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Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.host. We went to a contract manufacturing Los Angeles, literally sort of fell on our swords, and told him our dream, gave him the pitch, and said, we need you to do like a test run for us. He said, look, I have absolutely no reason to do this, because 99% of everyone that sits opposite me telling me this story does not succeed.
But for some crazy reason, I think you've got something interesting, and I want to be in for the ride. For Ramin P.R., it's how I build this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Rosé, and on to the show, a Jane Whirlwind went from doing facials for women at Beauty Parlor to building one of the leading skincare companies in the world, Dermalogica. So the story about Jane Whirlwind really begins about a month before she turned three.
Because that month, her father passed away. Jane barely remembers him, but what she does remember is that all of a sudden, her mom had to get a job. There were four girls in the family to feed, and she now had to do it all on her own. This was Scotland in the 1950s, and Jane's mom happened to have a skill.
She was a qualified nurse. So even though she hadn't worked for many, many years, she was able to find a job, and also pass along an important lesson. The five words that changed my life were my mom saying to my sisters and myself, learn how to do something, learn how to do something. She was absolutely adamant that we each of us had to get a skill set training, that no matter what happened, if we were somewhere anywhere in the world, we would have a skill set in our hands, that we could go to work immediately and earn money and keep food on the table.
So when she was old enough, Jane Whirlwind decided on her skill. She'd become what was called at the time a beautician. And right after she got her qualification at age 19, she started looking for work. I decided quite honestly, it sounds so flippant now, but it was freezing cold.
It was the winter of 1977. I think it's one of the coldest on record. I'm reading the Sunday paper, and I want to see where is the hottest place on Earth, because I have to feel better about this freezing cold flat that I'm living in. So I look at the weather in the Sunday paper and it said, Johannesburg, South Africa.
It was like 107 degrees. Oh my God, I wish I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And as I turn the page, it's like the universe sending me a sign. There's a quarter-page advertisement from the South African government saying, if you meet our prerequisite qualifications, we will pay an assisted passage for you to emigrate to South Africa, as long as you agree to live there for two years.
And I thought, good grief. I could be in Johannesburg in a month. And they had a list of 10 careers that they wanted to recruit to South Africa. And they were all vocational training.
The number one was butchers. The number two was patisserers. Third was a hair stylist. And the fourth was a beauty therapist.
And there I am. Six weeks later, I was on a flight to Johannesburg. And so when you got there, were you actually able to find a job? Yeah.
When I got to Cape Town, I sat in this immigration hotel and I picked up the yellow pages. And I literally started calling salons in the yellow pages to see if they were high on me. And by 5.30 that evening, I had a job. 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 ever experienced. You know, I remember my first day going to work. I was taking a bus.
And buses kept coming. I kept putting up my arm and they weren't stopping. 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 stopped finally said to me, they're not going to stop you because on the bus at the front it said, it said, Nie Blanc, and it means non-white.
And I said, what? And she said, well, you have to wait for a bus for white people. Anyway, so that was one of my first introductions. I had never seen it.
Obviously, I know it's been strange. When you were there in South Africa, were you more or less doing the same thing that you'd been doing in London? Yes, in care, manicures, pedicures, everything that I've been doing and trained to do and in love with the industry and feeling so happy that I had this training. Because literally, as odd as it sounds, I know I could walk out of the studio today.
I'll have a job by tomorrow because there is 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 going to get work. So how long did you live in there? I lived in South Africa for four years.
And is that where you met your husband? Yeah, I met him in South Africa. He's from Cape Town. And he was already in process for a green card for the United States.
And while we were dating, his green card came through. And I can't even explain how exciting it is. It's like getting the golden ticket in a Willy Wonka chocolate bar. It's so hard to emigrate legally and do it properly.
And he did. And off he went. And he 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. So you get telling this is like early in the days? Yeah, it was January 1983.
And I'd never been so excited in my life. Landy did Los Angeles with a suitcase on one hand. And my beauty school diploma rolled up and tucked inside. And had no idea that there was an unemployment rate of 10.4% in California at that point.
He's always good not to know these things because I was at police self-hye. And so my boyfriend had been looking for a job for six months. Couldn't find anything. I was living in a one bedroom apartment in Marina del Rey, ready to take anything.
And my land did. And I said, all right, well, I'm going to get a job and a sound. So I'm going to start calling my trusty yellow pages. And the first thing that struck me was, you were hardly any advertisements for skincare sounds.
They were mostly just like hair and yeah. Yeah, and I'm like, that's kind of weird. Anyway, then I quickly realized they were the ones I could find and there was literally a handful, Rawling Beverly Hills, and a very sort of elitist, expensive sort of offering. So I went and interviewed, what I called, got a job interview, went to interview.
