The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
It was in 1954 when Edith Hallas hitched up her skirt in the foyer of David Jones and demonstrated how to use the world’s first cold wax strips. It was at that moment that Ella Baché, a then 18 year old French skincare brand, became available in Australian stores.
“Ella Baché is my great aunt,” Pippa Hallas, the now CEO of the company, explains of the brand’s heritage. “Ella is my great aunt. She was a cosmetic chemist. My grandmother was Edith Hallas and she was a beauty therapist. They both left Eastern Europe for Paris because, luckily, they had the foresight at a very young age into what was about to happen on the brink of World War II. They moved to Paris, and that’s really where their passion and their love affair as scientists really started. Fast forward around 12 months and they were sitting in the Opera House in Paris. A gentleman stood up and he announced that the war had just broken out. It still gives me goosebumps. Their life changed dramatically in that moment, so they both applied for visas for Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand. My grandmother and grandfather, fortunately, were granted a visa to come to Australia, and Ella to New York. Their lives quickly changed. My grandmother always says that that moment in Paris changed their life because their passion became their life.”
It was after a trip to Egypt that Pippa’s great uncle, Madame Baché’s second husband, became the unlikely inspiration for a world-first product- cold wax strips. “It was the first ever wax strip,” Pippa tells me. “Interestingly enough, Ella’s second husband was an archeologist. He had been in Egypt and he hated the smell of the resin waxes that existed at the time. He observed the Egyptian women using cotton strips, and that sparked an idea in Ella to formulate these cold wax strips. My grandmother took them in to David Jones and met with the buyer of the day, and her name was Mrs Phillips- I still remember the story from 1954! Mrs Phillips was a very elegant lady, but very practical. She said to my grandmother ‘Okay, demonstrate to me how it works.’ My grandmother, who was quite shy and young, hoisted up her skirt and that was history.”
John Hallas, Pippa’s father, became the sole owner of the now heritage brand some decades down the track. Bringing a unique entrepreneurial quality to the brand allowed the company to expand in what Pippa explains as an “amazing combination of different people’s talents.”
“My father is second generation,” Pippa explains. “My father started working when he was quite young, and he built the brand and developed the distribution network that we know today.”
Despite growing up, almost literally, in the brand’s factory, taking a role at the company was never of the utmost importance to Pippa. “I never, as a child, consciously thought ‘I want to work there one day.’ I think it was an evolution. It was never a conscious thought that I want to have the CEO’s office one day. It was more organic than that.”
“Beauty in my family is not about makeup and vanity- it’s about science,” Pippa shares. “It’s always been about creation of formulas and, first and foremost, understanding the science and biology of the skin. That was always my grandma’s focus. Then it’s about understanding the formulations and ingredients that would deliver results. My family never walked around trying to be glamorous. My first memories of beauty were very much about creating formulas in labs, working in the factory and getting to know the people really well- some of them still work for us today. I’ve got a lot of really fond memories, but I think for anyone who grew up around a family business, you learn through osmosis and you don’t really understand it at the time.”
After finishing high school, Pippa elected to study business marketing at university- an industry she spent 10 years working in in both Sydney and London. “As an 18 year old, being in the family business didn’t appeal to me,” explains of the decision. “My family has always encouraged me to be a bit of a kindred spirit and an adventurer. I wanted to go and explore the world and I was really passionate about advertising and communications and understanding how, in a positive way, you can influence other people’s behaviour. That’s what I spent a good part of 10 years doing, both here and in London.”
It wasn’t until Pippa turned 30 that she decided to join the family business- Ella Baché. “I think I was at a crossroads in my life. I’d been working back in Australia for a couple of years and the advertising industry in Australia at the time was retail driven. I had a desire in my mind that I would either go to America and continue my career in advertising, or I would jump ship and give Ella Baché a go. I’m very fortunate that it’s such a great brand- it’s not selling tyres or something that I’m not interested in, so I was very fortunate. I decided to jump- I had no idea what I was jumping into, but I jumped.”
“When I joined the company,” says Pippa, “there hadn’t been a family member in the business for 20 years. I walked in here, completely naive, and everyone though I was a spy. I’d gone from working in an industry where everyone knew what I did, but didn’t really care about my last name, into a place where everyone cared about my last name and fearing it. It was really challenging for years.”
“I didn’t have a lot of female role models that I looked up to,” tells me of her time working in advertising- and the catalyst that saw her taking on her current role. “It was a young person’s industry which was fantastic, but there were no women who had kids. For me, it’s about finding some really good role models because, ultimately, they help you to become who you want to be. I decided to look for them in an industry that was probably more open to women and to mums, and that’s what I’d aspired to find.”
