Dermalogica: Jane Wurwand (2016)

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Go to npr.org slash summit. Oh, and this episode, we originally ran it back in the fall of 2016. Hope you enjoy it. We went to a contract manufacturing. And told him I'll be able to do that. To do that. Ninety-nine percent of everyone that sits opposite me telling me this story. But for some crazy reason. I think you've got to be a little bit more. Interesting and I want to be in for the wrong.

how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Roz and on today's show how Jane Whirwind went from doing facials for women at a beauty parley.

Thermologic. So the story about Jane Werwind 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 nineteen fifties, and

Jane's mom happened to have a skill. She was a qualified nurse. So even though she hadn't worked for many, many years, she was able to find a job and also pass along an important lesson. When my mum's saying to my sisters and mother How to do something. Learn how to do something. She was absolutely adamant that we each of us had. 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. So when she was old enough, Jane Rowan decided on her skill. She'd become what was called at the time a beautician. And right after she got her qualification at age nineteen, she started looking for work. I decided quite honestly, it sounds so flippant now, but it was freezing cold. It was the winter of nineteen seventy seven. I think it's one of the coldest on record.

And I'm reading the Sunday paper and I wanna see where is the hottest place on earth because I d I have to feel better about this freezing cold flat that I'm living in. So I look at the weather in the Sunday paper and it said Johannesburg, South Africa. It was like a hundred and seven degrees. I'm like, Oh my god, I wish I was in Johannesburg, South Africa and as I turn the page, it's like the universe sending me a sign.

There's a quarter page advertisement from the South African government saying if you meet our prerequisite kind of qualifications we will pay an assisted passage for you to emigrate to South Africa as long as you agree to live there for two years. And I thought, Good grief. I could be in Johannesburg in a month. and um they had a list of ten careers That they wanted to recruit to South Africa and they were all vocational training. The number one was butchers, the number two was patisseras.

Third was a hairstylist and the fourth was a beauty therapist. And there I am. Six weeks later I was on a flight to Johannesburg. And and so when you got there were were you actually able to find a job? Yeah. And when I got to Cape Town I sat in this immigration hotel and I picked up the yellow pages and I literally started calling salons in the yellow pages to see if they would hire me and by five thirty that evening I had a job.

W was it was it weird to live there at the time? I mean, what was it like to be there? It was completely different to anything I'd ever experienced. You know, I remember my first day going to work, I was taking a bus. And the buses kept coming, I kept putting up my arm and they weren't stopping and I couldn't figure out what was going on because on the front of the bus it said C point and that's where I was going to work.

And a woman at the bus stop finally said to me, You're not they're not gonna stop for you because on the bus at the front it said ni blanc and it means non white. And I said, W what? And she said, Well you have to wait for a bus for white people and I'm like, What? Anyway, so that was um one of my first introductions. I I had never seen it, obviously, I'd never seen anything like that. Yeah, it must have been it must have been strange.

When you were there w in in South Africa, were you m more or less doing the same thing that you'd been doing in London? Yeah, skincare, manicures, pedicures, everything that I'd been doing. and trained to do and in love with the industry and and feeling so happy that I had this training. Because literally

as odd as it sounds, I know I could walk out of of well, I could walk out of the studio today. I'll have a job by tomorrow because there is a such a demand for the work we do and if you're skilled at it and you're good at it and you love it, you're gonna get work.

So how how long did you end up living there? I lived in South Africa for four years. And is that where you uh where you met your husband? Yeah, I met him in South Africa. He's from Cape Town. And um he was already in process. For a green card for the United States.

And while we were dating his green card came through and I mean I I can't even explain how exciting it is. It is like getting the golden ticket in a Willy Wonka chocolate bar. It's it's so hard to emigrate 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 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 LA and

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

And uh had no idea that there was an unemployment rate of ten point four percent in California at that point. It's always good not to know these things, you know, because otherwise you'll put yourself off. Right, right. And so my boyfriend had been looking for a job months, couldn't find anything, was living in a one bedroom apartment in Marina Del Rey, ready to take anything.

And uh and I landed and I said, alright, well I'm gonna get a job in a salon. So I'm gonna start calling my trusty, you know, yellow pages. And the first thing that struck me was there were hardly any advertisements. for skincare salons. They were mostly just like hair and yeah. Yeah, and I'm like, it's 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 um elitist expensive 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 the skincare treatments were all European. I could, you know, hear their actions.