And when I got there, the people at the front desk all American and yet the people I was seeing in the white uniforms who were offering skincare treatments were all European. I could hear their accent. And I had a lot of interviews with the interview. There's a journey question.
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 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. I'm surprised that skincare wasn't a big thing in the US at the time. So what was a normal skincare regimen?
Very limited because it was all big hair, big shoulder pads, dalas. It was all makeup. I mean, you could pick up magazines then, Vogue, Carpis, Bazaar, Fashion magazines. There were always articles on makeup.
There was nothing on skincare. The dermatologists were all saying, oh, you can use anything. You can use soap and water. And I knew that not only did the correct products work, and you've got to 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 that point, did you, like, what did you do?
I went back, sat with Raymond, my partner, and he was... No, we weren't married then. 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 both come from the industry, both men 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, exfoliation, and it was brand new cutting edge. And he wasn't selling a piece. He was on the door to door to salon to salon to salon to salon. Yeah.
And so they were saying, we don't even understand what it is you're selling. So we were having this epiphany to sort it together because he was like, how come they don't understand what I'm selling when this is absolutely standard in Europe and the rest of the world. And we sat down and said, the opportunity is huge. We can teach how to do correct skincare treatments, and we can sell this equipment to the people that we're teaching.
So right then and there, you decided to start building a plan to create a business. Yeah, we actually cooked it up together on a drive back from San Diego, took us two and a quarter hours. And in that drive, we completely talked through our business plan. We got back and we wrote it out on the kitchen table on five pages of yellow legal paper.
And the plan was to train the professional 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 year training that we felt would bring them up to a level of proficiency where they could be successful. So the goal was really simple. We're going to make skin therapists more successful and able to run their own business and be financially independent.
So the idea was that you guys would open up a school and you would train them. Yeah. So, Ray was going to still sell equipment. He was going to stay on the road.
I was going to teach. I was going to use the equipment he was selling in the classes I was teaching, sell the equipment after the class, and we called it the International Dermel Institute. And how did you even have cash to start to open up a cash? No cash.
Yeah. It was a hell of a difficult to get a lease. Because remember, we were immigrants with no credit rating. We had no bank references with nothing.
So the only space we could find was an empty space that'd been empty for years next to the Social Security Office in Marina del Rey. And they'd found it very difficult to lease. Because there's like long lines of people waiting for their checks every day. Yeah, exactly.
Fantastic. We had sitting, you know, people waiting until it's used to be in truth. So we rented it. And then we got the equipment from the Japanese manufacturer put that in and we were off to the races.
And now the challenge was who were we going to train because we didn't know anybody? Right. I mean, we just you hung a shingle out, but like people had to know who you were. Well, so we knew that our target market were licensed as the tition.
So in other words, they had to already be licensed to work in the industry. So I called the State Board of Cosmetology in Sacramento, California. And I called them and I said, do you have a list of everyone licensed in the state of California to perform skincare treatments? And it was a very short list.
It was like 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 send me the list? And they said, yes, we can sell you the list. It's $25.
And would you like us to print on every label? And they did. And so we got in the mail. Just like the label of every person was licensed.
Yeah. So that was it. And we sat in the library. We got a phone book out and put us with a phone book in those days.
And we plotted the zip codes within a 50 mile radius of Marina del Rey. And we peeled off all the labels that fit those zip codes. And we sent out a postcard saying, this is who I am. This is my qualification.
I'm teaching a free one day class. We mailed it out. And we were hoping we get, I don't know, like a dozen responses. We had 70 responses within 24 hours.
So you were offering a free one day class to bring people in to get them so people would know what you're doing? Yeah. So we took 70 people, rented chairs took 70 people. And after a couple of weeks of doing the free class, we charge $10 a person.
So now we had $700 in that one day, which is huge. And you were like teaching, well, like cleansing, double cleansing, steaming, exfoliation, massage, and then Tony and moisturizing. It was very simple. And so by December of 1983, I was offering eight different classes.
And you were teaching all of those classes? Everything. Yeah. So every class did all the laundry, took the laundry home at night to our one bedroom apartment, sat in the garage laundry.
Wow. And never slept. Never slept. Worked.
I don't know. 16 hours a day, seven days a week. For years, for years didn't take a salary. Because I mean, 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 $300 a month for me. I was taking $300 a month out of the business to just sort of buy underwear and panty. 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, he 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 Solan's and say, hey, there's these classes.
Yeah. These classes come and take a free one first and they'll sign you up. And that's what they did. And were they full classes?
