Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our Slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer and currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on slack. So before we kick off today's recording, I've got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools, and if you're looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot. You'll be able to manage your whole sales process. Plus my favorite part, the reporting.

It's super intuitive, powerful and customizable. Plus the whole thing is powered by AI, so your teams can spend less time on tedious, time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto, but getting set up on Saleshub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business, and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons, you can tune it to your exact needs. Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales hub what is going on? DTC pod today we are joined by Aurelian Lease, who is the CEO at Dermalogica, which is one of the larger skincare brands globally. So, Aurelian, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your own personal background, maybe your background before you even got involved with Dermalogica, and then we can kind of get into the company.

Sure. Well, thanks for having me on this podcast. I'm very privileged. I mean, you should. You can guess by my accent that time, maybe from abroad. I was born in the UK and it's always very dangerous to ask somebody who's been in many places to explain where they are because it could take a long, long time. But english, german states for 25 years. My background itself I do run.

I'm the CEO of Dermalogica, which is this wonderful global skincare brand, which is rooted in skin treatment expertise. Probably get to that. We teach a lot of treatments, but I've been in the industry for many, many years. But I'm actually a physicist by training, so I studied atomic physics and laser optics, which is extraordinarily relevant nowadays. And, you know, so that was it. And I worked as an engineer for a few years, so I tend to have more of an analytical, nerdy bent to when I. When I do things and how I look at the world.

Absolutely. And how did you get involved? What was your path to getting involved as the global CEO of Dermalogica? What were you, you know, what was your career beforehand? Did you have any roles in the commerce space or the consumer space or what did that look like?

Yeah, I mean, so I, you know, I started. I started in some sort of a number of finance jobs quite quickly went into sales and marketing in the cosmetics industry with some of the prestige, some of the beautiful brands like Elizabeth Arden in the heyday and Calvin Klein and those. I later actually moved to the states because of a DTC opportunity, you know, when it was the first 1st big Internet wave. So I was part of a company called Delia's, which is teenage girls clothing company. And we took. It was a catalog business. We took it public April. It was April 9, 99.

So 25 years ago, about just a few months ago, and it was quite a big valuation, raised quite a lot of money, and then went set about building one of the first DCC companies. It was called iturf enlisted on Nasdaq. I'd say at that time it was quite different because you'd have to build everything and there was a huge amount of innovation in a short amount of time where, you know, sort of just permanent people. I remember being excited about, we can have a permanent shopping basket, you know, and that was, it was, that was where that industry was there. So I was there for quite a few years. We sold the pieces off to other companies, and then I moved on back into the skincare industry, had my own business for ten years, and then also a stint in running a large part of a makeup company. And, you know, that really brought me to Logica, wherever. I've been here for a good part of eight years, actually.

So it's a good run. And we've expanded a lot, including in DTC and e commerce, which has been really important for us.