So when I had my interview, um they said, Do you have any questions? And I said, Yeah, I do have a question. Why? I just noticed all the people are American on the front desk and all the people in the treatment rooms are European. And the woman who owned it, who was French, said to me, Well, it's really simple. The Americans have horrible training, they don't know how to give a skin treatment, and the Europeans can't sell.

So I m that's 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. Uh 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? 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 make up. There was nothing on skincare. The dermatologists were all saying, Oh, you can use anything, you can use soap and water Right. 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 audience. for the next era in skincare.

So at th at that point did you like what did you do? I went back, sat with Raymond, my partner, and he was Now your not your husband. No, we weren't married then. We was we were just dating and living together. 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. It was like equipment to do what? To do skincare, to do steaming and exfoliation and it was brand new cutting edge and he wasn't selling a piece. He was going like door to door to salon to salon trying to sell it? Yeah. And so they were saying we don't even understand what it is you're selling.

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

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

Skin therapist, then called an aesthetician. And we were going to take everyone who was licensed and we were going to bridge it to the two That we felt would bring them up to a level of proficiency where they could be successful. So the goal was really We're gonna make skin therapy. No successful. and able to run their own business.

So so the idea was that you guys would open up a school and you would you would train them? Both you and Ray? Yeah. So Ray was gonna still sell equipment, he was gonna stay on the road, I was going to I was gonna use the sell the equipment after the class. And we called it the International Dermal Institute. How did you even have

Cash to start a to to open up a No cash. Yeah. 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.'Cause there's like long lines of people waiting for their checks every day, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Fantastic. We had sitting, you know, people waiting to receive skin treatment. So we rented it and then we got the equipment from the Japanese manufacturer, put that in and we were off to the races and now the challenge was

Who were we going to train? Because we didn't know anybody. Right. I mean we just h you you you hung a shingle out, but like people had to know like who you were. Well, so we knew that our target market were licensed aestheticians. So in other words, they had to already be licensed.

to work in the industry. So I called the State Board of Cosmetology in Sacramento, California And I called them and I said, Do you have a list of of everyone licensed in the state of california to perform skin care treatments and it was a very short list it was like 2300 names and they said yes we do and i said is that list available, is it public record? And they said yes. And I said, can you sell me the list? And they said, yes, we can sell you the list. It's twenty five dollars.

And would you like us to print it on Avery labels? And I said, Yes, please And they did. Wow. And so we got in the mail Just like the label of every person who's licensed. Yeah. So that was it. And we we sat in the library, we got a phone book out, thank goodness for the phone book in those days. And we plotted the zip codes within a fifty mile radius of Marina Del Rey.

And we peeled off all the labels that fit those zip codes and we sent out a postcard saying this is who I am, this is my qualification. I'm teaching a free one-day class. We mailed it out and we were hoping we'd get, I don't know, like a dozen responses. We had seventy responses within twenty four hours. So you were offering a free one day class to bring people in to get them so people would know what you're what you're doing. Yeah.

So we took 70 people, rented chairs, took 70 people, and after a couple of weeks of doing the free class, we charged$10 a person. So now we had seven hundred dollars in that one day, which is huge. And you were like teaching what? Like cleansing, double cleansing. Exfoliation. Yeah. then um toning and moisturizing. It was very simple. And so by December of nineteen eighty three

I was offering eight different classes. And you were teaching all of those classes? Everything. Yeah. Taught every class, did all the laundry, took the laundry home at night to our one bedroom apartment, sat in the garage laundromat. Wow. And and And never slept. I don't know, sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

For years. For years. Didn't take a salary. Because I mean p presumably you you you don't become rich by teaching classes. No, no, no. We were actually earning enough to pay the rent for the school and cover three hundred dollars a month for me. I was taking three hundred dollars a month out of the business to just sort of buy underwear and pantyhos. 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. He'd go to salons and say, Hey, there's these classes, okay, these classes, come and take a free one first and then we'll sign you up and that's what they did. And were they full classes? Yeah. I had full classes with wait lists.

Yeah, well people were flying from San Francisco, they were flying from Phoenix, they were coming from Nevada, they were meeting each other, they were rooming together, they were they were forming friendships. The class would finish at five. And we'd order, you know, pizza and box wine by seven thirty. I love that you're like doing all the skincare and then you're eating burgers and pizzas too. That's very it's very heartening to hear. You weren't eating like kale salads and like lemon water.

No, we were not. We were eating, you know, twicks and uh Kit Kat.