Yeah, I'd full classes with wait lists. Yeah, when 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 forming friendships. The class would finish at five. And we'd order pizza and box wine by 7.30. I love that you're doing all the skincare and then you're eating burgers and pizza.
It's very hard. You weren't eating like kale salads and lemon water. No, we were not. We were eating twigs and Kit-Kat.
So at that time, like, you know, 83, and this was sort of the first years of it. I mean, did you see yourself as an entrepreneur? Did you have visions of making this a huge thing? Or was it just something that you loved doing that you were?
Well, first of all, I didn't use the word entrepreneur. I'm not sure I knew that word. Maybe I did. It wasn't the hot, sexy word like this now.
I just thought, I'm going to lead a tribe. We're going to change this industry. And so for three years, the international domain institute was our only business. But very quickly, I realized, and Raymond and I both together said, what product are they using when they go back to their salons?
And when I would ask them this, they would say, they were all European products, French, German, and Italian. And I said, why are you not using American products? And they said, well, which ones? And I realized there were no American-made products in the salon industry.
And it turns into apartment store and in the drug store. There was nothing in the salon industry. And it was like a light bar 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 Ros and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Ros. So it's about 1985 and Jane and Ray have decided to create a whole new line of skin care products.
And they wanted to be different than anything else on the market. I wanted cleansers that were completely went off with water. I wanted to develop an exfoliant that would be really, really efficient and not cause irritation to the skin. I have an allergy to Lanolin, so I didn't want any Lanolin in the product.
I wanted no mineral oil, no fragrance, no drying alcohol, no artificial color. Ray named the line Dermalogica. We had the International Dermal Institute, so it was kind of fitting with that. And we wanted to launch a line that was a bridge between a pharmaceutical product and a skin care product, a cosmetic.
Yeah, it sounds like it's made in a lab sort of clean. Yeah, we stepped forward with no jars, only bottles and tubes. And we didn't have sort of pink jars with gold tops and pink boxes. We had grey and white packaging.
A packaging looked pharmaceutical. Many times people criticized it in the early days as it was ugly. And we felt it was utilitarian and that was the image we wanted. That was who we were.
You'd been working with these products for most of your career at that point. You were really young. You were in your early 20s or mid 20s. How did you know how to make the stuff?
I had no idea. So I spoke to a chemist who we knew and he said, look, if you're looking for a chemist that can make the product, you want to use a lot of botanicals and plant extracts. Speak to the raw materials suppliers for the plant extracts and ask them who in Los Angeles is formulating product if anyone using a lot of plant extracts, because you need to work with someone that knows these materials. And that was what we did.
We contacted the raw materials supplier in New Jersey, asked them, do you have any chemists in LA that are using your materials? They gave us a list and we started calling the list. And out of the 17 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 was in LA? Yeah, he was in LA. He's 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. And that was the advantage of the product that we manufactured, not a percentage of sales, because we wanted to make sure he was tied into the fact that if we weren't actually able to ever make this product, he wasn't going to get paid. And he agreed.
And what did you decide to make? Was it one product or two products? 27 products. Right off the bat.
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. And then we had three products that were professional-only, peels and professional masks and things that would only be used in the treatment room.
In this chemist, he was making all these products in the lab. He was like, rumple's still skin. He was like, you were going and testing the mounting. The justice a little bit.
Yeah, I briefed him. He came back two days later with a little cobble box with samples. I thought we could possibly have made these that quickly. And they can't be right.
I mean, he must have gone to save on and bought them or something. But they were great. I mean, in nine months, we had developed 27 formulas and we named them in one afternoon. How were you even funding that because you think about that today?
Like the process, which I think it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to test it and just to get it into the tubes? Well, it probably should. How were you able to do it? We were buying tubes that nobody wanted.
We were buying 500 at a time that they were selling to us. Filling them yourselves? No, but we went to a contract manufacturing Los Angeles and literally sort of fell on our swords and told him our dream, gave him the pitch and said, we need you to do like a test run for us. And we can pay you like $500, whatever it was.
And his minimum ones are thousands. Yeah. And without him, we really wouldn't have a company because he looked at us after we'd been sort of like pitching crazily for an hour. He said, look, I've absolutely no reason to do this because 99% of everyone that sits opposite me telling me this story does not succeed.
But for some crazy reason, I think you've got something interesting and I want to be in for the ride. By the way, how were you able to test the product? I tested everything and approved everything. On yourself.
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 the students asked them what they thought. And they loved it and they were using it in the classroom. She just had a curiosity.