Pippa initially took on a role at Ella Baché within the brand’s marketing department before eventually taking on the CEO position, and what she has truly excelled in is maintaining the relevance of the heritage brand while staying true to the values set in place some 82 years ago by both her great aunt and her grandmother. “When I find myself in a challenging time, I still draw on the values and the principles that this business was founded on,” she shares. “Although the world has completely changed, I look back on the time when Ella and my grandmother started this business and it was just as disruptive. They were forced to flee their countries, they had to survive, to back themselves, to build networks- they had to do all the things we do today, but in a different way.”
“We had a really clear philosophy from the beginning of this company- celebrating the individual and empowering someone to feel really confident in their own skin. That’s my guiding light. The industry has changed so much, and I often refer to what’s happening now as the fast food of beauty. There’s a lot of really invasive treatments that have been driven by social media and the Kim Kardashian effect. I grapple with what’s going on there. How we wrap relevance around that is not by putting down people who want botox or fillers. That’s great, but our stance is that you still need to have healthy skin. It’s a complementary thing. I encourage people, especially young women, if they want to enhance themselves, also have healthy skin and do it in a way that celebrates your differences and doesn’t erase them.”
Being third generation in the family company, Pippa is well versed in an ancient proverb which, loosely translated reads The first generation starts a business, the second generation runs it and the third ruins it. “I know that proverb really well,” laughs Pippa. “It irritates me and motivates me at the same time.” Pippa has been able to rewrite history by keeping the brand feeling fresh and current. “For us, [staying current] is about leveraging the trends that are going on in the world at the moment. There’s really three things that we bring into this business. Technology, to make sure we are reinventing this business and having treatments that are really relevant and communicating with our customers the way they want to be communicated to. While you’ve got that higher tech going on, you’ve also got the role of high touch still needed in society. For our stores, there’s such a big opportunity to do that high touch really well, and there’s still such a role for treatments and hands on therapies, combined with the machinery and the technology available today. The third thing is that how you stand out, as a brand, is harder than ever before. It’s a massive challenge and it’s also a massive opportunity. The landscape has gone very much from mass media to really personalised media. I learnt a couple of weeks ago that it took 50 years for 40 million people to buy radios, but it took one year for 40 million people to have Facebook accounts. I think it’s definitely about using media in a very personalised way. I think social media is amazing and to stay relevant you need to take a message to a customer who really wants it.”
“We embrace the digital world,” she says. “In the last 10 odd years since I’ve been CEO we’ve driven enormous changes and still are driving changes to constantly reinvent this business. A lot of that is using technology. We have an education part of the business where we offer diplomas and teach young girls and guys to be therapists. That business, for example, has gone from predominantly face to face to now 80% online learning. To solve for an education platform in a very tactile industry has been really interesting.”
Today, the business (encompassing head office, the franchises and the education sector) is comprised predominantly of female staff- 70% to be precise. Her own company aside, Pippa still believes we globally have much further to go in our quest for gender equality in the workplace. “I know a lot of big companies are forcing women’s involvement through setting quotas and making sure they’ve got a balance. I think the issue is far broader than that though,” Pippa shares. “It’s about feeling included as a woman. Whilst there has been headway made around setting quotas and getting women to sit around the top tables, there’s still a cultural change that needs to see us including women once they get there.”
Pippa is passionate about making the workplace a safer, more inclusive place for women, but acknowledges that a CEO role is not necessarily for everyone. “You have to want it,” Pippa explains. “You have to be willing to go for the ride. There are highs and there are lows, and it’s a massive learning. One of the things that has helped me is a commitment to learning new things every day. As a leader and as a CEO you need to reinvent a business, so you have to reinvent yourself. If that’s something that turns you on, then go for it.
“It’s a cliché, but I’ve made the biggest mistakes in this role when I haven’t backed my own intuition,” Pippa tells me of the challenges she’s faced as CEO. “I really back myself now.”
Becoming a mother also proved to be a unique challenge, but Pippa tells me her ability to compartmentalise work allows her to be completely present during time with family. “Becoming a mum made for a real change in my career. I’ve got two little boys, and it was the biggest transition becoming a working mum. The guilt that goes along with that- I don’t know many mums who go to work and don’t struggle with that. The biggest piece of advice a friend, a working mum, gave to me was ‘Every day is going to be different, so just keep adjusting.‘ I live my life like that.”
To listen to the full interview with Pippa, subscribe to the Glow Journal podcast now on iTunes or Spotify.