So at that time like you know, eighty three to and and this is sort of the the first few years of it. I mean did you see yourself as an entrepreneur? Did you did you have visions of making this a huge thing or was this just something that you loved doing that you were it wasn't

Well, first of all, I didn't use the word entrepreneur. I'm not sure I really knew knew that word. Maybe I did. It wasn't a hot, sexy word like it is now. Um, I just thought, I'm gonna lead a tribe, we're gonna change this industry and so for three years the International Derman 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'em this, they would say they were all European products, French, German and Italian. And I said, Why are you not using American products? And they said, Well, which ones? And I realised there were no American made products in the salon industry. There were tons in the department store and in the drug store. There was nothing in the salon industry.

And that was like a light bulb went off for both Raymond and myself. We both said, okay, the big opportunity is product. And Ray said to me, If you had to write down the kind of products you want to use, do you believe you could write down the briefs for a line? And I said, Absolutely. And he said, Write down the briefs and let's set about making a product line.

When we come back in a moment, we'll hear how Jane and Raymond invented that new line of skin products and how they almost lost it before it even got off the ground. I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to how I built this from NPR. The founders on this show share something in common. They pick their tools carefully. What you build with shapes what you create. Claude is the AI for people who actually want to solve hard problems.

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It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Roz. So it's about 1985, and Jane and Ray have decided to create a whole new line of skincare products. They want it to be different than anything else on the market. I wanted cleansers that were completely rinse off with water. I wanted to develop um an exfoliant that would be really, really efficient and not cause irritation to the skin. I have an allergy to lanolin, so I didn't want any lanolin in the product. I wanted no mineral oil, no fragrance.

no drying alcohol, no artificial colour. Ray named the line Dermalogica. We had the International Dermal Institute, so it was kind of fit in with that. And we wanted to launch a line that was a bridge between a pharmaceutical product and a skincare product, a cosmetic. Yeah, it sounds like it's like made in a lab, sort of clean Yeah. We step forward with no jars, only bottles and tubes. And we didn't have sort of pink jars with gold tops and

pink boxes. We had grey and white packaging. Our packaging looked pharmaceutical. Many times people criticized it in the early days, although it was ugly. And we felt it was utilitarian and that was the image we wanted. That was who we were. How did you know how to make

Had no idea. Yeah. So So, um, I qu 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 extract. and ask them who in Los Angeles is formulating product, if anyone, using a lot of plant extracts.'Cause you need to work with someone that knows these materials.

And that was what we did. We contacted the raw materials supplier in New Jersey, asked them, Do you have any chemists in LA that are using your materials? And they gave us a list. And we started calling the list. And uh out of the seventy names we had. five would take our call and of the five there was one that number one was willing to work with us and number two we felt could do it. And this book chemist was in LA? Yeah, he was in LA. He's since passed away but he was in Los Angeles and

We couldn't pay him, that was the other thing. So we figured out Raymond figured out this amazing kind of way of paying him based on the first two years Of manufactured 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 gonna get paid. And he agreed, but

And and what did you decide to make? What was it one product or two products or four? Twenty seven products. Right off the bat. Right off the bat. Twenty seven products. Why so many? Well, because we needed to go in with a full footprint. If we went in with one or two products, we couldn't

capture a skin therapist's attention and say you need to use this exclusively in your room and you need to sell this to your clients. It wouldn't have been enough. So it was like creams and cleansers? So it was three cleansers, two moisturisers. Three boosters, two moss, An I makeup remover. Um and then we had I think eight or nine products that were professional only, peels.

and professional masks and things that would only be used in the treatment room. And this chemist, he was making all these products in the lab? Yeah, he was like rumple stilt skin. He was formulating them all and you were going and testing them out and saying, Well, adjust this a little bit or Yeah. I briefed him. He came back two days later with a little cardboard box with samples and I thought we can't possibly have made these.

And they can't be right. I mean you must have gone to Save On and bought them or something. But they were great. I mean and and in nine months we had developed twenty-seven formulas. How are you like even fine? 'Ca'cause you think about that today, like that process.

cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to test it and just to like get it into the tubes. Well it probably should. How did yeah how did you how were you able to do it? We were buying tubes that nobody wanted. We were buying 500 at a No, but we went to a contract manufacturer.

And we can pay you like five hundred dollars or whatever it was. And and his minimum ones were thousands, you know, and and without him we really wouldn't have the company'cause he looked Ninety nine percent of everyone that sits opposite me telling me And I wanna be in for the rock?