Does that have to go through any kind of regulatory commission or anything? Well, we weren't very young and new company and a lot of the rules I suppose we weren't even aware of probably. But at the time and still, we weren't using any ingredients that were controversial. We were eliminated, a lot of the irritating ingredients.
And so in the nine months that we were testing the product as we were developing it, we hadn't had any incidents of reactions or allergies, et cetera. So that was it? You just launched? Yeah.
So we launched it in January of 1986. And the crazy thing was the chemist who developed these formulas, who we were going to pay off over a two-year period, came to us in December of 85, so a month before we were due to launch and said that he did not believe in the product. He didn't believe we could be successful in an adventure. Why did he say that to you?
Because he'd just seen so many startups fail. This is not the guy that you know. No. This is Rumpel Stiltskin.
I don't think this is going to work. I don't think it's going to 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 was it going to cost you? Well, I mean, he wanted something extraordinary and we whittled him down and it came down to, you know, sort of $14,000. Which probably was a lot of money for you in 1980. Huge.
It was like telling us you wanted $10 million. Why did the chemist not think it would work? I think he didn't believe in us. I think he believed in the formula.
I think he thought these are two immigrants, these crazy immigrants. How did they know about starting a company? What did they know about funding a company? You can't just start a skincare company.
Were you freaking out? Yes. We were freaking out. But we had to figure this out and scramble, put it together.
So we borrowed money from family. We put together everything we could from the school. We put it together when we paid them. But weren't you so nervous?
Like if this is the kind of thing to you, this is not going to work. And you're like, we better come up with $14,000. But we're kind of screwed because this guy's not going to work. We were worried that the formulas he was giving us literally, you know, kind of exchanged on the table of a Coco's diner.
He passed them in a envelope of formulas over and we passed the money over. And we were worried that the formulas he'd given us were not the formulas that we'd approve. But we actually had the guy who was going to manufacture the product look at the formulas for us. And he said, no, this is it.
They're right. It's the real deal. I'm just thinking about that moment where a guy who's a total expert is saying to you, who's never manufactured skincare products, that this isn't going to work. And yet you have to come up with $14,000 to pay him.
Did you have any doubt? No. You didn't think he was right? No, he couldn't be right.
It wasn't possible because if he was right, we were about to launch into the biggest disaster of our lives. But that may have been the case. Yeah, but we turned each other on with self-repeated enthusiasm. You and Ray.
Like you and Ray were like, this is going to 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 would be saying, no, you've been, of course we're not crazy. The students love it. This is going to be great. And on the days when he was saying, I think it's a house of cards.
Maybe it's all going to collapse. I'd be saying, no, no, no, we just had the greatest class. It was so fantastic. Everybody's excited.
This is going to work. And you know what? If it doesn't work, we'll do something else. It's not the greatest disaster in the world.
We have nothing to lose, basically. And it was exciting. And what if it works? And we did the classic immigrant thing where look at the population.
It only takes 1% of the population to buy one product. And it's already enormous, bigger than it could ever be in the UK. So let's go for it. Okay, so you had no investors and you basically figured, we'll sell the product and that will fund the manufacturer more of the product.
Yeah, exactly. And most of your customers were who? My students, the first account we opened was in Bakersfield, California. This was one of your students who had a salon there?
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 going to take on the world. And you were not selling this in stores, right?
It was only? No, no, only salons. You had to have a skin care product. You had to have a therapist who sold this to you.
And why was that? Why wouldn't you just sell it in Walgreens or something? No, no, 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 and other people that were watching gave me was, you leave the party with the person you went with. So we were committed to skin therapists.
How did Dermalatia do in that first year? Did a million dollars not first year. That's insane. It was so insane.
You must have at that point had all these buyers who wanted to buy you out. Yeah. And lots of people wanted to lend us money. And you didn't take any of it?
No. Nothing. We wouldn't even... Because the sales was just funding the business.
Yeah, and it was so exciting. It was great. I mean, that first year we were plowing everything back into the business. You know, more staff.
We hired a direct sales force. We wanted people walking in that were Dermalogica. And so we were putting everything back into building the business. But how were you, like, teaching classes and hiring a staff and, like, building an organization?
We were working our tails off with what we were doing. I didn't hire another teacher until 1987. So I was right in the classes teaching the classes and still doing the laundry. And Raymond and a couple of other people were handling the product.
When the classes finished at five o'clock, we were doing the UPS orders. I was packing the boxes, sealing the boxes, writing the labels. There were five of us in the company. We did everything.
We finished at ten o'clock at night, eleven o'clock at night. Everyone came back to my house while flat for spaghetti. And then we were back at work at seven thirty the next morning. When did you and Ray sort of say back and say, we might actually get really rich from doing this thing that we never knew we could get rich from?
