The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
There are few characters in beauty that have the resonance Australia wide of Napoleon Perdis. A household name, Napoleon has sat at the helm of his namesake business for upwards of 20 years- one of only few beauty brands that is still privately owned.
“Every major brand today that is a household name in their country has been sold to one of the six major multinational companies,” Napoleon tells me. “The Napoleon Perdis energy, in Australia, has a very unique energy to it. Those elements are not easily recreated”
Napoleon himself attributes a great deal of that success to the fact that family is at the core of the business. His wife, Soula-Marie, and brother, Emanuel, own the company with Napoleon, while his eldest daughter, Lianna, has become something of a face of the brand.
Napoleon’s fascination with beauty began long before he entered into business. “My first real memory of beauty was my mother,” he says. “A lot of the Greek immigrants of the 50s, they didn’t wear a lot of makeup but she was always made up. I used to just watch her go into the department stores, I used to watch her at home getting ready before events, and that was my first real experience with makeup and the adornment, the enhancement, and the beauty of it.”
While at university, Napoleon and his now wife started doing bridal makeup in their spare time to earn some extra money while Emanuel coordinated the bookings, though as much as he loved beauty, he was still convinced that it would only ever be a hobby. It wasn’t until a trip to Los Angeles, during which Napoleon won a competition for creating “Cher lookalike” makeup, that Napoleon, Emanuel and Soula-Marie decided that it was time to try their hand at building a business.
“It was born out of necessity,” Napoleon tells me of the company. With a kit filled almost exclusively with Shu Uemura products, Napoleon realised that there was a serious gap in the market for an accessible (both geographically and financially) Australian beauty brand.
In August of 1995, armed with a business plan, Napoleon approached his father and asked for a loan. It was that loan that the now empire that is Napoleon Perdis was built upon.
Despite being granted a loan, Napoleon tells me he still didn’t believe his dad was offering him his complete support. “I’ve lost my father recently and I’ve had to reconcile a lot of things and remember things correctly. I don’t think they were supportive of me starting a career in makeup, but they did support me wanting to do my own thing. He wanted me to do the traditional type of work he was used to, in terms of safety. On the one hand, he didn’t want me to do that [work in beauty], but on the other hand he didn’t want to stop me from being who I wanted to be.”
It didn’t take too long for Napoleon’s father’s initial tentativeness to shift to complete support- he sold his business and began working in the Napoleon Perdis cosmetics warehouse, a position he held up until just three years before he passed away.
It’s those family ties that Napoleon credits with the company’s success- Napoleon heads the company as a professional makeup artist and creative, Soula-Marie manages the accounts while Emanuel heads sales. Within the space of a mere two years, the team had launched their own line of beauty products, opened their first store and opened the Napoleon Perdis Academy.
“It was a different world then,” Napoleon says of beauty education and training. “It wasn’t just about creating an Insta profile- you really had to build your book.” Napoleon candidly admits that Academy enrolments have in fact decreased of late, thanks almost entirely to the generation of aspiring makeup artists who have taken to YouTube to self-teach themselves.
Despite industry changes and the rise of social media, the company stays as relevant today as it was on launch day close to 25 years ago. Perhaps this continued relevancy has been aided by Napoleon and Soula-Marie’s decision to include their eldest daughter, 18 year old Lianna, in their roster of brand ambassadors. “[Lianna] plays a role because there’s a degree of authenticity. We work with her energy. I believe Napoleon Perdis needs to have authentic voices, so she’s part of that continuing cycle of authentic voice.”
The future remains bright for the Napoleon Perdis brand, with several new developments in the works and a freshly inked partnership with Australian mega-retailer Priceline. “I develop product for my customer, but I do have to balance the commercial reality which torments and tortures the pure makeup artist in me.”
“If our products aren’t in women’s handbags, then we’re not really doing our job.”
To listen to the full interview with Napoleon, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify.