By the way, had you h how were you able to test the the product? I tested everything and approved everything. And yourself? Mm-hmm. Did you just tested on your skin and you were like your own guinea pig? I was my own guinea pig and then I took it to class.

And they loved it and they were using it in the classroom. Just out of curiosity, does that have to go through like any kind of regulatory commission or anything? Well We weren't f 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 um 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 incidence of reactions or allergies, etcetera. I mean so that was it? That you just like you just launched?

Yeah. So we launched in January of nineteen eighty six. And the crazy thing was the chemist who developed these formulas, who we were going to pay off over a two-year period, came to us in December of uh 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.

Why why did he say that to you? Because he'd just seen so many startups fail. This is the this is the chemist this is not the factory owner. This is the guy that you love. He just said, I don't think this is gonna work. Yeah, I don't think it's gonna work. I'd like you to pay me out for the formulas now. And we didn't have any money to buy the formulas. What what was it gonna cost you? Well I mean th he wanted something extraordinary and we whittled him down and it came down to

you know, sort of fourteen thousand dollars. Which probably was a lot of money for you in nineteen eighty five, yeah. It was like telling us you wanted ten million. Why did the chemist not think it would work? I think he didn't believe in that. I think he believes in the formula. I think he thought these are two immigrants.

These crazy immigrants, how what do they know about starting a company? What do they know about funding a company? You can't just start a skincare company. Were you freaking out? Yes, we were freaking out. But we had to figure this out, scramble, put it together. So We b borrowed money from family. We put together everything we could from the school. We put it together when we paid him. But weren't you so nervous? Like if this is the guy saying to you this is not gonna work?

And you're like, we better come up with a fourteen thousand, but we're gonna be kind of screwed because this guy's saying it's not gonna work. We were worried that the formulas he was giving us literally we you know, kinda exchanged on the table of a cocoa's diner. he passed the Manila envelope of formulas over and we passed the money over. And uh we were worried that the formulas he'd given us were not the formulas that we'd approve, but we actually had

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

N no, he couldn't be right. It wasn't possible because if he was right, we w were were about to launch into the he biggest disaster of our lives. But that may have been the case. Yeah, but we turned each other on with self-repeated enthusiasm. You you and Ray. Yeah, we just like you and Ray were like, this is gonna work. Yes, it's going to work. Isn't it? And if one of us was having a modicum of doubt

guaranteed the other one was having a good day. So on the days when I might be saying, We're not crazy, right? Ray'd be saying, No, you of course we're not crazy. The students love it. This is gonna be great. And on the days when he was saying I think it's a house of cards. Maybe it's all gonna collapse. I'd be saying, no, no, no, we just had the greatest class. It was so fantastic. Everybody's excited. This is going to work. And you know what? If it doesn't work, we'll do something else.

It's not the greatest disaster in the world. We have nothing to lose, basically.

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

The first account we opened was in Bakersfield, California. And uh This was one of your students who had a salon there or 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 two. And I said, You're our first account in the world. And that was it. My students came up, they came up, they said, We want in, we want to be part of it. This was a California made skincare product.

And we were gonna take on the world. And you were not selling this in stores, right? It was only No, no, no. Only salons. You had to have a skin therapist. You had to have a s therapist who sold this to you. And and why was that? Why wouldn't you just like sell it in Walgreens or something? No, no, because

Because I'm a skin therapist. We knew that this was an educated cell. It had to be people that understood the skin. And also these were the people that brought us to the party. And my mum another piece of advice she gave me was you leave the party with the person you went with. So we w we're committed to skin therapies. How did Dermologica do i in that first year? Did a million dollars in our first year. That's insane. It was

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

Yeah. And lots of people wanted to lend us money. And you didn't take any of it? No. Because the sales were was just funding the business? Yeah, and it was so exciting. It was great. I mean That first year we were ploughing everything back into the business, you know, more staff. We hired a direct sales force. We wanted people walking in that were dermologica.

But how are you like teaching classes and hiring a staff and like building a a an organization? We were working our tails off is what we were doing. I didn't hire another teacher until nineteen eighty seven. So I was writing the classes, teaching the classes and still doing the laundry. And Raymond uh and a couple of other people were handling the product.

When the classes finished at five o'clock, we were doing the UPS orders. I was packing the boxes, sealing the boxes, writing the labels. There were five of us in the company. We did everything. We finished it Ten o'clock at night, eleven o'clock at night. Everyone came back to my house, our flat four spaghetti.