Last year. Well, I mean, we knew we had a tiger by the tail that first year. And we knew that we had to spread ourselves internationally. We needed eggs in all the baskets.
So if there was a recession in one place, it wasn't going to take our business down. And the International Derm Administration Institute is now the number one provider of advanced education in the industry worldwide. We train a hundred thousand skin therapists every single year. And last year our wholesale turnover was a little north of two hundred and fifty million dollars.
That's incredible. So you guys were, you basically ran the company for almost thirty years. Yeah, you were. And decided to sell it last year sold it to Unilever.
Why did you decide to do that? Well, you know, we've 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 you know, we realized much that we hate to think about it. The death rate is holding steady at a hundred percent.
So ultimately we were going to have to make a plan of what we wanted to do with the company. We have two daughters, the seventeen and twenty two. And neither of them wanted to come into business. And we didn't want them to.
We told them even kind of before they were born. We decided if we have children, they're not coming into Demologica. 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 were higher a CEO and we'd gone through a couple of CEOs in the eight years before we decided to sell. And we just wasn't working. And we realized the problem probably wasn't the CEO's. The problem was probably us.
Because we are the founders. You know, we have this sort of 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. 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 kind of lined up who we thought would be the right partners for us. And then we set about deciding which ones we wanted to court. And Unilever were very aligned with us on their sustainable living plan. They're very aligned with us on a value system.
And so we decided to go forward. And I have to say we're one year in and it's been a fantastic year. So much so that Raymond and I kept a small percentage of the company and was still involved. And that chemist, the one who like bailed a month before Demolodica launched.
Did he ever come back to you guys and apologize? No, never did. No, he was like rumple still skin that flew out the window and never came back. You know, it's amazing looking back at your story.
Because your mom was a widow with four girls and the chitarays 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 success? I know that she was really proud.
She felt validated in the direction that she pushed us in. She passed away in 2001. But she saw our success. And the last months of my mom's life, she had Alzheimer's.
I'm not sure she remembered anything about Demolodica. She remembered me and I sat on her bed when she was in hospital. And I was giving her a manicure. I was right back to filing her nails and painting them.
And she was watching me and she looked across at the woman who was in the chair next to her. And she said to her with a huge look of pride. She said to my daughters, a qualified manicurist, you know. 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 OK.
And I was. Jane Rowan, founder of Demolodica. 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 kit.
So here it is. Single best thing you can do for your skin is keep it out of the sun. So you wear a sunblock, you wear your hat. Stop lying out in the sun.
Get busy, start your business and go out and change the world. Thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or listen to previous episodes, you go to howagalthiss.npr.org. You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes and please do us a favor and write a review.
Let us know what you think. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at Howagalthiss. Our show is produced this week by Randa Del Fata with music composed by Rumpteen Arab-Louis.
Thanks also to Neva Grant, Senna, Smeshkin-Poor and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to Howagalthiss from NPR. Hey, thanks for sticking around because right now I'm not sure one of the hundreds of stories that you guys have been sending us. These are stories about the things that you are building.
And like many new ventures, this one that we're about to talk about starts with a problem. We could actually refer to it as trash juice. Trash juice. Juice.
JU-I-C-E. Which is the runoff from dumpsters and garbage trucks. If you're an urban dweller, you walk by and you smell it and you do not want to go anywhere near that. Okay, so Michael Lvenity and his partners came up with a device to put a stop to trash juice before it even starts.
Think of it as a utility cart. There is a hundred foot hose on it. And when you pull the trigger at the end of this hose, foam comes out. Think of it scrubbing bubbles times 1000.
And these scrubbing bubbles are kind of like the secret magical ingredient here. Michael says they're full of bacteria that eat up all that junk in dumpsters and in trash shoots. And then the foam kind of evaporates. So you don't even need water to clean it up and no water.
Oh, trash juice. We test out the product. We got incredible feedback. And the maintenance guys, they were like, you guys just cut my cleaning time in half.
Michael's company is called TP Foam. It's about a year old and so far they've sold about 60 of the cleaning carts to buildings from Maine to Florida. More orders are coming in and Michael says so far they're doing pretty well. And if you want to tell us about the company or idea that you're building, go to build.npr.org.
That's B-U-I-L-D.npr.org. And thanks. One more thing before we let you go. If you ever wondered what podcast should I listen to?
The Big Listen is ready to help. On NPR's newest podcast host Lauren Ober introduces you to podcasts you might never have heard of and gives you the inside scoop on shows you already love, like the one you're listening to right now. When you want something new, find the Big Listen on the NPR One app and NPR.org.