Renowned Aesthetician Renée Rouleau On Closing Her Spa, Sticking To DTC Distribution And Creating A Strong Company Culture

After Renée Rouleau closes her North Dallas spa today, her namesake company will move on to a new chapter concentrating fully on e-commerce. The closure is characteristic of Rouleau’s continuous reinvention. She’s rebranded her skincare line three times, perpetually reviews old products to improve them, and is constantly setting professional goals to elevate her and her brand’s performance. “If a company isn’t reinventing itself, that really has an impact on consumer perception,” says Rouleau. “Nobody wants to use outdated formulas and brands that are not cutting-edge.” Still, there are several core elements of her company that have remained the same. Rouleau’s skincare philosophy centered on nine skin types hasn’t changed for more than two decades, and she hasn’t wavered from a direct-to-consumer distribution model. “By selling direct-to-consumer, we have control over the brand messaging,” says Rouleau. Beauty Independent talked to her about how she established a DTC business long before it was a buzzy concept, cultivating a collaborative office culture, holding outside vendors to account, evolving her position and the origins of her bestseller.

How did you get into beauty?

Growing up, my grandmother owned a hair salon called The Powder Puff Beauty Shoppe. I watched her transform people who were coming into the salon feeling down and leaving with a smile. I saw the power of beauty. When you look better, you feel better. Even at a young age, I was drawn to beauty. In the fifth grade, I was the first person to wear makeup, and I was always into caring for my skin and hair. When it came time to choose my career, I wanted one that would be fulfilling and impact people’s lives, and I knew that the beauty industry was the industry for me. I met an aesthetician who became my mentor, and we opened a skincare-focused salon together. I was 21 at the time. It was 1991 and being an aesthetician wasn’t the profession it is now. Most aestheticians worked out of hair salons. Our skincare salon was widely successful, but, after five years, I was looking for a change in my personal life. I set my eyes on Dallas, Tex., a city known for people who value beauty and skincare. So, I sold my half of the business to my former partner, drove 2,500 miles in a U-Haul to Dallas and started Renée Rouleau Skincare. I didn’t know anybody. I was young and fearless in a new city. I had no doubt I could make it. I’ve had my company for 23 years now.

What distinguishes your approach to skincare?

One of the things I first noticed when I became an aesthetician is how each person’s skin is complex. I noticed the dry, normal and oily skin types just didn’t cover it. When I was working with clients, I had been mixing and matching from a few different product lines to find the best solutions. When I started my own company, I realized there needed to be better solutions. I came up with nine different types of skin, and developed a skincare line of products to complement those nine different types of skin with easy-to-use instructions on how use them. Fast forward 23 years later, my line has 50 products, and I’m currently working on five new formulations, and it still spans the nine skin types. I’m not missing a skin type.

People come to us because they have confused skin. A perfect example is someone who is 33, and they are focused on keeping their skin healthy and are interested in preventative aging, but are getting hormonal breakouts. Most skincare lines make you pick one or the other. That doesn’t do anything for the health and integrity of the skin. It might lead to them getting something for hormonal breakouts that really dries them out. On the flip side, if they want preventative aging, then a lot of the products will tend to be heavier, and that’s not going to really do well for their skin. We want to cater to people who have a little bit of everything going on.

What is the bestseller?

Our No. 1 bestseller bar none, hands down is called Anti Bump Solution. When I first worked at this hair salon out of school, we were selling a line at the salon, and this was a product of theirs. It was for acne, and it came in little ampoules. I was getting feedback from clients that it wasn’t working on their regular zits. Instead, they were dabbing it on their cystic blemishes. Typically, for cystic blemishes, the solution is oral medication like Accutane or cortisone injections. I was getting feedback from people saying, “On my God, I put this on, and it made my cysts go down so much faster.” I sold the product for years and, then, it was discontinued. That was two years into my company, so I bought the formula and reformulated slightly. It has a purified form of lactic acid, but I don’t even really know how it works. I don’t know why it’s such a miracle. It has a cult following, and it wins awards all the time.

What’s your approach to distribution?

We’ve always been direct-to-consumer and relied on word of mouth. Basically, I started my company as a skincare spa in Dallas offering skincare services. Then, I started formulating the line, and it did well. Everyone loved the nine skin types philosophy because they felt there was something for them in it. I knew I had to find new channels, so I started looking into the internet. In 1999, the dot-com boom was happening. My brother was a web developer, and I built an information-only website into a shoppable one. Back then, marketing a website was challenging. Heather Kleinman, who has a site called Cosmetic Connection, would review products in a weekly email. She gave our line the best review, and our website crashed within five minutes of the email going out. It took us about a day to get it back up. That was really the start of our website and internet business.

There are no shortages of opportunities for growth, but I’m not looking to be acquired. I’m not looking to take over the world. When your company name is on your birth certificate, there’s something very personal about that. I’m really strategic about what I say yes to because, once you say yes, you can’t go back, and the almighty dollar is not as important to me as having a great brand with integrity and a great team. We grow at a rate that works really well for us. I like to keep the growth at around 15% a year. I don’t want to grow so fast that it creates mayhem in our company, but I don’t want not to grow because it’s fun to grow, and one of our core values is to learn and grow.

Have there been retail opportunities you considered?

A lot of retailers really love our adult acne products because that’s a market that’s underserved. We’ve had conversations about having our adult acne products in smaller specialty retailers where they maybe have only one location, and we could have a good relationship with them. That’s something I’ve talked about, but not pulled the trigger on. It would be in New York or LA, but we have pop-ups in those cities, so we can connect with people that way.

How has your role evolved?

My role has changed tremendously this past year. My husband Florian passed away a year ago, and he was the COO of our company. In the beginning, like most small business owners, I wore every hat from product development to customer service. I used to say my name was Lydia for customer service, so people thought we had a bigger brand than we did. Now, I have people fill many operations roles. I brought in a COO to replace my husband. When he got sick, he said, “You’ve been a tiger in a cage. You’ve been trapped, and it’s time to let you out.” He really loved having control and having us do everything, but I knew I was doing things I wasn’t inherently wired for. When I hired the new COO, I said, “Get me in the visionary seat of the company and out of all the things I’m not wired to do.”

I’m still solely responsible for product development, writing for our popular blog and doing PR engagements. I have a small group of celebrity clients that I tend to. At the end of the day, I own 100% of my company, and I’m 100% in charge of driving the vision. I’m super strategic about our growth decisions. Our people matter in everything we do. We are a people-over-profits company. We spend more time with our co-workers than we do with our closest friends and family. To provide a working environment that is drama-free is super important. When we hire, it’s very slow, and we make sure we do our due diligence to have the right people on board.

How do you maintain the company culture?

We have five core values at our company. They are a decision-making tool for us. Our core values are: put customers first, learn and grow, understand the value of our reputation, be a team player, and be trustworthy. With these core values in place, I have been able to build a strong company around me. At all of our team meetings, we talk about them, and we have an in-depth hiring process where candidates have to speak to them. We are always giving examples of how people are living and breathing by our core values. When you stay true to who you are, it makes decision-making easy. We also have a personality profiling tool that we use that really ensures we are hiring people with the right skill set to thrive in our company. We don’t get dazzled by someone who’s worked for some huge company. We love the needles in the haystack. Some of our best finds are people who didn’t have impressive resumes. We knew they would be amazing culture fits for us. It’s amazing to watch them thrive and shine.

You are closing your spa in the Dallas area city Plano today. Why?

The decision was a difficult one, but my company is based in Austin now. My late husband and I relocated our company to Austin five years ago. I’m always somebody that likes change, and we just decided we weren’t making any new memories in Dallas. Austin had a lot of things that appealed to us personally and professionally. Our company will have 18 of us here in Austin. We have 10,000 square feet of office and warehouse space. We will be strictly 100% focused on e-commerce. What’s important to me is that I remain an aesthetician-based company. In our office in Austin, we have an in-house aesthetician that does virtual consultations, and we just hired another aesthetician. We are still giving expertise and guidance that’s coming from an aesthetician. The time was right to close the spa. We needed to remodel the location, and I just decided that I didn’t want to be pulled in two different directions. We have an ability to impact people all over the world in a much bigger way than having a location in Dallas that catered to that area.

What’s your approach to consumer outreach?

I started my blog in 2009 to educate consumers about skin, and it’s been the best brand awareness tool for us. We’ve got incredible organic traffic from search engines because Google has seen me as a trusted resource for many years, and media sites link to it. The average person who wants to get smarter about their skin reads it and shares our blog posts. We also have a huge industry following of professionals that use the blog for continuing education. Skincare education is the heartbeat of my company. I don’t want to just be a company that goes, “You have skin problems, buy this.” People want to know the why and how, and lifestyle tips that will help them. The cornerstone of our company has been the blog, and we use social media to push out that education in small bite-sized pieces. As we speak, we are building a video content studio in our office. I’m going to get back on YouTube again, and we are pushing out more video.

What are your thoughts on clean beauty?

In my line, I’ve never used synthetic fragrances. I’ve never used sulfates. I’ve never used synthetic dyes. I’ve taken cosmetic chemistry courses at UCLA through the years, and I’ve always been hands-on with ingredients. I definitely think that there are ingredients used in a product to sell it and make it more Intagrammable. I’m finding that everyone is starting to use synthetic dyes because they want that color to give a product a wow factor. I don’t do that at all. I have always been focused on keeping out ingredients that don’t need to be in there because they aren’t beneficial to the skin and have a reputation for being bad for health. On the flip side, because I work a lot in the adult acne space, you really need performance ingredients to get results. So, I consider my line clean science. I will never have an organic line. When somebody has perfect skin in their 20s and they have no issues, they can use anything, but, because I work with so many people that have true concerns and skin issues, you need to drive results, and science does that. When you are younger, the metabolism of your skin is active and, when you get older, it slows down, and science does a great job sending signals to the skin to act in a young way.

Your line has been rebranded three times. Why?

The beauty industry is very much like fashion. It’s trendy, and you want to keep it fresh. The reason why companies die and don’t thrive is they don’t ever reinvent themselves, and they don’t keep things exciting. We have 50 products, and we are always launching new products. We are also going back to older formulations. Of the five products I’m working on, three of them are reformulations. When you have such a big line, every now and again, products need to be updated.

What are you most interested in handling now?

When I hired our marketing director, I became less day-to-day, and I felt a little lost. I didn’t have a clear compass because a lot of responsibilities had been taken off my plate. I’m somebody that needs a goal. My COO said to me, “Write down the things you want to do, and rate them on a scale of one to five,” five being something I really love and want to do all the time, and one being something I hate. Most things were threes, fours and fives on my list. I work with a time management coach once a month. He said, “Wait a minute, this isn’t over yet. Your job is to figure out how to be only doing fives by turning threes into fives. When you are really thriving, you need to be doing all fives, and the company needs you to be doing all fives.” That was a really cool exercise and thought process to go through. Since then, I’ve been working with my COO and marketing director to only do fives. I still have a few fours on my plate, but we are always thinking about how I can do only fives.

What are fives for you, and what’s not a five that you want to be freed of?

Product development is a five for sure. I love doing pop-ups and appearances. I love meeting with customers face-to-face. I love doing media interviews, podcasts and speaking engagements. I love the clients that I work with and the influencers we work with. Filming videos, I don’t like that as much. I do much better talking off the cuff than if I’m reading talking points. When you put me in a box and make me follow a script, that’s a three for sure. I don’t sit still well, so having to redo things is frustrating.

How do you work with external vendors?

We try to be a company that’s focused on doing the things we are good at. We are not an accounting company, so we outsource that and have a lot of outside vendors. We do an audit of our vendors once a year. There’s a process that we go through to rate them on whether they get back to us in a timely manner and whether there’s someone properly managing our account, among other things, to always make sure we are working with the best quality partners possible. They have to rank a certain amount for us to keep working with them. What we could do better is going to visit them in person more, and that’s one of our goals for this year.

How do you keep your company’s employees motivated?

We have quarterly goals for everybody in our company. They get to choose their own quarterly goals that they are working toward, and they are coached by their leadership team to make sure they are on track. Then, we have a meeting every three months to celebrate the quarterly accomplishments. Then, we have a one-year goal with five or six bullet points and, then, we have three-year goals and ten-year targets. We are always focused on forward momentum. All of these goals and targets are talked about in meetings, so everybody in the company knows where we are headed, and they are part of the decision-making as well. It’s not Renée’s way or the highway. People need to really feel like they have a voice, and they are on the same page with the vision.

What is your 10-year goal?

We want to be four times the company we are now. To get there, we need to continue to innovate with new products, share even more content and broadcast it out in a bigger way that we are a trusted resource. We are also seeing our international sales grow. We have always shipped internationally, and Canada, Singapore and the U.K. make up a large portion of our international sales. We are always looking at ways to improve international shipping to keep costs down for our international customers. For our employees, we are always making sure our workplace is a great environment. I hope to keep seeing the team grow and flourish, and deliver a better experience for our customers. When the company is your name, people really enjoy knowing the face behind the brand, so I want to look for new opportunities for people to be able to connect with me.