My 20 year journey with Dermalogica
Dermalogica is a skin care range that most people around the world will have heard of. In fact at one stage there seemed to be two or three beauty salons stocking the brand on every on every high street in every town which I think contributed to the thinking that Dermalogica was ‘common’ and with that not specialised enough and certainly not superior to other skin care brands. The original grey and white bottles were so different from everything else available at the time that many people just didn’t ‘get it’. I got it though, from the minute I started using them at college I totally got it.
Let me tell you my story and you’ll see why Dermalogica means so much to me.
I was pretty academic at school, I enjoyed it, and if I put the work in I could get the grades. There was no question that after my GCSE’s I would be staying on to do A-levels. Up until that point I wanted to study Law at University… that was my direction. I really thought I knew where I was going.
Something else happened around that time though, and that was two weeks of work experience… one week at an architects (which I enjoyed) and another at a beauty salon. And oh my did I love that week at the beauty salon, you literally couldn’t shut me up at the end of the day… I was buzzing!
So when I started Sixth Form, in the back of my mind was beauty and the desire to do something different just got stronger and stronger. Until ultimately (and I’m sure to my parents’ disappointment) I decided to go to college to study Beauty Therapy… only after I finished my A-levels!
The thing was I didn’t fit in to the Beauty Industry or at least I didn’t feel that I did. I was quiet, quite shy, not your usual bubbly and chatty young girl that you would come across at your local salon.
This feeling changed when I came across Dermalogica. Dermalogica was serious about skin care. They were different and their education was different. Jane Wurwand, the founder of the brand, set out to raise the image of skin care. To change the perception of beauty therapists. To give them a greater knowledge, to develop their skills and to end the stereotypes associated with the Industry. To do that she needed a brand that was exceptional, she needed products that did more than just look and smell nice, she needed to create products that really worked. Products that incorporated the science and achieved the results and she didn’t care if they looked pretty or smelt great.
When I moved to Portugal to open my first salon I knew there was no other brand that I wanted to work with. I’d worked with Decleor and Elemis by this stage but Dermalogica was at the forefront of my mind. That however was no easy task. At the time there wasn’t a distributer of Dermalogica in Portugal, I was the first person in the Country with the brand, so I had to order through a UK account and have the products shipped out to me! An expensive solution but I knew I only wanted to work with them, so I had no option.
Being the only stockist of Dermalogica in Portugal meant that training wasn’t easy, I’d come back for as many courses as I could but ultimately, what it really meant was that I had to up my game in my level of knowledge, I had to know the products inside out because it wasn’t as easy as just picking up the phone and speaking to my rep if I had questions. By this point I was all in. I was Dermalogica through and through. So much so that when I entered the Therapist of the Year Competition in 2010 (and won by the way) I was described as Miss Dermalogica!
Before we moved back to the UK, five years later, we bought another salon in Alfreton, this would become my home for the next 8 years. We had a salon manager in place and I assumed it would be easy to stock Dermalogica. Not so. As I had a salon in Portugal and the Managing Director of Dermalogica at that time, was concerned that I would purchase all my stock through the UK account (rather than using the newly established Portuguese Distributor). Despite a face to face meeting with him, he simply refused, no matter what we agreed to sign. So until I moved back to the UK my salon there had to go with another brand. To say I was disheartened and disillusioned was an understatement. I really wavered at this time and my loyalty was tested. However as soon as I got back to the UK, we changed brands, we got Dermalogica back! I was now close to the training centres, I could do all the training I wanted to, I had a rep that I saw every 6 weeks and the love that I’d always had for the brand came flooding back!
I have quite literally never questioned them since. I do have and I will always have niggles when long standing (and brilliant) products get discontinued but I don’t doubt for a second that Dermalogica still stands for those original values. They are now, I believe, absolutely leading this industry and now not just from a product perspective but from a treatment perspective too.
I am super proud to be one of Dermalogica’s Platinum Partners. It’s fair to say I’m a bit obsessive about them. I love what they stand for and I love what they do.
xxx