Entrepreneur Jane Wurwand on why 'high-touch will overshadow high-tech' in business

In an interview with the BBC, founder of the multimillion-dollar skincare empire Dermalogica talks about entrepreneurship, independence and why human skills are the future of the service industry.

On a sunny day in Los Angeles, Jane Wurwand stands outside the first storefront for her skincare brand Dermalogica. In 1983, she started with the idea to create a training programme for the industry. "I actually wrote down my first kind of statement of purpose: total world domination of professional skincare," she says. 

The humble beginning set the stage for a monumental ascent in business – the one she'd envisaged from the start. Along with her training academy, Wurwand also created Dermalogica's skincare line in 1986. Her products are now sold in more than 80 countries – and Dermalogica is one of the most recognisable brands in the industry. 

The cosmetologist-turned-self-funded-entrepreneur s BBC correspondent Katty Kay on Influential, her unscripted interview series, which features iconic guests including Ina Garten, Misty Copeland and Michael Lewis. Wurwand discusses her business empire, and how she learned to prepare for the unknown from age four.

After settling in Los Angeles from Scotland by way of South Africa, Jane Wurwand and her then-boyfriend, recent business-school graduate Raymond Wurwand saw a clear opening in the 1980s skincare market: to bridge the gap between salon experience and self-care education, information reserved at the time to plastic surgeons and dermatologists. 

Without the necessary financial history in the US to take out a line of credit from an American lender, the two bootstrapped the business with a modest sum of $14,000 (£11,040) – a combination of their personal savings and early investment funds gathered from friends and family.

"Self-funded, we never took a loan," Wurwand tells Kay. "When we built the company to an acquisition, we owned it 100%, we had never given equity, never taken a loan, there was no debt to pay off." The first training centre they set up was 1,000 sq ft (92.9 sq m), for which they paid $1,000 (£789) a month.

About 30 years later, in 2015, Wurwand, then 57, sold her brand to multinational consumer goods conglomerate Unilever for an undisclosed amount. In 2016, she was named ambassador for entrepreneurship by US President Barack Obama.

Wurwand learned ambition and independence early. Her mother was widowed at 38, with four children. When Wurwand was four, her mum tucked a house key into her jumper so she could come home alone after school – an experience, she says, that stoked fearlessness. "As scared as I was – and I was scared of course – knowing I could do that, it starts to build your confidence."

Determined to chart her own course, Wurwand became a "Saturday girl" in a salon. Aged 13, she swept hair from the floor, and continued to beauty school. Swapping traditional university classrooms for the interiors of salons, Wurwand began to develop a widely applicable skill set – an approach her mother emphasised during childhood.

"Every time I go anywhere, Katty, whether it's where my family lives in Moule in the Hebrides, all the way through to anywhere I travelled around the world – Vietnam, South Africa, Norway, New Zealand, anywhere in between – the first thing I look in any small town or village, 'do they have a salon">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });