Dermalogica Founder: Building A Billion Dollar Business While Looking After Your Mental Health

Jane Wurwand is the co-founder of Dermalogica, which revolutionised skincare for millions of people worldwide. One of the first skincare brands when it launched in the 1980s, Jane got people to care about something they didn’t realise was important. Today she finally tells her incredible story in this conversation and in her new book, Skin in the Game. Jane’s story to self-independence begins when she was in a toxic relationship with a controlling boyfriend, in a strange country she knew little about. She describes feeling the physical hand of her late father on her shoulder guiding her where to go next. She picked herself up, and with a new partner used her new business as a fresh chapter in her life. Then, her industry was just one clinic in Los Angeles. Now, it’s a chain worth billions. Jane lit the touchpaper on a revolution, and in finding her own confidence, Jane helped millions of others find theirs too. Follow Jane: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/janewurwand Jane’s book - https://bit.ly/3KfGpqt Dermalogica - https://bit.ly/3uWKitZ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You know, people who say, how do you balance your life and your work? I know that they hate one of those two parts in their own life. There is no work-life balance. 1983, we started the International Dermal Institute, which is still the number one training programme in the industry. And we launched Dermalogica in January of 1986.

• 0:19Steven Bartlett?

  And that business generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  We knew that the big opportunity was going to be a product. Lots of people have great ideas every day. The difference? Most people can't execute because the details are really important. And most people miss them or start to think they're petty. A brand triggers emotional responses. I'm not a diva, but I am strong and I know what makes a business successful. We can't be afraid that some people won't like what we say. We have to say it.

• 0:49Steven Bartlett?

  We both know that we could just spend all of our time just doing business. What's the cost of that?

• 0:53Speaker 00

  I would self-sabotage relationships. We were just working so hard and Lucy came downstairs and she said, "Mum, I just..." And I said, "Lucy, for goodness sake, what is wrong?" And she said, "I wanted to give you a hug. You look so cross."

• 1:09Speaker 00

  I was just stood there with my child in front of me, looking scared of me.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  That was the tipping point for me. I had to ask for help.

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

  So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO USA Edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 1:39Steven Bartlett?

  Jane, as I delve deep into your story, into your book, it became so apparently clear to me that your early years, your childhood, were very, very formative. Can you tell me about those early years and how they shaped and moulded you into the person you were to become today?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  I think at the time, obviously, I didn't realise exactly how formative my childhood was going to be. I think most of us look back at our childhood, for better or worse, and realise that's actually where so much of whatever I am as an adult came from. So I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the youngest of four girls. My mum and dad had been, they met in the Second World War in India. Dad was a little older than my mum. My mum was thirty eight, my dad was fifty when he died of heart attack. Suddenly, not expected, did not know he was ill. My mother, at thirty eight, with four children, had not worked since she married.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  And the reason was she was a trained nurse. But at that time in the UK, and it carried on until, I think, the early seventies, and it did here too. If you were a married woman, you gave up your job to a single woman. Because it was assumed that you didn't need the work. That was true in nursing and in teaching. So she hadn't worked since nineteen forty five. She also didn't know how to drive a car, and she had no financial literacy. But this woman, my mother, she pulled herself together. She got work as a nurse. She had a friend who was then working at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  She called her up, she said, Pat, I need a job. She said, what can you give me? And she said, I can give you a night shift, seven to seven, because I was two, so I wasn't going to school. My mum had to take care of me during the day and then go to work. And so everything was kind of determined right there. My mother drummed into every one of us, learn how to do something. Because if you don't know how to do something, literally a skill set in your hands that you can turn on a penny and go into work right away. I don't, she, she didn't know what she would have done without her training. And so that became absolutely concrete in my head.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  I have to be able to support myself, I have to be able to earn my own money. And I can't ever put my future in the hands of, of someone else's income or success. And so, yes, that was highly formative. It then led me to the life I, I know I've led and also what things I care about and what I think is important.

• 4:29Steven Bartlett?

  And you're, the loss of your father at two and three quarters years old. What impact in hindsight did that have on? You directly.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  I think it was huge. One thing, the, the emotion I remember feeling at the time was not grief exactly, because I wasn't quite sure what had happened to him. They didn't say to me right away, he's dead. That I was told he'd gone away.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  And then my sister Judy, who's next one up from me, she's six years older than me, told me directly, he's not coming back, he's dead. And I, at that stage, I was about five, four and a half, five, I was going to school. And the next emotion I felt was, was shame. That I didn't have a father, I didn't know anyone else that didn't have a father. I didn't know you could grow up in a family without a father, so I hid it. And as far as relationship and role modeling, I didn't realize then, but I do now. Here I am, I grew up in a household of very strong, capable women. That's how I saw them. They were all older than me, bigger than me, they helped me get dressed, helped me, they did everything. I then went to an all-girls school.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  And I was, I had all women teachers, I was a brownie and a girl guide. And so I'd never had that relationship role played for me. I'd never really thought about there being, not that, of course, I knew there was a difference, but I hadn't really thought about the power dynamic, I hadn't seen that actually. And then I, I went to a friend's house when I was 11. Her dad came home, we were home about four thirty and her dad came home at about six, I think, and sat down right away and her mum gave him a cup of tea and he put on the TV and

• 6:17Speaker 00

  I, I thought he was sick. I said, is your dad not well? And she said, no, he's fine. And I said, oh, well, oh. Because the only time I'd ever been given a cup of tea, sitting in a chair, was when I was sick. And my mum would say, well, get up and, you know, get dressed, put on your dressing gown. So I, I, and now in later life, I realize it's impacted me a great deal. It, it, as I've been married now to Raymond for well over thirty years, we got married in nineteen ninety. So what's that? No, it's longer, right? Like, how long have I been married? Forever? And I think that a lot in my relationship with Raymond, I thought I was always being very independent and doing the right thing by doing everything I could. But I also realised that was exclusionary.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  I I can be very exclusionary of the other person. Hard to ask for help, not because I consciously don't want to, but because emotionally I don't feel I need to. That's not great. So there's a lot to unpack and work through.

• 7:17Steven Bartlett?

  That formative, like really pivotal advice that your mum gave you, which was learn how to do something. It seems so simple, but it was so clearly really profound for you and has been throughout your life. At that age, what is it that you wanted to learn how to do? What is it you wanted to be when you grew up, when you're, you know, eleven, eleven years old, say?

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Actually, I remember looking in the Bournemouth Evening Echo newspaper and saying to my mum, "Look, this hair salon is hiring fifteen year old apprentices." And I think I was about eleven. And I said, "I'm going to cut it out and keep it because when I'm sixteen and I leave school, I will apply." And and my mum said, "Well, I think you'll stay at school longer and I think you'll go to university", which no one in my family had. And I thought, "Well, maybe." But that was in my head. I I I wanted to to, I got my first Saturday job at thirteen, working in a salon. And I saw firsthand proof that if you know how to do that, you know how to earn money.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  And then when that salon hired a skin therapist, then called a beauty therapist, but I don't like the word beauty when applied to people's appearance.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  I realised that that's actually what I want to do. I want to be a skin therapist. So it's pretty, pretty early.

• 8:39Steven Bartlett?

  You don't end up going to university?

• 8:41Speaker 00

  At that stage, you went to university primarily if you were going to follow a profession, legal, the law, or be a doctor, or an academic, or a pharmacist. Or I couldn't quite grasp the immediacy of how that was going to equip me to be self determined quickly.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  You see, my biggest fear growing up, after my father had passed away, was that my mum would. I used to make these elaborate plans of what would happen if my mum died, and then how old was I? Would I be taken into foster care? Or would my older sister be able to be my guardian? And at that stage, my older sister was fifteen when my dad died. But when my older sister turned twenty-one and I was eight, I was so relieved because I knew now she's an adult and married. She would be able to go and live with her. So I'd make all these plans of what would happen. And I wanted to be self-determined quickly.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  And so when I was looking at a long haul of three years' education, maybe, I just couldn't attach myself to it. I wanted to be able to do a training that I could travel with, I could work with. It would be literally in my hands. And now I realise in my head and in my heart, and it could take me anywhere I wanted to.

• 10:06Steven Bartlett?

  That sounds like a consequence of the advice your mother had instilled in you that learned how to do something. And she really had tried to make you sort of autonomous and self-determined for many reasons.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:17Steven Bartlett?

  So nineteen years old, you look at the newspaper.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I look at the newspaper and it's a Sunday and it's freezing cold in England. It's winter, nineteen seventy-seven. And freezing, and I had a gas meter. So you had to put coins in to get the heating on. And I never had, you know, I was working as a, I disqualified. So I was, but I was still working as a junior in a salon. So I never had enough money. And I had a boyfriend who said, with me, who said, jeez, it's bloody freezing. And what's the hottest place on earth today? I just want to know where it is. So I looked at the weather in the Sunday paper and I said, it's Johannesburg. And it was then, it was before we went into, you know, Celsius.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  I said, it's a hundred and six, which was really hot. And he said, God, I wish I was in Johannesburg. And I said, me too. Where's that? And he said, South Africa. Geography wasn't super strong for me. Turned over the page and as I turned the page, there was a quarter-page ad taken by the South African government for assisted passage.

• 11:26Speaker 00

  That if you would emigrate to South Africa, and I think Australia and Canada used to do the same thing as well in the UK, then the government of South Africa would pay your passage, they would assist it, it would cost you forty pounds to go, which was really, it was a lot of money, but it wasn't that much money that we couldn't have scraped it together. And just on a whim, it was a Sunday, the next day salons were closed, it was a Monday, that's pretty typical still in salons, we called the number in London and got the papers, because there was no internet, you couldn't Google anything or look anything up, filled them out and emigrated to South Africa.

• 12:06Steven Bartlett?

  With what intention?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Getting a job. I was pretty good at what I did, and I knew I could get a job, I'll just get a job in a salon and I'll start working. And for assisted passage, you had to fulfil one of the requirements, one of the jobs that they needed to hire for, and there were ten listed, and the number one was patisserie, well, I wasn't a patisserie, I was a pastry maker, number two was a butcher, definitely I wasn't a butcher, number three was a hairdresser, bingo for my boyfriend, and number four was then, as the name was, beauty therapist, and that was me.

• 12:42Steven Bartlett?

  Wow. And how did that phase of your life go? So from between nineteen and twenty-two, roughly?

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:49Steven Bartlett?

  When you're in South Africa, how, when you reflect on that, how was that experience?

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Well, it was hugely formative. First of all, we got, the boyfriend and I, Tony and I got married. It was easier to apply for assisted passage if you were a couple, and you would get housing.

• 13:07Steven Bartlett?

  Ah.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Now, I was also crazy about him, and, and he was about me, and off we went.

• 13:13Steven Bartlett?

  Nineteen years old?

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:15Steven Bartlett?

  You got married?

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:16Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Not a, not a successful marriage, we didn't know each other very well, great boyfriend, wrong husband, and so that lasted about a year when I was in South Africa. And yet, there I am now, on the other side of the planet, with no family, no cell phones, no computer, no FaceTime, there was nothing like that. In order to call her home, I had to go to the post office in Cape Town and book an international call, and it was expensive. So I literally called home once a year. But I can work, which is great because I can support myself. My marriage has broken up and I've got to wait to get a divorce because there's no such thing as a sudden divorce in South Africa.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  It's then operating under Dutch Reform Church law. So I had to be separated for two years and then they give you a decree nielsaai and then I could apply for one more year I had to be separated, never go, not going back together again. And only then do you get your decree absolute. So it was three years before I could get divorced.

• 14:20Steven Bartlett?

  I read that you walked out one day essentially from the marriage and he had emptied your personal bank account and

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:26Steven Bartlett?

  You were pretty much still on your tracks, you were on the street on your own.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was in the street. My clothing had been thrown out of an upstairs window of our rented terraced house along with some garbage bags, trash bags, rubbish bags. And I picked up the stuff that wasn't cut up because he cut up a lot of my stuff as he threw it out, stuffed it in the trash bag, got in my car and I drove to a friend's house. And as I drove away, I can, I feel it now, I can feel myself sitting in the car. It was a Mazda and I was driving away and I looked in the rear view mirror and I could hardly see because I was crying, I was really scared and emotionally very devastated and I was shaking. And I looked in the rear view mirror and I just promised myself, this will never happen again.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  I will never allow myself to be this vulnerable. I will never allow myself to ever be in a situation that I run away with my clothes in trash bags and going to pull my act together in a big way. That was a lot that happened in that four years. That was probably the most formative time of my life. What seemed like the greatest calamity, because remember now, my mother had been widowed, but I'd now just walked out of a marriage. And at that age, I guess I thought it was, that was my marriage, not like, oh, I'll have more. I've just walked out of my marriage. I am now alone.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  The very thing that happened to my mother. I didn't have kids, but I think all of that was wrapped up. And, you know, I probably should have had a lot of therapy a lot sooner, but I didn't. So all of that was wrapped up. I felt incredibly vulnerable, physically vulnerable. So I hit the ground running. And I'd now got a job working for a company, for a skincare company, selling to salons. It was Redken, which now owned by L'Oréal, but then they were privately owned by an entrepreneur, Paula Kent-Mahan, in Los Angeles. And she started Redken with her hairdresser, Jerry Redding. That's where the name Redken came from. Jerry Redding and Paula Kent. And so I had a company car. I worked really

• 16:43Speaker 00

  hard. I was determined to do well, get promoted, which I did. And within a year, I had been made the brand manager for the skincare division and transferred to Johannesburg. And Johannesburg was where I met Raymond.

• 16:59Steven Bartlett?

  And so how does that then lead you from Johannesburg to Los Angeles?

• 17:03Speaker 00

  That was Raymond Worland. We worked together for the next year. He was my boss's boss, so I didn't report directly to him. But I would be in meetings with him because I was the brand manager for the skincare division. And he was brilliant. He is brilliant. And I love and respect and admire that. We would have conversations at the table at work and everyone would be positing some idea or another. And he would see right through everything to the conclusion. He was very pragmatic. Okay, I've heard everything. This is what I'm thinking. This is what we should do. And he was right. And I saw that and I loved that. And I felt very inspired by that. And he saw in me my creativity, because I would

• 17:48Speaker 00

  usually be the one at that table that was saying, I know we're out of stock of that color of foundation because we haven't had a shipment from Los Angeles. But I think that was in our gift sets last Christmas. Can we see how many we've got left over in the warehouse? Break open the pallets because it's now March. And just take out the foundation and sell that. And that actually was true story, that's what we did. So he loved my creativity and my ideas and thinking. And we would brainstorm as a group of several different companies, new product ideas, et cetera. I loved his brilliance and I guess over that we fell in love and started secretly dating.

• 18:26Steven Bartlett?

  Secretly dating.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Not so secret, but yeah, secretly dating. There was no, um, there was no sort of HR department that would legally have stopped that then. I suppose they would now, I don't think it could happen, I'm not sure. But, um, yeah, and he was, he had been in process for a green card for two years. And his green card came through while we were dating. And he said, I've got ninety days to go to the States and claim my green card. If I don't go in ninety days, I forfeit it. And I said, it's like the golden ticket in Willy Wonka's chocolate bar. You can't, you can't say no, you don't say no to the green card. Get on a plane and go. And he said, well, you know, we were really, you know, serious about each other. I said, doesn't matter, if we're meant to be together, we will go. And he said, okay, all right.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  And we sort of broke up because he got on a plane and flew to New York. And I had no idea I was going to come here. I didn't, I wasn't going to get a green card. So off he went. And that was in May of eighty-two. And in the August of that year, Redken, who were based in Los Angeles, wanted me to come and do a training program here because I was running the brand. And so I came on a two week trip to LA. And at that stage, Raymond had moved from New York to Chicago and from Chicago to LA. So of course, we'd kept in contact, writing letters, air mail letters.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  And I knew he was in LA and we arranged to meet and then we knew this was it. And I, I made a decision when I was on the flight home back to South Africa. I'm going to be there. It was, um, September when I flew back. I'm going to be there by Christmas. I'm going to make a plan. And I did.

• 20:16Steven Bartlett?

  What was the plan?

• 20:18Speaker 00

  I don't know if it's completely legal, but I'll tell you. So what happened was while I was here, we wanted to explore how I would get immigration, how to get a work permit. And so we went to see an immigration attorney here in Los Angeles. And the easiest way was to marry Raymond, who had a green card. I wasn't going to do that because I just, I I literally didn't get my divorce until a few weeks after that. So in South Africa, so that wasn't going to happen. And I wasn't coming imminently. I was thinking, you know, in a year or two, and I just wanted to understand what it would take, how I could go about it.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  And so I wasn't going to get married for, for the, the security of being able to immigrate. And I wasn't sure I wanted to marry him anyway, because we, you know, we'd been dating, but I wasn't going to make that mistake again. And it was 10 years before we married, in fact. But what happened was we went through every single option of how you could get a work permit. I didn't fit any of them. I said, well, what if I had, you know, I'm a trained skin therapist. And he said, it's, you know, the training doesn't exist. The training exists here. And I said, well, I'm a trained teacher in skin therapy, which didn't exist here. And actually, only 70 of the 50 states even had a license to do skincare.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  But California was one of them. So what we, what we put together was we started a company, Raymond started a company. But we both together started it. We registered it in Sacramento and it cost $300 to start that company. On the understanding that I would go back to South Africa, I would be made a job offer by that company in a management position and I would transfer to the States. The caveat was I had to, I went to South Africa, had to set up a company in South Africa. Cause you had to have a company in both places.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  And that company had to offer someone in management in that other country, a job. Transfer it. And, and it was not illegal. It was a slight loophole, which I have to say has been closed because now I think you have to have 10 staff that already work for you in the States. And you have to have tax returns for the last several years, but that wasn't the case then. And I transferred myself in on an intercompany transfer visa.

• 22:41Steven Bartlett?

  And you and Raymond end up starting a company together.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:45Steven Bartlett?

  International Dermal Institute.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  The International Dermal Institute, because I was on this visa and I needed, I would have to work for myself. So to begin with, I thought I'd work as an independent contractor and get a job in a salon. So I went, I did the rounds in Beverly Hills of the, then that was the only place there were skincare salons that I could find in the Yellow Pages, which was the telephone directory, remember? Still no internet, no computers, no Google. And what I realised when I went on interviews was that everyone they were hiring had an accent from somewhere in Europe. And when I asked the people who were interviewing me, who were generally the owners, why are you, why do you hire people who were trained in Europe? Why are there no Americans? They said the training here is a few months and

• 23:29Speaker 00

  we're used to several years. The training's not, not good enough for my clients, for these clients. So yes, I could have got a job. In fact, I was offered jobs at each of the salons I interviewed at as an independent contractor, which is very common in our industry. So I'd be working for myself, but in fact, working in their salon. And, but what Raymond and I were discussing was the big opportunity, oh my goodness, what are we talking about? There is no, there were no skin therapists here and we're in Los Angeles, we're in California, where I thought everyone was going to be getting a skin treatment every three minutes because that was sort of the myth of the States, especially LA, was not true at all. It was makeup and hair. It wasn't skincare, it wasn't spa. There's no such thing as a

• 24:15Speaker 00

  day spa. There was no such thing as a skin treatment. There was no such thing as microneedling or any of the rest of it that we think of now. That was an industry that had to be established. And so we started a company called the International Dermal Institute. And the purpose of our, it was a training programme. I'd got my teaching qualification in South Africa as a skincare therapy teacher.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  And I'd done, you know, several years' experience in the industry, wrote the curriculum, and our goal was to bridge the gap in training between what was the California State Board License, which was 600 hours, about four months of training, and the two- or three-year full-time training that was common in Europe. And so in doing that, that would that would upskill the professional skin therapists to be able to start an industry that we then would continue to train. So it was almost like training your own industry, and that's exactly how it started. And, you know, we knew this would be a huge opportunity, despite

• 25:21Speaker 00

  many people telling us we were crazy, because if it was such a good idea, why wasn't it already here? Yeah, that's a common thing to entrepreneurs. If it's such a good idea, how come no one thought of it before now?

• 25:33Steven Bartlett?

  And how did that go? So you you launched that that sort of sort of training

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Eighty-three, the year I got here.

• 25:39Steven Bartlett?

  And how did it go? Year one?

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Year one. So really well. And I'll tell you why it went well, because in that year, okay, so I got here in January eighty-three, we're now in December nineteen eighty-three, when we incorporated the International Dermal Institute. And we took that year to write the curriculum, do research, do our homework, where were we going to draw these people from? And Raymond got a job selling equipment for a skincare company that sold to salons. So now we were in contact with salons. And Raymond wasn't selling any of this equipment because it was too sophisticated for the training that existed here. So I started doing training for this equipment. And so I spent that whole year training salons how to use this equipment that Raymond was selling on a commission-only basis. He wasn't getting

• 26:27Speaker 00

  a salary. So in order to eat and pay the rent on our one-bedroom apartment, we needed him to start selling some equipment, and I needed to be making money teaching. And that's how we put together our plan, and that's how we put together The idea of the International Dermatologist. So I'd had a year of seeding students and saying, I'm going to be opening a training centre. So rather than me just demonstrating this machine to you, I will be able to teach you all the techniques that I know. And that's going to be aromatherapy, manual lymph drainage, it's going to be waxing, it's going to be reflexology, things that had never even been introduced at that stage, as well as of course, great skincare techniques. So we started the International Dermatologist, classes

• 27:10Speaker 00

  were were filled pretty much straight away. We were charging then seventy five dollars a day. Pretty quickly, it went up to a hundred dollars a day. People were driving to our one classroom in Marina Del Rey, which was walking distance from our apartment because we only had one car and Ray was driving it. And that's how we put it together. And then we built and we built a very successful training programme, which is still the number one advanced training programme in the industry. We train over a hundred thousand skin therapists every year still. So we train around the world. But what I realised in the following

• 27:52Speaker 00

  two years, there was no American made professional salon product. And that was something that you didn't train and get a certificate and leave, you would be purchasing on a repeat basis. So we knew, because that was our background was product as well. We knew that the big opportunity was going to be a product.

• 28:12Steven Bartlett?

  When you think about why the training was so successful, and why you as an individual and your husband succeeded in that, what are the like factors where you think, do you know what, that's the thing that made us different, whether it's character or execution or whatever it is?

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know exactly what it was. I'd love to tell you it was because I wrote the most brilliant curriculum and I am the best teacher, neither of which is true. I wrote a good enough curriculum and I'm a good enough teacher. But what we did, somewhat inadvertently, it's sort of accidentally on purpose, if you know what I mean, community. We knew, because I had been, that skin therapists are isolated. We work in rooms on our own. And the busier you become, the more full your book is with appointments, you're in the treatment room, which is about an eight by 10 room with your client. It's not, and was not then, performed out in the public, like hairdressing.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  When you're a hairdresser, you can look across the salon and see five other people doing your job as you do, and you learn from them, and you're inspired by them, and you have a feeling of community in a salon. And I knew that because I'd been part of full-service salons where they're cutting hair and giving skincare treatments and doing nails. And so we knew that what was missing was this sense of community. All of our students that were coming to the classes, none of them really knew each other. They'd never met other skin therapists, so we're only 2,000 in the whole state, so it wasn't surprising. So we doubled down. Our whole mantra was make every excuse, think of every idea, to bring our people together.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Guest speaker evenings, power breakfasts, working lunches, summer picnics, holiday party. We were doing everything, any idea we saw, from what we saw in a coffee shop to what we saw in a shoe repair shop. We were doing whatever we thought would help us pull people together for the ostensible reason of training in skincare, but in fact was making them into a community. So much so that after about 18 months, two years, my students said to me, you know what, we're like family. And I said, yes, although we don't have the same accents. And they laughed and they said, no, we're not family, we're a tribe.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  It is human nature. That was the core of our success. And what I see now, and in the last two years of Covid, we've never needed it more than now, more than ever, we need human connection. We are sick of our Netflix and our streaming and our everything. We want human connection, we want to see each other, I want to see your smile, I want to see your face. I want to hug you, I want to touch you. And guess what? The industry that I have spent my life in has never been more relevant than now. Because we're the cavalry. That's what we do as our work. We literally touch people. Not because they're to look pretty, pampering, luxury or indulgence.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Because human connection is the deepest form of unconditional love.

• 31:28Steven Bartlett?

  It's such a profound, but seemingly obvious piece of advice for how to build an engaged customer base, how to build great company culture, how to build an audience if you're a social media influencer. But that, but you're right, it's right at the heart of our sort of Maslowian innate human needs is to belong to a tribe.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and what a lot of people do as they become successful, they start to distance themselves from it. They start to think that was, I'm bigger than that, or I'm better than that. What? There's nothing better than being connected to other people in a loving, kind, empathetic way. I talk a lot, you know, in my book, that you know, about empathy and the power of kindness. And I continue to learn that all the time and be accessible. I would always be accessible to my students. When we built our premises, our lunchroom was for students and staff. I would eat lunch in the lunchroom with everyone else. We all did because we wanted, I want to be with everybody else. I don't want to be on my own. I want to be with everyone else.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  And I want everyone else to know that they can be with all of us. We're all in this together. Whether it's somebody, when you own a business and you think you're all that. Well, guess what? The people that are in your janitorial staff, your housekeepers, they're making you look good every day. Because that's the image that people have when they come in. When I go to a restaurant, the first thing I notice is how clean is it? How well cared for is it? Is it loved? Is this space loved? And can I see that it's loved? Are people taking pride in this space? Because all of that is noncommunicate, that's nonverbal communication. And it all matters. And we forget it because we start to think it's us. We're the things, we're the ones, we're the one. It's nonsense, complete and utter nonsense.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  And the minute you start to feel that way, you will fall.

• 33:18Steven Bartlett?

  How would your team members that have worked for you, say, for 10 years, describe you as a leader in terms of that balance you describe of empathy and kindness, and then also strength and decisiveness?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Well, there's a lot of people that have worked, have and had worked for me for more than 10 years. I'm thinking now of Laurie McGregor, who's our Director of Comms, Senior Director of Communications. She's in the studio right now, and I could ask her because she's certainly worked with me closely for many years. I hope they would describe me as fair. I hope they would describe me as kind. I hope they would describe me as accessible. I hope they'd also say I was collaborative because that's what I like to think I am, I believe I am.

• 33:59Steven Bartlett?

  What about the weaknesses?

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Lots, more than I could probably name my strengths. I'm impatient. I want things to be done now rather than tomorrow. It can make me careless. I see the flaws. I see the good, but I also see the flaws. If I walk into a salon and somebody missed a piece of hair that wasn't swept up, I'm going to see it first. I just am. I can't help it. I have that kind of vision. Yes, the product looks amazing. Yes, the lighting is great. Yes, I love your uniform and I love the storefront and the great job you did with the windows. But why the hell is that hair in the corner not swept up? I can't take my eyes off it.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  But I'm also not above going in the back, finding the dustpan and brush and brushing it up myself because I will.

• 34:56Steven Bartlett?

  Will you say it like that?

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  I'll say it just like that.

• 35:00Steven Bartlett?

  You know, when you say it like that?

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:02Steven Bartlett?

  About the hair being on the floor?

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:04Steven Bartlett?

  That it will make people feel a certain way. I'm the same.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:08Steven Bartlett?

  So why do you say it like that?

• 35:11Speaker 00

  Well, I would, I probably, the likelihood would be, I would start that conversation by saying to the person, I'm sorry, do you have a dustpan and brush in the kitchen, in the staff room? And they'll say, uh, yeah, why? I'll say, just, just show me what it is, do you have to do it? And I would come out with a dustpan and brush and I would sweep it up. And then I'd say, because the only thing I could look at when I came in here was that hair in the corner. Now, let's talk about all the great things you do, but let's never forget that that's important. It might be some version of that, but I certainly wouldn't say, I wouldn't walk in and go, I'm sorry, excuse me, before we do anything, I can't see a thing. That hair in the corner, someone sweep it up.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  I wouldn't do that. I'm not a diva, but I am strong and I know what makes a business successful. And I can't allow a business to not hear what my thought is if I think it will make them more successful and I know it will. It's not a matter of taste or style, that's a matter of hygiene. So then I'm fierce.

• 36:16Steven Bartlett?

  And that attention to detail, tell me how important it is in your view, now you've been in business for so long. How important is, because some people say, oh, that's petty.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  No, it's huge. It's everything. The devil and God are in the details. Here's the deal, there is no shortage of a good idea. Lots of people have great ideas every day. The difference, most people can't execute. And if they can execute, they don't execute well. And if they execute well, they can't maintain it. How do you stay relevant and growing in an industry like my industry, cosmetics, makeup, skincare, hair, fashion? How do you stay relevant for almost forty years and stay the leader if you're not paying attention to detail? You'll peak and you'll drop in a quick minute.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  You're going to be a party that happened overnight. You're not going to be a relationship that lasts a lifetime. Two different things, both can be fun, but one is a long game that you're playing. And one is a short term fix that you want. And that's very different. It's like dating and a marriage or dating and a long relationship. You're playing a long game. And for me, business was always about playing the long game. We didn't build Dermalogica to flip it and sell it. We could have done that after three or four years. And if it wasn't going well, we probably would have done. But we were self funded on fourteen thousand dollars, highly profitable, and took it all the way through to acquisition in twenty fifteen by Unilever. And I'm still

• 37:50Speaker 00

  involved with Dermalogica. I still function, my title is chief visionary. And when things are going wrong, or I think you're making the wrong turn, I'm going to tell you. You don't have to listen to me. You don't have to agree with me. But I'm going to, I have to know that I said it, because the details are really important. And most people miss them, or start to think they're petty.

• 38:13Steven Bartlett?

  The other thing you mentioned, which I found fascinating is you added to your list of weaknesses, impatience.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:19Steven Bartlett?

  But you are well aware of the strengths of impatience.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Of course, that's the thing. Whatever is your weakness, flip it. It's like a coin. The other side is your strength. Now, I know that sounds like complete opposite, right? But I'm impatient. So as a weakness, especially when I'm tired, I'm not making tiredness an excuse, but especially when I'm tired, it can make you angry. It can make you short tempered. It can make you rude.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  And so you have to take a moment and get yourself in check, because impatience can also lead to a fast pace, to a quick idea, to a rapid execution, to a sense of urgency, to a sense of excitement, to a sense of enthusiasm, to a definite sense of leadership in the team. So that very quality is your strength and is your weakness. And you have to be able to, I always, I say in the book, you have to have a truth teller. Now, hopefully your truth teller is yourself, so that you can say, that wasn't my best self, or that was not, that was my strength at its weakest moment. And if you don't, if you're not good at being truthful or honest with yourself, you better have somebody around you that is.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Because you'll have a lot of, you know, ass kisses around you, especially when you're successful. Not when you start, but especially when you're successful and you have to know it's not, not necessarily because they're insincere, but they're not going to be your truth tellers. So that's lovely to have and it's lovely maybe for your ego or your, whatever it is for inviting to parties. But you have to have some truth tellers.

• 40:04Steven Bartlett?

  Have you got truth tellers around you?

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:06Steven Bartlett?

  That will tell you when you're, you're out of line or that you've been rude.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:10Steven Bartlett?

  Who are those people?

• 40:11Speaker 00

  My number one truth teller is Raymond.

• 40:13Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  He will tell me he has no filter. He has no ability to edit. He's about the kindest and most generous person I've ever known. He's certainly the smartest person, but he has absolutely no edit button. And I will say to him sometimes, Raymond, I cannot believe you just said that. He said, but it's true. It's true. And he's right. Okay. So that's Raymond. And then I have people in my tight team, Natalie Byrne, who works with me on strategy for our nonprofit. She will call me and has many times, sometimes late at night and say, Jane, I can't stop thinking about this. I think what you said today was off base or off the mark or whatever it is. And we talk about it and she's almost a hundred percent right. And that's, I tell her, Natalie, I love you because you tell me the truth. Don't ever.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  She said, I don't want to hurt your feelings. I said, Natalie, please, you will not hurt my feelings.

• 41:02Steven Bartlett?

  On the point of impatience, one of the things I read that I really resonated with a lot. And it's in fact something that Barack Obama had said when I spoke at a conference with him in Brazil, is this idea of making decisions.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:14Steven Bartlett?

  Before you're a hundred percent. And people really struggle with this, but some people, it's the most liberating thing they can hear. And I've had actually a guest come on this podcast that said, when you said that, that changed my life. I read you, you said the exact same thing. You said, you know, get to 70%.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's my number. I don't even know if that's the real number.

• 41:30Steven Bartlett?

  But it just feels right.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, 70% sounds right. If you've got 70% of the information that you will need to make a decision, make it. Don't, you will not get a hundred percent because by the time you even think you're at a hundred percent, the situation's changed. It needs a decision now. Leadership requires decisiveness and you need to make a decision immediately, whether it's in a war-torn country or whether it is in a strife-driven life. I mean, you need to make the decision. So I would say to people who I would hire, let me give you the lowdown of how this works because most people want to know how do I become successful in this company, let's

• 42:13Speaker 00

  say, or words to that effect. And my answer is always, you will get ten points for making the right decision. You will get no points for making the wrong decision, but you will get minus ten points if you don't make a decision. You can't be in a meeting and not speak up because then you're an audience. I want an audience. You can get a chair and sit over there and listen if you want to, but you must have an opinion and you must state it. That's what you're here for. That's why we want you. Decisiveness is critical because in order to make that decision, I have to hear all the opinions. Doesn't mean I'm going to, it's going to persuade me differently, although it might, but ultimately

• 42:57Speaker 00

  the buck stops with the person who's going to have to make that ultimate decision and you must make it.

• 43:03Steven Bartlett?

  One of the other quotes which I found really interesting and inspiring was that your aim when you started Dambaloga was to piss off the eighty percent and to please the twenty percent. That's, that's a quote taken from your book, Skin in the Game.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, Raymond, that's Raymond's phrase. In fact, what happened was, we were, I won't use the word beauty, and, and so I was bemoaning the fact that, you know, people didn't agree with that. You know, I used to get people saying this, you know, you're running down our industry, you're disgraced to our industry because I wouldn't say I was a beauty therapist and, or a beautician. And I mean, this, these are all great names. I'm happy for you to call yourself anything you want to. It just doesn't apply to me. I don't apply that to my work. So I was having this sort of like rant with Raymond and he said, but we can't be afraid that some people won't like what we say. We have to say it. We actually ran an ad on, based on that conversation, which was Mel, who worked front desk for us, holding

• 43:58Speaker 00

  a sign saying, um, we're not pretty. And at the bottom, we just put the company logo.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  And because, and Ray said, we understand something, this was a team of us marketing. We have to be prepared to piss off eighty percent or we'll never turn on twenty percent. We'll be middle of the road, mediocre, average, palatable, but not definable. That's a product, that's not a brand. A brand has a voice, a brand has a personality. A brand triggers emotional responses. And so that became our kind of watchword in marketing. We need to piss off eighty percent and turn on twenty percent. We don't need everyone to like us. And if we're not being decisive, and if we're not being truthful, and if we're not being

• 44:51Speaker 00

  slightly disruptive, we're not being true to ourselves. And if we're not doing any of that, then everyone's going to like us, but not a lot. No one's going to hate us, but not a lot. And we can't walk that middle ground.

• 45:05Steven Bartlett?

  So it was a couple of years into your training company that you launched Dermalogica.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so nineteen eighty-three, we started the International Dermal Institute. And we launched Dermalogica in January of nineteen eighty-six.

• 45:20Steven Bartlett?

  And the resistance you faced, talk to me about the resistance and the challenges you faced in trying to launch that company, because I know there were plenty.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Well, at that time, everything was sort of, the industry was segmented into cosmetics. That included skincare, hair care, makeup, whatever you can think of, artifice, decoration. That's why I don't ever put skincare in the cosmetic industry, which is an amazing industry, and I love it. But it's not my industry. My industry is skincare. It's very specific and it's different. And it's closely related to nutrition, healthcare, and self-care. So, and human connection. So therefore, when we started, we wanted to form this hybrid between a cosmetic and a pharmaceutical.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  There was nothing in the middle of those two things then, nineteen eighty six. But remember, this is conversations happening in eighty five, because we launched in eighty six. So we wanted to put together this thing between the two. So what did that mean? It had to look like a pharmaceutical, but perform like a cosmetic. It had to be cosmetically elegant, but it couldn't look luxury. It couldn't be a pink jar with a gold lid. So all of that idea of branding influenced what our voice was going to be. The name, Derma means skin, Logica means sensible, sense. Simple, serious and unique. That was kind of our mantra. So we, we took a lot of pushback for that. We were told our packaging's ugly.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Uh, why don't you use jars? Jars are, you know, the industry standard and they're disgusting. And because they contaminate with bacteria, not just from your hands, but also because we tend to use our products in bathrooms now, not at dressing tables in your dressing room. And in a bathroom, E. coli bacteria is airborne. There's more bacteria in your bathroom than anywhere else. So you really don't want that in a jar of cream. It's like people have a bar of soap in their shower and they take that bar and somebody uses the bar and washes their bits and pieces. And the next person gets in and washes their face. It's disgusting. So we were talking about all of this and we were getting pushed back. And we just, we just weathered it.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  And I spoke at a big conference for the industry in Glasgow, a world conference in nineteen eighty seven. And I was speaking about this kind of thing. And after I had twenty five minutes assigned to me for my presentation. And after, I think it was about nine minutes, the organizers came up and switched the mic off and asked me to leave the stage. Cause they said what I was talking about was counterpoint to. Kind of anarchy in the industry. And what I was talking about was that salons should not be gender specific, that we shouldn't have male salons and female salons. In fact,

• 48:26Speaker 00

  there is no gender binary. And we should sell product in our salons because clients need to have product to take home and maintain the results they just paid us for in the treatment room. And apparently me suggesting that there is no binary in a target market for our work, skincare, and skincare is not a luxury, it should be a necessity for everyone, and we should retail products, was deemed to be an anarchy in the industry. Now, it pissed off probably eighty percent of the people, I guess, in that room, I don't know. But

• 49:05Speaker 00

  the twenty percent of skin therapists who heard that message crowded our stand there at the trade show that was part of that conference and applauded. When I got back to our booth, there were a crowd of skin therapists applauding because they were waiting to have a business, a profession, an industry to be proud of. And it was not a hobby, or something I did for pin money, or something I did on the side, or something that, you know, it's my little thing, I love skin, I don't make any money at it. They said, we need a career, we need a profession, we need an industry and a voice that'll speak for us because

• 49:47Speaker 00

  we love this work and we want it to be profitable. Otherwise, how do we pay the rent? And so that was my rallying call. The twenty percent were always my tribe.

• 49:59Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's, it's so unbelievably important, especially as it relates to marketing and branding, to, to have a perspective to stand for something, or else you fall into this category of like indifference and people trying to please everyone and pleasing no one, as you say.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:11Steven Bartlett?

  I, you know, the, the business did phenomenally well as well. So Dermalogica, you made a million dollars roughly in your first year.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:17Steven Bartlett?

  Eventually, that business gets acquired by Unilever. Your other company, still to this day, is going incredibly strong. As you say, it's the, the number one in the world in its category. I think I read that you had one thousand four hundred employees.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:30Steven Bartlett?

  Or something like that.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:31Steven Bartlett?

  Staggering.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:33Steven Bartlett?

  And that business generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year. How hard did you have to work? How many hours were you working in those early Dermalogica days?

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Oh, it's a blur. Twenty four.

• 50:46Steven Bartlett?

  Twenty four, wow.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  No, seriously, um, the minute we woke up, seven o'clock earlier, if it was something, you know, we were fretting about, or a trade show that we had to pack up and go all the way through till we fell asleep. I don't, there is no work-life balance. It's all your big messy life. You know, people who say, how do you balance your life and your work? I know that they hate one of those two parts in their own life. I've never wanted to. My, it's not that my life is my work or my work is my life. It's all part of my life. And I want all of it. So I try and make it happen. I can't do it all at the same

• 51:27Speaker 00

  time. I waited till I was thirty six to have my first child. I really thank God that I was able to have two children and kind of snuck in what I feel under the, under the rope. And a lot of people, that, that doesn't happen for them. I feel really grateful for that. But the reason, one of the reasons we put off having children was we, we were just working so hard and traveling. It was word of mouth. Well, there was no social media. There were no influencers. The influencers were our skin therapists. And if to word of mouth meant you had to find someone and tell them. So we were working every trade show. I was flying to New York where all the magazines were being published. And with my box of products, when I was literally sitting in the lobby of Conde Nast, hoping

• 52:12Speaker 00

  that any one of the editors from any one of their magazines, you know, please God, it might be Vogue, will come downstairs and I can grab them in the lobby before they get out the door, or see them as they get in the elevator. That was before they had secure elevators. So you could get into the elevator with someone and give them a literally an elevator pitch before they got to the fourteenth floor where their magazine was. And I, and I was lonely and I was scared and I would go to Vogue and, and, you know, all the magazines or Hearst Publishing and, and just sit there with my little box of products thinking, what am I doing? I was just like, pull it together because you've got to keep watching those doors when those elevator doors open. If it's someone, you've got to go over and say, one minute and press that sampler of skin prep scrub into their

• 52:57Speaker 00

  hands. And, and it worked.

• 53:01Steven Bartlett?

  What's the cost of that, though, that working, you know, seven days a week, tremendous hours, what is the cost?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  I think the greatest cost is friendships. I had friends who really were annoyed that we were just never available. Me as a person and Ray and I as a couple, because we came as a couple, really. So we were never available for Sunday brunch. We couldn't go out on a Saturday night because I was teaching on a Sunday. I taught every Sunday. We were running errands on a Saturday. We were doing laundry every night after the class. And we lost a lot of friends that I look back and I'm sorry that we lost them because I liked them. And I thought that our friendship might have a shot at withstanding it. But the friends who are still our friends understood it. And they talk about it now and say, oh, my goodness, remember when? And we say, yes, you know, I would, I would invite everyone for dinner, but we were having Indian takeout.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Because I couldn't cook. I mean, not I can cook, but I didn't have time to, I didn't have time to do the shopping. There was no Instacart. We kept our closest friends and our dearest friends are still with us. But I think friendship is the thing, the thing you lose.

• 54:08Steven Bartlett?

  Did you have to, because I'm, I'm thinking, once upon a time, I, I am, I was in a relationship with someone I worked with. Did you have to make time, like, you know, romance time?

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Date night?

• 54:18Steven Bartlett?

  Date night and all that stuff. Did you, have you ever done anything like that?

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Never, I've never had a date night.

• 54:22Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 54:22Speaker 00

  No, I don't, how does that work? So you say, we're going on a date on Thursday.

• 54:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  So then we go on a date, so we're going out to dinner, maybe, whatever you're doing, you're walking on the beach. You're having alone time with that person. And do you not talk about anything other than your relationship?

• 54:39Steven Bartlett?

  I, I don't know, you talk about the food on the menu and I don't know, the music or, you know.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  And then there's sort of pressure that you're going to have sex or whatever.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  I'm just wondering, I've never done a date night because. I can't even, I know what Raymond would say, because we've talked about it. And I've said to him, do you want to go on a, like, if you've ever heard about this date night? This is like years ago, and he goes, what's that? And I said, you know, where you get together with your partner and you talk about things that, you just talk about yourselves, I guess, or like your relationship, the things that are important, important. Um, what do you think about that? He's looked at me, he said, don't we do that every night? And the answer is, yes, I mean, for our relationship, I'm not for one second saying you shouldn't have a date night. We know that Barack Obama and Michelle Obama used to famously have their date nights. I'm just not sure that Ray and I would be able to keep a straight face on it. We talk about everything all the time. If we're upset with each other, we say, I'm really upset with what you said to me yesterday.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  I just felt like you weren't listening to me. Or, um, we went to a dinner party and I kept trying to catch your eye at the dinner table, because I was sat next to this ridiculous crazy person who was like saying the biggest conspiracy theories in the world to me, and you wouldn't look at me. You've got to remember, we've got to look at each other so I can catch your eye. For us, it's just one big messy relationship. And, um, we never took our personal arguments to work. Uh, we did used to bring work conversations home. We called them fierce conversations. But Ray and I are the kind of couple that we will, we call it, you know, you put the mattresses against the wall. You, you stay in the room, mattresses against the wall, until you have figured it out

• 56:17Speaker 00

  and you are not leaving this room until we do. And we will reach, we will reach a point of agreement, and we will.

• 56:27Steven Bartlett?

  So you don't let that resentment sort of foster?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  No, try not to. Sometimes it's inevitable. It still bugs me, some things that Raymond does. I know that I annoy the hell out of him sometimes, but nothing that's important enough to not be playing a long game for life with this person.

• 56:44Steven Bartlett?

  You made a comment earlier on about therapy. And I thought it was, I wasn't sure if it was flippant or serious, but have you ever been to therapy? And what, what for?

• 56:53Speaker 00

  I had not seen a therapist, although I now realise I really should have. I'm quite positive about that, until, um, about five years ago. And what happened five years ago, it was pretty soon after we'd sold the company, which was momentous, but I felt like I was dealing with it fine. Um, Raymond lost his father, passed away.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  We had a house in Santa Barbara that we were, that was our forever house. We, we went up to Santa Barbara, we raised our kids every summer up there. It's a beach community about eighty miles north of Los Angeles. That's our go-to place where we feel safe, we feel protected. If we ever had a, a staff event that we wanted to have a small group and discuss stuff, we would do it in Santa Barbara. We had meetings there, we, it was just like our place. And we had this great house, like a farmhouse, and, and I loved the garden and I, I replanted the garden and I, I, I loved the house.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  And in January of twenty eighteen, Santa Barbara had a massive fire, the Thomas Fire. And soon after, there was flash flooding and a giant mudslide from the mountains above. And our house was destroyed. And if we had been in it, which we were not, and the only reason we were not is this mudslide happened the late hours of January eighth, early morning, January ninth. And Lucy, our youngest child's birthday is January eighth, and we came back to LA to celebrate it with her friends here. If we'd been in our house in Santa Barbara, we wouldn't have made it out. A huge, massive boulder came straight through the master bedroom, which was on the ground

• 58:44Speaker 00

  floor. And we would have, we would have been killed. That was the tipping point for me. And to begin with, I felt like I just wasn't coming to terms with the fact that we'd lost the house and Raymond was becoming really worried about me. And he kept saying, Jane, I cannot believe you're attaching this much to a, to a place, to a house, to a possession, to our stuff. It's stuff. Like, we're safe. And for some reason, I just couldn't put it down. I couldn't get through it. I, I was carrying it with me like a weight. And I wasn't sleeping and I started not sleeping and I went for forty-one nights with less than forty, four hours sleep a night.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  I clocked it. And I went to see my doctor who said, I, I think you need to, we need to book you into the sleep clinic at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles. And there was a three month waitlist. So I decided I was going to go talk to my doctor about sleeping tablets. And I went and he recommended Ambien.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  And I'd never taken Ambien. And I, and I really didn't know if I wanted to start taking that. And he casually said, well, maybe, you know, psychologically, there's a reason you're not sleeping. So I decided I'd go see a psychiatrist who I knew. Our youngest child had had an eating disorder and had seen this person, this doctor. And I went to her and I said, I'm not sleeping. And she said, let me do some cognitive testing, which she did. And then she said, okay, you are, did you drive here? And I said, yeah. And she said, you shouldn't drive home. You're cognitively should not, you should not be driving. We've got to get you sleeping. And through trial and error, she tried every sleeping tablet on the market and I, nothing helped me. 10 milligrams of milligram didn't help.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  I'd wake up after three hours. And ultimately she said, Jane, you don't have an insomnia problem. You have an anxiety problem. And I had to dig in and deal with it. And of course, as I dug into losing the house, it wasn't about the house. The house was representative of every loss I've ever had in my life, going all the way back to when I was two and three quarters years old and lost my father. Had to go all the way back and dig in and unpack it and realize why, not who I am, but why I am who I am. Had that not happened, had I not been able to unpack all of that? And then realize how much I had in that suitcase?

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  And which pieces it was okay to put in a cupboard and close it? No, it's there, but not have to wear it every day? And which were the bits I needed to wear every day? Cause it was so much part of who I am. I, I know I couldn't have written the book and I don't know that I would be in the place I am today.

• 1:01:41Steven Bartlett?

  Is it the awareness of what's going on in the suitcase that that is the liberating thing? Or is there also like tools and techniques and strategies of dealing with triggers or moments that?

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  I think it's both. But for me, what has been successful is having the right questions asked. And you're excellent at this, so you know this. How did that make you feel? Or what were you thinking then? Or what did you do immediately after that? And not having that person tell me therefore what happened, but allowing me to think, oh, that's, that's interesting. I had a bath, or whatever it might be, you know. And then slowly over the next, sometimes it's a few days, sometimes it's a few months, sometimes a couple of years, you start to realise, I'm seeing a pattern here. There's

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  a pattern here that I'm recognising in myself. And then, for me, the tools, I get given tools to try, encouraged to try, try thinking about it this way. One thing when I would talk about my childhood, for example, and I was ashamed that I didn't have a father. And I've, and I felt ashamed when my mother started to develop Alzheimer's and was still socially active, but clearly not herself. I've reframed that as how proud I am of my parents. And I am. And I'm proud of my mum's fortitude and I'm proud of her determination.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  And I can talk with pride about my mother and father and not feel anything else, not feel any other emotion, other than of course, love. And I'm really grateful for that. And I think that a lot of people not laugh at therapy, but knock it. And I think it's because it's probably the single most terrifying thing you ever do, is really look deep at your choices and actions and behaviours. And it's much.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Kinder to oneself to just keep it packed up. We can keep that locked away. We don't need to discuss it. Don't look at that. Stop talking about that. You don't need to talk about that. That's over. That's in the past. Why do you keep talking about that? Don't. You don't need to. You're okay now. Oh, best not to bother. Best not to. Leave well alone. I've heard all that my whole life. I mean, that I grew up under that, not just from my family, but from people. And I realise now, no, I think that's the only way you really find who you are. And maybe you can do it with best friends helping you. Maybe you can do it as a client of a skincare therapist who listens to everything you tell them. And if you do, that's great.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  But however it works for you, find the way that helps you examine, because a life unexamined is a life not lived.

• 1:04:41Steven Bartlett?

  So, so interesting. You know, I sit here with lots of guests on this podcast and many of them have taken the, taken the leap or made the decision at some point to go to therapy and to start kind of unpacking things that have happened to them in their life. And yet, I still, and they speak to the profound impact, positive impact it's had on their life. And yet, I still, as I sit here today, definitely feel a stigma myself about going.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's okay. You're twenty eight.

• 1:05:07Steven Bartlett?

  I'm twenty nine, yeah.

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  Twenty nine. Okay. So definitely people told me, many people I was in relationships, told me in my twenties that, you know, you should see someone or, you know, and I, to me, there was a stigma. There was nothing wrong with me. And I had good friends I could talk to, and I had sisters I could tell. But none of them are completely as objective as we think they might be. And of course, it's not completely confidential. And I'm now sixty three. I'm going to be sixty four next Saturday. And I think there's a point where we start to be ready. And if not, not. And you'll know when it is, because your body will tell you. It won't be your mind. It won't be the stigma. It'll be something I thought I had insomnia.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  I could have just probably started swallowing Ambien and thinking, oh, well, this doesn't work either. I guess I'm just getting older and I don't sleep. But you see, I wasn't able to function without sleeping. So my body literally took me to a place where I had to ask for help. And it took all those years. And so it's okay that there's a stigma. It's okay. You don't want to do it, then don't do it. It's not, maybe it's not right for you now, probably not very much to unpack, even though you feel like there's a lot. And maybe you haven't seen the pattern repeat itself enough for you to think, oh, it's not that person or that person. This is actually my pattern.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I just think all of us should find our way however we can.

• 1:06:44Steven Bartlett?

  The symptoms, the symptoms culminated, well, you're the unpacked suitcase culminated in this insomnia later in your life.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Steven Bartlett?

  But now in hindsight, now that you've been and you've spoken about it and you've unpacked these things and understood them better. Can you identify other symptoms that were present at other phases in your life? Or was it just at that point when you got insomnia that you thought, well, I need to, was there other?

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  I see it all the way. Yeah, I see. I used to pride myself that I left a relationship before anyone left me.

• 1:07:17Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, right.

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  And I think because of that fear of being the one left alone, I would self sabotage relationships, whether they be friendships or whether they be personal intimate relationships.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  And that might work very well until you have children. And that changes everything for me. Well, because you are forced, I tell a story in my book about my youngest child, Lucy. Before cell phones, we had established a routine of we all had breakfast together. Ray and I always ate breakfast together, even if it was a banana and a cup of tea stood in the kitchen. And then as we had children, we would literally take 10 minutes to just sit around the table and have a piece of toast, a bowl of cereal, whatever. And just say, you know, have a great day and it, you know, you didn't have to have any kind of profound conversation, just be present.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  And with cell phones, I started to get, you know, emails and texts coming in from our markets in Europe that were already four o'clock in the afternoon, at eight o'clock in the morning. You know that. You're nodding now. Of course you do. So we had a twenty four hour business. And so I started to get into the habit of just checking, just quickly, just checking my emails and texts before I sat down to breakfast. And then I would walk Lucy to the bus stop for school. And then it got to where I would check them before I sat down for breakfast so that I knew what was on my plate. And then I'd walk her to school. And then it got to, I would check them and then maybe I couldn't sit down for breakfast because I had to just quickly answer this text. You know how that goes. It's a slippery slope. But I'm so busy and I'm successful and

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  I'm working. I'm not fooling around. I'm not like, you know, reading the the comics or anything at the back of the paper. I'm working. I mean, I'm answering a crisis. There's a crisis in New Zealand. So I was on my phone and and earlier I'd come down at like six thirty and I was busy scrolling and I had to quickly answer. There was a catastrophe. It was a bit of a disaster happening in the UK and I had to answer them. They needed an answer now because it was the end of the day there. And Lucy came downstairs and she said, morning, ma'am. And I said, and I didn't say, I just kind of like nodded and said, waved at her like, hi, hi. She sat down and I was busy texting, texting, looking at something. And she said, and then from the chair, she got up

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  from the table and she said, ma'am. And I said, Lucy, just one minute, hang on. And I'm, ma'am. And I said, Lucy, just one minute, please. And carry on. And she said, ma'am, I just, and I said, Lucy, please, can you not see I'm busy? I've got a whole thing happening in the UK and I have to get back to them. And I suddenly saw her eyes well up. And I said, Lucy, for goodness sake, what is wrong? And she said, I wanted to give you a hug. You look so cross.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  And it was, I was just stood there with this stupid bloody phone in my hand and my child in front of me, looking scared of me.

• 1:10:35Speaker 00

  And I just put down the phone, I got on my knees, I gave her a big hug and I said, Lucy, I'm so sorry. And she started crying, then I started crying, I said, Lucy, I'm so sorry. There is nothing more important than you and being here right now. I got distracted by business, it's not acceptable, I promise you, it will never happen again. And I made a rule, it never did. Doesn't make me any more perfect a parent. My mum was very busy, she worked a lot. It's not about that. It's about knowing when the moment, it's not a long, a moment is important to pay attention.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  And that day, at least for that person, my child, when someone says, mum, I'm listening.

• 1:11:23Steven Bartlett?

  How do you make sure that despite the crisis that might emerge at any given moment in any day, and also just the general gravitational pull that business has because of the allure that you can be more successful or make more money? How do you make sure that you are allocating your time against your true priorities, like spending time with your children, or like friendships, or like your husband? Because we both know that we could just spend all of our time just doing business.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Steven Bartlett?

  So how do you?

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  I really think about, is this a true emergency? Or is it a rush of adrenaline because being able to solve this or do something about this is making me feel relevant, important, special, needed, bigger?

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  And if it's for any of those reasons, it can wait.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  Your ego can wait. Or is this moment not as much about me, but about the people I love or their need to show me love? It's it's not easy because we're impatient. So we get caught up in that rush. And that's the thing that made us successful. That's the thing that drives us. That's the thing that without that we wouldn't be us. And yet,

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  take a breath and just say, okay, wait a minute. Does this have to be done right now? While I've got this other person, my child, my husband, my partner, my mother, my wife, fill in the blank. Or could it wait four minutes? Could it wait an hour? Could it wait till tonight? Could it wait till next week? Does it actually have to be answered? And trust me, if it is a TikTok or a social media thing or anything like that, I will tell you the answer now. You know it. It does not have to be answered right away. I don't care if you've got two million followers, twenty two million, one hundred and twenty.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  It doesn't have to be answered right away unless literally it is an emergency. So just take a beat, take a minute and decide who needs this time the most. And sometimes it's not another person, it's you.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  Sometimes you need that minute the most. I need this minute for me now. So take a break and go and have that time for yourself because you need that as well.

• 1:14:01Steven Bartlett?

  I heard one of the things you said as advice to entrepreneurs is to first and foremost, make sure you are one.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  Make sure you are. Listen, not everyone's an entrepreneur. It sounds like the cool thing to be, right? The sexy thing is to be an entrepreneur. Some people are not cut out to be entrepreneurs. To be an entrepreneur, it's not just that you are a risk taker. I don't, I hate hearing, it's just so tired, cliched to say, you know, entrepreneurs are great risk takers. Entrepreneurs are not frightened of being scared. Let's say that. It's not that we're not scared. We are, but we'll deal with it. Courage, bravery is not the absence of fear. It's the presence of fear and still being able to function. So that you have to have, you also have to be decisive, you have to be able to make a decision. You have to um have seventy percent and make a call. Not everyone has that and you don't have to.

• 1:14:52Speaker 00

  You can also have a bit of that and be an intrapreneur. So you think entrepreneurially within someone else's company. Which is fine, that's like playing in Vegas without using your own chips. Uh but it's not the rush of using your own chips, you know, the entrepreneur, we're using our own chips and it's once you get, it's easy to risk a few chips when you haven't got many on the table. When the chips start stacking up and you wanna put everything on red twenty two. Well, that's gonna be a huge gamble. So it's that kind of energy, it's very different. So you've got entrepreneurs, you have entrepreneurs, you also have, I think, two kinds of entrepreneurs. You've got entrepreneurs that are serial entrepreneurs. They flip it, then they build it and flip it, build it and flip it.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  And they they're very good at starting things, but they can't follow, they don't want to follow through and grow it. And then you get a long, long player like, like me and Raymond, where you build one company or two and you grow it into an acquisition and that defines your entrepreneurship. Both are great, either are fine. You have to find what your path is and you find that by finding what your purpose is and what's your fastest route to get there. And for us, it was entrepreneurship, but it's not for everybody and neither should it be. And that's the, that's the magic, find, find your path.

• 1:16:12Steven Bartlett?

  I know you weren't intent on selling Dermalogica, especially in the early years, but you ultimately did.

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:16:19Steven Bartlett?

  Two questions.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Steven Bartlett?

  Question one is, the week after you sell Dermalogica, how did you feel about it? And the second thing is, why? Why did you choose to sell the company?

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  Euphoric.

• 1:16:31Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  Yes, and I'll tell you why, because we knew exactly why we were selling. Um. I I don't know if it ever feels that way if you resell, you sell regretfully or because of a, some other reason. But the reason we sold was we felt strongly, we had taken Dermalogica.

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  To as far as we could run it. We were, not that there were other people that were so much more clever than us out there. I did think that in the early days, that there must be someone who knows all these answers. But then you realize pretty quickly, people don't, no one has the answers. And no one knows your business better than you do. So it wasn't that so much, that if, we thought of it as a relay race. Raymond and I ran the first leg, but you're running so fast and so hard, at your fullest capacity. You can't possibly run the second, third and fourth legs. So you have to pass that baton into a different kind of runner, who the second leg is a different kind of runner, as is the third leg, and guess what? The fourth leg is the one that's got to take it home. So we felt very strongly about that.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  We had rule, we didn't need, we didn't want to go to an IPO. Because we don't play well in the sandbox with other people. Could we have promoted someone from within and like stayed on as benevolent, you know, owners? No, I mean, we were aging out. We were definitely, you know, we realized our relevancy was going to, was going to wane. What we knew and what we knew how to do, life was changing, the world was changing. It was time. We knew you've got to know when to leave the party. I don't know about you, but I'm very good at knowing when to leave the party.

• 1:18:07Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I am, yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  And Raymond is excellent at knowing when I should leave the party too. And so he said, this is the time. The time is, we've got to pass the baton and it's going to be an acquisition. And then in the book, Skin in the Game, I tell the story of the acquisition. Because the likely suspects of who would acquire us, people in the cosmetic industry, in prestige, sure, they were at the table at the beginning. But at the end of the day, what guided us was a shared value system. And the shared value system was Unilever. And we're still with them. And we appointed our first CEO when we sold. He's still our CEO. He's terrific. The team stayed on board. Ray and I have stayed involved. The company continues going strength to strength. They're in double digit growth.

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  So we know we chose the right partner. So we felt euphoric about it. And now I feel gratified that we did the right thing. Promise you, I don't miss it a bit. And I'm incredibly proud of what we did.

• 1:19:08Steven Bartlett?

  Guess that's when you know it's the right time.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Steven Bartlett?

  You built wealth over many, many years from two different businesses. So this, even the acquisition of Unilever, I'm guessing wasn't a life changing in terms of the fundamentals of your life moment.

• 1:19:19Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:19:20Steven Bartlett?

  Right. So when you think about those two wonderful daughters you have and leaving them that, that money.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  Oh God, yeah.

• 1:19:26Steven Bartlett?

  You know what question I'm gonna say?

• 1:19:28Speaker 00

  Ask me.

• 1:19:28Steven Bartlett?

  Cause you're, you know, much of your tenacity and your hunger has come from not having it. I remember hearing the stories of you like looking down the back of the sofas for coins when you were younger.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Steven Bartlett?

  All these things that you did. Are you scared that your kids won't have that same tenacity and hunger if you leave them your, your wealth?

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. And let me tell you something, they're 23 and 28. We better have done a good enough job by now because you're not changing, I don't know that you can change someone at 23 or 28. You couldn't have changed me at 23 or 28. We, we, um, we raised them in the house that we bought way before the acquisition. We bought it 18 years before the acquisition. Um, we live in a nice neighborhood. We don't live in a gaily community. I don't live in a mansion. I never had live in help or anything like that. I didn't want it. It's not who I am. It's not my value system. It's not Raymond's. We raised them in as normal a childhood as anyone has. I never had, I mean, who had a normal childhood?

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  I think they have a very strong value system. They're aware that they are incredibly fortunate. They also know that a sense of purpose means how does it benefit other people? And that wealth is a burden if you don't figure out how it can benefit others and give you some sense of gratitude at having it. So yes, of course we've done estate planning and of course we don't want to see our children not taken care of. And they will also understand how they're going to take care of other people, people they know, and also people that they don't know and will never meet. Cause that's part of it. If you are given this kind of opportunity, you have.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  A responsibility, whereas I like to call it another equal and opposite opportunity to do something with it. And I think if you don't recognise that pretty quickly, it becomes a burden and can lead to incredible unhappiness. And I really hope that Ray and I have done the right things to make sure that doesn't happen. I feel pretty good so far.

• 1:21:31Steven Bartlett?

  I have a high degree of confidence that you have by how you've delivered that because it seems to be very well thought through. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the previous guest writes a question for the next guest and I don't get to see it until I open this book. So on a scale of one to 10 of self-love, how much do you accept yourself, have positive thoughts about yourself, have healed your wounds and fully love who you are authentically? One being you don't love yourself at all and 10 being you love yourself authentically.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  I love myself authentically, 10. And it's taken me help and support and trust and faith to get there, but I honestly do with my flaws. It's not that I think I'm perfect, it's that I am always learning and I'm open to being better.

• 1:22:22Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:22:23Steven Bartlett?

  It's a beautiful sense of sort of self empathy to that.

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm kind to myself.

• 1:22:28Steven Bartlett?

  Well, thank you so much, Jane. Honestly, I learnt so much just from researching your life and your book, the sort of human vulnerable, honest nature, whilst also this constant undertone of real actionable advice is what makes it so important. I think that's the best use of words. Thank you.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  Thanks.