this to you. And why was that? Why wouldn't you just like sell it in Walgreens or something?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  No, no, because I'm a skin therapist. We knew that this was an educated sell. 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 were committed to skin therapists.

• 30:12Guy Raz?

  How did Dermalogica do in that first year?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Did a million dollars in our first year.

• 30:17Guy Raz?

  That's insane.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  It was so insane, yeah.

• 30:21Guy Raz?

  I mean, you must have at that point like had all these buyers who wanted to like buy you out.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and lots of people wanted to lend us money.

• 30:31Guy Raz?

  And you didn't take any of it?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  No, nothing.

• 30:33Guy Raz?

  Because the sales was just funding the business?

• 30:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:50Guy Raz?

  But how were you like teaching classes and hiring a staff and like building an organization?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  We were working our tails off is what we were doing. I didn't hire another teacher until 1987. So I was writing the classes, teaching the classes and still doing the laundry. And Raymond 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 at 10 o'clock at night, 11 o'clock at night. Everyone came back to my house, our flat, for spaghetti. And then we were back at work at 7:30 the next morning.

• 31:37Guy Raz?

  When did you and Ray sort of sit back and say, we might actually get really rich from doing this thing that we never knew we could get rich from?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Uh, last year.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, no, I mean, we knew we had a tiger by the tail that first year.

• 31:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  And we knew that we had to spread ourselves internationally. We needed eggs in all the baskets so that if there was a recession in one place, it wasn't going to take our business down. And the International Dermal Institute is now the number one provider of advanced education in the industry worldwide. We train 100,000 skin therapists every single year.

• 32:19Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And last year, our wholesale turnover was a little north of $250 million.

• 32:26Guy Raz?

  That's incredible. So you guys were, you basically ran the company for almost 30 years.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ran the company.

• 32:33Guy Raz?

  And decided to sell it last year, sold it to Unilever.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 32:38Guy Raz?

  Why did you, why did you decide to do that?

• 32:40Speaker 01

  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 100%. So ultimately, we were going to have to make a plan of what we wanted to do with the company. We have two daughters, they're 17 and 22, 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

• 33:22Speaker 01

  not coming into Dermalogica. 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'd gone through a couple of CEOs in the eight years before we decided to sell. And we, it just wasn't working. And we realized 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 A 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.

• 33:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  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, because 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 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.

• 34:44Guy Raz?

  And that, the chemist, the one who like bailed a month before Dermalogica launched, did he ever come back to you guys and apologize?

• 34:51Speaker 01

  No, never.

• 34:52Guy Raz?

  He never did?

• 34:53Speaker 01

  No, he was like Rumpelstiltskin that flew out the window and never came back.

• 34:57Guy Raz?

  You know, it's, I mean, it's amazing, like, looking back at your story. Because your, your mom was a widow with four girls and 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?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  I know that she was really proud. She felt validated in the direction that she pushed us in. She passed away in 2001, but she saw our success. And the last months of my mom's life, she had Alzheimer's. I'm not sure she remembered anything about Dermalogica. 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 she said to her with a huge look of pride, she said, my daughter's a qualified manicurist, you know?

• 36:01Speaker 01

  And, and I smiled as I was doing it because I thought that 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.

• 36:18Guy Raz?

  Jane Wurwand, 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.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  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, stop lying out in the sun, get busy, start your business, and go out and change the world.

• 36:51Guy Raz?

  And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building.

• 37:00Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today, we're going to update a story we ran about a year ago. This one comes from Winfield, Pennsylvania.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  My name is Nicholas Gilson, and I am one of the original founders of Gilson Snowboards.

• 37:19Guy Raz?

  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.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  I brought in the original prototype for an idea I had when I was my students' age, when I was in middle school.

• 37:35Guy Raz?

  And that idea was basically to design a board which, instead of being flat at the bottom, was curved. 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.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:02Guy Raz?

  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.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  It was an active stable. It was an active stable. There were donkeys and horses next to our machines.

• 38:15Guy Raz?

  And in that stable, Nick says, they were able to make their boards even better.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 38:36Guy Raz?

  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 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 howibuiltthis.npr.org. Please also

• 39:19Guy Raz?

  subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts or however you get your podcasts. You can also write us at [email protected]. You can tweet us too, at howibuiltthis. My Twitter address is at Guy Raz. Our show was produced this week by Rund Abdelfatah. Ramtin Arablouei composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Thomas Lu, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Noor Kutsi. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.