And then we were back at work at seven thirty the next morning. When did you and and Ray sort of sit back and say, uh, we might actually get really rich from doing this thing that we never knew we could get rich from? Uh last year. Well, I mean no, it I mean Uh we knew we had a tiger by the tail that first Yeah. And um 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 gonna take our business down.

And the International Dermal Institute is now the number one provider of advanced education in the industry worldwide. We train a hundred thousand skin therapists every single year.

And last year uh our wholesale turnover was a little north of two hundred and fifty million dollars. That's incredible. So you guys were you basically ran the company f for almost thirty years. Yeah, we ran the company. And decided to sell it last year, you sold it to Unilever. Why did you why'd you decide to do that?

Well, you know, we'd run the company as what I sort of say was, you know, a beneficial dictatorship. We've always had a great team, we still have a great team, but the decisions ultimately came down to Raymond and myself. product approval, advertising, everything, the brand ID. And and you know, we realise

much that we hate to think about it, the death rate is holding steady at a hundred percent. So ultimately we were gonna have to make a plan of what we wanted to do with the company. We have two daughters, they're seventeen and twenty two. and neither of them wanted to come into the business and we didn't want them to. We told them even w kind of before they were born, we decided if we ever have children they're not coming into Dermologica.

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 realised the problem probably wasn't the CEOs, the problem was probably us. Because we are the founders, you know, and we have this sort of Uh passion about the ownership.

And it's very hard to run a company when the founders are in place and kind of want to have the last word. Yeah. And so we decided we should at least explore the idea of an acquisition. We'd never taken a phone call from anyone that was interested in buying never even taken a call 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 uh I have to say w we're one year in and it's been a fantastic year. So much so that Raymond and I kept a small percentage of the company and we're still involved.

And and that uh the chemist, the one who like bailed a month before Demologica launched, did he ever come back to you guys and apologize? No. Never. He never did. No. He was like Rumpel Stiltskin that flew out the window and never came back. You know, i it's I mean it's amazing like looking back at your story. Because your your mom was a widow with four girls and uh that she had to raise on her own and she must have been a little worried when you left

England for South Africa and then to the US with very little. What did she make of your of your success? I know I know that she was really proud. She felt validated in the direction that she pushed us in. She passed away in two thousand and one. But she saw our success. And the last uh months of my mum's life she had Alzheimer's. I'm not sure she remembered the

anything about dermologica. She remembered me and I sat on her bed when she was in hospital and I was giving her a manicure. I was right back to filing her nails and painting them and she was watching me. and she looked across at the woman who was in the chair next to her and uh she said to her with a huge look of pride, she said to her, My daughter's a qualified manicurist, you know.

And uh 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. Jane Werwind, founder of Dermology. 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. So you wear some blog. Uh stop lying at the end. Get busy start your business.

And go out and change the world. And please do stick around because in just a moment we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. Every business right now is asking the same question. How do we actually make AI work for us? Because the possibilities are huge, but guessing is risky. And sitting on the sidelines, that's not really an option because chances are your competitors are already making their move.

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Hey, thanks so much for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And today we're gonna update a story we ran about a year ago. This one comes from Winfield, Pennsylvania. My name is Nicholas Gilson and I am one of the original founders of Gilson Snowboards. Nick

And his business partner sort of fell into the snowboard business. They were middle school teachers in Nashville and did a science project where they challenged their students to build a better snowboard. I brought in the original prototype for an idea I had when I was my student's age. I was in a middle school. 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. With this board, you can actually ride close to flat and engage these really surfy, drifty maneuvers that allow you to get through the trees way easier with way more surfy motion. And so with barely any money, Nick and his partner quit their teaching jobs and set

Up a snowboard shop inside a stable in Pennsylvania. It was an active stable. It was an active stable. There were donkeys and horses next to our machines. And in that stable, Nick says, they were able to make their boards even better. And we then started to travel.

the country, starting a company much the way our grandparents would have. We need to tangibly and physically share something with people. And so we went out and immersed ourselves in the community, traveled 17,000 miles from coast to coast, and started getting these people on the boards. Now since we

Last spoke to Nick, his team has traveled 17,000 more miles to slopes and parks across the country, letting people sample Gilson snowboards for free. The company is now four years old, they've sold thousands of of boards and they've recently expanded to skis. You can find out more about Gilson's snowboards on our Facebook page. If you want to tell us your story, go to build.com. PR.org. or building. This weekend. Please also subscribe. PR.org. My Twitter address is Yeah.

Thanks also to Nick. Sanas Meshkin for Thomas Louis. Our intern is Noor Kutzi. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to